The History of Oklahoma in

Fifteen Notable Books

by Judy Haught

Are you an Oklahoma history buff? Are you looking for a good book? The following list may be just what you are searching for. Doug and I put our heads together and came up with a list of fifteen books about Oklahoma history that we think are worth your time. Most of the titles are available at the Elk City Carnegie Library. Also, I apologize for my shameless self-promotion, but I included my own two books on the list. After all, you might find a story or two about your western Oklahoma friends and neighbors. Take a look at the following list, and you may have suggestions of your own to add.

1.      Baker, Lindsay. The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives. University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

2.      Baker, Terri M. and Connie Oliver Henshaw. Women Who Pioneered Oklahoma: Stories from the WPA Narratives. University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.

3.      Brewer, Landry. Cold War Oklahoma. The History Press, 2019.

4.      Dary, David. Stories of Old-Time Oklahoma. University of Oklahoma Press, 2011.

5.      Debo, Angie. Prairie City. University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

6.      Debo, Angie. The WPA Guide to 1930s Oklahoma. University Press of Kansas, 1986.

7.      Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Houghton Miflin, 2005.

8.      Gann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon. Doubleday, 2017.

9.      Haught, Judy. Extraordinary Valor: Stories of Oklahoma Veterans. Ingram Spark, 2020.

10.  Haught, Judy. Heroes in Our Midst. Blurb.com, 2016.

11.  Henderson, Caroline. Letters from the Dust Bowl. University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.

12.  Hesse, Karen. Out of the Dust. Scholastic, 1994. (Young Adult Novel)

13.  Madigan, Tim. The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot. Griffin, 1991.

14.  Reese, Linda Williams. Trail Sisters: Freedwomen in Indian Territory, 1850-1890. Texas Tech University Press, 2013.

15.  Wickett, Murray R. Contested Territory: Whites, Native Americans, and African Americans in Oklahoma, 1865-1907. LSU Press, 2000.

 

The Missiles of Oklahoma 

 

This October marks the 60^th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  And as the world approached the brink of nuclear war during those 13 days in October 1962, Oklahoma played a prominent role in the nation’s nuclear deterrent.

 

In January 1960, Oklahoma’s U.S. Senators Robert S. Kerr and Mike Monroney, along with Oklahoma Congressman Toby Morris, announced that Altus Air Force Base in Jackson County would serve as the hub of 12 Atlas F intercontinental ballistic missiles that would be housed at separate communities within 40 miles of the base.

 

The Cold War was raging, and what ultimately became a 45-year ideological conflict between the United States and the Democratic West on one side and the Soviet Union and the Communist East on the other had not reached its midpoint in 1960. When the Soviets got the atomic bomb in 1949, the Cold War intensified. When the Soviets tested their first thermonuclear device in 1955, it intensified again.

 

Then, in rapid succession in late 1957, the Soviets launched the world’s first ICBM, then Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. Tremendous pressure was placed on President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration to complete development of the first American ICBM.

 

And the Atlas missile was born.

 

Three operational Atlas models were created—the D, E and F. The 577th Strategic Missile Squadron at Altus Air Force Base operated 12 Atlas F ICBMs.

 

A symbolic groundbreaking ceremony for the Altus-area Atlas missile sites was held May 20, 1960, at Altus AFB. The mayors representing Altus and the 12 nearby communities where the missile sites would be located participated.

 

The sites chosen for the Atlas sites were Lone Wolf; Snyder; Cache; Frederick; Fargo, Texas; Creta; Hollis; Russell; Willow; Hobart; Manitou; and Granite.

 

The sites cost approximately $21 million to build. Adjusted for inflation, the price tag would be about $180 million today.

 

The Atlas missile was 82.5 feet long and 10 feet wide. It weighed 18,000 pounds empty and 267,000 pounds when filled with its liquid fuel. The missile could fly 9,000 miles. If fired from their Altus-area sites, the missiles would have arrived in the Soviet Union in less than 45 minutes, inflicting massive destruction.

 

Each Atlas F missile carried an approximately 4-megaton (equivalent to about 4 million tons of TNT) nuclear warhead that was more than 250 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on the Japanese city Hiroshima at the end of World War II in 1945.

 

The Army Corps of Engineers oversaw construction of the massive missile sites, an enormous undertaking. Each missile was stored vertically in an underground silo that was 174 feet deep, 52 feet wide and built of heavily reinforced concrete that was poured over rebar to withstand a Soviet nuclear blast at the surface. Silo walls were nine feet thick at the top down to 30 feet below ground surface where they began tapering downward and were 2½ feet thick at the bottom.

