THE history of Oklahoma is an integral part of that peculiar phenomenon of restlessness that pushed people across the North American continent in unending pursuit of richer soils, better opportunities, and the chance to begin anew. The first white men entered this new land from two directions—the Spanish from the south, the French from the east. The Spanish adventurers moved out of their Mexican possessions in the 1500s in search of fabled kingdoms of sun and gold. But the future Oklahoma disappointed them. It held no gold or jewels, no exotic races of people, no prospects for the instant wealth so dear to the Spaniards’ ambitions. Although the Oklahoma plains area was a logical extension of New Spain, in the end the conquistadores hurried elsewhere. They left trails and names on the land, but no permanent imprint.
With the growth of French influence in the Mississippi valley, after La Salle’s explorations in the 1680s, traders moved up the rivers of Oklahoma in search of pelts for the St. Louis and New Orleans fur trade. There were traces of the French contact in French-Indian bloodlines and in some place names, but little permanent influence remained. Like the Spanish who preceded them in this new world, the French were soon overextended. By 1803, Napoleon was ready to abandon France’s costly North American empire, more productive of risk than riches. With the Louisiana Purchase, modern Oklahoma, except for the Panhandle, became a part of the territorial United States. Despite a profitable fur trade with indigenous Indian tribes and the potential for even richer commerce with the Plains Indians and the Spanish borderlands, Oklahoma languished for eight more decades. It was an irony of her history that, despite expectations of being among the first of the new states fashioned from the Louisiana Territory established in 1805, she was the last.
The explorers, adventurers, and traders who touched Oklahoma prior to the nineteenth century made the nation conscious of the territory. Permanent settlers were needed, however, to make a new civilization from the contact of people and land. The pioneers who finally came entered from three directions, east, north, and south. Indian tribes from the southeastern part of the United States were resettled in Oklahoma prior to the Civil War. White ownership of land was not officially permitted until the end of the 1880s. But in varied ways the landscape reminded all of these settlers of their former homes.
To the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—entering Oklahoma from the east, familiar vistas helped ease the wrenching experience of removal. Eastern Oklahoma was a leafy bower that could nourish the Indians’ mystical attachment to the earth, just as the woodlands of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi had done. The hilly terrain and forests of pine, oak, hickory, cypress, and even magnolia were reassuring. The Indians regarded the green hills, lush valleys, rivers, and abundant wildlife as friends and providers, not as property. That concept appealed to few whites and underlay much of the later tension among varied groups of settlers.
To the “Jayhawkers,” Unionist guerrilla bands who came from the north, the grass-covered, windswept prairie, with its extremes of heat and cold, drought and flood, was reminiscent of their previous experiences in the Dakotas, Kansas, and Nebraska. And settlers coming from the south through Texas found native pecan trees in the bottomlands of the Red River and many places that reminded them of former homes in the South. Moving north and west, they found an extension of the higher, drier lands characteristic of the greater Southwest. It seemed that the remnants of both geography and people came together in Oklahoma. In spite of their differences in origin and in time lapsed between their arrivals, both Indians and white settlers were refugees. Whether driven westward before governmental decrees, drought, or wanderlust, all came to Oklahoma in search of new roots and with hopes of success.
Oklahoma looked very different when settled in the nineteenth century from the way it would look in the twentieth. An arcadian quality, a sense of pastoral innocence about the land caused a Cherokee to write to Chief Dennis Bushyhead in the 1880s: “There is no better country in the west than this, you can picture any kind of land and location for homes and find it here. Rich loamy prairie or timbered bottoms and black limestone valleys and uplands . . . well watered and timbered.”1 Richard Harding Davis, glamorous correspondent for Harper’s Magazine, traveled through Oklahoma in 1891. Despite an eastern heritage, Davis caught something of the new land’s spirit and potential. Its soil was “rich and black and soft, and looks like chocolate where the plow has turned the sod.”2
The interior plains of Oklahoma remained basically unchanged for centuries until white settlers came in the later 1880s. As a pioneer and historian wrote later, “pitted with the wallows of the vanished buffalo and broken in the distance by irregular green lines of timber that marked the courses of streams,” the land had absorbed generations of red men.3 Because the Indians lived from the land, not on it, they did not destroy the prairies.
