am not here to decide which of you owns that lot, but to keep peace between you until it is decided.” In September of 1889 a number of disaffected citizens announced an election which was to overthrow those then in power, and Captain Stiles was instructed by his superior officers to prevent its taking place. This he did with a small force of men in the face of threats from the most dangerous element in the community of dynamite bombs and of a body of men armed with Winchesters who were to shoot him first and his men later. But in spite of this he visited and broke all the voting booths, wrested a Winchester from the hands of the man who pointed it at his heart through one of the windows of the polling-place, and finally charged the mob of five hundred men with twenty-five soldiers and his fighting surgeon, young Dr. Ives, and dispersed them utterly. I heard these stories of him on every side, and I was rejoiced to think how well off our army must be in majors, that the people at Washington can allow one who has served through the war and on the border and in this unsettled Territory, and whose hair has grown white in the service, to still wear two bars on his shoulder-strap. It is much more pleasant to write of these early days of Oklahoma City than of the Oklahoma City of the present, although one of its citizens would not find it so, for he regards his adopted home with a fierce local pride and jealousy almost equal to a Chicagoan’s love for Chicago, which is saying a very great deal. But to the transient visitor Oklahoma City of to-day, after he has recovered from the shock its extent and solidity give him, is dispiriting and unprofitable to a degree. This may partly be accounted for by the circumstance that his only means of entering it from the south by train is, or was at the time I visited it, at four o’clock in the morning. No one, after having been dragged out of his berth and dropped into a cold misty well of darkness, punctured only by the light from the brakeman’s lantern and a smoking omnibus lamp, is in a mood to grow enthusiastic over the city about him. And the fact that the hotel is crowded, and that he must sleep with the barkeeper, does not tend to raise his spirits. I can heartily recommend this method of discouraging immigration to the authorities of any already overcrowded city. [Illustration: POST-OFFICE, JULY 4, 1890]