Oklahoma City was founded in a single day April 22nd, 1889.

On that wild and wooly Monday morning.

Thousands of desperate people descended upon the 320 chaotic acres that would become the state's largest city.

Merchants, bankers, newspapermen and preachers literally fought for city lots alongside saloon keepers, gamblers and prostitutes.

There was no law at first and no police.

Brothel owner Big Ann Wynn made the rules for cutthroats and pickpockets that roam the streets nicknamed Bunco Alley, Maiden Lane and Battle Row in a forgotten part of town called Hell's Half Acre.

Many of the most familiar sights in Oklahoma City.

The PayCom arena.

The Skirvin Hotel.

The Devon Tower and the Myriad Gardens all rest upon the original footprint.

The first 320 acres fought over by 10,000 desperate people looking for a new start.

On the morning of April 22nd 1889, there was just a lonely train depot set in a sea of tall grass There were a scattering of buildings.

But, you know, eight, ten, maybe.

Not much to look at.

Otherwise, it was pretty wide open prairie.

It was called Oklahoma Station was really nothing but a stop or a station.

On the Santa Fe Railway.

And there were very, very few people around because they couldn't come in on these lands yet because there was an army post nearby and they would be arrested, unlike the Sooners, who could go out in rural areas and set up shop on the land that they wanted There was a guy by the name of A.W.

Dunham who was the station master at the time, and he described climbing up on top of the boxcar over there at the depot, looking out at the horizon.

And in no time, the crowds began to emerge.

And he describes what it was like to have these hordes suddenly appear on the horizon, and then only came suddenly the air was filled with dust.

Thousands of horses, buggies, wagons of every kind arrived all at once.

Trains filled to overflowing, brought in thousands more.

One of the people that stepped off the train that day would build an empire of crime and corruption that she would reign over for 20 years Big Ann Wynn.

She was tall, had blonde hair, and often dressed in tight clothing.

She came down from Leadville with some other madams to get their start here.

Probably just seeing a business opportunity and set up shop very quickly.

So working in tents to begin with and then small shacks until they had amassed a fortune.

It was lawless and these folks had to figure it out on their own by the seat of their pants.

With virtually no communication with the outside world.

There was one telegraph line early on running into town.

You could get opium, you could get alcohol.

It flowed in the streets there were shots fired.

I mean, it was lawlessness in Hell's Half Acre because there was no law enforcement to speak of Pandemonium.

There are so many stories of claims that were not substantiated or people fighting over claims.

And it was very confusing The Homestead Act of 1862 had focused on establishing rural plots and gave little to no thought into town sites.

320 acres were designated to be Oklahoma City, but no official sections had been plotted and no street grid had been laid out.

Part of the problem was that the two companies had pre-sold some of them, you know, or had taken money in in earnest.

One of the ways that surveys were different was the lot sizes were different sizes.

You had people who bought a town site based on one survey, and then when the compromise was made, their lot was based on the other survey.

And so you had people with like lots that were in the middle of the street or that their lot was suddenly half, half the size What this started doing early on was pitching tents and you know, maybe they brought some lumber with them to start building some kind of a structure.

But it would have been absolute chaos.

It was probably is is democratic a scene, as you're going to find, because there just wasn't there were no amenities to rely on.

It was just bare ground and a few rattletrap buildings Not everyone pitched a tent.

Businessman Henry Overholser shipped in ready made buildings by train.

He set those up and they were up and running establishments in no time.

And that was where a lot of buildings were were built.

I mean, some from scratch.

You know, folks brought in lumber and other materials, but others were, you know, prefab buildings.

So that's one way that the city got its moniker born grown.

They are shipping down like readymade homes, like whole walls or what you can fit on a on a boxcar.

As much infrastructure could already be built He was a business guy.

He is one of the city founders and very wealthy, well-to-do guy who was, you know, in on some of the earliest, earliest decision making in the city.

The sounds of construction came from every direction.

Once they had found their plot, they stood gun in hand and waited for the survey company to verify their claim and give them a receipt.

