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This blog is pretty long and mostly focuses on a pretty specific bit of American history. If you came here for, I dunno, Magic: The Gathering or something, you're probably not going to find what you want here. But hey, if you read it anyway I'd love to know your thoughts.
In the summer of 2021 I found myself in Oklahoma for a family reunion. Much of it was spent on various watersport activities on Tenkiller Lake, but for a couple days we headed over to Guthrie. It's a weird little town. More than a century ago, it was the de facto capital of the not-yet-a-state; but very early on, that all shifted to Oklahoma City, and there just wasn't anything keeping people in Guthrie. Wikipedia has a chart of the historical population going back to 1890, when it had 5,333 people; in 2020 it had 10,759. Other towns grew and developed; roads and stores and houses were built and torn down and rebuilt differently; but Guthrie just kinda stalled out. A lot of the roads and sidewalks are still these awful, uneven brick walkways, and it's full of these ancient brick structures proudly displaying the year of their construction (frequently starting with "18"). It has the feeling of a Colonial Williamsburg, except it's not an intentionally curated historical theme park meant to imitate old aesthetics; it's just still like that. It never stopped. Like Colonial Williamsburg, though, the town now gets its money from historical tourism. We took a Historical Walking Tour with a big-personality guide that walked around and pointed at stuff and told lame jokes. (You probably know the type – it might not surprise you, for instance, that we were encouraged to come back after dark for the "Guthrie Ghost Tour.")
The main story of the tour, however, was the main moment of historical import for the town: The Land Rush of 1889. The short version is this: In 1889, the "Indian Appropriations Act" was passed allowing President Benjamin Harrison to take 2 million acres of land, previously designated as part of the so-called "Indian Territory," and open it for settlement. So at noon on April 22, 1889, eligible would-be settlers gathered in Guthrie to wait for a cannon to go off, signalling the start of the "land run" – essentially, a race in which each settler rushed out on their fastest horse into the newly-opened territory to claim the best piece of land they could get their hands on as theirs. There were several more of these land runs over the next couple decades before Oklahoma eventually became a state in 1907, but in essence, every person who owns land in Oklahoma, owns it because they bought or inherited it from someone who bought or inherited it from someone who bought or inherited it from someone... who claimed it in a land run.
I still can't stop thinking about this story. It's insane. Your first impulse, perhaps, might be outrage at the baldfaced theft of Native American lands – lands which, by the way, we had already forced them to take in exchange for abandoning their former homelands earlier in the same century. Personally I think it's often useful, in historical contexts, to set aside moral outrage for a moment and pause to try to understand better exactly what happened and why. But even then, it's just baffling. Why would this be the system for land allocation? Weren't there an infinity of legal disputes over who, exactly, had staked a claim on this or that bit of valuable land first? And what the fuck do you do, now that you've raced out on your fastest horse, staked a claim, and are (more or less) officially the owner of 160 acres of extremely flat land in the middle of Oklahoma?
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I'll back up a bit in the story. Over the course of the 19th century, the United States was progressively expanding across the continent. A lot of the same reasons that would have motivated people to move from Europe to America (usually some combination of ambition for creating a New World and fear of persecution back home) made people want to set out into the West and try to find somewhere to plant a stake and call theirs. For individuals, wanting a bunch of land given to them basically for free was certainly a selfish motivation, but the whole society was caught up in it. The very ideas of "progress" and "growth," essentially "goodness" itself, were wrapped up in the process of expansion, traveling out into natural landscapes and transforming them into farms and towns and cities. So-called "manifest destiny."
Of course, every new expansion was met with a Native American tribe or set of tribes who already lived there. What about them? Should we buy their land off them? Trick them into signing some agreement they don't understand, which takes their land from them in exchange for something worse? Find some pretense or provocation to just kill them until they leave or die? Opinions differed, of course, but what pretty much everyone agreed on was that taking that land, by one means or another, and transforming it into farms and towns and cities was the goal. And so a repeating pattern emerged across the continent: European Americans would move into an area; an extended sequence of negotiations and battles and ceasefires and more negotiations would begin; but always, eventually, one way or another, the land would wind up in American hands being developed into farms and towns and cities. With that land "claimed," more European Americans would move further West, and begin the same process wherever they went. Native Americans were either killed, assimilated, or moved somewhere else; and generally, "somewhere else" was Oklahoma.
We got all the way to the Pacific. We negotiated a northern border with Canada. Some American settlers moved into northern Mexico for a while, fought a war of independence from Mexico, then agreed to let the newly independent territory get annexed by the US. Not long after the US fought another war with Mexico to claim another big chunk in the South. We put our expansionist urges on hold for a bit to fight an extremely bloody civil war. But eventually, the land ran out. And with no new "West" to send our ambitious young men into, we started looking around for any territory we had missed, and there was this big chunk of land we were calling the "Indian Territory" we had been sending all those Native Americans to.
