Random film of the day: Ron Howard's "Far and Away," 1992, with young Cruise and Kidman. The picture is honestly mediocre: critics gave it 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the formula "beauty of American epic without depth" stuck to it forever. But at the very end of the film something happens that made it worth enduring two hours of Irish melodrama: hundreds of riders and wagons freeze at the border, a cannon booms — and a human avalanche tears into the prairie for free land. It's precisely for this finale that "Far and Away" deserves to be forgiven almost everything else.
I was almost certain this was Hollywood invention, an impressive set piece for a romantic ending. Turned out — the opposite. The film's finale is its most documentary part. On September 16, 1893, about one hundred thousand real people actually tore off to settle the Cherokee Outlet — the Cherokee Nation's "exit to the west" — in Oklahoma, and it was the largest land run in US history — "possibly the largest event of its kind in history," as the encyclopedia puts it. The story behind that frame turned out to be harsher, funnier, and more absurd than any script Hollywood would write.
Three of Ron Howard's great-grandfathers rode in that very 1893 race — and not one got a single acre. His great-grandmother showed six-year-old Ronny a newspaper clipping with a blurry photograph of the start and jabbed her finger at a blur in the front row: "That's your great-grandfather Tomlinson." The Oklahoma boy grew up, became a director, and ninety-nine years after the race made a film about it for $60 million — and the character named Tomlinson was played by his own father.
That's the layering that hooked me. Not "film about history," but history that lived in one family for a whole century: three great-grandfathers without land in 1893 — and a grandson with a Hollywood budget in 1992. And beneath that — a completely unromantic story about how the state gave away free land, and why almost none of the heroes of that avalanche got rich.
By noon on September 16, 1893, an army of roughly one hundred thousand people lined up along the Cherokee Outlet border. Infantry kept order at four land offices — in Perry, Enid, Woodward, and Alva; cavalry camps stood at eight points around the perimeter. Neighboring Kansas for weeks had been dotted with "boomer" camps — people living in tents on the edge of starvation, because the country's economy was already shaken by the Great Depression of the 19th century, the Panic of 1893: droughts, wheat price collapse, ruined farmers. For thousands of families this was the last chance in life for their own land — the last large territory in the US public domain.
The start was simple: cannon, noon — and go. First come, first served. The ride to the best plot could take hours: the territory stretched 60 miles wide and about 200 miles long — 7 million acres of prairie that the government was giving away essentially for free. In one noon, forty thousand homesteads had to be claimed — plots of 160 acres each.
The railroads raised the stakes: special trains with certificates in hand went straight into the prairie, and people jumped from moving cars. Competition was fair only on paper — but more on that below. For now the fact is enough: demand vastly exceeded supply, and most participants that day left with nothing.
But before the cannon boomed, you had to get clearance — and here's where the mechanics of "free land" crumbled into bureaucratic hell. Interior Secretary Hoke Smith, fearing cheaters, invented a system of nine registration booths on open prairie: four in Oklahoma, five in Kansas. No certificate — not a participant. The booths opened only on September 11, worked ten hours a day, and staff for all nine points consisted of 45 clerks.
Next — queue arithmetic. One hundred fifteen thousand people eventually got certificates, standing in lines up to a mile long, four people across, for several days, without water or shelter. September heat, dust, smoke from prairie fires. At least ten people died from heatstroke right in the queues; a newspaper from Arkansas City, Kansas counted fifty cases of sunstroke in one day, six died overnight. Another twenty thousand minimum never managed to register by start time.
Rules for trains the authorities published only on September 13 — three days before the event: passengers only with certificates, loading no earlier than half an hour before departure. Railroad men publicly stated this was physically impossible. Formally the US was preparing for the largest mass settlement event in its history, actually — for improvisation with human casualties.
Even this pain wasn't enough, because from the very beginning there existed people who didn't play the race by the rules. They were called "sooners" — from an article in the Appropriations Act of 1889 prohibiting land occupation before the official signal. Outlaws hiding in ravines and brush were initially called "moonshiners" — they entered the territory "by moonlight," and at the start appeared as if from underground, already standing on the fattest plot.
But the real elite of cheating was legal: postmen, marshals, railroad workers, Indian agents — everyone who had an official reason to be on the territory beforehand. "Legal sooners" occupied the best places with the same ease as nighttime violators. Rights disputes dragged on for years, and by the 1895 run, at the opening of the Kickapoo reservation, officials estimated: sooners filed claims for roughly half of all plots. The system couldn't hold: after that the government abandoned races entirely and switched to lotteries — land no longer went to the fastest, but fell by ticket.
And here's the main ironic ending of this word history: the cheater's brand became a point of pride. In 1908 the University of Oklahoma named its football teams "Sooners," by the 1920s the negative meaning had evaporated, and now the entire state is unofficially called the Sooner State. A name that meant "one who stole the start" is now sewn into anthems and T-shirts. So an act for which in 1889 you'd lose your right to land became the identity of an entire state.
And now what's not in "Far and Away" at all — and what makes all the romance of the final scene bitter. The land that one hundred thousand people rode for wasn't nobody's. It was property of the Cherokee Nation — a "perpetual outlet to the west," secured by the treaty of 1833, five years before the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation that claimed thousands of lives. The Cherokee themselves, farmers, for decades barely used this prairie; their income came from renting to ranchers — the Cherokee Strip Livestock Association paid $200,000 a year for the right to drive herds through the Outlet along the Chisholm Trail.