To the first white settlers, the land’s most striking quality was a mantle of luxurious grasses. Able to withstand recurring cycles of drought, wind, and extreme temperatures, the vegetation held the plains together. Bluestem grass, native to central Nebraska, spread across Kansas and spilled into central Oklahoma as far south as the Canadian River. It was the dominant prairie covering, and settlers were fascinated by its height, density, and constantly changing hues. It appeared a light green in the early spring, looked at with the wind, and dark green, seen against the wind. In summer the bluestem took on a reddish-brown cast. By autumn its purple and copper tints contrasted with the red, gray, white, and silver tones of dropseed, switch grass, squirreltail, and Indian grass.
Where the soil remained moist, bluestem formed a continuous sod, creating a limitless sea of grass interlaced with creek beds boasting borders of trees and shrubs. Early settlers often described the terrain in nautical terms. The breeze shifting the grass made it resemble waves and the ocean’s gentle heaving. And the canvas tops of pioneer wagons were often compared to the sails of ships.
The grass grew so tall along creek bottoms that it hid all but the tops of wagons. Tiny islands of settlement on the prairie were sometimes engulfed in the tall grass. And the prairie chickens and fleet deer so necessary as food in early days of settlement abounded, but were often swallowed in the waves of bluestem before a man could shoulder his gun.
But the rich grasslands of northern and central Oklahoma did not shape her image to the rest of the world in later times. The land’s comfortable, fecund look disappeared rapidly, as industrious farmers burned, plowed, and grazed hundreds, then thousands, of acres. Yet the memory of that verdant scene lingered for the pioneers. During the depths of the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, a Panhandle farmer accidentally pulled up the cornerstone of an original land survey while contour plowing. The incident reminded his neighbor, Caroline Henderson, an early settler devoted to the land, of the time when the earth was fresh and untouched. She wrote a friend in Maryland that, for her, the cornerstone
always . . . has suggested the beauty of the untouched prairie as it was when the surveyors set the stone, the luxuriant turf of native grass—grama grass, buffalo, and curly mesquite—the pincushion cactuses, straw-color and rose, the other wild flowers which in their season fulfilled the thought of Shakespeare:
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die.4
The first waves of settlers flowing into Oklahoma with the land opening of 1889 were as captivated with the climate as with the scenery. Compared to winters on the northern Great Plains, Oklahoma weather was temperate. Ruth Gage, a homesteader weary of battling twenty-below weather in the Dakotas and Nebraska, recalled “this ‘Promised Land’ of Oklahoma beckoning us on to further adventure.”5 Early territorial newspapers boasted of “a country which for several months in the year holds winter in its hand, spring in its arms and summer in its lap, all at the same time.”6 Yet even the most optimistic or gullible newcomer quickly learned the statement’s implications. In Oklahoma, winter seldom melted into spring, and Indian Summer did not necessarily come in October. Like everything else in Oklahoma, the seasons overlapped and competed with each other. Nor was the daily weather any more predictable than the actions of people who lived with it. May might bring snow or heat; fall might come in October or December; and it could rain a year’s quota in one week, or not rain for months.
Located in the transition zone between the humid, subtropical climates of the south and the colder climates to the north, with humid lands on her eastern borders and semiarid lands to the west, Oklahoma experienced turbulent weather. Nature did everything on a grand scale and with intemperate mixtures. Wide, shallow rivers were torrents one day, then sluggish, meandering streams with treacherous quicksands, or broad strips of blowing sand on still another. Dry air often evaporated rainfall quickly, so that one could experience a downpour and a sandstorm almost simultaneously, if the wind was strong enough. Summers were hot and long; winters were usually windy and cold.
