=The Opening of Oklahoma.= In 1889 Kansas lost about 50,000 of her population. This came about through the opening of Oklahoma to settlement. The President issued a proclamation setting high noon of April 22 as the time at which the settlers could enter the new country to take claims. The opening of Oklahoma had been anxiously awaited for years, and, as the appointed time drew near, people from all parts of the United States began to assemble along the southern line of Kansas. Arkansas City was the chief gathering place, for it was at this point that the one line of railroad entered Oklahoma. When, at noon, April 22, the cavalrymen who patroled the borders fired their carbines as a signal that the settlers could move across the line, a great shout went up, and the race for claims began. Hundreds crowded the trains, thousands rode on fleet horses, many rode in buggies and buckboards, others in heavy farm wagons, and some even made the race on foot. In the morning Oklahoma was an uninhabited prairie, at midday it was a surging mass of earnest, excited humanity, in the evening it was a land of many people. Within a few days the breaking plow was turning the sod on many homesteads, while merchants, bankers, and professional men were carrying on their business in tents or in rough board shanties. The rush of settlement to Kansas was remarkable, but the settlement of Oklahoma is the climax in the story of American pioneering. Although Kansas furnished such a large number of the Oklahoma settlers, immigration to our State from the East soon made up the loss. =The Panic of 1893.= In 1893 a financial panic extended over the whole country, accompanied in Kansas by a partial failure of crops. Those were dark days in Kansas, for many of the people were still burdened with heavy mortgages. But this period should be remembered as our last “hard times.” Within two or three years conditions had greatly improved. The twenty-five years following that time brought almost uninterrupted prosperity.