The work done in six years is simply marvellous. Imagine the prairie described by Loomis as the place where you could see day after to-morrow coming up over the horizon; at times covered with flowers fair as the garden of the Lord, or covered with snow, and nothing to break the fury of the wind. Seventy-five thousand Indians the only permanent residents in the morning; at night hundreds of thousands of whites--villages, towns, and cities started, in some of them a mayor chosen, a board of aldermen elected, and the staked-out streets under police control. The inhabitants were under tents for a few weeks, while sickness of all kinds attacked them. There were rattlesnakes of two varieties, tarantulas, two kinds of scorpions,--one, the most dangerous, a kind of lizard, which also stings with its tail, and with often deadly effect,--and centipedes that grow to six inches in length. One of the latter was inside a shirt which came home from the laundry, and planted his many feet on the breast of one of our minute-men, and caused it to swell so fearfully that he thought at one time he should die. He recovered, but still at times feels the effect of the wounds, which are as numerous as the feet. The pain caused is intense, and the parts wounded slough off. [Illustration: FORMING IN LINE TO VOTE FOR MAYOR. _Page 296._] Now imagine all this; and then six years after you visit this land, and find cities of ten thousand inhabitants, banks with polished granite pillars,--polished with three per cent per month interest,--great blocks, huge elevators, and fine hotels. And nowhere, even in Paris, will you find more style than among the well-to-do. And on the same streets where I saw all this, I also saw men picking kernels of corn out of an old cellar close by a second-hand store, where already the poor had given up and sold their furniture to get home. I looked out of my hotel window one morning in "Old Oklahoma," and saw a lady walking past dressed in a lavender suit, a white hat with great ostrich feathers on it, by her side a gentleman as well groomed as any New York swell, an English greyhound ambled by their side, while in the rear were rough men with the ugly stiff hats usually worn by your frontier rough. Storekeepers were going to work in their shirt-sleeves. This was in a town of two thousand inhabitants, where there were four banks, four newspapers, eleven churches, and only three saloons. While I was there a most brutal murder took place,--a woman shot her step-daughter, killing her instantly. The husband, the girl's father, swept the blood from the sidewalk, and went down to the jail that night and stayed with the woman, while a fiddler was sent down to cheer her. This man was her fifth husband.