In a horse-drawn covered wagon that could go "no faster than the cows could go," Isa Mentzer rode westward from Jasper County, Missouri, to a new territory in 1892, the livestock dragging their hooves along the way.

It was just three years after the great Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 had opened settlement in the Unassigned Lands of Oklahoma Territory. The migration continued as wagon trains brought settlers in the years before statehood.

Sunday marks the 129th anniversary of the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush. For years after the land run, thousands of people would continue to migrate to the region where small towns and bigger cities and farms and ranches fenced land where buffalo once roamed.

Amy Isadore "Isa" Mentzer was a 15-year-old girl and one of seven children of George Mentzer's family from southwest Missouri. They weren't in a race for land at the sound of a pistol, but three years after the area was opened they bought land once they got there. She wrote her memories of her journey to the new land in a diary that her descendants have saved.