Drought alternated with flood. Early settlers knew from experience in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas that the only safe prediction about plains weather was that dry years followed wet ones in both long and short cycles. Early white settlers came to the plains in a wet cycle and willingly allowed it to convince them that the territory would support most kinds of farming. Reluctant to admit that there was no escape from nature’s caprice, thousands of farmers reared in the practices of humid agriculture settled on the area’s marginal lands. They were at the mercy of a rainfall pattern that varied widely.
But more than the vagaries of seasons, rainfall, and temperature, the strong wind was the most difficult feature of the region’s climate to tolerate. As with other aspects of the weather, the booster territorial press concentrated on the wind’s gentle moods. The editor of the Watonga Republican in 1893 described a December wind as “a balmy mellowness . . . in the air. Light zephyrs like the airy undulations of sweet softness that fan the sylvan bowers of fairyland, gently but voluptuously filled the earth.”7
Because of the great variations in the temperature and humidity of air masses colliding over Oklahoma, winds frequently whipped up violent tornadoes or electrical storms that scattered hail or sand in their wake. Sometimes the atmosphere was so charged with electricity as thunderstorms raged over the prairies that “the points of the horns of cattle would at night blaze with tiny tapers of light.”8
The Oklahoma settler learned to read the wind and sky with a concerned accuracy. Windmills turned away from the wind and shut off when it blew at twenty to twenty-five miles per hour. If hawks rode the air currents, while smaller birds were juggled like balls, the breeze was nearing thirty miles per hour. At about that speed, Russian thistles uprooted and became tumbleweeds that raced across the land. Driven along at sixty or seventy miles per hour, masses of them easily flattened fences. The winds were a necessary part of the plains’ subtle ecology, since they reseeded grasses; but they equally foretold danger or death for man and animal when they became tornadoes, or took on hurricane force. When the winds were most savage, horses and cattle turned tail and drifted away; but the pioneer who survived in Oklahoma learned to interpret the air’s moods, and like the lordly bison that preceded him on the prairies, he faced into the storm.
So pervasive were the effects of climate on daily life that settlers quickly resorted to the ironic frontier humor that blended understatement with hyperbole. There was the story of a man plowing with a team in summer when one of the horses overheated and died. Before he could remove the harness, the wind shifted and the other horse froze to death. The newcomer who asked with irritation, “Does the wind blow this way all the time?” got a ready answer: “Hell, no! It blows the other way about half the time.”9 And if a man lost his hat in the gale, he was told not to chase it, since he could grab the next one blowing by. Even Oklahoma houses supposedly had special features called “crowbar holes” to gauge the wind. “You shove the crowbar through the hole; if it bends, the wind velocity outside is normal; if the bar breaks off, it is better to stay in the house.”10 And of course there were inevitable comparisons with Texas. A farm wife who lived in Old Greer County, an area both Texas and Oklahoma once claimed, hoped that the boundary commission would draw the state line to place her home on the Texas side, because she had heard that the Oklahoma weather was so terrible.
Yet even the climate had its blessings and its partisans. Summers were hot, but the wind offered some relief. The cool fronts of autumn and winter turned the sky brilliant blue and the air crystalline. And, later, people would offer ironic thanks for the wind, which kept smog from accumulating over the state’s cities.
The climate joined with the terrain of western and central Oklahoma to reinforce the impression of a land of infinite possibilities. The opulent vastness made people revise their sense of proportion and standards of measurement: they learned to think in terms of miles, instead of the inches and feet that had once sufficed. Farmsteads became ranches, acres became domains. Plans and ambitions expanded in an environment where even the most monumental task seemed possible to fulfill. Such an enlarged viewpoint gave the settler a sense of importance and compensated for many drawbacks and disappointments. The Oklahoman further learned to exaggerate the sense of scope so common to Americans of all eras. In time, he pitied those too timid to face the beckoning distances of the great frontier and the arching sky: “He believed they were cramped by a narrow life and earnestly urged that they come out and join him in the development of a new country.”11 Yancey Cravat, fictional hero of Edna Ferber’s Cimarron, spoke for thousands of real-life settlers when he declared: “Here everything’s fresh. It’s all to do, and we can do it. There’s never been a chance like it in the world. We can make a model empire out of this Oklahoma country, with all the mistakes of other pioneers to profit by.”12
The optimism of those early settlers did not diminish with time. In an environment where everything—climate, soil, vegetation, topography, scope, and isolation—combined to make achievement difficult, people endured. Second-generation Oklahomans born and reared on the open prairie loved the land so intensely that, when visiting the wooded areas their parents had left, they felt stifled and shut in.