It wasn't the government at first. For a while it was just private individuals, heading into the territory and setting up tent cities, coaxing new settlers in with the promise of cheap land, before the US military had to go in and force these settlers to leave. The term you will frequently hear about these folks is "Boomers," which is funny given the modern use of the term, but of course has no connection besides the name – apparently that's just a catchy pair of syllables to label a group of people with. I've had a little trouble figuring out the actual origin of the term; the tour guide said it had to do with the "boom" of the cannon at the start of a land run, although I've seen others say it's referencing the "booming" loudness of these people demanding to be given settlers rights. I have to imagine the concept of an economic "boom" was not unrelated.
At any rate, a concerted "Boomer" movement to seize Oklahoma for settlement by European Americans rose in influence and popularity. It was inevitable. I'm skipping a lot of details, obviously, and I hope you'll understand that's not an effort to elide any bloody details; this blog is already going to be way too long. But the pattern was more or less the same as before: the US negotiated, and renegotiated, and took by force, all part of an inexorable movement toward obtaining the land to open for settlement. After five land runs (and a few land lotteries and such), Oklahoma became a state in 1907.
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There's a lot of directions to go from here, but I'd like to stick with the Oklahoma settlers for a little while. As I wondered when I first heard this story, there were indeed a lot of legal disputes over who owned what. Most famously, a huge number of disputes hinged on "Boomers" versus alleged so-called "Sooners." Originally "boomer" had been the name for advocates of opening the land for settlement, but in this context a "boomer" was someone who had obtained the land "legitimately," i.e. waiting for the cannon in Guthrie or wherever, before racing out to claim their land. A "sooner" had cheated by somehow finding their way into the territory (technically illegal, before it was opened for settlement) and pouncing on some bit of land before any "boomers" even had a chance to race there. There were years of bitter legal battles over every aspect of this. As one example: some people were legal representatives of the US government, and as such allowed to be in the territories before the cannon went off. Were they allowed to claim land this way? The answer was ultimately "no," although it took a lot of years of legal cases to decide that.
Now forget about all that for a moment. Imagine you're one of these settlers. Whatever the circumstances that led to it, you're now the proud new owner of 160 acres. What now? You're legally required to "improve the land" in the next 5 years in order to keep it. So you're gonna chop down some trees and try to make some kind of house out of them, start a family if you haven't already, and try to work the land into producing something you can sell, so you can go into town and buy some of the stuff you desparately need. One thing it's easy to forget about colonization is that aside from the morality of it, it's really hard. There's an enormous amount of both manual labor and expertise that you're gonna need just to "live off the land," let alone amass any kind of wealth out here. Do you have what it takes? Keep in mind that if you were already a farmer in 1889, that's probably because you already had a farm somewhere, in which case you didn't need to participate in any goofy land runs. So realistically, you and all your neighbors probably aren't working from a lot of experience as you try to figure out how do this (maybe a few folks have some experience working somebody else's farm).
So a lot of folks are pretty poor. Farmers have always been in a pretty precarious position – crop yields depend on a lot of factors outside your control, even if you do everything right – and there's a lot of knowledge involved that is pretty slow and expensive to acquire (imagine how many crops you have to lose to some pest before you figure out the right type of prevention/treatment for it). But desperation breeds determination, and settlers tried harder to pull more out of the soil.
You might already know where this is headed. In the 1930's, when everybody was particularly poor and particularly desperate, those farmers tried particularly hard to pull more out of the soil. Widespread erosion of topsoil combined with a drought caused the catostrophic ecological collapse known today as the "Dust Bowl." Think for a moment: that's less than 50 years after that first land run. Less than 30 after Oklahoma became a state. These desperate folks signed up for the government's weird horse race, just to compete for a chance to toil desparately and ineffectually at farming until their combined efforts destroyed the land they had all raced out here to own. And then they picked up whatever they had and moved to California.
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Doesn't this story feel familiar? I can't be the only one, right? Not that this specific bit of history is all that well-known – I don't think most Americans know anything about the Land Run of 1889, although if you went to public school in Oklahoma I'm certain they talked a lot about it. But the game of it! There's this system between you and what you need to survive, and the system pits you against everybody else in these weird, arbitrary competitions. You have to prove yourself! You have to "earn" it! But "earning" it just means winning at the game, not necessarily producing anything of value for anyone else (that's just one way to win at the game, and probably not the most lucrative one by a long shot).
