Land Run and Its Effects

At noon on April 22, 1889, thousands of non-Indians on horseback, in wagons and on foot crammed on Santa Fe Railway cars, left the town of Purcell, and rushed to claim their 160-acre tracts in the "unassigned lands" to the north. While few Chickasaws paid much attention to the Land Run at the time, it signaled the opening of more territory to white and black settlement, ultimately leading to the creation of Oklahoma as the forty-sixth state in 1907.