 

Within each silo, a huge metal structure the equivalent of a 15-story building called “the crib” was installed to support the missile and allow for maintenance.

 

Each vertical silo included 65-ton hydraulic doors at the top which were flush with the ground surface when closed.

 

A 50-foot tunnel connected each silo to the Launch Control Center (LCC) where a five-person U.S. Air Force crew lived around the clock. Outfitted with kitchens, showers and beds on one level and the technology to fire the missile on another level, five-person crews would live in the LCC working a 24-hour shift, then return to Altus AFB for 48 hours.

 

Building missile sites was dangerous. Oklahoma was one of six states — along with Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and New York — to house Atlas F missiles. Other ICBMs, such as the Titan, were also housed in several states. Nationwide, more than 50 men died building ICBM sites.

 

Three men died building the Altus-area sites. Two men fell to their death at the Cache and Fargo, Texas, sites, and a man was electrocuted at the Hobart site on his first day of work there.

 

The sites were built with great speed to hasten the American nuclear deterrent in a dangerous time.  In a 1961 speech to the United Nations, President Kennedy said, “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”

 

That thread was nearly cut in October 1962.  The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest that the United States and Soviet Union came to nuclear war. When the Kennedy administration learned that the Soviet Union was placing nuclear missiles in Cuba that could reach most of the continental United States, all 12 Altus-area Atlas F ICBMs were placed on alert for the first time.

 

Oklahoma and the world were spared a nuclear conflagration, though Oklahomans near Frederick received a scare when the missile there exploded May 14, 1964. Fortunately, the warhead was unaffected, and there were no injuries or fatalities. But the force of the explosion destroyed the site, and it permanently closed.

 

The following November, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced that the Atlas program would be phased out by June 1965.

 

That quickly Oklahoma’s part in the nation’s Cold War nuclear arsenal ended.

 

The Atlas sites were decommissioned and sold to private owners. School districts at Snyder, Hollis, Granite and Fargo, Texas, own the site properties at those locations today.

 

When President Kennedy went on national television the evening of October 22, 1962, to tell the nation of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, he issued a warning to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

 

Kennedy looked into the camera and told Khrushchev that the United States would “regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

 

That “full retaliatory response” would have included firing the nuclear-armed missiles near Altus Air Force Base.

 

During the crisis, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev pleaded with President Kennedy by letter that they must avoid nuclear war between their countries, because “only lunatics or suicides, who themselves want to perish and to destroy the whole world before they die,” could allow such a war to happen.  He knew the extent of the American nuclear arsenal, which included missiles nearby.

 

Western Oklahoma’s ICBMs played an important role within the nation’s nuclear deterrent during those 13 fraught days in October 1962 as we approached the brink and the sword of Damocles came perilously close to falling.

 

 

Landry Brewer is Bernhardt Assistant Professor of History for Southwestern Oklahoma State University at the Sayre campus, and he is the author of Cold War Oklahoma.

Willow Atlas Missile

 Here is a link to a digital collection of historic Oklahoma postcards. There are two postcards of Elk City in the collection.

https://digitalprairie.ok.gov/digital/collection/okpostcards

 

Postcards from the Past

by Judy Haught

I am a deltiologist. Now don’t go thinking I am some kind of fancy scientist because what I am is a collector of postcards and not just any postcards but postal greeting cards mailed during the years of 1905-1915. I got started in this somewhat obscure hobby in the late 1990s while browsing in an antique store. I found a treasure trove of old postcards with beautiful artwork on the front and brief personal messages on the back. They weren’t the photographic postcards I had come to expect but beautifully colored, embossed copies of paintings. Well having always loved greeting cards and being a bit nosy, I had to have them, and just like that a hobby was born. For the last twenty-five years, I have trolled antique stores for stashes of old postal greeting cards.

As it turns out, the history of antique postal greeting cards is really quite fascinating. Most of the really beautiful postcards from that era were imported from Germany. The German printers used lithography and superior ink. The American printers had not caught up with the technology. The cards became an astounding success. Americans mailed literally billions of postcards during the ten years between 1905 and 1915. In fact, postcards actually bailed out the U. S. Post Office, which was $17 million in the red in 1909. By 1911, the Post Office had a surplus of $200,000, due in no small part to the postcard craze.