Meanwhile there are people that want to moralize at you, and tell you everything that system gives you was stolen; that you're benefiting from the cruelty and theft that was done to someone less fortunate. But that's pretty hard for you to believe, when you're already working so hard for so little from this system. You're supposed to be the cheater here, the recipient of ill-gotten gains? I think there's something fundamentally American about this story, although I'm sure the feeling is familiar to plenty of people in other parts of the world, too. Juxtaposing with today, it almost feels too on the nose - making everybody compete in a literal race to get their handouts? A state of perpetual desparation propelling everyone to hustle harder and harder, all of which only accelerates an impending ecological collapse? The word boomer?
One problem with studying history is that it very rarely tells you what you should do differently. I certainly don't know, anyway. The trouble with yelling about the "system" is that the "system" is just a collection of other people, all of whom are also just trying their best to figure out how to survive. You don't feel like you're getting what you deserve from the "system" but none of them do, either. So what then? You can hunt around for who the "bad guy" is, and there are certainly some of those out there, but to the extent this system is failing due to individual bad actors, it's only because it created the circumstances for them to exist and incentivized them to act as badly as they do. If you magically poof them out of existence, new ones will take their place, because it's the inevitable consequence of this system's design.
But I think there's value in recognizing the dynamics, at least. There's nothing contradictory, for instance, about simultaneously being a victim of the system's design and a beneficiary of its cruelty. Nor is there necessarily any guarantee that the things you do to succeed within it are actually producing value. You "earn" what you get, in the sense that you had to do something hard to obtain it, but you simultaneously "deserve" so much more (in that every person deserves to have what they need to survive) and yet you may or may not "deserve" even what you've been given.
The only lesson I've figured out to draw from this (and again, I've been stewing on it for a year and a half) is that it's not enough to focus on the task in front of you, earn your keep, and trust that if everyone else does the same it'll be alright. Difficult as it may be, unlikely as it may seem, we all have to poke our head out of the water and look for things we can do, not just for ourselves, but for everyone.
If you figure out what those things are, please let me know, and if I figure it out I promise I'll share it.
 
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Thanks for the fascinating and poignant bit of history. I had never heard of the land rush (although I did read the novel Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig, which follows the lives of a pair of Scottish settlers of Montana who gain their land in a similar way --- the direction of some character arcs got on my nerves, but the writing sure brought the historical moment to life).
I wanted to wait to comment until I could sum up my thoughts on the events you describe, but after 24 hours I can't sum them up --- something something, the nature of ownership, the value of meta-level thinking and collective action, the astonishing power of a small number of decision makers to create world-shaping policies like the land rush --- so I'll just say that I appreciate you sharing.
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That makes me very happy to hear!
Yeah, it’s funny. It’s a story that feels immensely meaningful, like there’s a ton of lessons to draw from it. But then I think “okay, name one, and put it in the blog at the end” and I just kinda got stumped. The last few paragraphs are the best I came up with, but it still feels pretty slim. But I guess I think the story speaks for itself better than any trite summary I could ever come up with, so I just needed to come up with something that feels kind of like an ending, and post it.
Anyway, thanks for the kind words, and I’m glad you liked it.
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This was a really insightful read, thanks!
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Norway28517 Posts
Yep, enjoyable read! Thank you! 
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Well, what I got with this land runs is pretty much the same as in previous history - a group of people is stronger than another. So the first go to the land of the latter, subjugate, kill, buy, expel, whatever is necessary and ultimately take their land. Be it because of technological advantage, clever tactics, biological reasons - that's hardly relevant. The end result is the same - land/wealth is taken. How did Mexico come about? The same way. Canada? Same. Borders in Europe are being redrawn as we speak by similar thinking - the folks there got what's ours, we feel like we're stronger, rights and laws aside, let's go and take what's ours, we'll deal with consequences (if any) later.
As much as I enjoyed reading the mechanics of the land run and about the legal disputes, the only lesson I can draw is that history really seems to repeat itself and also that humans' social and ethical progress is always way slower than the technological one.
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Good read, enjoyed it.
If you figure out what those things are, please let me know, Study and practice revolutionary socialism. Treat it like it's something that matters to you.
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On December 13 2022 03:45 JoinTheRain wrote:
Well, what I got with this land runs is pretty much the same as in previous history - a group of people is stronger than another. So the first go to the land of the latter, subjugate, kill, buy, expel, whatever is necessary and ultimately take their land. Be it because of technological advantage, clever tactics, biological reasons - that's hardly relevant. The end result is the same - land/wealth is taken. How did Mexico come about? The same way. Canada? Same. Borders in Europe are being redrawn as we speak by similar thinking - the folks there got what's ours, we feel like we're stronger, rights and laws aside, let's go and take what's ours, we'll deal with consequences (if any) later.
