The West from a Car-Window by Richard Harding Davis

THE only interest which the East can take in Oklahoma City for some time to come must be the same as that with which one regards a portrait finished by a lightning crayon artist, "with frame complete," in ten minutes. We may have seen better portraits and more perfect coloring, but we have never watched one completed, as it were, "while you wait. " People long ago crowded to see Master Betty act, not because there were no better actors in those days, but because he was so very young to do it so very well. It was as a freak of nature, a Josef Hoffman of the drama, that they considered him, and Oklahoma City must content itself with being only of interest as yet as a freak of our civilization.

After it has decided which of the half-dozen claimants to each of its town sites is the only one, and the others have stopped appealing to higher and higher courts, and have left the law alone and have reduced their attention strictly to business, and the city has been burned down once or twice, and had its Treasurer default and its Mayor impeached, and has been admitted to the National Baseball League, it may hope to be regarded as a full-grown rival city; but at present, as far as it concerns the far East, it is interesting chiefly as a city that grew up overnight, and did in three years or less what other towns have accomplished only after half a century.