all states    this state Make your own photo site Photowiki is free and easy for you to share your photos. Make your own! www.photowiki.com

© 2004 Hugh Scott Introduction Essay for Oklahoma 24/7 This Is Our Place By Ann DeFrange Oklahomans have a difficult time defining where we are, much less who we are. But for the purposes of geographers and demographers-and this book-this is our place. We are the most northern of the Southern states and the most southern of the Northern states. We are classified as Midwestern, Southern, Western, Southwestern, and next to Texas. None are exactly appropriate, including the Texas reference. We've got prairies and plains and forests. We've got mountains and rivers. We've got wetlands and sand dunes. We still have that Dust Bowl image, but we've watered it down with 2,500 lakes. None of them were here to begin with; we built them all. None of us were here to start with, either. We arrived at different times, from different places, for different reasons. The Indian tribes arrived first. Then the federal government shipped in Southeastern tribes, the Five Civilized Tribes, in what became known as the Trail of Tears. Then Washington gave the other half to homesteaders. Now we're adding Hispanic and Asian faces. In a nutshell, Oklahoma goes to the fastest, the most enduring, the most daring, the stubbornest, and the most stolid. Not bad qualities, we think. When tornadoes come every year and literally blow it all down, we stand against the wind and brace for the next one. When the oil fields boom then bust, we wait for the cycle to roll back around. When we built a national memorial, it wasn't to define us as the state where the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed, but as the people who got back up, put out a hand to someone who was down, and went at it again. Not a bad mix, we know. That almost everything and everybody are already here might be why people come home. We see them all the time now: folks who loaded up their old trucks and headed down Route 66 to California during the Depression-or their children or grandchildren-headed back home to Oklahoma. We still think of ourselves as a wide-open land of wheat farmers, cattle ranchers, and oil drillers. These remain our cherished icons. But the land gets smaller; we're running out, using it up; and there's not enough to leave to the kids. Drive through any country town and someone will come up to you and say, "This used to be a thrivin' little town." He will point out a boarded-up building or a weed-infested foundation or part of a wall, and tell you that used to be the bank or the hotel or the grain elevator or the jail, and he'll tell you the school consolidated and the church closed down and even the jail's got no business anymore, and everyone moved into town. We call them "used to be" towns. Our place is changing. In town, we work hard to capture technology and industry and a quality lifestyle. But we still hold dear God and country and freedom and football and cows and kids and kin and all those great old stereotypes. Not a bad place to live in the 21st century, we believe. ANN DEFRANGE has ancestors who arrived in Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears and ancestors who came to a land run in a covered wagon. She writes a column for The Oklahoman in Oklahoma City. Browse    View All    This Is Our Place    Hard at Work    Oklahoma at Play    Reason to Believe    Our Town Photos: 127 Photographers: 32 Towns: 48

home  |  about 24-7  |   buy a book Copyright © 2004 24/7 Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of the website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Please contact Alex@America24-7.com to request permission