The Wild West

On 22 April 1889 a large part of central Oklahoma, 'bought' from the Creeks and Seminoles at a rock-bottom price, was opened up to settlers. In the space of twenty-four hours at least 50,000 people flooded into the area and staked every available acre. Ten more openings occurred during the next few years. The Indians were moved onto low-grade reservations with few resources where they mouldered away. The story is told in David Lavender's hugely-informative Penguin Book of the American West. Let those with eyes to read read.

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In land rush Oklahoma, Creeks and Seminoles
Watched helpless as, bamboozled of their rights,
The “Boomers” in their thousands claimed with spade and poles
The land, each loamy inch from plain to heights.
That brute wave irresistible, the Seminoles
And Creeks were thrust aside in dead-end bights,
   And law was what the Boomers’ frowns made known,
   Self-serving, shifting, implacable like stone.

In days, huge townships, numbers strong, sprang up, complete

With schools and stores, with newspapers and fanes;
Just so, through England’s fields another rush replete
With self-sure surliness fills trains and lanes
That towns engorge and brusque-shoved natives make retreat
To hamlets or estates to mourn their pains.
   In streets Slavs’ peevish whine makes sharp the air;
   And mosques in county towns crouch still and stare.

Those Indian tribes collapsed, forced crudely from their lands,

Fair prey for gun rule, agents’ glib-hand tricks;
On grassless reservations of cold skies and sands
They mouldered, lawbound, chivvied, scarred with kicks;
Far-off, the game-horde prairies like bestowing hands
Bemourned their dust-filled blankets hung from sticks:
   Arapaho dance their Ghost Dance, though in vain,
   That hard-lost times of honour come again.

In Britain now, a thinned-out culture breathes its last,
Cities are souks, old ways do not suffice,
Millennia folk, ensnarled by laws their leaders passed,
Are crushed as land-grab masses twist the vice;
Belief and practice packed away, the Christian caste
Trades off its churches at the highest price;
   And birth-bred nuance from a tree is hung,
   Language becomes lingo and fists are swung.

What follows? No-go ghettos face off new and old,
The thought-world of old Britain is remade,
Those faiths and customs of the settlers, taking hold,
Wrestle for dominance with threat and blade;
Such Wild West dogfights favour Islam’s stubborn fold:
The British, flung out from their last stockade,
   Will, like those dancers in their hopeless tread,
   Crumble to history in the dust, their bed.

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© October 2015