Oklahoma City

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Introduction

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. However, white settlers didn't have an easy life. After great oil prosperity in the 1920s, the settlers faced 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 is the state's hard-hit 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.



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