OKLAHOMA

Oklahoma was admitted to the Union as the forty-sixth state on November 16, 1907. Its location in the western south central United States makes it a geographic melting pot. Sharing borders with Texas and Arkansas, Oklahoma is part of the South. But its common borders with Missouri and Kansas place Oklahoma in the central United States, and its borders with Colorado and New Mexico give the state a western flavor. Oklahoma is the nation's eighteenth largest state with over 69,000 square miles. Its population of 3.3 million people ranks 30th among the fifty states. Oklahoma City is the state's capital and its most populous city.

The state enjoys a diverse topography, climate, and economy. The humid eastern region of Oklahoma is graced by seven million acres of forests and 2,600-foot mountainous peaks where mining and lumbering are the chief economic activities. The east is also home to hundreds of swift-running rivers, many of which are damned to provide hydroelectric power in neighboring communities. Wheat is grown and cattle raised in the more temperate, low-rolling prairies to the west. Most of Oklahoma's cotton is grown in the drier, heavily irrigated southwestern counties. Petroleum and natural gas are produced throughout the state—Oklahoma is one of the country's five leading producers of both mineral fuels.

Oklahoma winters are relatively mild, with temperatures in January averaging about 38 degrees Fahrenheit. Spring brings dozens of tornadoes that twist through the state annually, usually leaving measurable damage. Summers tend to be long and hot, and periodic droughts can turn the semi-arid western region of Oklahoma into a dust bowl. But the state's sometimes challenging climate does not stop yearly visits from 16 million tourists, who generate over $3 billion in gross revenue for the state. Popular Oklahoma tourist attractions include plentiful state parks, rodeos, Old West shows, and Native American exhibits.

Native Americans played an integral role in Oklahoma's early history. The name "Oklahoma" itself is derived from two Choctaw words: "okla" meaning people and "humma" meaning red. Oklahoma has been inhabited by Native Americans since at least 1200 AD. Explored by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and settled by the French in the seventeenth century, Oklahoma was acquired by the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase. To open land for white settlers in the Atlantic states during the 1820s the federal government began relocating Native Americans from their homelands in the southeastern United States to the new Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi. The most populous tribes inhabiting this area were the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee. Many of these Native Americans adopted European dress styles, farming methods, and political practices.

In the 1830s the federal government seized more land from Native Americans and created what was then called the Indian Territory, which included all of present-day Oklahoma as well as parts of Nebraska and Kansas. Tens of thousands of Native Americans were forcibly uprooted from their communities and driven into this newly created territory. Two-fifths of the uprooted Native Americans died along the way, while others suffered great hardship in what became known as the Trail of Tears.

During the American Civil War (1861–1865) the five tribes indigenous to Oklahoma signed treaties committing their support to the Confederate states. But the war left Oklahoma in ruins. Homes, land, and personal property were destroyed, creating widespread poverty and lawlessness. From the disorder, outlaws and bandits emerged, including the notorious Frank and Jesse James. In response to complaints about the growing tumult, the federal government built a district courthouse in Arkansas and appointed hundreds of U.S. marshals to quell the chaos.

The federal government also built a number of military posts that were designed to keep Native Americans on their reservations. (The Indian Territory had been reduced to the area of present-day Oklahoma after various tribes surrendered land as a condition for rejoining the Union.) Beginning in 1866 native peoples from several western states were relocated to reservations on the western half of the Indian Territory, while the five tribes were cramped into reservations on the eastern half. Skirmishes soon erupted when Native Americans left their reservations to hunt for food on white settlements in Texas and Kansas. U.S. troops were ordered to chase after the wayward Native Americans, beat them back to the reservations, and disarm them. During one particularly cruel military campaign in the winter of 1868, Colonel George Armstrong Custer led a Seventh Cavalry attack on an unsuspecting Cheyenne village near the banks of Oklahoma's Washita River. Custer's troops killed more than one hundred men, women, and children.

Treaties and federal laws further encroached upon the Indian Territory. In 1889 Congress opened 800,000 acres for settlement in the central Indian Territory known as "the Unassigned Lands." Promoters (called "Boomers") organized the settlers (called "Sooners") into communities of home seekers. On April 22, 1889, 50,000 Sooners lined up on the border of the Unassigned Lands, awaiting their signal to race across the unclaimed lots in search of property they wanted to settle. By nightfall nearly all of the available land was taken, and Oklahoma had a new nickname, the Sooner State. "Boomer Sooner," the University of Oklahoma's fight song, was also named after this page in the state's history.

The Native American population in Oklahoma was decimated by the influx of Sooners during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Native Americans comprised only 9 percent of Oklahoma's population at the time it was granted statehood in 1907, a stark contrast to their 27 percent of the pre-statehood population of 1890. African Americans, many of whom had been lured from other southern states by the promise of unsettled land in Oklahoma, comprised 10 percent of the state's population. They established more all-black towns in Oklahoma than the rest of the country combined.

Although African Americans were discriminated against in Oklahoma, as they were elsewhere in the country, the Oklahoma African American community served as a bellwether for the Civil Rights Movement. For example, African Americans in Oklahoma were among the first to successfully file lawsuits challenging the system of racial segregation in the South. These lawsuits, brought to court during the 1940s, fore-shadowed the U.S. Supreme Court's groundbreaking 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in all public schools unconstitutional.

Oklahoma continued to act as a kind of national political and economic barometer for the remainder of the twentieth century. Relations between Native Americans in Oklahoma and the federal government seesawed during this time. The federal government teetered between periods when local tribes were encouraged to exercise greater authority over their internal affairs and periods when the federal government interfered with that authority. Oklahoma farmers enjoyed a boom in wheat prices that resulted from massive grain sales to the Soviet Union in the 1970s, but suffered a swoon when the prices began to fall in the 1980s. The Oklahoma petroleum industry also mirrored that pattern as it watched gas prices skyrocket during the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s, but then saw oil-industry jobs disappear as prices dropped a decade later.

Near the end of the century Oklahoma became the site of the most deadly terrorist act in U.S. history. On April 19, 1995, 168 people died in Oklahoma City when a bomb exploded inside a rental truck parked outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Timothy McVeigh was convicted of 11 counts of conspiracy and murder for his part in the bombing, while Terry Nichols was found guilty of conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors portrayed the defendants as right wing, anti-government extremists who sought revenge for the federal government's destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. McVeigh was sentenced to death and Nichols to life in prison.

OKLAHOMA

FURTHER READING