Profound attachment to the land characterized both Indians and whites. But there were striking differences in their attitudes toward land use and toward the larger natural sphere of which it was a part. To the Indian, the land was one component of a great order of trees and streams, wind and rain, man and beast. He was but one part of a harmonious, unending cycle. The most remarkable feature of the Indians’ relationship to land was the lack of any sense of private ownership. The land was for use and sustenance, but not for exploitation and profit. It belonged to all, whatever individuals used it. An Indian tilled only the soil needed to grow food for his family, not to sell to a neighbor or to feed a process that sustained distant people. His livestock grazed freely and he hunted in open woods and plains; he fished the streams to fill his stomach, not his purse. He had little desire to conquer the sod, drain marshes, or change land that nature had made inhospitable to cultivation. He accepted nature as it was. The Indian often lived a life of violence and insecurity, but not of conscious poverty, for he tailored his needs and desires to nature’s apparent order.
For these reasons, Indian life left the land generally unchanged. The only scars were natural, marks of erosion, fire, or flood. If game overgrazed an area, hunger soon drove them to other pastures, and in time the grass healed the wounds. Even the industrious mixed-bloods among the Five Civilized Tribes, who engaged in plantation agriculture before the Civil War, used the land with care. Towns in Indian Territory were laid out neatly, and men built in accordance with the terrain, respecting streams and woodlands so that there was little sense of man’s destructive impact, although a vigorous society flourished. No wonder the white settlers marveled at the beauty and the empty, undisturbed quality of this land they coveted.
Whatever the varieties or logic of nature’s dispensation, the white settler, unlike the Indian, arranged the land to suit his preconceived purposes. Attitudes and practices that were natural and prudent to Indians seemed “backward” to the whites dedicated to earning more than subsistence from the land. The Indians’ calmness toward nature often seemed apathy to those imbued with a different work ethic. And a willingness to take what nature gave without destructive effort seemed “lazy” in the eyes of many whites. This divergent view, reflected in many social attitudes, underlay much of the tension between Indians and whites.
The pioneers who came to Oklahoma in the 1880s and 1890s did not differ from those who had moved west earlier in search of wealth and new life. They were part of the long drama of filling up the continent. They wished to establish homesteads, rear families, develop a society, and attain economic security. The ideal was praiseworthy, but the pioneer psychology was not. The white settler believed firmly in dominating the land. Man clearly came before nature in his priorities, a view that religion, history, and human desire seemed to certify.
In subduing and arranging the land, the pioneer did untold harm to the natural order. His first act was usually to plow a fireguard around his claim, then burn off the grass surrounding his dwelling. To ease the task of planting, he often burned off whole fields before plowing. Those burrowing creatures and other wildlife who survived this fiery carnage soon fled before the cutting, probing plow. Determined to mine the prairie environment with habits of farming learned in other climates, the first settlers turned the light, rich soils, then exhausted them with too many crops. The soil that did not blow away in dry times washed off in rainy seasons. Human energy, self-deception based on the desire for security and gain, and mechanical inventions broke the balance of nature that had sustained the complex ecology of plains life.
