The children were playing boisterously a little way off. What a terrible noise they made! But she had better let them keep on with their play, as long as they were happy.... She sat perfectly quiet, thinking of the long, oh, so interminably long march that they would have to make, back to the place where human beings dwelt. It would be small hardship for her, of course, sitting in the wagon; but she pitied Per Hansa and the boys—and then the poor oxen!... He certainly would soon find out for himself that a home for men and women and children could never be established in this wilderness.... And how could she bring new life into the world out here!... Slowly her thoughts began to centre on her husband; they grew warm and tender as they dwelt on him. She trembled as they came.... But only for a brief while. As her eyes darted nervously here and there, flitting from object to object and trying to pierce the purple dimness that was steadily closing in, a sense of desolation so profound settled upon her that she seemed unable to think at all. It would not do to gaze any longer at the terror out there, where everything was turning to grim and awful darkness.... She threw herself back in the grass and looked up into the heavens. But darkness and infinitude lay there, also—the sense of utter desolation still remained.... Suddenly, for the first time, she realized the full extent of her loneliness, the dreadful nature of the fate that had overtaken her. Lying there on her back, and staring up into the quiet sky across which the shadows of night were imperceptibly creeping, she went over in her mind every step of their wanderings, every mile of the distance they had travelled since they had left home. The Land Rush in Oklahoma The history of Oklahoma contains two of the most fascinating episodes in the Westward Movement. These were the land rushes of 1889 and 1893, when the government threw open several million acres of land to settlers on a first-come, first-served basis. The opening of these tracts came at a time when choice land throughout the plains states already had been taken up, and because the openings were well publicized throughout the country, the competition for farms and town lots was tremendous. In the following report Hamilton Wicks describes the boom psychology and his own part in the race for free land in 1889. Guthrie, Oklahoma, where Wicks claimed a town lot, was on the route of the Henry Ellsworth and Washington Irving expedition in 1832. Hamilton Wicks Races to Guthrie