As much as I enjoyed reading the mechanics of the land run and about the legal disputes, the only lesson I can draw is that history really seems to repeat itself and also that humans' social and ethical progress is always way slower than the technological one.
I think you and I might be asking different questions about this history. Is 19th century American expansionism categorically different than previous empires' expansion and conquest? No, probably not. I mean, the details are always a bit different each time around, but fundamentally, yes, one group of people had the power to take another group of people's land, and they chose to do so. It was neither the first nor the last time that happened.
But your last line about humanity's social and ethical progress – that's not an aside for me, that's the whole point of the story! Fast forward to the 20th century, and most places started out with more or less the same amoral inevitability assessment of war: "Powerful empires are always going to fight and conquer their less powerful neighbors; given that inevitability, it's righteous and good for you to go and fight to make your country the former, rather than the latter." It, uh, became pretty obvious to everyone pretty quickly that our social and ethical progress was going to have to at least try to keep up with our weapons technology, or we were all going to live short, miserable lives for the rest of time.
GH's sig has a quote I think about a lot (I'll copy it here, even though you could just scroll up and read it):
People like to look at history and think 'If that was me back then, I would have...' We're living through history, and the truth is, whatever you are doing now is probably what you would have done then
My purpose in this story isn't just to condemn the moral atrocities of the American settlers and feel superior, as an enlightened modern person who would never do such awful things. My purpose is to understand that those '89ers weren't fundamentally different to me. Based on what I know now in 2022, what do I wish they would have understood? And would any of that be true today in ways I hadn't considered?
If the story feels fairly lesson-less to you, how about this prompt. If humans start trying to colonize Mars within our lifetimes, what will be different for the Martian settlers than for the '89ers? What will be the same? Does this story make any difference to you in deciding whether you'd want to be on the first ships or not?
On December 13 2022 08:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Good read, enjoyed it. Study and practice revolutionary socialism. Treat it like it's something that matters to you.
Wait, you mean stewing on some bit of history for a year and a half before writing a blog on TL about it isn't praxis?
Idk man, we've talked about this before but if you tell me "study and practice revolutionary socialism" I sit there for 15 minutes and think "if I were to forget about every other priority in my life and focus solely on practicing revolutionary socialism, what would I do?" and the only thing I come up with is starting over on that copy of Pedagogy of the Oppressed I've got in the other room, which wouldn't be a waste of time, but certainly isn't praxis either. Then at some point I think "shit, I've gotta go to work." There's gotta be a different way for me to be thinking about this.
Like, I understand you can't give me step-by-step instructions, but it feels a bit like if my boss told me "go tear down the capitalist power structure" and then got mad when I just stood there looking confused (sorry to equate you with my boss). You could accuse me of being too attached to the comfort and security the system gives me to be willing to venture any real effort to tear it down, and I don't even know if you'd be wrong. But that makes it sound like there's a course of action I'm aware I could take and I would know how to go about it but I'm choosing not to, when I really just have no idea what that even looks like.
The best I can come up with is "keep earning money from my job because I know how to do that, and donate the money to people and organizations that seem to have a plan." And donating more money to various causes would probably be valuable. But that seems like an extremely capitalist way to think about it, right?
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That's what the "treat it like it's something that matters to you" part is about. I know you at least already know a next step of joining an organization. So I outright reject the notion that you have no idea.
Part of the point of joining an organization is to help provide more step-by-step direction through dialectic. Whatever org you pick will teach you a lot about what you want in an org and likely trying to bend the one you join to fit (or be closer to) your ideal will teach you a lot about organizing. Disagreements about what to do/how to do it will necessitate a deeper understanding of the underlying theory and organizing principles you and the org operate with and where/why they differ.
makes it sound like there's a course of action I'm aware I could take and I would know how to go about it but I'm choosing not to, when I really just have no idea what that even looks like.
You're not an idiot. You know how to research a topic and develop a better understanding through at least traditional academic means. Reading Lenin's "Where to Begin?" and "What Is To Be Done" seems like a reasonable place to look. Not as gospel to be carried out unquestioningly, but as a reference point to bring to a dialectical engagement about what makes sense for one's own role in the struggle with respect to one's own material conditions.
That one struggles to find the time and energy is at least believable (and true for most of us). But that's a struggle with prioritization, not ignorance.
If someone is in an org, ingesting theory, and applying/refining that theory through praxis with the org, they're exponentially further along than the overwhelming majority of the country and even a lot of people that call themselves socialist.