People were hired to hold down claims.

Women would often hold down claims.

And then you think, well, you have your land.

Well, what about everything else I need?

Where is there going to be water?

Who's going to go and get that There's this story of a lady that sat on the porch in a rocking chair with a shotgun, you know, until she secure her townsite.

You had people like William Couch, who was one of the loudest of the boomers to open the territory.

He realized that he could probably have the best shot at claiming a, you know, prime homestead if he was there early.

So he got himself a job with the railroad And when the the signal was sounded to that the land was open, he just said, I quit and walked out of the station and started laying out the town of Oklahoma City stopped to stake his own homestead of course, too.

Became the de facto mayor because there was really no city administration.

There was no official government for 13 months after April 22, we went to May, early May of 1890 before Congress passed legislation enabling territorial governance.

And so for 13 months they just made up their own rules.

He was accused of being a sooner, which he was, and he was shot to death by a claimant and eventually died of his wounds.

So yeah, strangely enough, it was exactly a year to the date after the land run that he died.

There's so many businessmen that were right behind the land run coming down and bringing building materials on the trains just in the hours and days after the gun was fired.

TM Richardson and worked in a lumber yard in Purcell, planning for the day that he could start his business in the new city.

He had gone shopping in Dallas for all the paraphernalia.

You need to start a bank.

So what do you need?

Paper, pens, safes, desks, chairs, you know, whatever he had the wherewithal to put those on a boxcar and send them north on the Santa Fe so that they'd be waiting on a siding when he got there.

So he gets to town.

He and the sons climb off the train, babble their way through the scene of chaos.

When he found the lot that he wanted, he was prepared and he brought in all his paraphernalia.

Eventually, his little bank and a tent, the Oklahoma bank morphed into the First National Bank Trust Company of Oklahoma City.

You know, it all started in a in a tent in a sea of absolute pandemonium.

There were grocers and lumber companies, and there's believed there was a banker there who was, you know, basically just making cash loans and things like that.

There were, you know, like hardware people, shovels and picks and things like that.

There was even a story of a guy named Louis Cramer who made a fortune selling potatoes right off of the boxcar, never had to unload them because, you know, the people came and they didn't have food and they were building a city and it didn't come with grocery stores.

And shortly after dark, a quiet fell upon the hundreds of tents each lit from within by the golden glow of a lantern city began on April 22.

For six days, everybody you know, worked on building a city.

And on seventh, they rested.

And what a biblical image that is.

Chaos returned with the morning light and the fights over ownership intensified.

They instituted martial law for a while.

And because what was happening was there were disputes over the land titles and things like that, which was a federal issue.

And so the federal government sent the army to be there to maintain order.

Their land claims office was overrun with people.

It took years sometimes to figure out exactly who owned a peace.

And you had claim jumpers.

You had somebody go visit their mother in another state.

There were three people there saying, oh, no, this has been my claim since the day of the land run.

The city grids are really between two sort of rival factions that were laying out the city.

But because they were competing business interests, they had very little reason to compromise with each other.

The Seminole Land in town company that was interested in laying out town sites and selling them.

And there was a rival company from Colony, Kansas, and they were really the Oklahoma Town Site Company.

They got referred to as the colony crowd.

And then later as the Kickapoos the colony crowd, they started their survey based on the North Star, and they started surveying using their surveying equipment and they lined it up, you know, straight on north, south and east west axis.

And the Seminoles Town Company, they laid their town site out using the railroad as a baseline.

The thing is that the if you've ever seen railroad tracks, they're not straight and they follow the contours of land.

The town side companies eventually reconcile their town sides, but not without creating what they call back in the day, jogs in the street.

And these were streets just didn't line up because rival town site companies created them so long Grand Avenue, some of the streets didn't line up perfectly as they would in a nice even grid.

What happened was when you get to Reno, which is the dividing line, then the streets started to angled to one side.

Town side companies established lots, but they had to have alleys and back.

I mean, you have Main Streets and Alice and back.

