As peace officers, we covered ourselves by bringing in minor offenders for trial at Fort Smith and Fort Scott, even garnered some reputation as enforcers, but we didn’t worry much about petty crime, so except for Grat, who waded into brawls with a stocking full of lug nuts, we mostly retired and let the Osage deputies administer law in their nation. I got bored diddling with paperwork and spent more time around the bunkhouse of the Bar X Bar ranch, pitching pennies with Dick Broadwell and Bill Doolin, while Grat and Bob rode their horses on fake patrols with scowls on their faces. But soon they got just as tired of the sham as I did, and they spent their afternoons in porch chairs with their boots on a bannister, waiting to be fired. It would take more than a year.

The territories then were in the midst of the Homestead Run of April 22, 1889, which allowed sixty thousand settlers strung along a hundred miles of Kansas border to swarm across into newly opened Indian land at the sound of cavalry bugles. The price to those claiming land at the federal offices in Guthrie, Kingfisher, and Oklahoma City, was merely $1.50 per acre with an assessor’s fee of $14.00 for entering 160 acres. Property within the city limits of Guthrie that cost $258.00 at the time of the run was four years later worth from one hundred thousand to a quarter of a million dollars. When I hired on as a cowhand, Guthrie had two wooden buildings, the land claim office and the stagecoach depot, and that was about it; after the run it had a population of thirty thousand people in a city of white tents spread out as far as you could see.

The federal government hadn’t prepared for any of that, nor for the passions that come from bargain land, and there were too few peace officers to stop the claim jumpers and thieves and murderers, so most of those lawmen assigned to the territories stayed loose of the wars just like we did, until Congress established a United States Court for the Oklahoma Territory with the organic act of 1890.

My brothers and I pooled our money and claimed a fine section of land for our mother, and the Dalton family, lacking my father, packed up and moved southwest, which seemed a change of luck to Mom. Ben was prosperous, Charles and Henry were getting a little ahead, and the girls all took beaus. Only my brothers Bill and Littleton were still in California, and Bill was on his way to owning a wheat farm and about to stand for the California Assembly. The divorce action was brought before the courts that year and my father, who was by all accounts insane, stayed behind in Coffeyville where he died in a woodshed, banging from wall to wall in the night, spewing vomit and blood. Mice got to him before the neighbors did.