Run of '89 West Boundary
El Reno, Canadian County, Oklahoma
Marker Inscription
Run of '89 West Boundary At the opening of "Old Oklahoma" April 22, 1889, this was the west line for the Run starting at 12 O'clock noon. Prairies and hills in the 2,000,000 acre tract, east were peopled by tens of thousands of homes where planted and tent cities sprang up before nightfall.
The Story
At high noon on April 22, 1889, this line marked the western edge of the land opened in the first great Oklahoma Land Run. When the signal sounded, tens of thousands of homesteaders raced across the two-million-acre 'Old Oklahoma' tract to stake their claims. Within hours, open prairie gave way to instant tent cities and settled homesteads.
Why it matters
The Land Run of 1889 was one of the most dramatic single days of American westward expansion, opening former Indian Territory to a rush of settlement.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · Land Run of 1889
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Mennoville Mennonite Church
El Reno, OK
In 1891 twenty-seven charter members organized Mennoville as the first Mennonite church in Oklahoma Territory, raising their sanctuary in 1893 just two years after the great Land Run opened the region to settlement. The congregation drew Swiss, German, and German-Russian farmers, some tied to the nearby Mennonite mission school for Cheyenne and Arapaho children at the Darlington Agency. Services continued for 61 years, and in 1997 the historic building was moved to Heritage Square in El Reno.
Skeleton Trail Ranch Marker
Enid, OK
Overlooking Skeleton Creek in what is now Garfield County, the Skeleton Trail Ranch was a working way-station on the great post-Civil War cattle trails that pushed Texas longhorns north toward the Kansas railheads. Like other trail ranches, it gave the drovers a place to hold and rest their herds and to find a few basic comforts along a long, dusty road. It stood at the meeting of open range, hard travel, and the booming beef economy of the late 1800s.
Burnett Horse Ranch
Burkburnett, TX
In the 1870s cattleman Samuel Burk Burnett launched his famous 6666 (Four Sixes) ranch in Wichita County. When drought struck the 1880s, Burnett and neighboring ranchers leased vast grazing lands from the Comanche and Kiowa across the Red River in Indian Territory, and he acquired land for a dedicated horse ranch during the outfit's greatest years of expansion and selective breeding. His son Tom kept ranching in the county after headquarters moved to King County; the family sold the horse ranch in 1906.
Valley View Baptist Church
Nocona, TX
A regional Baptist association voted in 1895 to plant a church near Spanish Fort, and Red River Baptist Church was organized that year after a brush-arbor revival at Red River Station. Early worship rotated through local schoolhouses, and by about 1919–1920 the congregation shared the new Valley View Schoolhouse; a pastor who doubled as the school's principal led it in the early 1920s. Renamed Valley View Baptist Church around 1929, it built a lasting record of supporting missionary work, sending many former pastors into the foreign mission field.