Some folks claim lots and found out two or three days later that they were actually in an alley and they were going to be running a business out of an alley.

Others found that maybe there are in the right away for a railroad and they're about to get scooted out of there by trains.

Most of the jobs in the street grid and the pie shaped lots remained until urban renewal in the 1970s.

What we don't talk about a lot is probably the 20% of the people who certainly landed in what is now downtown Oklahoma City before nightfall on that day of the land run were murderers horse thieves, people running from the law.

Oklahoma City was so condensed compared to the city we have now and so we have churches right next to brothels, right next to stores.

Everything was sort of on one street as the city began to develop in you know, more substantial brick buildings and structures started to to be constructed.

Then the the vise started to to develop in certain areas.

As the new arrivals stepped off the train at the Santa Fe station, they found themselves in an area called Hell's Half Acre.

It stretch from Front Street, now named Santa Fe, and went west to Walker Avenue.

And from Northwest Second Street south to Reno, raucous, muddy road so choked with thugs and thieves, few upstanding citizens dared walk there after dark When you would arrive in Oklahoma City by train, you'd really start seeing the vice areas almost right when you walked off the train.

You just kept walking straight down.

California, you could find pretty much any kind of trouble you were looking for.

Many of the saloons took their names from popular dives in other cities.

There was the Arlington, the Red Onion, the Turf Exchange, the Southern Club, the Black and Rogers, the Two Johns, The Vendome and Noah's Ark.

There was a place called Noah's Ark that was not an actual ship but it was this Tin Tin Shack that had like they just kind of slapped together a bunch of stuff and somebody said, It looks like Noah's Ark and so that was kind of a wild house, but that was that second in Hudson.

If you ask the gamblers and the prostitutes and the saloon keepers, you know, maybe they just thought it was another day of business.

If you ask the woman who came in later, they were scared to death to walk in that part of town for good reason.

It was estimated that within a few months of the run of 1889 that Oklahoma City sported 100 professional gamblers.

The Hartland row is that area on second and so that really did get a reputation of being for working girls and just places of ill repute.

We don't think about working girls being proud of their work or being known citywide.

It's really interesting to look at the census records because they everybody listed their occupation.

We see prostitute listed as an occupation all the time.

There were brothels and gambling houses and opium dens and everything else that came along with people.

It's like a full smorgasbord of entertainment.

We have some madams, like Ann Wynn or Nina Truelove that ran, you know, shops with a brothel upstairs and a bar or recreation hall, as it might be called downstairs.

The queen of the city's criminal underbelly was Ann Wynn, known as Big Ann.

She owned several brothels and saloons and if it was entertainment you were looking for, she could find it.

And she knew how to deal with influence, different politicians or the police and things like that.

She's pretty adept at working the legal system to her benefit and to the benefit of others in her world.

She started in a tent over by right off the train station, the Santa Fe station.

There were a lot of like railroad shacks or kind of chanties and things like that along second street.

And she set up a brothel there.

There were several brothels and bars there.

The Arlington house was where she lived which was a house of ill repute.

And that was kind of where her headquarters was for quite a long time at one time.

And Wynn had a fortune of $100,000, so able to really invest in her business and create more lavish brothels.

There all really described as having fine furniture.

They often invoke a sense of European grandeur.

Whether or not that was true, that it rivaled it, made people feel like they were in a luxury experience or having a more continental time.

So they are they often had fine sofas and carpets and tapestries, but she later was to say that she would pay certain police officers $26 a month, a lot of money in 1889 in 1890 and would even pay certain city councilmen six to $10 a month so that she was not raided.

She knew a lot of people and I don't know if they were her friends or her clientele but politicians, businessmen, judges, police all knew who she was, her, her existence was not a secret and many people knew that she provided a vital service in early Oklahoma City.

And so they if they weren't her friends they had a professional relationship with her.

So often she might be arrested and bailed out very quickly by somebody.

And, you know, sometimes their bails were $1,000.

This is not chump change at that time.

And so people with deep pockets were her friends.