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I know you already said you won’t believe me but I’m genuinely unsure what “joining an org” means in this context. Any form of organization that tries to collectively bring about change, or do you mean something more specific?
Like, DSA? Food Not Bombs? A union? Any of the above? None of the above? I swear I’m not deflecting or making excuses, I’m genuinely trying to understand you.
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On December 14 2022 09:49 ChristianS wrote:
I know you already said you won’t believe me but I’m genuinely unsure what “joining an org” means in this context. Any form of organization that tries to collectively bring about change, or do you mean something more specific?
Like, DSA? Food Not Bombs? A union? Any of the above? None of the above? I swear I’m not deflecting or making excuses, I’m genuinely trying to understand you.
I'd start with one that you'll show up for based on your preferences/circumstances and go from there. Your first org won't be your last or only and certainly won't be perfect.
Even if you lucked out and picked the perfect organization to join, it (as well as you) will still undergo significant changes over the course of the struggle because that is an indispensable part of adapting theory, informed by praxis, to the material conditions we find ourselves in at a given time and place.
Such a framework is part of what drove/drives my posting on TL. It's obviously not a revolutionary socialist organization but it's what I needed to maintain motivation to find time and energy to research, think through, articulate, discuss my perspective, and occasionally try to persuade. Nowadays I am for the most part able to find more fitting spaces for that elsewhere, but my time here helps/helped me immensely in learning what I was/am looking for.
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Huh. Sounds like more of an “any of the above” situation (i.e. just find a group of people trying to make the world better somehow and join in). It’s certainly intuitive enough to me that “solve a limited set of problems with a group of like-minded people” would be a lot easier than “figure out how to solve everything by yourself.”
I think my motivations for participating in discussion on TL aren’t too different from yours, actually. Not that I’m anything close to what you’d call a “revolutionary socialist” (idk, maybe some day, stay tuned!)
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Pretty much, with the caveat that you have to keep up on the adapting socialist theory informed by praxis to the material conditions part if you want to be considered serious as a socialist of just about any stripe.
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On December 14 2022 03:01 ChristianS wrote:
My purpose is to understand that those '89ers weren't fundamentally different to me.
Why yes, we're no different but we don't need such a story to say so. Evolutionary studies on the human skull and brain suggest our current brains are pretty much the same as they were 200 thousand years ago. We've advanced in technology yet the emotions and desires that move us are unchanged. That's a huge issue, I think, because the destructive power nations now possess is immense, with the potential for total annihilation if not of all life at least for destruction of conditions that make Earth habitable for people. That's why I lament that ethical development is lacking.
On December 14 2022 03:01 ChristianS wrote:
If the story feels fairly lesson-less to you, how about this prompt. If humans start trying to colonize Mars within our lifetimes, what will be different for the Martian settlers than for the '89ers? What will be the same? Does this story make any difference to you in deciding whether you'd want to be on the first ships or not?
The story is lesson-less in the sense that I find it a confirmation of a pattern of behavior that has been exhibited by previous people of different cultures. The lessons I got were in the details and mechanics of the land runs, not so much the goal of them which clearly was to gobble as much land as possible by force.
As for Mars, that's a really intriguing topic, worthy of a blog post all by itself. I'll try to be concise in stating my thoughts. First, I'm really skeptical that Mars is useful. From all I know until now it seems like a desolate rust covered wasteland, uninhabitable as it is, has no usable atmosphere, radiation is unbearable, the Martian soil is useless and the probes there so far haven't sent information that there's resources worth exploring. But be that as it may, perhaps a probe that can drill deeper can go there and explore, maybe it'll find something that colonists can use. Anyway, it's safe to say Mars needs heavy teraforming and not just I but scientists who work in this field don't see how a single nation can cope with this task. So it's safe to say a consortium of nations will have to take this task. The most likely course is that these countries will make some sort of an agreement, a law of sorts, that binds them and settles their rights on Mars. That's how I think it's going to unfold. So, in short, I think colonizing Mars would be way different than the land runs you've so marvelously described. And it also helps that there are no Martians who we'll have to displace or murder to make room for us, that makes going there more palatable, in my eyes at least.
As for me on a ship to Mars, I can never see myself going there. All I care about is here on Earth, I like my life a lot, I'm content and happy in my place. I don't even like travelling to different cities in the miserable tiny republic where I'm situated, let alone volunteer for Mars. I don't wanna use absolute terms but I really feel like I'd rather die than go to Mars.
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I am a descendant of that group of European Americans that seized land in Oklahoma. Ironically enough when you translate my surname from Czech to English, it means "Newcomer." interesting, no?
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EPT
