Oklahoma, Ok There Is Much More To The Sooner Sate Then The Oklahoma City Tragedy We Will Always Remember

The land that is now Oklahoma was heralded as the adventurous man’s last Eden. “Free land!” trumpeted the fliers seeking settlers. “Grass belly-high to a tall horse! Deep black soil never touched by a plow!”

In fact, the appeal was so enticing, that Okla huma - “red human,” in the Choctaw language - was nicknamed the Sooner State when whites hungry for Indian soil couldn’t wait for the crack of the pistol to start the great land runs of the 1880s and 1890s.

Since those early days, the word Oklahoma has called to mind everything from the dusty hell of John Steinbeck’s Depression-era novel “The Grapes of Wrath” to the farmers and cowmen who praised the “waving wheat that sure smells sweet” in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Oklahoma!”

The cowboys and Indians are still there. Bison, oil rigs and prairies too. You can bet that these were the allAmerican visions people pictured when you said “Oklahoma.”

But a year ago all that changed. Oklahoma became known as the state where “the bombing” took place: April 19, 1995; the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City; 168 dead.

It was the worst act of terrorism the country had ever experienced. And for weeks all the world saw and heard of Oklahoma was mindless devastation and suffering.

But there are other images of Oklahoma that will play on your heartstrings, too.

Imagine lush, green, hugged-inclose hill country with tabletop plains that shrink a quarter-million-dollar piece of farm machinery into a grasshopper gnawing at a cornstalk.

Envision more man-made lakes sprinkled across the landscape than in any other state, creating more shoreline than the combined Atlantic and Gulf coasts and bringing back beavers in such numbers that their pebbled and ferned fairyland pools dot the roadsides.

See in the mind’s eye red mountains of monument-quality granite rising out of rugged plains; lowlands where alligators creep; and the dry desert badlands. And, of course, the prairies where buffalo still roam; and cowboys and more Indians than anywhere else in the world.

Why, there are so many images of Oklahoma that frustrated tourism people have tried to divide the state into six “countries” to get a handle on them. For our purposes, let’s break it down into three and move counterclockwise around the state: the rugged plains and canyon country of the northwest and southwest, the green mountains and many streams of the southeast, and the tallgrass prairie of the northeast.

Start in Oklahoma City, the center of the state, then head west and north, into the Panhandle. This puts you in the Great Plains, where Black Mesa rises from a dry land of pale desert pastels, cacti, juniper, pinion and antelope. It fools you into thinking you can see forever.

Look around and imagine these plains as they looked when they were the hunting ground of the Apache, Comanche, Cheyenne-Arapaho and Kiowa.

Now it is home of winter ice fishing and trout fishing in man-made Lake Etling at Black Mesa State Park, west of Boise City. North of nearby Kenton, a hiking trail will take the hardy to the top of Black Mesa, highest point in the state at 4,973 feet.

As the land spills out of the Panhandle, Alabaster Caverns near Mooreland offer cool year-round cave exploring. Within an hour’s drive southeast, a mini-desert erupts into Little Sahara State Park. Its 70-foot-high sand dunes shift so much under relentless winds that early explorers called them walking hills. Dune buggies are for rent there now.

A jog north near Cherokee leads to the Great Salt Plains where Indians used turkey feathers to fluff the precious white mineral into rawhide bags. You can dig there on the shore of Oklahoma’s Great Salt Plains Lake for the selenite hourglass crystals that occur nowhere else.

In Ponca City, in the wheat and oil plains of the north, a 17-foot bronze statue honors courageous white women who created homes in the raw, new prairie. And on the grounds of the state capitol in Oklahoma City, a 15-foot bronze statue honors their Native American sisters who were driven from their prairie homes to make room for them.

Near Watonga, a hour northwest of Oklahoma City, a huge canyon slashes through red and white gypsum hills, baby mesas and farm fields, forming a mini-world of its own. Three springs gush a million gallons a day.

An old Indian holed up there once, hiding from the white man. His name was Wohine - Hooked Nose - but there were many Indians named Wohine, and he had to take the name Henry Caruthers Roman Nose so he could deal with the white world. When the last of the Indian land was broken up and handed out, Henry Caruthers Roman Nose spurned the fertile farm fields and chose the canyon instead. Wohine pitched his tipi there in his own canyon, out of sight of the white world.

That canyon is now Roman Nose State Resort and Park. In addition to an excellent lodge and golf course, there’s trout fishing in one of the two lakes formed when the springs were dammed.

The state maintains an outstanding riding stable there, too, with mustangs from the prairie worked into the herd. So horses’ hooves still strike sparks on the trail near where old Hooked Nose put up his final tipi.

Roman Nose wasn’t the only Indian who sought to avoid the society of white men. At Hinton, just west of Oklahoma City - close by the Missionary Baptist Church and in the shadow of a trailer court - a Comanche pony trail once disappeared into solid rock, baffling pursuing federal troops.

