Oklahoma Summary

Oklahoma is a warm, dry state of more than 3.4 million people, with 68 percent living in urban areas; German, Irish, English, and Native American ancestries are predominant. Service industries dominate the economy, although manufacturing, oil, gas, beef cattle, and wheat are also important.

Native Americans have always been an integral part of the state, and today their culture, art, and history are tourism drawing cards. Prior to 1889, Oklahoma was set aside for Native Americans, namely the Seminole, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw tribes. From 1830 to 1842, these tribes were driven from their lands in the Southeast and forced to march along the “Trail of Tears” to Oklahoma, in the course of which thousands died. The different tribes set up their own “nations” with their own governments, courts, laws, farms, and schools. Although the land was promised to them in perpetuity, it was later reclaimed and opened to general settlement. On April 22, 1889, the day the first land parcel was released, settlers, including about 10,000 African-Americans, assembled at the border. At the sound of a pistol shot they tore across the state to claim farms and town sites.

Oklahoma became the 46th state in 1907. At that time there were more African-Americans in Oklahoma than there were Europeans and Native Americans combined — many had arrived as slaves and had established businesses and towns after slavery was abolished. In the twentieth century, oil and gas brought prosperity to the state, although the Great Depression saw many “Okies” fleeing unemployment, low produce prices, and a drought during the 1930s. The drought turned the farmlands into a “dust bowl,” as famously depicted in \”The Grapes of Wrath,\” the songs of Oklahoman Woody Guthrie, and the photographs of Dorothea Lange.

The 1950s saw the rise of industrialization. Today, Oklahoma City has the largest cattle market in the United States, and Tulsa has world-class museums alongside world-class jazz. There are cowboys and rodeos, harvest festivals, and Native American powwows, all in a setting of stunning natural beauty.