King Blood(2)

They were not hoggish about it. Not for a moment would they have enriched themselves while impoverishing the Indians. It had always been French policy to make friends with the Indians, and Choteau, a good man and a gentleman, would have done so anyway. He and his men intended to found a permanent settlement here; had even gone so far as to pick a name for it, the name of their patron saint. They would build a city here, one in which French and Osage would be equal. And how, why, being reasonable men, and to make these great events possible, could the Osages object to the sharing of a fraction of their furry wealth when they had such an unusable abundance of it?

The Osages confessed to being reasonable men. Being reasonable, they suggested that there was no valid reason for sharing what they already owned, and that it was their prerogative, not the Frenchmen's, to decide whether or not they needed it all.

The Choteau party became irritated. They got very firm with the denizens of _tulsa lochopocas._ Nor were they the last to do so. For Tulsey Town's bland independence, her notion that she should deal with the world strictly on _her_ terms, grew stronger each day of her rambunctious history.

More than two hundred years after her off-handed brushing-off of the French trappers and hunters, Tulsa was telling Wall Street to take its underwriting and financing and get hence (or words to that effect). The House of Morgan, _et al.,_ were amused rather than annoyed. The notion that an upstart Oklahoma town could itself raise the billions necessary for the proper exploitation of its oil resources was simply laughable. And yet… the upstart town _did_ raise those billions. Not only for itself but for others. And in the end, Wall Street was forced to admit that it had a rival. It remained first, in the big money capitals of the world, as a financier of the oil industry. But little Tulsa – or, rather, not-so-little Tulsa – ranked second to it.

So there you were, then. There Tulsa was. A friendly town, an amiable live-and-let live town. A proud town, which liked doing things its own way and knew just what to do with those who would have it otherwise.

As late as the early years of the Twentieth Century, there was riverboat traffic as far north as the Dakotas. So relatively much, compared with railroad commerce, that the Midwest was visualized as the future population center of the country, and there was agitation to move the nation's capital from its eastern site to some more suitable spot in Nebraska Territory.

Because of her location, Tulsa was host to no small number of riverboat travelers, and she provided for them characteristically. Graves, for some. Tar and feathers for others. For others – those whose notions coincided with her own – homes and happiness, and often wealth.

Similarly, when the Cherokee Strip was thrown open to settlement and the great ranches broken up into quarter-section homesteads, Tulsa provided for the now-jobless cowboys, the adventurers and desperadoes who had formerly roamed the Strip; taking care of them – in one way or another. And when the homesteaders, often underfinanced, were drouthed out or otherwise brought to disaster in their first season, Tulsa was again a provider – in her own fashion.

Tulsa knew just what to do about the Crazy Snake rebellion, the last of the Indian uprisings. She knew just what to do – and she did it – when race riots threatened to destroy the city. She…

But that is getting ahead of the story. Moving back a couple of hundred years to Auguste Choteau and his men:

Their 'firmness' with the residents of _tulsa lochopocas_ was repaid with interest. The Frenchmen were, in fact, forced to flee for their lives; heading their long boats on up the Arkansas, and thence into and up the Mississippi, along whose shores, in an uninviting stretch of mudflats, they at last established their permanent settlement, duly naming it after their patron saint.

It became a large and prosperous city, even as they had predicted. A city which Critch had often visited to his advantage. Now, at the end of his second day in Tulsa, with his wallet empty and the place where he carried it sore from a Tulsan's kicking, Critch cursed the foolish fate that had guided him here instead of to the friendly metropolis of Auguste Choteau's founding, the city of St. Louis.

In fact, Tulsa had so unnerved him that he was even fearful of responding to the small box-notice in the local newspaper. A boldface-type announcement that Critchfield King, youngest son of Isaac Joshua King, should immediately present himself at the offices of Judge Washington Dying Horse, attorney-at-law. *c*

It took a night of hunger and sleeplessness, a very long night without money for food or room, to change his fearfulness to fatalism and the conclusion that life could dip him in no sourer pickle than he was already in. In the morning, then, after shaving and tidying up at the railroad station, he at last presented himself at Judge Dying Horse's office.