Next begins a negotiation drama that would make any negotiator's jaw clench. Congress in 1889 cancelled the lease and offered to buy the land at $1.25 per acre — less than ranchers had once offered the Cherokee for the same land: for $3.00 per acre the association was ready to buy the Outlet outright, and the tribe then refused. Then President Harrison simply banned cattle grazing on the territory — and Cherokee income dropped to zero. Economically crushed, they agreed to sell at $1.40–2.50 per acre. By treaty ratified in March 1893, the US paid $8,595,736.12 — about $8.6 million for 7 million acres, which that same year they gave away "free" to a hundred thousand settlers.
The truth about the pace of this deal sounds like a verdict: the real value of the Cherokee Outlet the Cherokee won back from the government only in 1964 — $14.7 million paid to original allotment holders or their heirs, plus $2 million in interest. Seventy-one years later. In Howard's film about this — not a frame: there Irish people ride for land, not descendants of the prairie's owners.
Now about the "free land" worth riding dozens of miles on horseback in the heat. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, any head of household over 21 could file for 160 acres, paying a $10 filing fee and another $4 when getting the patent. The terms of this deal were simple: live on the plot for five years, work it, bring two witnesses that this is all true — and the land is yours. Leave the land for more than six months — the plot returns to the state.
Sounds generous, and by the standards of the era — yes, this was the most radical land redistribution program in history. But in 1893 reality crashed into it: many "best places" on the prairie turned out unsuitable for farming, towns grew under inflated expectations, and because of the Panic of 1893 agricultural prices fell faster than newcomers could put up a fence. Oklahoma's official history records without embellishment: many plots were abandoned by year's end. The race winner didn't get victory — he got a mortgage of fate for five years, where you could lose with a single drought.
And even that's not all: the economy was changing. Industrialization was redefining the very concept of "opportunity" — small farms were no longer a ticket to the middle class the way they had been for their fathers' generation. Towns living on farm money withered along with their customers. Incidentally, present-day Perry — 4,484 residents by the 2020 census: less than half of the forty thousand who pitched tents there in September 1893.
But if we move from bitterness toward pure human drama, then the saga of cities born that day — pure gold. In Perry, where beforehand only the land office stood, by the night of September 16 forty thousand people stood in tents. Jack Tierney started from the county line and reached Perry in 31 minutes; by four o'clock in the afternoon he'd already opened the Blue Bell saloon.
A detail worthy of a separate monument: he sold beer for a dollar a bottle — because there was no water in town at all, and thirst after the ride under the September sun was such that in the first day he sold 38,000 glasses. The town was officially incorporated on September 20 — four days after it didn't exist. From "empty place" to "municipality with court and authorities" — four days. Not even California during the gold rush showed such a pace of urbanization.
Towns like Perry sprang up along the entire starting line. And not by chance: one of the ugliest sides of that day — sooners and officials grabbed the best places precisely in townsites. Town land was the most valuable: there would be shops, banks, courts. So the periphery of the race is not only rides for homesteads, but a silent war for future main streets.
Back to the film that brought it all together. Howard carried the idea since 1983 — right after "Risky Business" he wanted Cruise for the lead, but after "Top Gun" he told himself: "hope is gone." The script reached the actor only in 1989, at the perfect moment when he was looking for a romantic project. Nicole Kidman was pushed by producer Brian Grazer, who fell in love with her performance in "Dead Calm." And when Howard shared with him an amusing coincidence — Cruise had fondly recalled working with Kidman on "Days of Thunder" — Grazer quipped: "Ron, will you read a newspaper once in a while? Don't you know they're dating?" The romance of the two stars was by then Hollywood's worst-kept secret.
Filming the race — a separate feat, almost repeating the original in scale. On a 12,000-acre ranch near Billings, Montana, in July 1991 they shot the scene with more than 800 riders, 900 horses (plus mules and oxen), and 200 wagons on a "set" a quarter-mile wide. Twelve cameras including helicopters, new Panaflex Super 70s and Arriflex 765s for slow motion. This was the first film shot on new Super Panavision 70, and the first 70mm shoot in ten years — since "Tron." Instructions for the crowd of extras fit in one line: "Get on your horse and ride over there. Don't knock anyone down and don't let anyone knock you down. And ride like hell."
It wasn't without a mirror reflection of the original: four people had broken bones, one wagon flipped and sent extras to the hospital with broken ribs, one horse died. Producer Grazer summed up with Hollywood optimism: "There were fractures. But nothing serious. No deaths." In the real 1893 race, one participant, John Hill, was shot by a soldier ten minutes before the starting shot — soldiers opened fire on the crowd that broke through the cordon line. Hollywood basically didn't lie when it called its version "safe."
And a small irony for last: the scene itself was shot on territory where Oklahoma never was — in Montana, purely for business reasons. Box office in the US — 58 million dollars on a budget of 60: the film about people who bet everything on a piece of prairie itself barely broke even at home. But the race scene entered cinema history as one of the most massive frames shot on 70mm film. The legend outlived both commerce and criticism — just as it outlived its heroes themselves.
I came out of this investigation with a double feeling. On one hand — admiration for the energy of that noon: one hundred thousand people who believed that horse speed would decide their fate, this is one of the most cinematic scenes of real American history, and Hollywood, in my opinion, never shot it better than it looked itself.
On the other — a sober thought that "free land" was one of the most effective marketing slogans of the 19th century. The word "free" was paid for by the Cherokee — twice: first with the Trail of Tears, then with a deal whose fair price the government acknowledged only after 71 years. The "winners" themselves paid too: with years of life on infertile land, ruin, and queues where people died from heat. Real "free" cost more than "expensive."
But probably the most beautiful conclusion — about the sooners. A cheater who stole the start in 1889 became a university mascot in 1908 — nineteen years later, and by the 1920s the stigma was erased completely. Today the name "Sooner" is used for both Oklahoma sports teams and its residents. A story where moral judgment of the act was erased by time, and only speed and daring remained. There's something very honest about America in that — and very hopeful for everyone who in their life has ever started before the signal.