Fifteen minutes after twelve the men of the Seminole Land and Town Company were dragging steel chains up the street on a run, the red and white barber poles and the transits were in place all over the prairie, and neat little rows of stakes stretched out in regular lines to mark where they hoped the town might be. At twenty minutes after twelve over forty tents were in position, and the land around them marked out by wooden pegs. This was the work of the “sooners,” as those men were called who came into the Territory too soon, not for their own interests, but for the interests of other people. At a quarter past one the Rev. James Murray and a Mr. Kincaid, who represented the Oklahoma Colony, stopped a sweating horse and creaking buggy and hammered in their first stakes. They had left the border line exactly at noon, and had made the fifteen miles at the rate of five minutes per mile. Four minutes later J. H. McCortney and Colonel Harrison, of Kansas, arrived from the Canadian River, having whipped their horses for fifteen miles, and the mud from the river was over the hubs of the wheels. The first train from the south reached the station at five minutes past two, and unloaded twenty-five hundred people. They scattered like a stampeded herd over the prairie, driving in their little stakes, and changing their minds about it and driving them in again at some other point. There were already, even at this early period of the city’s history, over three different men on each lot of ground, each sitting by the stake bearing his name, and each calling the other a “sooner,” and therefore one ineligible to hold land, and many other names of more ancient usage. [Illustration: FOUR WEEKS AFTER THE OPENING]