Tulsa, Oklahoma

• 1. Introduction

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  Tulsa, Oklahoma sits on the Arkansas River in the foothills of the Ozarks, and for most of the twentieth century it wore a nickname that said everything about its ambitions: the Oil Capital of the World. But oil is only one layer of this city's story. Beneath it lies a founding by the Muscogee Creek Nation under a tree, a neighborhood called Black Wall Street that was reduced to ash in sixteen hours, a musical genre born inside a dance hall, and a legal ruling that reshuffled who controls the land. How did a small settlement on the banks of the Arkansas become one of the most complex cities in the American interior? What happens to a place when the industry that built it begins to leave? And what does it mean for a city to reckon, decades later, with the worst act of racial violence in American history?

• 2. Muscogee Roots

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  On the 28th of March 1836, Opothleyahola and the Muscogee Creek Nation planted a settlement called Lochapoka, meaning "place of turtles" in Creek, beneath the Creek Council Oak Tree at the present-day intersection of Cheyenne Avenue and 18th Street. The name Tulsa itself traces to a Muscogee settlement in the southeastern United States called Tvlahasse, whose short form Tallasi translates to "old town" in the Muscogean language. When Hernando de Soto visited that original settlement in 1540, he became the first European on record to document it.

  The Lochapoka band had traveled west along the Trail of Tears, and members of their town largely settled together with those of the related town of Locvpokv. The land they came to was already home to the Kiikaapoi, Wahzhazhe Ma zha (Osage), and Caddo peoples, among others. The area that would become Tulsa was Indian Territory, and it remained so through the Civil War, when the Battle of Chusto-Talasah took place on Bird Creek and skirmishes spilled into nearby counties.

  After the war, the tribes signed Reconstruction treaties that extracted land concessions. The post-war decades also brought outlaws: the Wild Bunch and the Dalton Gang periodically roamed the corridor along the Arkansas River. When a construction crew laying out the St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad arrived on the 7th of August 1882, they chose a sidetrack just north of what would become Whittier Square. An area merchant persuaded them to move the site westward into the Muscogee Nation, where laws were more accommodating to white business owners. That small negotiation shaped the geography of a city still decades away from existing. Tulsa was officially incorporated on the 18th of January 1898, with Edward E. Calkins elected its first mayor.

• 3. Black Gold, Black Wall Street

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  P.L. Crossman and his crew struck oil near Red Fork on the late night of the 24th of June 1901. Tulsa was still a small town on the river banks when that well came in, but the discovery of the Glenn Pool Oil Reserve in 1905, about fifteen miles south of downtown, pulled entrepreneurs into the region at speed. Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller, and Harry Ford Sinclair were among those drawn by the find. Rockefeller's Prairie Oil and Gas Company and Texaco moved their headquarters to Tulsa starting in 1909. Between 1901 and 1930, the city's population surged to over 140,000. Art Deco construction booms followed the money, leaving zigzag and streamline facades across downtown and midtown that still stand today.

  While white Tulsans built oil fortunes, the Greenwood neighborhood north of downtown became something extraordinary. In the early twentieth century, Greenwood was known as Black Wall Street, one of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States. It was there that the Tulsa Race Massacre unfolded on May 31 and the 1st of June 1921. Mobs of white Tulsans killed Black residents, looted and burned homes and businesses. Sixteen hours of violence ended only when the governor brought in National Guardsmen. An official report claimed 23 Black and 16 white citizens died, but other estimates suggest as many as 300 people were killed, most of them Black. Over 800 people were admitted to hospitals. An estimated 1,000 Black residents were left homeless, with 35 city blocks and 1,256 residences destroyed by fire. Property damage reached $1.8 million, a figure equal to over $30 million in 2024 dollars.

  Survivors later described witnessing military aircraft dropping explosives on the neighborhood during the massacre. The community noted at the time that this was the first and only occasion on which the United States government had attacked its own citizens. Efforts to secure reparations for survivors have been unsuccessful, though the city and state reopened the historical record in the early twenty-first century. The oil profits that were funding Tulsa's skyline during those same years flowed alongside that history of destruction.

• 4. Route 66 and the Radio Era

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  In 1922, Tulsa voters approved nearly $7 million in bonds to build the Spavinaw Dam, after oil drilling had polluted the Arkansas River. Completed in 1924, it was at that time the third most expensive municipal works project in the United States. Three years later, Tulsa businessman Cyrus Avery launched his campaign to link Chicago to Los Angeles with a single highway, founding the U.S. Highway 66 Association in Tulsa in 1925. That effort earned Tulsa the title the "Birthplace of Route 66". Avery also shaped the routes of U.S. highways 64 and 75 through the city.

  The 1930s brought Bob Wills and his group, the Texas Playboys, to Tulsa for a long performing stint. Radio station KVOO began broadcasting their concerts in 1934. The following year, Cain's Ballroom became the group's base, and the venue would continue drawing musicians across generations. Western Swing, which Wills and the Playboys made famous, traces its birth to that ballroom. Oil profits carried Tulsa through the Great Depression better than most American cities managed, with oil prices in the city running between $1.00 and $1.18 per barrel from 1934 to 1940.

