The Sooner State
(from Growing Up Stories)
by
Kenny A. Chaffin
All Rights Reserved © 2013 Kenny A. Chaffin
Quite often on the farm plowing,
digging postholes or just herding cattle we’d find ammonite fossils. Our black
dirt farm was just off State Highway 99c a few miles southwest of Madill ‘in
the arms of Lake Texoma.’ We were 10 miles north of the Evil Texicans as the
crow flies, straight north of the Willis Bridge. There was never much love lost
between Oklahomans and Texans particularly in the football arena. Lake Texoma
was the major source of summer entertainment for swimming, water skiing and
fishing but I never considered it a source for the ammonites even though I knew
they were water dwellers. Ammonites were ancient sea creatures that lived from
400 to 65 million years ago and died out along with the dinosaurs. They were
spiral shaped with segmented shells looking something like a giant snail or
today’s nautilus but are actually related to the more intelligent cuttlefish
and octopus.
Ammonite Fossil
After I’d learned a bit about
them from the encyclopedia and library books on fossils and ancient life I remember
holding one that I’d come across in the pasture, a large one maybe a foot wide
in my hands and just staring at it in awe thinking, “This was once the bottom
of the ocean and this thing was alive wriggling, twisting and swimming through
it.” I was astounded. I imagined salty blue-green water reaching from the black
dirt at my feet to the puffy white cumulus clouds floating above. I was amazed that
all this land could have been at the bottom of the ocean. That was one of
several events which set me on a life-long quest to learn everything I could
about life, science, nature and the universe, a quest which has never ebbed in
my six decades and which I expect to continue through my last dying breath.
Oklahoma
sits slightly south of the center of the United States, in the lower part of
the Great Plains and was at the edge of a great inland sea that filled the
central U.S. until about 60 million years ago. The land where our farm was would
have been under water and that water would have been thriving with life, much
of it ammonites as evidenced by the abundance of fossils found on our land. To
Daddy they were more a nuisance than anything, just rocks that broke plows or
got in the way of digging post holes or other work, but to me they were magic
they transported me to another world, another time, another place.
The land
left over from that abundant sea life and the sediments it left behind created The
Great Plains, a huge swath of flat fertile land on which the prairie grasses
(tall and short) would grow and on which the buffalo would feed. Because of
that sea and its ‘recent’ demise the existing vegetation is relatively new by
geological time standards and consists of mostly grasses and few trees. This is
how The Great Plains came to be. This vast prairie would be undisturbed by
humans for 60 million years.
The first evidence of human travel
through Oklahoma was during the last ice age and the oldest permanent settlements
are from the Mississippian culture between 800 and 1450 BCE. These are the
Spiro Burial Mounds near the Arkansas border in the eastern part of the state.
The plains Indians of course
followed the migrations of the buffalo. They had no permanent settlements but they
left traces of their travels over most of the state. The name Oklahoma comes
from the Choctaw words okla and humma, meaning "red people" and was
suggested by the Choctaw Chief Allen Wright during negotiations with the U.S.
Government.
Geographically the state slopes
slightly downhill from the northwest to the southeast. It has over 500 named
creeks and rivers and 200 man-made lakes created by dams, the largest number of
artificial reservoirs of any state. The Land of 10,000 Lakes has got nothing on
Oklahoma...well except for a few more lakes....but ours were created by
intelligent design.
The French explored and laid
claim in the 1700’s to much of the land west of the Mississippi river including
what is now Oklahoma. It was acquired from them in the well-known Louisiana
Purchase of 1803. One hundred and four years later in 1907 Oklahoma became the
47th state followed by Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii.
