The First Eight Months of Oklahoma

WEDNESDAY. APRIL 24.

The citizens' committee of fourteen went to the township line running east and west on Reno avenue and made it the southern boundary line of their work. An enormous

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crowd followed them from lot to lot as they slowly proceeded to adjust the individual rights thereto. In a great many instances there would be a squatter on each end of a lot and a third fellow holding it down in the middle. The committee would hear the story of each claimant and then by vote decide to whom the lot would go. The person receiving the lot paid the committee's treasurer the sum of one large dollar to defray the expense of the survey. The crowd became so dense that O. H. Violet went to General Merritt and asked for a detail of the military to keep the committee's track clear. The commanding general promptly complied with the request and until Thurs-day afternoon a guard of soldiers with fixed bayonets held the crowd back and gave the committee room to breathe and work. Thursday afternoon General Merritt received the false information that the committee were using the military to extort from the lot claimants one dollar per capita and he directed that the guard be withdrawn, which was done. While this adjustment of lots was going on in the southern part of the city, hundreds of citizens were settling in the north part upon the lines of the Seminole survey and those who could not find any place to settle, were talking loud, holding meetings, and denouncing everything and everybody.