Cimarron by Edna Ferber

Coat tails swishing, eyes flashing, arms waving, voice soaring.

"Folks, there's never been anything like it since Creation. Creation! Hell! That took six days. This was done in one. It was History made in an hour -- and I helped make it. Thousands and thousands of people from all over this vast commonwealth of ours" (he talked like that) "traveled hundreds of miles to get a bare piece of land for nothing. But what land! Virgin, except when the Indians had roamed it. ‘Lands of lost gods, and godlike men! ' They came like a procession -- a crazy procession -- all the way to the Border, covering the ground as fast as they could, by any means at hand -- scrambling over the ground, pushing and shoving each other into the ditches to get there first. God knows why -- for they all knew that once arrived there they'd have to wait like penned cattle for the firing of the signal shot that opened the promised land. As I got nearer the line it was like ants swarming on sugar. Over the little hills they came, and out of the scrub-oak woods and across the prairie. They came from Texas, and Arkansas and Colorado and Missouri. They came on foot, by God, all the way from Iowa and Nebraska! They came in buggies and wagons and on horseback and muleback. In prairie schooners and ox carts and carriages. I saw a surrey, honey colored, with a fringe around the top, and two elegant bays drawing it, still stepping high along those rutted clay roads as if out for a drive in the Presidio. There was a black boy driving it, brass buttons and all, and in the back seat was a dude in a light tan coat and a cigar in his mouth and a diamond in his shirtfront; and a woman beside him in a big hat and a pink dress laughing and urging the horses along the red dust that was halfway up to the wheel spokes and fit to choke you. They had driven like that from Denver, damned if they hadn't. I met up with one old homesteader by the roadside -- a face dried and wrinkled as a nutmeg -- who told me he had started weeks and weeks before, and had made the long trip as best he could, on foot or by rail and boat and wagon, just as kindhearted people along the way would pick him up. I wonder if he ever got his piece of land in that savage rush -- poor old devil."