| Spirits of Adventure RANDY KREHBIEL World Staff Writer 09/13/2003 Tulsa World (Final Home Edition), |
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| 'A sense of endless possibility' Dr. Ralph Rucker Jr. holds memorabilia of his grandfather, Clinton M. Allen, who was in the Oklahoma land run of 1893. |
| Below: Clinton M. Allen and his wife, Mary. |
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| The descendants of Clinton M. Allen look over memorabilia of his 1893 land run. Pictured (back row from left) are Wendy Watson Rucker, Dr. Ralph Rucker Jr. and Sherry Allen Rucker; (front row) William Allen Rucker with his children (from left) William Allen Rucker II, Jackson Craig Rucker and Callie Elizabeth Rucker. Photos by STEPHEN PINGRY / Tulsa World |
| Towns to celebrate 110th year of Oklahoma's greatest land run |
| His grandchildren remember Clinton Allen as a slight, scholarly man with a passion for educational psychology and a doctorate from Columbia. But he had been young once, daring and adventurous, and in the final years of his life Allen reminded himself and his grandchildren of it. |
| He wrote them a letter, recounting a golden day six decades before when a 14-year-old boy rode a fast horse in the greatest of the Oklahoma land runs, the Cherokee Outlet opening of Sept. 16, 1893. |
| "(W)e stood viewing a spectacle that the years have not dimmed," Allen wrote. "As far east and as far west as we could see the line was jammed with people, horses, wagons and carts. Trains were loaded and waiting at Orlando . . . There was no marshal or policeman anywhere near us. At a few minutes to twelve o' clock we began to move." |
| An estimated 100,000 people made the run of 1893. In a space of 48 hours they settled all or parts of 11 counties, and put up dozens of towns. |
| The Cherokee Outlet, more commonly called the Cherokee Strip, originally extended more than 7 million acres from near Tulsa north to the Kansas line and west to the Texas Panhandle boundary. By 1893 the Cherokees had been forced to transfer about a million acres in the Outlet to the Osage, Kaw, Nez Perce, Ponca, Pawnee and Otoe and Missouri tribes. The reservations of the Pawnees and Tonkawas, who occupied the former Nez Perce tract, were included in the 1893 run. |
| The run's 110th anniversary will be commemorated Saturday in communities throughout the Outlet. Enid and Perry, which have museums dedicated to the Outlet, have parades, frontier demonstrations and other activities scheduled. |
| Only about a third of Oklahoma was opened to white settlement by land run. Not everyone celebrated them -- for Indians and cattlemen the runs meant the passing of their ways of life. But the vigor, excitement and disregard for convention exemplified by the land runs dominated early Oklahoma. It proudly became the "Sooner State", named for the scofflaws who sneaked in ahead of the starting gun and who, in any other context, would have been considered cheats. |
| The impression that prevailed instead was of the potential of the blank slate. For many, Oklahoma meant a fresh start in a new, unformed place, where someone with gumption could prevail over poverty and social class. |
| That is the lesson his grandchildren learned from Clinton Allen. |
| "I got from him a sense of endless possibility" said Allen Rucker, now a writer living in California and author of several popular books on the "Sopranos" television series. "I got the sense that a person could do anything." |
| "He came from dirt-poor Kansas farmers, and he wound up with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, "said Dr. Ralph Rucker Jr., another grandson and a retired physician living in rural Wagoner County. |
| According to his letter, Clinton Allen left Hartford, Kan., southeast of Emporia, with two neighbors on Sept. 8, 1893. The two men, named Joe Marlow and Frank Cross, asked Allen along to help with their horses and wagon. |
| The two men planned to cross the Osage Reservation and enter the Outlet from its southern border near the town of Orlando, west of Stillwater. From there they planned to ride to the Red Rock Creek valley, smack in the middle of the Outlet. |
| Marlow, being a "rather large man", was to start on a workhorse named Bess. Allen, being much lighter, was to follow on a sleeker mount named Handy. When Bess wore out, Marlow switched horses and continued while Allen returned to camp. |
| Marlow did not return until evening of the following day. He told Allen and Cross he "held the lead . . . until they reached Black Bear Creek. When they emerged on the north side of that creek, there were many more in the race than there were when they approached it. These Sooners had fresh horses and in the nine or 10 miles between there and Red Rock Creek they were in the lead most of the way." |
| Marlow and Cross seem to have been disappointed. Cross staked what turned out to be school land. Marlow filed a disputed claim on a quarter section occupied by what was in all likelihood one of the Sooners. The little party returned to Kansas a few days later. |
| Allen settled in Oklahoma in 1898. He taught school around Carney and Marshall for more than a dozen years before earning his first college degree at the University of Oklahoma. |
| At Columbia, Allen apparently studied under the influential educational psychologist Edward Thorndike. Back in Oklahoma Allen became an early proponent of aptitude testing. He joined the Oklahoma City University faculty in the early 1920s and served in a number of administrative positions before retiring in 1948. |
| Clinton Allen died in 1957. |
| Ralph Rucker said his grandfather rarely mentioned his early exploits. "He talked mostly about his work at the school, and his work in intellectual and IQ testing". |
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| "My grandfather was kind of a petite man,+; said Allen Rucker. "He looked like a scholar. He was not a big, rugged guy. But he was enormously skilled in what you might say unexpected ways. He could walk out into the woods, find a grapevine, and make it into a flute." |
| Allen Rucker said, "I idolized him. He was like a mythical figure" |
| The Allen family, scattered across generations and thousands of miles, gets together from time to time to go through a scrapbook crammed with mementoes of Allen Rucker's life. It reminds them of the limitless horizons of the Oklahoma he knew. |
| "At least one of his brothers could not write his own name", said Allen Rucker. "He came to this place, which was really the end of the wilderness . . . and made this huge kind of leap." |