Often ridiculed by the rest of the country as dust-filled
and boring, 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 series of manic free-for-all
scrambles starting 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, improved
farming techniques brought life, and people, back to Oklahoma.
Today the state is known for its staunch conservatism; as the
Bible Belt stronghold, bars and liquor stores close early, while
tattoo parlors are banned altogether.
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.