The things Oklahoma is most
known for other than being in Tornado Alley is being the Indian State since it
was the destination of the Trail of Tears and of course being part of the Dust
Bowl in the 30’s. I won’t delve into all the Indian history as there is plenty
of information on line (see the links at the end of this text) and in books but
it was probably the most horrific thing to take place on American soil with the
possible exception of the Civil War. The Native Americans were forcefully moved
in tribes to designated locations, reservations in Eastern Oklahoma starting
with the Choctaw in 1801 and proceeding systematically through all the eastern
seaboard tribes. Sixty-thousand of the one hundred thirty thousand relocated
Cherokees died as a result of the forced march they were required to make in
the middle of the winter in 1838. Even those relocations were not to be the end
of the evil perpetuated on the Native Americans though. During the cattle
drives from Texas to Kansas and points north many whites began settling in the
Indian allocated lands. Eventually this led to conflict and to the passage of
the Dawes Act of 1887 another atrocity against the Native Americans. It
subdivided the communal Indian lands into individual ‘family’ properties and
allocated specific size plots to each Indian and in the process stripped the tribes
of half their lands. The railroads and whites took it at the behest of the U.S.
Government. This ‘open land’ led to another thing Oklahoma is known for – the
land runs. The ‘freed up’ Indian lands were made available through the
Homestead Act to any U.S. citizen that was willing to follow the rules. In some
cases this meant lining up on the border and racing into the allocated areas to
‘stake a claim’ (i.e. literally putting stakes in the ground to mark a plot of
land) of 160 acres as allowed by the Homestead Act. Some of these settlers were
less than ethical and snuck in early placed their stakes and just waited. These
were known as the ‘Sooners’ and that is where the state nickname comes from -
The Sooner State. It is also the name of
the University of Oklahoma football team.
Although The Dust Bowl did not
affect southern Oklahoma so much it was devastating in the panhandle and
northern parts of the state and certainly made an impact in the psyche of the
nation through the photos, stories and of course through Steinbeck’s classic
novel The Grapes of Wrath.
Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm.
Oklahoma is primarily agricultural
but it is also an oil state. I guess that’s one more thing! Oil wells have been
discovered and drilled all over the state including ones on the actual State
Capital grounds which are unique in the world. The Osage Indians got lucky in
that there are significant oil deposits under their land in Northeastern
Oklahoma making them the richest of all Native American Tribes.
Partially because it lay on the
edge of the inland sea and due to other geological activity the land sloped
downward to the southeast and ranges from red dirt in the northern and central
parts of the state to rich black dirt of southern Oklahoma where our farm was
located. The Red River brought much of that black dirt to the area and forms a
natural border between Oklahoma and Texas with the designated boundary line
running down the middle of the river and subsequently down the middle of Lake
Texoma. The lake is formed by Dennison Dam and is one of the largest man-made
lakes in the country. This is where I grew up; the lake was where I spent many
a summer day.
And this was the land Grandpa
Sid came to from Missouri in 1901 six years before it was a state, when it was
still Indian Territory. He would have been eighteen years old at the time and
from what I can learn he moved to Indian Territory with his parents to a place
just south of where the farm I grew up on is located. I can only guess that it
was homesteading that brought them here when land opened up but I don’t
actually know and the records are sparse. I’ve always wondered where, how he
got the land and farm where I grew up. I wish I’d asked these questions when I
was growing up or at least before it was too late but back then all I wanted
was out, to be away from there. I believe that he or his parents homesteaded it
or another homestead and later traded/bought the farm. There were two plots of
land, two parcels, the land where the farmhouse and barns were, which was a
quarter section – 160 acres and another parcel half that size across State
Highway 99c which had no buildings or improvements other than an old dry water
well.
That
farm and land was turned over to Daddy to work the year of my birth. For the
next fifteen years that’s exactly what he did, he worked his ass off, but in
the end it came to naught as the farm was lost to bankruptcy.
References/Resources/Links
Oklahoma:
Native Americans/Trail of Tears:
Lake Texoma:
Inland Sea:
Dust Bowl:
About the Author
Kenny A. Chaffin writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction
and has published poems and fiction in Vision
Magazine, The Bay Review, Caney River Reader, WritersHood, Star*Line, MiPo,
Melange and Ad Astra and has
published nonfiction in The Writer,
The Electron, Writers Journal and Today’s Family. He grew up in southern
Oklahoma and now lives in Denver, CO where he works hard to make enough of a
living to support two cats, numerous wild birds and a bevy of squirrels. His
poetry collections No Longer
Dressed in Black and The Poet of Utah Park and his collection of science essays How
do we Know are available at Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B007S3SMY8. He
may be contacted through his website at http://www.kacweb.com.
