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Ridiculed
by the rest of the nation as boring, and
forever the butt of jokes at the expense
of the “Okies,” 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 manic
free-for-all scramble 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, the region is
now facing another crisis, and its major
downtown areas are uncannily still.
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.
Click here to go to Oklahoma State
web site. |