The Oklahoma settler was no more greedy or profligate than other American pioneers. He sincerely believed in his right to this vast, promising cornucopia. After he slashed the timber, destroyed the watershed, burned the grass, and mined the soil, he could move on, like other generations. Indifference and simple negligence accounted for as much of the devastation as did ignorance. By the time Oklahoma was settled, agriculture was a business rather than a way of life. It was a risky business, with high stakes, and everyone gambled. As one plains farmer admitted during the devastated 1930s: “We know how to farm better than we do. We simply take chances, winning in good seasons and losing when it fails to rain or the wind blows out our crops.”13 Territorial journalists and agricultural experts preached the need for windbreaks, contour plowing, stubble mulching, and terracing in the 1890s, as their later counterparts did after the great dust storms of the 1930s. But what did timid men or “hifalutin’ experts” know, when wheat was selling at two dollars a bushel in Chicago? Or when corn-fed cattle brought record prices and the chance to pay off the mortgage beckoned the man willing to plow up another quarter-section even if it was a dry year? Only fools planted grass, when wheat and cotton turned to gold.
The farmer was not alone in violating the natural order. The coal operators and later the oil producers each left ugly legacies. Soil soaked with petroleum and brine became badlands, while the patterns of gouging and filling the earth made while strip-mining created desolate areas that looked like “a giant’s plowed field.”14 Early timber cutters did not bother to replant the forests that made them rich. The devastation of the landscape was usually the work of unthinking people caught in an exploitative ethic they took as natural, based on reigning national models, steeped in history and respectability.
By the time most ’89ers reached middle age, erosion had scalped much of Oklahoma. Networks of gullies and sandy, scrubbed wastes replaced grass and forest lands in many sections. The rich cinnamon-colored clay that pleased the eye, especially against the green backdrop of spring vegetation, was a warning of erosion. Clear streams became silted, choked with debris, or stagnant. The fearful experience of the Dust Bowl was necessary to halt the chaos that threatened to destroy the land forever. It was a message written on the wind, echoing the older Indian ethic that not even the most optimistic agrarian could ignore. After more than forty years of slow, careful efforts at conservation, the land has been revitalized. Tree belts, dams, contoured fields, and greater care in plowing and grazing have softened the sinister look of ruined areas. But old-timers still recall the days when “the land was fresh,” understanding the poignancy of Will Rogers’s remark: “We spoiled the best Territory in the world to make a State.”15
In modern times, an awareness of their treatment of the land has been an important key to understanding the cultural heritage and attitudes of Oklahomans. Like every other state, Oklahoma was a congeries of topography, people, and customs, settled at different times for varied reasons. Larger than any state east of the Mississippi, Oklahoma drew both geography and settlers from states on her borders. The eastern and western halves of the state varied almost as widely in terrain, vegetation, and rainfall as Colorado and Missouri. And the length of the growing season and topography of the northern and southern extremes were as disparate as Kansas and Texas.
Stretching east from the southwestern corner of Oklahoma, the land resembles Texas. The Red River drains the sandy soil there and forms the state’s southern boundary. Intensive cotton cultivation and the neglect characteristic of tenant farming sapped this once-fertile area. The short grass native to the region now sustains limited grazing, and modern methods of irrigation, soil conservation, and crop rotation have rejuvenated the land. Peanuts, melons, and vegetables lend variety to an agriculture once limited to cattle, cotton, and sorghum. Despite the growth of trade centers such as Altus and Frederick, there is still a limited quality to life in the southwestern corner of the state that contrasts sharply with the vast sunny sky. The taciturn and wind-burned farmers live with the fear that deep wells may run dry, resulting in disaster for crops, animals, and men.
Farther east, the granite outcroppings of the Wichita Mountains rise above the surrounding plains as weather-sculptured domes. They witnessed several frenzied gold rushes that spawned dozens of ghost towns like Wildman, noted for its post office on wheels. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt designated the area a national wildlife preserve. Congress later provided funds to purchase seventeen buffalo from the New York Zoological Society in an effort to preserve the nearly extinct species. A large number of old Indians in traditional dress camped near the specially constructed receiving pens in the Wichita Preserve and awaited the return of the “Great Spirit’s Cattle.” It was a moving scene as the great beasts lumbered from the railroad cars back onto Oklahoma terrain. Deep emotions transformed the weathered faces of the Indians who pressed against the wire fences and “recalled the old days when the plains were black with buffalo.”16 Within a month, in 1907, two calves were born. In a land rich with Indian tradition, the arrival of the second calf, named “Oklahoma,” on the day of statehood, November 16, 1907, was a good omen.
