That novel about Oklahomans got it wrong. The Joads left their home near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, two-and-a-half hours east of Oklahoma City, to escape the Dust Bowl. It was the middle of the Great Depression, sure, but our last great ecological disaster was in the Panhandle of Oklahoma (and the Panhandle of Texas, and parts of Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico). The Dust Bowl wasn’t Sallisaw’s disaster, because Sallisaw is in the eastern part of the state. The coming great ecological disaster may be more widespread, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’ll get here on its own time
Oklahoma geography is mostly some timber and hilly stuff then variations on plains. Moving from east to west, first come the Ozarks and the Ouachitas, then plains, including a lot of rolling prairie. Finally there are the High Plains in the Panhandle, the Dust Bowl land, the flat mostly treeless land that was once grassland, then wheat, then dust.
Oklahoma was first seen by Spanish explorers, then French traders, and was finally purchased by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. It’s an extractive industry state, oil and gas, gas and oil. There are some odd bits of small mountains in the state, the Ozarks, the Ouachitas, the Arbuckles, and the Wichitas. Small accidental ranges pop up out of the prairie and the Cross Timbers. Because of the granite in the bits of mountain it’s a great place to buy a tombstone.
It’s beautiful but subject to tornadoes. The wind really does come roaring down the plains.
I grew up 19 miles south of the Red River, about as close as you can get to a place and not be there. I know Oklahoma as well as anywhere that’s not Texas. We shared tornadoes. I had some great grandparents and great-great grandparents who made it to Oklahoma, and my grandparents, Arthur and Eva, were married in Ryan, Oklahoma, in 1908, a year after statehood. They apparently got there after the Indian Territory opened to white settlement in 1898, so they weren’t Sooners, but pretty soons. When my grandparents married he was 22, she was 17. They returned to Texas to farm dry-land cotton in the west, just outside the territory covered by the Dust Bowl, just outside the area that would have made us Texas Joads.
If Oklahoma was late to white settlement, it had plenty of previous traffic. In addition to the Spanish explorers and French traders, there were indigenous people. After California, Oklahoma has the largest American Indian population of the states, 9.2 percent of the total population of 3.7 million. There are 39 different recognized tribal headquarters in the state. Some of the tribes, the Wichita, Kiowa, Osage, Caddo, and Comanche, are considered indigenous. Most tribes came from throughout the South and Midwest, displaced into Oklahoma. Oklahoma was the end-point of the Trail of Tears. Tribal names are the place names of eastern and central Oklahoma.
Indians and cowboys, cowboys and Indians. A cousin in Oklahoma, my mother’s second cousin, was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth for founding the American Paint Horse Association. My mother said she won the Nobel Prize for Animal Husbandry, and maybe she said it first as a joke but as she aged she thought it was true. When I was 10, I shook Roy Rogers’ hand at the American Indian Exposition in Anadarko. Then it was called the Oklahoma Indian Pow Wow.
Even where I grew up on the correct side of the border there were names that came from the tribes: Wichita Falls, Wichita County, Quanah, Nocona, Comanche . . . My high school yearbook was the Yamparika, named after a a band of the Comanche. Nocona’s wife (and Quanah’s mother), Cynthia Anne Parker, was recaptured 40 miles west of my home at the Battle of Pease River. His father, Peta Nocona, was killed there, or was probably killed there anyway. The manager of Tri-State Lumber was known as Quanah Parker Jr. and was rumored to be one of Quanah Sr’s descendants. Quanah Sr., handsome, charismatic, and the last Comanche war chief, was a bit of a polygamist, with numerous wives, children, and grandchildren, so maybe the descendant part was true.
Meanwhile Oklahoma voted for Trump in the 2016 election. It is a deeply conservative state, religious, middle class, tied to oil and gas, but not as white-alone as one would think: in the 2010 census the white-alone population (which excludes Hispanics) was only about 67 percent of the total. Hispanics are the next largest population group, with 10.6 percent, more than double the 5.2 percent Hispanic population counted in the 2000 census. Trump carried the state by 65 percent. Oklahoma is reddest in the Dust Bowl counties, but also the least populated. It’s pinkest–no place is blue–in the Tulsa and Oklahoma City/Norman areas. I don’t know how Trump fared with Native Americans, though I could see how Make America Great Again would have a certain appeal. I doubt it would mean the same thing though.
