"No-Man's Land," and which the law-abiding citizens, uniting against
bandits and highwaymen, had sought to organize as Cimmaron
Territory.

Then came the rivalry between Guthrie and Oklahoma City for the
capital, adding picturesqueness to territorial history, and offering
incitement to many a small village to make itself the county-seat
of its county. The growth of the new country advanced by leaps and
bounds. In 1891, the 868,414 acres of the surplus lands of the
Iowa, Sac, Fox and the Pottawatomie-Shawnee reservations formed the
new counties of Lincoln and Pottawatomie and increased the extent
of some of the old ones. The next year, 3,500,562 acres belonging
to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians were taken to increase several
of the older counties, and to from the new ones of honest old
American names--Blame, Custer, Washita, Dewey, Roger Mills, Beckham
and Ellis. In the year following, the Cherokee strip was opened for
a settlement together with the surplus lands of the Pawnee and
Tonhawa--5,698,140 acres; besides increasing other counties, this
land furnished forth the new counties of Alfalfa, Garfield, Grant,
Harper, Major, Woods, Woodward, Pawnee, Kay and Noble. At the time
of Wilfred's visit to Brick Willock, the winter of 1894-5, the
opening of the Kickapoo reservation was already a near certainty;
while the vast extent of Greer County itself, so long in dispute
between Texas and the United States, would in all likelihood be
added to the swelling territory of Oklahoma.

The territory, so young but so dauntless, was already agitating the
question of statehood--not only so, but of single statehood, meaning
thereby the prospective engulfment and assimilation of Indian
Territory, that all the land from Texas to Kansas, Missouri and