East of the semiarid Wichitas, the land is greener. Expensive herds of Santa Gertrudis and Charolais cattle graze placidly on well-tended ranches. The houses are substantial, well kept, but there is still some evidence of overgrazing and wasteful farming where the grass has yet to reclaim many deep red gullies and barren rises. In some places, fingers of the tangled, stunted forests of blackjack and post oak encroach on pasture and cropland. Known as the Cross Timbers, this miniature forest, varying from five to thirty miles in width, runs diagonally from the southwest toward central Oklahoma. It divides the bluestem prairies and rolling woodlands of the east from the shortgrass-covered, level plains of the west. Early travelers dreaded struggling through these “forests of cast iron,” where masses of reeds and brambles snared the feet while bushes and limbs tore at the flesh of men and horses.17
A little farther east are the Arbuckle Mountains. Although very old and worn to a height of only six hundred to seven hundred feet above the surrounding plains, they are a geological textbook. The top of the range looks as if some ancient cataclysm had pulled a plug of earth from a horizontal position and tilted it upward. These richly textured, exposed strata now fascinate travelers on Interstate 35.
Still farther east, the land begins dramatic changes. Broken cotton stubble dots the fields, and unpainted shanties blend with the dull colors of the earth. Children, pigs, dogs, and chickens share yards littered with rusting car hulks and cast—off furniture. The habit of parking cars in the yard rather than on the street is hard to break, even in Oklahoma’s modern cities. The sounds of speech become slower, movements more deliberate. Fundamentalist religious groups meeting in one-room churches, billboards announcing visiting evangelists, and other signals suggest the placid calmness, if not the torpor, of the rural South.18 Heat, humidity, and a watchful attitude toward strangers evoke some of the darker qualities of the Louisiana bayou or Mississippi delta. Near the town of Hugo the population is so sparse and vegetation so dense that two elephants escaped from a circus in 1975 and eluded their keepers there for two weeks—an event that received national news coverage. Another bizarre Oklahoma story, it belied the state’s stereotype as a windswept plain. There is a slow quality about life in “Little Dixie,” a moist, wooded section that contrasts sharply with the rest of the state.
Part of “Little Dixie” is mountainous. The rough, wooded terrain of deep, narrow valleys reinforces a sense of isolation. The Ouachita Mountains near the southeastern border with Arkansas are composed of high, almost parallel ridges. They have romantic, fanciful names typical of Indian Territory—Winding Stair, Blue Bouncer, Buffalo, San Bois. There is a tranquility in the rivers and deep shade uncharacteristic of the rest of the state. As the Choctaw name for the Kiamichi River and mountains implies, this part of Oklahoma is a refuge to many.
The Arkansas River valley separates the Ouachita Mountains and the old Choctaw plantation area of the southeast from the Ozark Plateau farther north. Once bordered with fine shade and sandy beaches, the Arkansas River, carrying about two-thirds of the state’s runoff, is now navigable, moving through long stretches of man-made channels. An intricate system of dams and locks enables barge traffic to move between Tulsa and New Orleans. But even with increased commercial traffic and the promise of large-scale future growth, life here retains a slow and easy tempo.
The inhabitants have deliberately cultivated the area to make it appear more southern, more hospitable. On the land where the early Indian administrators had encouraged the tribes to grow cotton, the citizens of Muskogee have planted azaleas. These flowering shrubs have prospered, creating an impression of the more temperate Gulf Coast.
Crossing north onto the Ozark Plateau, a predominantly wooded region of moderate limestone hills, the land empties. At the extreme southern end of the plateau lie the Cookson Hills, an area of deep gullies, wild prairie, and oak-studded foothills. Primitive and inaccessible, this tract was the special refuge of outlaws from the 1870s to the 1930s. Illegal backwoods stills are not unknown, and strangers are not welcome, even today.