The trail has been widened so you can drive a car down it into what is now called Red Rock Canyon State Park, a tiny spring-fed ecosystem that supports ancient plant species. Yellow maples in its bottom mimic New England and defy the hot red plains as the silence of the Comanche defied the thunder of the soldiers.

At Clinton, just off Interstate Highway 40, the Oklahoma Historical Society has established the Route 66 Museum in honor of the road’s 70th birthday. Steinbeck called it the Mother Road, and there are more miles of the original route in Oklahoma than any other state.

The 60-mile Wichita chain of red mountains, jewel of the rugged plains country of the southwest, comes into sight north of Altus and continues nearly to Lawton. They are of solid granite, their sides cobbled with massive boulders that time has managed to pry loose. Prickly pear and yucca and grasses cling to little patches of soil brought to the mountains by wind and captured by rain. The old Plains Indians wintered here because the red rocks hold the sun’s warmth well into a winter night.

The historic North Fork of the Red River was dammed at the foot of the mountains to irrigate cotton, creating a Shangri-La of dry redstone hills with their feet - now forested - in blue water. Called Quartz Mountain State Park, it’s one of the state’s five resort parks.

The way the light changes like moods on its face gives it a brooding beauty that has made Quartz Mountain a center for the arts in Oklahoma.

An afternoon ride to the east brings you to an obscure little stream called Honey Creek near Davis. The waterway blossoms suddenly into great whorls of bridal lace called Turner Falls that spill delicately down 77 feet of stone into a pool of swimming water that is every child’s and every artist’s summer dream.

The Ouachita National Forest, in southeastern Oklahoma, has trails for walking or riding horseback. In the deep forest trails, black bear still will put you up a tree if you act up with them, and mountain lions will “scream you off the mountain” on which they have hidden their young.

The forest is topped by Oklahoma Highway 1, a road called Skyline Drive, that careens up and down the backbone of the Ouachita’s highest mountains and connects Talihina to Mena, 54 miles away in Arkansas.

In late autumn, bursts of bright foliage spatter the deep green pine valleys and high ridges with such hues that lovers of these things come in busloads to ride the little roads and drink from the springs.

To the south, Beavers Bend State Park and Broken Bow Lake, north of the town of Broken Bow, have preserved the easy feeling of things being the way they have been forever. It’s in the trees that line the Mountain Fork River, in the cypress trees in still waters and in the Forest Heritage Center within the park. Beavers Bend stands as one of Oklahoma’s premier parks, with rustic cabins and camp sites that range from full service to just a level spot down by the low-water dam. A luxury lodge should be ready for occupancy this year.

But that which drew the Sooners to this land lies a day’s drive north, in the northeast section of the state.

“Hills dip and heave to the horizon in every direction, seeming to promise that waves of tallgrass still wash all the way to Canada,” Oklahoma author Burkhard Bilger writes.

They do not, of course, go all the way to Canada, but Oklahoma’s Tallgrass Prairie Preserve north of Pawhuska is busily protecting a fraction of a virgin prairie that once covered a fifth of the continent.

Some say it almost died, but it’s coming back. In the spring, it is again a “green carpet stitched with black-eyed Susans and purple coneflowers; in the fall, the wind ruffles the heads of golden grass like a horse’s mane,” Bilger writes.

And the bison are back. Not the horizon-to-horizon herds than once blackened the land and caused the earth to shake with their passing, but they’re there.

Oklahoma is all of this and more. In the deep forests of the southern part of the state, the Choctaw once were amazed by the ignorance of white people who thought they could actually own the earth. The Choctaws dreamed of an Indian state where no man could own the Great Spirit’s land, but all could use it. They called the state Sequoyah. The white land-hungry pioneers of the Panhandle dreamed of a state called Cimarron.

Both dreams - and all that is between - are now called Oklahoma.

Historian Angie Debo says Oklahoma experienced in generations what America experienced in centuries. It still is fresh here: an indefinable essence hidden in little rips in the prairie and in vertigo-green mountain hollows.

If you do not understand this, keep coming back.

Ralph Marsh, an Oklahoma native who lives in the Ouachita National Forest, is a frequent contributor to Oklahoma Today magazine.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: If you go For general information on visiting Oklahoma, contact the Oklahoma Tourism and Recreation Department, (800) 652-6552 or (405) 521-2409. Adventure Guide magazine publishes annual issues on Red Carpet Country of the northwest, Great Plains Country of the southwest, Green Country of the northeast, Kiamichi Country of the southeast, Frontier Country of central Oklahoma and Lake Country of the south. All six free issues or your choice can be ordered by writing to Oklahoma Adventure Guide magazine, P.O. Box 96122, Dept. 305, Oklahoma City, Okla. 73143.