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Place Name
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Oklahoma
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Place Status (Type)
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state
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Capital is
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OKLAHOMA CITY
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Population
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3,277,687 (1995)
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Location
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Oklahoma, United States, North America
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Latitude
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unknown
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Longitude
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unknown
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Oklahoma
, state (
69,902 sq mi/181,046 sq km; 1995
est. pop. 3,277,687), SW U.S.;  Oklahoma City. Admitted
as the 46th state of the Union in 1907. The state is bounded on the N
by Colo. and Kansas and on the E by Mo. and Ark.; the Red R. marks the
S border with Texas; Texas also bounds the state on the W and on the S
of the Okla. Panhandle, a 34-mi/55-km-wide strip of land
that extends 166 mi/267 km W from the NW
corner of the state, bordering N.Mex. on its W end. Oklahoma City and
Tulsa are important cities. Okla. is a land of climatic
transition. The Ouachita Mts. of the SE average more than 50
in/120 cm of precipitation per year while Black Mesa
averages less than 16 in/41 cm. Consequently, dense
forests were the original cover for most of E Okla. while short
grasslands dominated the W. The high, short-grass plains of W Okla. are
part of the Great Plains and, like the rest of that area, are
chilled by N winds in the winter and baked by intense heat in the
summer. There are extensive grazing lands and wheat fields. The plains
are broken here and there, notably by Black Mesa in the Panhandle and
by the Wichita Mts. in the SW, but the general slope is downward to the
E, and central and E Okla. is mostly prairie, rising in the NE to the
Ozark and Boston Mts. and in the SE to the Ouachita Mts. Lesser ranges
include the Arbuckle Mts. in S and Wichita Mts. in SW. The rivers that
flow W-E across the state—the Arkansas, and its tributaries,
the Cimarron and the Canadian (with the North Canadian) in the N; the
Red R. with the Washita and other tributaries in the S—are
much more prominent in the E. Formerly the major crop of Okla. was
cotton, but now wheat is the leading cash crop; however, income from
livestock (esp. cattle) exceeds that from crops. Other important crops
are peanuts and sorghums. Also sheep, poultry, exotic fowl [emu,
ostrich] gained popularity, in the 1980s, being raised for their meat.
Many minerals are found in the state, including coal, but the resource
that has given the state its wealth is oil. After the first well was
drilled in 1888, the petroleum industry grew by fits and starts to
enormous proportions, and Oklahoma City and Tulsa were among the great
natural gas and petroleum centers of the world. Okla. remains a
major—but declining—oil-producing state. Many of
Okla.'s factories process raw materials found in the state and its
chief industry includes non-electrical machinery and fabricated metal
prods. Okla. has a rich Native Amer. heritage. The Native Amer. pop. is
the largest in the nation; the 1990 census reported 252,420 Native
Americans in Okla. (c.8% of total state pop.). Several Native Amer.
cultures existed in the area before the first European visited here in
1541. Francisco Coronado almost certainly crossed Okla. in that year,
and Hernando De Soto may have visited E Okla. Later Juan de Onate
passed through W Okla., and some other Span. explorers and traders and
Fr. traders from La. visited the region, but there was no development
of the area. Native Americans dominated the landscape, tribes of the
Plains cultures—Osage, Kiowa, Comanche, and
Apache—in the W, and the Wichita and other relatively
sedentary tribes farther E. It is asserted that the first Eur. trading
post was established at Salina by the Chouteau family of St. Louis
before the territory was transferred to the U.S. by the Louisiana
Purchase in 1803, but the land remained in control of the sparse and
nomadic Native Amer. pop. For the most part only traders,
official explorers (notably Stephen H. Long), and scientific
and curious travelers (among them Washington Irving and George Catlin)
came into the present-day state. In 1819 the Adams-Onis Treaty
with Spain defined Okla. as the SW border of the U.S. After the War of
1812 the U.S. govt. invited the Cherokee of Ga. and Tenn. to move into
the area, and a few had come to settle before intense white pressure
for their lands, with the approval of President Andrew Jackson, forced
the Cherokee and the others of the 5 Civilized Tribes (the Choctaw, the
Chickasaw, the Creek, and the Seminole) to abandon their old homes E of
the Mississippi and to take up residence in what was to become the
Indian Territory. Their tragic removal is known as the Trail
of Tears. They settled on the hills and little prairies of the E sect.
