Oklahoma

• 1. Introduction

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  Oklahoma gets its name from two Choctaw words: okla, meaning 'people', and humma, meaning 'red'. Choctaw Nation Chief Allen Wright proposed that name in 1865, during treaty negotiations with the federal government. He was imagining something that never came to be: an all-Indian state, governed under the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, set apart for Native peoples who had already lost so much.

  What emerged instead was one of the most layered and contested patches of land in the United States. A place where 25 Indigenous languages are still spoken. Where the word 'sooner' went from a legal infraction to a badge of pride. Where an average of 62 tornadoes strike every year, and where a single November day in 1911 swung from 83 degrees Fahrenheit to 17 degrees Fahrenheit before midnight.

  Oklahoma sits at a confluence. Geographically, it straddles the Great Plains, the Ozark Plateau, the Interior Highlands, and the Upland South. Culturally, it absorbed waves of removed Native nations, Texas cattle drives, Southern settlers, African American Exodusters, and oil prospectors. No single story contains it.

  How did a swath of land designated as permanent Indian Territory become the 46th state of the Union? What happened to the people already living there? And what does it mean that, as of the 2020 U.S. census, Oklahoma has the highest percentage of residents identifying as American Indian of any state in the nation?

• 2. Before the Borders

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  Spiro Mounds, in what is now the town of Spiro, Oklahoma, flourished as a major Mississippian mound complex between AD 850 and 1450. The people who built it were among many nations whose presence in this region predates any European footprint by centuries. Ancestors of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, the Tonkawa, and the Caddo lived across the land. Plains Apache people had settled the Southern Plains and the Oklahoma area between 1300 and 1500.

  The first European to cross the region was the Spaniard Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, whose expedition traveled through in 1541. French explorers followed, and France eventually claimed the territory, holding it until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 transferred the entire region west of the Mississippi River to the United States. For a brief period, what is now Oklahoma fell under the jurisdiction of Arkansas Territory, from 1819 until 1828.

  By the 18th century, the Comanche and Kiowa had entered from the west, and the Quapaw and Osage had moved into what is now eastern Oklahoma. The land was already a mosaic of peoples and claims before the U.S. government decided to add another layer: forced removal.

• 3. The Trail and What Followed

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  In 1831, the Choctaw Nation became the first of the Five Civilized Tribes to be forcibly removed from the Southeastern United States. The phrase 'Trail of Tears' originated from that removal, though it later came to describe the Cherokee removal as well. Seventeen thousand Cherokees and 2,000 of their enslaved Black people were deported. Slavery in Indian Territory was not abolished until 1866, a fact that complicates any simple narrative about the period.

  By 1890, more than 30 Native American nations and tribes had been relocated onto land within Indian Territory or 'Indian Country'. The Five Civilized Tribes signed treaties with the Confederate military during the Civil War. The Cherokee Nation experienced its own internal civil war during that conflict.

  Cattle trails cut through the territory as Texas ranchers pushed north toward Kansas railheads. In 1881, four of the five major cattle trails on the western frontier passed through Indian Territory. The government responded to settler pressure for access by enacting the Dawes Act in 1887 and the Curtis Act of 1898. Those two pieces of legislation abolished tribal governments, eliminated tribal land ownership, and allotted 160 acres to each head of an Indian family. Land not allotted to individual Indians was sold to settlers and railroads. By 1900, about half the land previously held by Indian tribes had passed into white ownership. Allottees often sold their shares under duress, or had them taken through fraud.

  Attempts to create an all-Indian state named Sequoyah failed in the early 20th century, but the Sequoyah Statehood Convention of 1905 laid the groundwork for the Oklahoma Statehood Convention two years later. On the 16th of November 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamation no. 780, making Oklahoma the 46th state of the Union.

• 4. Sooners, Oil, and Route 66

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  The land rushes that opened former tribal territory to white settlement began in 1887 and continued through 1895. Each rush started at a precise moment, with prospective settlers racing to plant a claim on 160 acres under the Homestead Act of 1862. Those who crossed the border into the territory before the official start time were said to have gone 'sooner'. George Washington Steele was appointed the first governor of the Oklahoma Territory in 1890, just a year after the most famous of those rushes opened the unassigned lands.

  Oklahoma's entry into statehood coincided almost exactly with a surge in oil discovery. Tulsa would eventually be known as the 'Oil Capital of the World' for most of the 20th century, and oil investments drove much of the state's early economic growth. Then, in 1927, Tulsa businessman Cyrus Avery began a campaign that would shape American travel for generations. Known as the 'Father of Route 66', Avery used a stretch of highway from Amarillo, Texas to Tulsa, Oklahoma as the original spine of what became U.S. Route 66, and he founded the U.S. Highway 66 Association, headquartered in his hometown of Tulsa, to oversee its planning.

  In late September 1918, Oklahoma was struck by the Spanish flu. Rough estimates from contemporary reports suggest approximately 100,000 people fell ill before the pandemic ebbed in 1919. Of those cases, around 7,500 proved fatal, a mortality rate of roughly 7.5 percent for the state.

• 5. Greenwood, the Dust Bowl, and Oklahoma City

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  By the early 20th century, Tulsa's Greenwood district had become one of the most prosperous African-American communities in the United States. Black towns across the state had taken root during Reconstruction, founded by the Freedmen of the Five Tribes and swelled by Black Exodusters migrating from neighboring states, especially Kansas. The politician Edward P. McCabe had even discussed with President Theodore Roosevelt the possibility of making Oklahoma a majority-Black state.