Beyond these hills, deep into the Ozark Plateau, lies the heart of the Old Cherokee Nation, now the last retreat of conservative full-bloods. Unobtrusive, quiet, and generally poor, their lives blend into the heavily wooded landscape. Everything seems to occur or grow on a small, gentle scale. Tiny bottomland plots characterize the agricultural system, and livestock range freely through the tangled woodland. Occasionally a log cabin or its modern equivalent, a mobile home, or a house, newly constructed with an Indian loan, is visible. But most dwellings are out of sight. The beauties of autumn and spring in these woodlands often camouflage the bleakness of human existence underneath.
Settled more than half a century before the west, eastern Oklahoma seems very old. It has a violent social history, including much destruction during the Civil War, and long-term conflict between whites and Indians, and whites and Negroes. There is also a sense that the land and the people are dormant, though here and there a town revives when a particular modern industry comes in, creating new jobs and incomes.
The images of Arkansas and Missouri fade beyond the Verdigris River, as the angle of vision curves westward again. The Sandstone Hills, a wide strip of land extending north and south through the east-central part of the state, supports little but the scrubby Cross Timber forests and a profusion of spring and summer flowers. But beneath the thin topsoil are deposits of oil, gas, coal, lead, and zinc that have enriched the state. The landscape is not as appealing as parts of eastern Oklahoma, but there is a great sense of vitality and activity.
Farther west, the land runs into vastness, and wheat engulfs the senses. It rolls to the distant horizon, replacing the sea of green with oceans of gold and russet. Most of this land is cultivated with modern, expensive machinery. Many older houses built at the turn of the century have been renovated, while newer ones bespeak prosperity. On many of these farms, a modern ranch-style dwelling stands near the old homestead as sons continue to work with fathers in the tradition of the frontier. There is a mood of profit about this wheat land, where people rest from hard work but are not idle.
Two tiers of counties west of Enid, the texture of the landscape coarsens. Here in the Gypsum Hills the climate is drier and the vegetation more ragged. Bands of red and white alternate in the soil. And in some places, sparkling crystals washed down from the Glass Mountains are strewn across the surface like false jewels.
As the “Gyp Hills” region rises to the High Plains, the growth declines to chaparral, sagebrush, and shinnery, so called because it scrapes the shins of a walking man. Tumbleweed drifts against fences. Near the far western boundary of the state are the barren Antelope Hills, a welcome landmark to early travelers on the way to Santa Fe. At the northwest edge of the Panhandle is Black Mesa, the state’s highest point at 4,973 feet. Lava spilled from a New Mexico volcano formed this tableland where piñon trees and western yellow pines struggle against the wind and sun.
The Panhandle is shortgrass country, a place of wind-driven snow in winter and dancing mirages in summer. It is bountiful when the rains cover it with wheat and always attractive to those enamored of a big sky. In some places the land is so level that water will not drain. The few people in these counties, really immense fields, seem to take their temperament from the land: they are solid folk who persevere.
Crossing the Oklahoma landscape in a counterclockwise arc from southwest to east to north to west gives a profound impression of the changing look and mood of both land and people. The northwest resembles the nation’s Midwest. The southeast retains the South’s unhurried casualness. There is also a sense that physical geography exaggerates the ranges of poverty and wealth.
The importance of land, man’s hunger for it, his attitudes toward it, his use and abuse of it, dominated Oklahoma history. Land for farms and homesteads, land that utilized human energy rather than capital, was the area’s greatest lure. It represented the average man’s last chance to make security if not a fortune for himself and family. Unlike the Indians, white settlers with no understanding for nature’s balances or limits occupied this land and depleted its resources. The crisis came with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and a realization that man’s desires must conform to nature’s plan. But man’s ambitions and nature’s systems, whether at war or in harmony, made a unique civilization in this last frontier.