00,000 to extinguish the trust upon which the
land was held. By December the newly opened territory boasted 60,000
denizens, eleven schools, nine churches, and three daily and five weekly
newspapers. In a few years it was vying for statehood with Arizona and
New Mexico.

[Illustration: About twenty-five tents.]
A general view of the town on April 24, 1889,
the second day after the opening.

[Illustration: About 25 one-story buildings.]
A view along Oklahoma Avenue on May 10, 1889.

[Illustration: Several two story buildings on a crowded street.]
Oklahoma Avenue as it appeared on May 10, 1893,
during Governor Noble's visit.
THE BUILDING OF A WESTERN TOWN, GUTHRIE, OKLAHOMA.

In addition to the prospect of thus losing all their lands, the Indians
were, in the winter of 1890, famine-stricken through failure of
Government rations. With little hope of justice or revenge in their own
strength, the aggrieved savages sought supernatural solace. The
so-called "Messiah Craze" seized upon Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahoes,
Osages, Missouris, and Seminoles. Ordinarily at feud with one another,
these tribes all now united in ghost dances, looking for the Great
Spirit or his Representative to appear with a high hand and an
outstretched arm to bury the white and their works deep underground,
when the prairie should once more thunder with the gallop of buffalo and
wild horses. Southern negroes caught the infection. Even the scattered
Aztecs of Mexico gathered around the ruins of their ancient temple at
Cholula and waited a Messiah who should pour floods of lava from
Popocatapetl, inundating all mortals not of Aztec race.

[1892]

While frontiersmen trembled lest massacres should follow these Indian
orgies, people in the East were shuddering over the particulars of a
real catastrophe indescribably awful in nature. On a level some two
hundred and seventy-five feet lower than a certain massive reservoir,
lay the city of Johnstown, Pa. The last of May, 1889, heavy rains having
fallen, the reservoir dam burst, letting a veritable mountain of water
rush down upon the town, destroying houses, factories, bridges, and
thousands of lives. Relief work, begun at once and liberally supplied
with money from nearly every city in the Union and from many foreign
contributors, repaired as far as might be the immediate consequences of
the disaster.

Along with the Johnstown Flood will be remembered in the annals of
Pennsylvania the Homestead