and built separate organized states and communities. The Cherokee
particularly had a highly Europeanized culture, with a written
language, invented by their great leader Sequoyah, and highly developed
institutions. Some of the Cherokee were slaveholders and ran their agr.
in the traditional Southern plantation pattern; others were small
farmers. The 5 Civilized Tribes clashed briefly with the Plains
Indians, particularly the Osage, but they were for a time free from
white interference, and they were able to establish a civilization that
strongly affected the whole history of the region. The
troubles of the whites did not, however, long escape them, and the
Civil War was a major disaster. Although no major battle of the war was
fought in present-day Okla., there were innumerable skirmishes. Most
Native Americans allied themselves with the Confederacy, but Unionist
disaffection was widespread, and individual violence was so
prevalent that many fled, leaving their farms to desolation. As a
punishment for taking the Confederate side the 5 Civilized Tribes lost
the W part of the Indian Territory, and the Federal govt. began
assigning lands there to such landless Eastern tribes as the Delaware
and the Shawnee, as well as to nomadic Plains tribes, who caused much
trouble before they were subdued and settled on reservations. The
territory was victimized by lawlessness and served as a hideout for
white outlaws. After the establishment of a Federal court at Fort
Smith, Isaac Parker became famous as the hanging judge. Immediately
after the Civil War the long drives of cattle from Texas to the Kansas
RR began to cross Okla., traveling over the cattle trails that became
part of Western folklore. The best known is the Chisholm Trail. The cattle were fattened on the virgin ranges of Okla., and
cattlemen began to look on the grasslands with speculative and covetous
eyes. The first RR to cross Okla. was built bet. 1870 and 1872, and
thereafter it was not possible to keep white settlers out. They came
despite laws and treaties with the Native Americans, and by the 1880s
there was a strong admixture of whites. Ranches were developed, too,
nominally owned by Native Americans, but actually controlled by white
cattlemen and their cowboys; the region took on a tinge of the Old West
of the cattle frontier, a tinge that it has never wholly lost. In the
1880s, land-hungry frontier farmers, the boomers, agitated to obtain
the “unassigned” lands in the central sect.—the lands not given to
any Native Amer. tribe. The agitation succeeded, and a large strip was
opened for settlement in 1889. On April 22, 1889, prospective settlers
lined up on the territorial border, and at noon, at the sound of a
pistol shot, were allowed to run into the state to compete for the best
lands. Some settlers who illegally entered ahead of the set time were
referred to as the Sooners, hence the state's nickname, the Sooner
State. Later other strips of territory were opened, and settlers poured
in from the Midwest and the South. The W sect. of what is now the state
of Okla. became the Okla. Territory in 1890; it included the Panhandle,
the narrow strip of territory that, taken from Texas by the Compromise
of 1850, had become a no-man's-land where settlers came in
undisturbed. In 1893 the Dawes Commission was appointed to implement a
policy of dividing the tribal lands into individual holdings; the
Native Americans resisted, but the policy was finally enforced in 1906.
