Oklahoma, Here I Come!

 
Prague, Oklahoma, about 1903

Oklahoma was never on my list of places to see before I die. Which goes to show how prejudices we don't even know we have limit our view of the world. 

Jim Thorpe was born in Oklahoma in 1887 (not 1888, as most sources claim) near where this rough western town of Prague would be created about twelve years later by immigrants from Bohemia. His Sac & Fox and Potawatomi people had been "removed" (forcibly relocated) to Oklahoma after the Civil War from Kansas (to which they had been removed from Iowa, to which they had been removed from Illinois). Towns like this were laid out overnight on Indian lands that opened up for white settlement with the famous Oklahoma land runs, like the one pictured below, that began in 1889.



When I first arrived in Oklahoma City (OKC to locals) in 2002 to start research on Thorpe the city and surrounding country looked flat, dry, and plain. There didn't seem to be much for the eye to linger on. The wind blew constantly because there was nothing to stop it. 

Then I noticed the sense of humor -- flat, dry ("dusty!" laughed one Oklahoman), plain, and very funny. Will Rogers wit. The punch line came at you like a cowboy seen far away on the horizon: Wait for it. "Why is Oklahoma so windy? It's all that hot air blowing up from Texas." It's an intimate state, a  monk told me, a man so handsome he was referred to, affectionately, as "Brother What A Waste" and "Father Hunk-a-Monk." When the state finally got around, 80-some years later, to adding a dome to the capitol building, there was a constituency that argued it was more distinctive to be the only state in the union without a dome. 



Any biography worth its name should expand the sympathies and understanding of the biographer. Now I love the state I had to learn so much about in order to write NATIVE AMERICAN SON. One new friend recently dubbed me "an honorary Okie." It's a title I'm delighted to accept.

Angie Debo: Oklahoma Historian Extraordinaire

Angie Debo, Oklahoma Historian Extraordinaire 1890 - 1988.

Jim Thorpe was born in Oklahoma Indian Territory in 1887. More than a hundred years later I started researching his life in the old, dusty Oklahoma Historical Society in the Wiley Post building across from the (then-domeless) state capitol in Oklahoma City. The creaky central wooden staircase and the warren-like rooms looked, felt, and smelled as if they hadn't changed a bit since the structure was built in 1930. At desks guarding the stacks of books and files were devoted archivists with an Oklahoma humor so dry one of them called it "dusty." ("Why do we need a capitol dome, anyway? It's better being maybe the only state without one.")

My first day at the Society one of the archivists sat me down for an introductory chat. It was important to understand from the start of my work, he said, that the early history of Oklahoma was, as he put it, corrupt and venal. It was not Oklahoma! And the person we had to thank for having the courage to write the true history of her state, against concerted opposition from major political figures who wished to preserve the Boomer/Sooner myths, was Angie Debo. 

Read this brief summary of her life -- http://www.unl.edu/plains/publications/resource/debo.shtml. Imagine what it must have been like for this remarkable woman, working tirelessly for years in the same dusty archive, piecing together the heartbreaking story of the Indian nations and individuals of Oklahoma and beyond.

The scrupulous and disciplined passion of her self-imposed calling animates every word she wrote in such books as And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes, A History of the Indians of the United States, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place, and more. Her work is accurately called the cornerstone of American Indian scholarship.

p.s. The Oklahoma State Capitol got its dome in 2002. A portrait of Debo hangs in the rotunda area. The Historical Society moved to brand-new quarters in the Oklahoma History Center in 2005.