Our Collection

At the Institute’s core is the Gilder Lehrman Collection, one of the great archives in American history. More than 85,000 items cover five hundred years of American history, from Columbus’s 1493 letter describing the New World through the end of the twentieth century.

William S. Prettyman Oklahoma great land rush: "boomers" and towns & cities they built

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Gilder Lehrman Collection #: GLC05475 Author/Creator: William S. Prettyman Place Written: [various places] Type: Photograph Date: 1889 Pagination: 14 photos Order a Copy

Collection of fourteen photographs taken in Oklahoma (Indian) Territory at Oklahoma Station (later Oklahoma City) around the time of the land rush. The first five images show the growth of Oklahoma City from March 1889-1892. Other images include views of Chickasaw Indian Nation, Choctaw nation, Fort Washataw and Atoka. The photographer is unknown, but simalrities between the photographs in this collection and photographs by William S. Prettyman that appear in Robert E. Cunningham, Indian Territory: A Frontier Photographic Record by W. S. Prettyman (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1957), suggest that they are a product of Prettyman.

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