The wide lands of the Indian Territory were thus made available to
whites. The Civilized Tribes made the best of a poor bargain, and the
Indian Territory and Okla. Territory were united in 1907 to form the
state of Okla., with a constitution that included provision for
initiative and referendum. Already the oil boom had reached major
proportions, and the young state was on the verge of great economic
development. At the same time, cotton, wheat, and corn were major money
crops, and cattle-land holdings, although shrinking, were still
enormous. In World War I the great demand for farm prods. brought an
agr. boom to the state, but in the 1920s the state fell upon hard
times. Recurrent drought burned the wheat in the fields, and
overplanting, overgrazing, and unscientific cropping aided the weather
in making Okla. part of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Farm
tenancy increased in the 1920s, and in both the E and W the farms
tended more and more to be held by large interests and to be
consolidated in large blocks. A great number of tenant farmers were
compelled to leave their dust-stricken farms and went W as migrant
laborers; the tragic plight of these Okies, many of whom took Route 66
(the Highway of the Okies) to Calif., is the theme of John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath. A larger migration, however, took place
within the state as rural residents moved to the cites. With the return
of rains, however, and with increasing care in selecting crops and in
conserving and utilizing water and soil resources, much of the Dust
Bowl was again made into productive farm land. The demands for food in
World War II and Federal price supports for agr. prods. after the war
aided farm prosperity. Large state and Federal programs for conserving
the water of rivers and for supplying irrigation have resulted in the
construction of many large dams and reservoirs, such as the reservoir
impounded by Kerr Dam on the Arkansas R., resulting in extension of
barge navigation on the Arkansas R. Navigation System to the Tulsa area
in 1971, improved agr. conditions and new recreation areas. (For more
detailed information on irrigation projects, see separate articles on
the rivers of Okla.) Okla. experienced a boom in its economy during the
late 1970s when oil prices rose dramatically. In the mid-1980s,
Okla.'s economy was hurt (as it had been in the 1930s) by dependence
on a single industry as oil prices fell rapidly. Okla. has increased
its industrial diversity and has moved, along with Texas, into the
apparel industry (availability of cotton and low-cost labor). Also
important is the state's aircraft and rocket industries. The bombing
of the Murrah Federal Bldg. in Oklahoma City, on April 19, 1995, killed
166 people and interrupted the state's usual tranquillity. During the
1920s 2 governors, John C. Walton and Henry S. Johnston, were
impeached. Prohibition, in effect since statehood, was
repealed in 1959. The original 1907 constitution is still in
effect. The Cheyenne and Arapacho tribes are currently suing
the state govt., claiming that their tribal lands were illegally seized
in 1883 and 1948, including a 12-sq-mi/31-sq-km piece of
land (formerly the Army base of Fort Reno) with unmarked graves of
their people and ritual dance grounds, as well as significant oil and
gas reserves. They are asking for the land's return; as yet, the issue
has not been resolved. Okla. has a legislature of 48 senators and 101
representatives, elected for 4- and 2-year terms, respectively. The
governor is elected for a 4-year term. The state elects 2 U.S. senators
and 6 representatives and has 8 electoral votes. The most important
institutions of higher learning in the state are the Univ. of Okla.,
Okla. State Univ., and the Univ. of Tulsa. Okla. has 77 cos.:
Adair,
Alfalfa,
Atoka,
Beaver,
Beckham,
Blaine,
Bryan,
Caddo,
Canadian,
Carter,
Cherokee,
Choctaw,
Cimarron,
Cleveland,
Coal,
Comanche,
Cotton,
Craig,
Creek,
Custer,
Delaware,
Dewey,
Ellis,
Garfield,
Garvin,
Grady,
Grant,
Greer,
Harmon,
Harper,
Haskell,
Hughes,
Jackson,
Jefferson,
Johnston,
Kay,
Kingfisher,
Kiowa,
Latimer,
Le Flore,
Lincoln,
Logan,
Love,
McClain,
McCurtain,
McIntosh,
Major,
Marshall,
Mayes,
Murray,
Muskogee,
Noble,
Nowata,
Okfuskee,
Oklahoma,
Okmulgee,
Osage,
Ottawa,
Pawnee,
Payne,
Pittsburg,
Pontotoc,
Pottawatomie,
Pushmataha,
Roger Mills,
Rogers,
Seminole,
Sequoyah,
Stephens,
Texas,
Tillman,
Tulsa,
Wagoner,
Washington,
Washita,
Woods,
Woodward.,
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