  During World War II, the city's economy expanded beyond oil into aircraft. In 1941, Tulsa voters approved a $750,000 bond by nearly 80 percentage points to finance a 1,000-acre Douglas Aircraft Company plant near the Tulsa Municipal Airport. The plant opened in 1942. Skelly Oil president J. Paul Getty began living in a concrete bunker that same year to oversee his Spartan Aircraft Company. American Airlines took over a former Douglas facility in 1946 and moved its entire fleet to Tulsa by 1950. The cold war kept government contracts flowing to the Douglas and Spartan plants, eventually reaching into the billions.

• 5. Oil's Retreat, Tulsa's Pivot

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  In the June 1957 issue of Reader's Digest, Daniel Longwell named Tulsa "America's Most Beautiful City", crediting its landscaped airport and decorated public buildings, a description recorded by local historian Danney Goble in 1997. That was also around the time Texaco and other oil companies began moving their headquarters from Tulsa to Houston, a city Goble called "Tulsa's rightful heir as the oil capital".

  A national recession struck hard in 1982, when falling gas prices caused a mass exodus of oil industry jobs from the region. Tulsa, deeply tied to that sector, was among the hardest-hit cities in the country. By 1992 the state's economy had recovered, and civic leaders committed to building in sectors unrelated to oil and energy.

  The Vision 2025 program, approved by voters in 2003, channeled investment into infrastructure and tourism. Its centerpiece was the BOK Center, a multi-purpose arena designed by architect Cesar Pelli, the same architect behind the Petronas Towers in Malaysia. The BOK Center broke ground in 2005 and opened on the 30th of August 2008. Within its first year, it ranked in the top ten among indoor arenas worldwide in ticket sales. Today Tulsa's economy includes substantial aerospace, finance, technology, and telecommunications sectors. The American Airlines maintenance base at Tulsa International Airport is the largest such facility in the world, and in February 2020 the airline announced an investment of $550 million over seven years into that base, described as the largest single economic development investment in city history.

• 6. A City of Sound and Art

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  J.J. Cale and Leon Russell developed the Tulsa Sound in the 1960s and 1970s, a genre blending rockabilly, country, rock and roll, and blues. The Church Studio in the Pearl District, a building constructed in 1915 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, became its cultural home after Russell converted the old church into a recording studio and office for Shelter Records in 1972. The studio now holds an archive of more than 5,000 pieces. Musicians who started their careers in Tulsa include Garth Brooks, The Gap Band, Hanson, Kristin Chenoweth, and Dwight Twilley, among many others.

  The Woody Guthrie Center opened in the Tulsa Arts District in April 2013, housing thousands of the Oklahoma native's personal items, sheet music, and manuscripts. The Bob Dylan Center followed, opening on the 10th of May 2022 with the Bob Dylan Archive on display. Tulsa's Philbrook Museum of Art, housed in the former villa of oil pioneer Waite Phillips, is considered one of the top 50 fine art museums in the United States and holds works by Pablo Picasso, Andrew Wyeth, and Georgia O'Keeffe. In the Osage Hills, the Gilcrease Museum holds the world's largest collection of art and artifacts of the American West, anchored by the collection of Native American oilman Thomas Gilcrease.

  The city's art deco architecture concentrated wealth and style into dozens of structures: the Philcade Building, the Boston Avenue Methodist Church, Will Rogers High School, and the Tulsa Union Depot have drawn preservation events and architectural tourism. Frank Lloyd Wright's Westhope project in midtown was completed in 1927. Since 1969, public art in Tulsa has been funded by one percent of the city's annual budget. At the entrance to Oral Roberts University stands the Praying Hands, a bronze sculpture 60 feet high, which is the largest bronze sculpture in the world. Outside the Tulsa County Fairgrounds, the 76-foot Golden Driller stands as a tribute to the oil industry.

• 7. Land, Law, and Sovereignty

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  In July 2020, the United States Supreme Court ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma that much of eastern Oklahoma, including Tulsa, remains Native American land as it pertains to criminal law. The ruling placed the prosecution of crimes committed by Native Americans on these lands within the jurisdiction of tribal courts and the federal judiciary under the Major Crimes Act, rather than Oklahoma's state courts. A subsequent ruling, Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, clarified that crimes committed by non-Native Americans on native lands fall under joint federal and state jurisdiction.

  Most of modern Tulsa sits within the territory of the Muscogee Creek Nation. Northwest Tulsa lies within the Osage Nation; North Tulsa sits within the Cherokee Nation. The 2020 census recorded 413,066 residents in the city, with a median age of 35.8 years and a population that is 19.1 percent Hispanic or Latino, 14.9 percent Black or African American, and 5.2 percent American Indian and Alaska Native. Among the most reported ancestries were English at 15.4 percent, Mexican at 14.3 percent, German at 11.6 percent, and Cherokee at 4.8 percent, reflecting the interwoven histories that the McGirt ruling brought back into legal focus.

  The present mayor, Democrat Monroe Nichols, won the 2024 mayoral election and took office on the 2nd of December 2024. Jim Inhofe, who would later serve 30 years representing Oklahoma in the United States Senate, also served as Tulsa's mayor earlier in his career. The city's nine-district council still operates under the mayor-council system adopted in 1989. Southern Hills Country Club, which has hosted three U.S. Opens and five PGA Championships, held its most recent major in 2022, the same year the Bob Dylan Center opened its doors.