  Jim Crow laws established racial segregation before the turn of the century. Social tensions worsened after 1915, when the Ku Klux Klan was revived. In 1921, White mobs attacked Black residents in Greenwood. Sixteen hours of rioting destroyed 35 city blocks, caused an estimated $1.8 million in property damage, and left an estimated death toll of between 75 and 300 people. The Tulsa race massacre stands as one of the costliest episodes of racist violence in American history.

  Then came the Dust Bowl. During the 1930s, poor farming practices, long droughts, strong winds, and abnormally high temperatures combined to devastate parts of Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and northwestern Oklahoma. John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath captured the plight of Dust Bowl-era Oklahoman farmers, introducing the term 'Okies' to a national audience. Over a 20-year period ending in 1950, the state experienced its only historical population decline, dropping 6.9 percent as families left.

  On the 19th of April, 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated a large explosive device outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The attack killed 168 people, including 19 children, and remains the most destructive act of domestic terrorism in American history. McVeigh was executed by the federal government on the 11th of June 2001. His accomplice, Terry Nichols, is serving life in prison without parole.

• 6. Land, Law, and Sovereignty

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  On the 9th of July 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma that the reservations of the Five Tribes, comprising much of eastern Oklahoma, had never been disestablished by Congress. They remained 'Indian Country' for the purposes of criminal law. Subsequent decisions by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals extended that recognition to the Quapaw Nation, the Ottawa Tribe, the Peoria Tribe, and the Miami Tribe.

  This ruling arrived against a backdrop of legal and demographic significance. According to the 2020 census, 14.2 percent of Oklahomans identify as American Indian, the highest such percentage of any state in the nation. There are 38 federally recognized Native American tribes headquartered in Oklahoma, and 67 Native American tribes and bands are represented in the state altogether.

  The 57-acre Coke Hill exclave, a smuggling camp noted for cocaine trafficking that sat in a sliver of Choctaw territory bounded by Arkansas, the Arkansas River, and the Poteau River, is one small symbol of how tangled these boundary questions became. After Congress handed that parcel to Arkansas in 1905, the Choctaw Nation was not notified or consulted. The 1985 U.S. Supreme Court case Oklahoma v. Arkansas confirmed the transfer, reducing Oklahoma's territory by those 57 acres as first established in treaties of the early 1800s.

  The Cherokee Nation's effort to preserve its language reflects another dimension of sovereignty. In 2005, the nation launched a ten-year plan to grow new Cherokee speakers from childhood. The Cherokee Preservation Foundation invested $3 million into opening schools, training teachers, and building curricula. A Cherokee language immersion school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma now educates students from pre-school through eighth grade, working toward a goal of having at least 80 percent of their people fluent within 50 years of the plan's start.

• 7. Weather, Land, and Extremes

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  Oklahoma contains 11 distinct ecological regions, more per square mile than any other state. Its highest point, Black Mesa, stands at 4,973 feet above sea level in the far northwest corner of the Oklahoma Panhandle. Its lowest point sits on the Little River near the town of Idabel in the far southeast, dipping to 289 feet above sea level.

  With more than 200 lakes created by dams and more than 500 named creeks and rivers, Oklahoma holds the nation's highest number of artificial reservoirs. As of 2024, the state had more than 4,700 dams, roughly 20 percent of all dams in the United States. That network was built largely in response to the Dust Bowl, as soil and water conservation projects transformed how the state managed rainfall and drought.

  The state sits squarely in Tornado Alley, where cold dry air from Canada, hot dry air from Mexico and the Southwest, and warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico collide with a frequency found virtually nowhere else on Earth. An average of 62 tornadoes strike Oklahoma per year. On the 11th of November 1911, Oklahoma City recorded 83 degrees Fahrenheit as the day's high, then watched the temperature plunge to 17 degrees Fahrenheit by midnight after a cold front of unprecedented intensity swept through.

  Norman, Oklahoma is home to the Storm Prediction Center, the National Severe Storms Laboratory, the Warning Decision Training Division, and the Radar Operations Center, all part of the National Weather Service. The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in north-central Oklahoma, at 39,000 acres, is the largest protected area of tallgrass prairie in the world, part of an ecosystem that now covers only ten percent of its former range across fourteen states.

• 8. Culture, Art, and Sport

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  Five Native American ballerinas from Oklahoma achieved worldwide fame and became known collectively as the Five Moons: Yvonne Chouteau, sisters Marjorie and Maria Tallchief, Rosella Hightower, and Moscelyne Larkin. Chouteau and her husband Miguel Terekhov founded both the Oklahoma City Ballet and the University of Oklahoma's dance program. That university program, launched in 1962, was the first fully accredited program of its kind in the United States.

  Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa, known as the 'Carnegie Hall of Western Swing', served as the performance headquarters of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys during the 1930s, helping popularize western swing as a musical style. Stillwater is considered the epicenter of Red Dirt music, a genre whose best-known proponent was the late Bob Childers.

  Ridge Bond, a native of McAlester, Oklahoma, played the role of 'Curly McClain' in the Broadway and International touring productions of Oklahoma! across more than 2,600 performances. Bond was instrumental in the show's title song becoming the Oklahoma state song, and he appears on a U.S. postage stamp commemorating the musical's 50th anniversary.

  The Gilcrease Museum of Tulsa holds the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of art and artifacts of the American West. The Oklahoma City Museum of Art contains the most comprehensive collection of glass sculptures by artist Dale Chihuly in the world.

  On the sports side, Oklahoma City is the home of the Oklahoma City Thunder, the state's only major league franchise in the NBA. Oklahoma State University holds the most NCAA national championships of any collegiate wrestling team, with 34. Devon Park in Oklahoma City will host softball at the 2028 Summer Olympics, and the Riversport OKC complex will host canoe slalom at the same Games.