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OKLAHOMA
Often ridiculed by the rest of the country
as dust-filled and boring, OKLAHOMA has had a
traumatic and far from dull history. In the 1830s
all this land, held to be useless, was set aside
as Indian Territory; a convenient dumping ground
for the so-called Five Civilized Tribes who blocked
white settlement in the southern states. The Choctaw
and Chickasaw of Mississippi, the Seminole of
Florida, and the Creek of Alabama were each assigned
a share, while the rest (though already inhabited
by indigenous Indians) was given to the Cherokee
from Carolina,
Tennessee and Georgia, who followed in 1838 on
the four-month trek notorious as "the Trail of
Tears". Today the state has a large Native American
population – oklahoma is the Choctaw word for
"red man" – and even the smallest towns tend to
have museums of Native American history. Once
white settlers realized that Indian Territory
was, in fact, well worth farming, they decided
to stay. The Indians were relocated once more,
and in a series of manic free-for-all scrambles
starting in 1889, entire towns sprang up literally
overnight. Those who jumped the gun and claimed
land illegally were known as Sooners; hence Oklahoma's
nickname, the Sooner State. White settlers didn't
have an easy life, however, facing, after great
oil prosperity in the 1920s, an era of unthinkable
hardship in the 1930s.
The desperate migration, when whole communities
fled the dust bowl for California, has come to
encapsulate the worst horrors of the Depression,
most famously in John Steinbeck's novel (and John
Ford's film) The Grapes of Wrath, but also in
Dorothea Lange's haunting photos of itinerant
families, hitching and camping on the road, and
in the sad yet hopeful songs of Woody Guthrie.
After the slump of the early Thirties, improved
farming techniques brought life, and people, back
to Oklahoma. Today the state is known for its
staunch conservatism; as the Bible Belt stronghold,
bars and liquor stores close early, while tattoo
parlors are banned altogether. Oklahoma is not
the flat and unchanging expanse of popular imagination.
Most of its places of interest, such as attractive
Tulsa, lie in the hilly wooded northeast; only
the sparse and treeless west is devoid of appeal,
on the far side of the central "tornado alley"
prairie grassland which holds the state's revitalized
capital, Oklahoma City. The lakes and parks of
the south, which bears more than a passing resemblance
to neighboring Arkansas (complete with mountains,
foliage and bluegrass music), have made tourism
Oklahoma's second industry after oil.
Eastern Oklahoma
Eastern Oklahoma includes the "Green Country"
of the northeast, patterned with the foothills
of the Ozarks, and woods, streams, lakes and rivers
that make it a popular camping destination. Art
Deco Tulsa is its cultural center; Tahlequah and
Pawhuska are the capitals of the Cherokee and
Osage nations respectively.
Oklahoma City
OKLAHOMA CITY was created in a matter of hours
on April 22, 1889, after a single gunshot signaled
the opening of the land to white settlement. What
was barren prairie at dawn was by nightfall a
city of ten thousand. In 1911 the capital was
moved here from nearby Guthrie, and in 1928 oil
was discovered. Sitting on one of the nation's
largest oilfields, the city was brought up short
by the slump in the 1980s, but it remains the
largest stocker and feeder cattle market in the
world. The economy came alive again in the 1990s,
aided by tourism development and an inflated sales
tax that funded redevelopment in run-down neighborhoods.
However, the devastating bombing of the Alfred
P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995,
which killed 168 people, nineteen of them children,
literally tore the heart out of the city; the
massive community rescue effort has since helped
Oklahoma City regain some of its self-confidence,
though it will be a while before the city is fully
healed. In June 2001, ex-military recluse Timothy
McVeigh was executed for the crime; his accomplice,
Terry Nichols, is serving a lifetime sentence
in jail for his part. A permanent landscaped memorial
has been constructed at the former site of the
Murrah building, while the Journal Record Building
next door has been turned into the Museum and
Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism.
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