He documented the historic moment in a travel diary, later hastily adding in pencil, “Carts, buggies, light wagons. Everything at break neck speed.”
Osburn was one of an estimated 50,000 people who joined the epic race that day in hopes of staking a 160-acre claim. President Benjamin Harrison signed a proclamation a month earlier on March 23 that opened two million acres of the Oklahoma Country — officially titled the Unassigned Lands — to non-Indian settlement. Homesteaders generally considered the designated acreage among the richest unoccupied sections of public land in the United States, and it was therefore carved from Indian Territory.