The police station and the city hall were located at Main and Broadway and the interesting thing is they actually used kind of an early version of eminent domain to take over a saloon.

It was the Black and Rogers Saloon.

It is said that as many as 100 horses would be tied to hitching posts just along Front Street at night.

So you had thousands of people milling around with a handful of police officers.

They couldn't enforce the peace.

They couldn't do that at all.

Everything was just wide open and unregulated.

Unless you have to run into Charlie Colcord, in which case he might have something to say about it.

Charles Colcord was a cowboy from Kansas who says he filed the first claim for a city lot.

He was tapped very early on to provide some law and order.

Well, I guess you know, cowboy and gave him enough experience to do that.

So he became the city's first policeman and, you know, mustered up a few other guys to help him out.

But it was a tiny police force.

I think the Colcord is so much a symbol of like early Oklahoma City that he was both a businessman and like the chief of police, sort of people had overlapping jobs that just wouldn't happen today.

There are accounts of these guys riding up down the streets and shooting out the lights.

And, you know, Charlie had the Charlie Colcord had throw a lot of them in jail.

And you know what?

A lot of them were probably his old buddies even with a new police force.

The West was still wild in Oklahoma City.

Sometimes justice was served in a shootout in the street like the day Robert Ford's killer came to town.

Ed Kelly was going was coming to town and he was coming to do business and settle some scores because he'd just gotten out of prison because he had murdered Robert Ford in Colorado.

And Robert Ford was the man who killed Jesse James.

And so a policeman named Joe Burnett was waiting for him.

And he heard that he was in one of the bar areas and so he he found them on the street and they got into this hand-to-hand, you know, struggle it was this like brutal wrestling match, you know, and finally, Barnett found his gun and was able to disable Kelly, and he eventually died.

But that was a story that was told for years and years about this famous gunfight of the man who killed the man who killed Jesse James.

By 1901.

The crime and violence were too hard to ignore, putting more pressure on corrupt officials to do their jobs the good people of the New Oklahoma City would show up at the city council meeting almost weekly and protest what was happening down many times because of the noise.

People couldn't sleep, no air conditioning, so the windows were open so they would show up at the city council to protest.

But hardly ever did the city council do anything about it.

There's a famous court case that sort of was the beginning of the undoing of Big Ann, Ann Wynn, when two girls that had recently emigrated from Holland were out drinking with their uncle, the two young women said that they were drugged.

They were given beer that had something in it, and there were huge accusations of rape that they were, you know, sort of taken upstairs.

And one of the men, George Garrison, who is a famous gambler in town, was convicted of rape of these two young Dutch girls.

They were 18 and 21.

The conviction was overturned but public sentiment began to go against public vice.

Then in August of 1907, a fire where four people were killed brought Big Ann's empire to its knees.

This was just a huge trial, maybe the biggest trial of 1908 or up there because these accusations of murder that maybe people with a bunch of gambling wins were were murdered in the fire was done to cover it up.

The state at one time claims that they have 150 witnesses.

The state of state's evidence is a woman that used to work for and has come in and said that she had worked on plotting murders before and this is a time that Ann Wynn could not get out of prison but eventually the state's case sort of fell apart and the charges against her and one of the porters that worked for her were dismissed.

But for her that was like kind of the the signs of the end for her in town and that was in 1908.

And so she moved to California and kind of lose track of her alcohol being underground, drove everything else more underground and was less tolerated.

Most of these brothels and gambling houses exist as part of saloons becoming a state, getting onto the, the national scene and the hopes people had for Oklahoma City really demanded a change in the in the underworld Oklahoma City's kingdom of vice with Bunco Alley it's rioting Battle Row and the temptations of Harlots' Alley retreated in the face of statehood and commercial progress.

Big Ann's mighty empire was gone.

But Satan remained still challenging the forces of decency to come forth.

Prohibition gave way to bootlegging.

Gambling halls and bordellos went underground and political corruption continues as a testament to the arrogant underworld that came early and stayed late in Hell's Half Acre.