To my mother Julia Ferber...

For certain descriptive passages in the portion of this book concerned with the Opening of Oklahoma in 1889 acknowledgment is made to Hands Up, by Fred E. Sutton and A. B. MacDonald, published and cop...

Only the more fantastic and improbable events contained in this book are true. There is no attempt to set down a literal history of Oklahoma. All the characters, the towns, and many of the happenings ...

All the Venables sat at Sunday dinner. All those handsome inbred Venable faces were turned, enthralled, toward Yancey Cravat, who was talking. The combined effect was almost blinding, as of incandesce...

Coat tails swishing, eyes flashing, arms waving, voice soaring. “Folks, there’s never been anything like it since Creation. Creation! Hell! That took six days. This was done in one. It was History mad...

Indians were no novelty to the townspeople of Wichita. Sabra had seen them all her life. At the age of three Cim was held up in his father’s arms to watch a great band of them go by on one of their an...

The child Cim had got it into his head that this was to be a picnic. He had smelled pies and cakes baking; had seen hampers packed. Certainly, except for the bizarre load that both wagons contained, t...

By noon next day they were wondering how they had got on at all without him. He gathered wood. He started fires. He tended Cim like a nurse, played with him, sang to him, helped put him to bed, slept ...

Long before the end of that first nightmarish day in Osage, Sabra had confronted her husband with blazing eyes. “I won’t bring up my boy in a town like this!” It had been a night and a day fantastic w...

From Doc Nisbett, Yancey received laconic information to the effect that the house had been rented by a family whose aquatic demands were more modest than Sabra’s. Sabra was inconsolable, but Yancey d...

Yancey put his question wherever he came upon a little group of three or four lounging on saloon or store porch or street corner. “How did Pegler come to die?” The effect of the question always was th...

Ranged along the rear of the tent were the Indians. Osages, Poncas, Cherokees, Creeks. They had come from miles around. The Osages wore their blankets, striped orange, purple, green, scarlet, blue. Th...

Mournfully, and in accordance with the custom of the community, Yancey carved a notch in the handsome ivory and silver-mounted butt of his six-shooter. It was then for the first time that Sabra, her e...

Sabra’s second child, a girl, was born in June, a little more than a year after their coming to Osage. It was not as dreadful an ordeal there in those crude surroundings as one might have thought. She...

In the three and a half years of her residence in Osage Sabra had yielded hardly an inch. It was amazing. It was heroic. She had set herself certain standards, and those she had maintained in spite of...

Before the Katy pulled in at the Osage station (the railroad actually had been extended, true to Dixie Lee’s prediction, from Wahoo to Osage and beyond) Sabra’s eyes were searching the glaring wooden ...

Sabra noticed that Yancey’s hand shook with a perceptible palsy before breakfast, and that this was more than ever noticeable as that hand approached the first drink of whisky which he always swallowe...

Dixie Lee’s girls were riding by on their daily afternoon parade. Sabra recognized their laughter and the easy measured clatter of their horses’ hoofs before they came into view. She knew it was Dixie...

“Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” You read this inflaming sentiment on posters and banners and on little white buttons pinned to coat lapels or dress fronts. There were other buttons and penna...

“Case of the Territory of Oklahoma versus Dixie Lee!” (So they had made it a Territorial case.⁠ ⁠…) “Counsel for the Territory of Oklahoma!” Pat Leary stood up. “… for the defense.” No one. The close-...

It was as though Osage and the whole Oklahoma country now stopped and took a deep breath. Well it might. Just ahead of it, all unknown, waited years of such clangor and strife as would make the past y...

Cim was nineteen, Donna fifteen. And now Sabra lived quite alone in the new house on Kihekah Street, except for a colored woman servant sent from Kansas. She ran the paper alone, as she wished it run....

For years Oklahoma had longed for statehood as a bride awaits the dawn of her wedding day. At last, “Behold the bridegroom!” said a paternal government, handing her over to the Union. “Here is a star ...

Young Cim came home from Colorado for the summer vacation, was caught up in the oil flood, and never went back. With his geological knowledge, slight as it was, and his familiarity with the region, he...

But Cim did not come home on Saturday. On Saturday, at noon, when Sabra and Yancey drove from the office in their little utility car to the house on Kihekah Street for their noonday dinner they saw a ...

Osage was so sophisticated that it had again become simple. The society editor of the Oklahoma Wigwam used almost no adjectives. In the old days, you had read that “the house was beautifully decorated...

Still, oil was oil, and Indians were Indians. There was no way in which either of those native forces could quite be molded to fit the New York pattern. The Osages still whirled up and down the Oklaho...

Sabra Cravat, Congresswoman from Oklahoma, had started a campaign against the disgraceful condition of the new oil towns. With an imposing party of twenty made up of front-page oil men, Senators, Cong...