Who were those people mailing all those postcards? Most of them were women and children from rural areas and towns of less than 10,000 inhabitants. It seems that even today, women and young people are the trendsetters, so it is no surprise that they became the postcard fanatics. The fact that postcards were inexpensive and cost only a penny to mail added to their appeal. In a way, postcards were the forerunner of today’s social media. Like a text message or a tweet, they contain short messages. After all, a postcard writer had half of the back of a card to make a point. Also, the pictures on the cards were meant to impress just like FaceBook posts that generally show people at their best. Another similarity is that postcards by their very nature were not private. Like messages on the internet, anyone could read them. An old joke told of a post master who had to retire from his job because he went blind from reading so many postcards.

This cultural phenomenon of post cards proliferated with the help of rural free delivery, which became widespread in the United States in 1902. Until then, many country dwellers suffered from isolation. With the advent of regular mail delivery, they could now receive news of the outside world in the form of magazines and newspapers. They also began receiving postcards. Imagine the thrill of receiving a little piece of art in the form of a postcard with a personal message from a friend or family member. Letters were still sent, but they weren’t colorful and convenient like postcards.

Even with all the advantages of postcards, they had their naysayers. John Walker Harrington, a writer for American Illustrated Magazine, called postcards “epistolary sloth” and called the craze “postal carditis.” He warned of encroaching immorality brought on by the sending of postcards. He said, “Unless such manifestations are checked, millions of persons of now normal lives and irreproachable habits will become victims of faddy degeneration of the brain.” It sounds like some of the complaints we hear about social media today.

Americans’ love of postcards began to wane in 1909 when the U. S. government created a tariff on postcards from Germany making them more expensive for American consumers. Then when World War I started, German printers were shut down. American printers did not have the expertise to create cards the caliber of the German ones, and paper and ink were scarce. Another cause of the postcard craze’s demise, was the advent of the telephone. As more people gained access to phones, they began to write fewer cards and letters.

Over the years, I have collected hundreds of postal greeting cards, many from Western Oklahoma. They are a small glimpse into life in this part of the world over a hundred years ago. Many of the cards talk about social gatherings. Parties and pie suppers are scheduled. The children discuss school and overnight visits. Many mention picking cotton and harvesting wheat. Some even complain of the wind. I guess some things never change.

Amongst my array of cards is a large collection of cards addressed to a young girl named Lecie Hutchinson of Elk City. The address in just Elk City, Oklahoma, no street or post office box. Lecie was born in 1896 and lived in Elk City with her parents and grandmother. Her postcards are obviously from friends and relatives, and they speak of school, parties, Christmas, and birthdays. Some even contain short little love poems from male admirers. All seem perfectly mundane except one from a cousin that says, “Wes is in jail. Don’t tell Grandpa.” We have to wonder who Wes was and why he was in jail and what Grandpa would do when he found out. One thing I noticed about the cards Lecie received was that the pictures tended to become a little racier as she grew older, certainly not by today’s standards but enough to raise eyebrows in 1910. For instance, some of them showed men and women kissing, and one even depicts two young women in bathing attire.

Lecie’s postcards are only half of a conversation. We don’t know what she wrote on the cards she sent, but I feel like I own a small slice of her childhood. I bought the cards at a booth in an antique mall, and I assume the vendor bought them at an estate sale. I cannot imagine selling a relative’s mail from her childhood, but apparently no one cared enough to save them. Some of the cards are missing the postage stamps. I suppose stamp collectors cared more about the one-cent stamps than the messages.

Lecie married George Calvert in 1916, and they lived most of their lives in Roger Mills County. They both died in 1971 and are buried at Hammon. I feel privileged to have shared a small part of her life.

 

Sources

Gifford, Daniel. American Holiday Postcards, 1905-1915: Imagery and Context. Jefferson, North

            Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2013.

-------- “Golden Age of Postcards.” The Saturday Evening Post. 12 Dec. 2016.

            https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/12/golden-age-postcards/

Pyne, Lydia. Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network. London: Reaktion

            Press, 2021.

 

                                     

                                             Confederate Veterans Buried at Sayre

by Judy Haught

A stroll through Lone Oak Cemetery near Sayre, Oklahoma, will reveal the graves of several veterans, among them a number of graves of Confederate soldiers. A Confederate grave is easy to spot. The gravestone will have a pointed top and a Southern Cross of Honor engraved in the stone. Legend has it that Confederate gravestones have pointed tops to keep Yankees from sitting on them. The Southern Cross of Honor was originally bestowed to Confederate soldiers as a medal. It was the Confederate version of the Union Medal of Honor. Later the United States Veterans Administration issued gravestones for Confederate veterans with the cross engraved on them. Occasionally a Confederate grave will also have a metal version of the cross alongside the gravestone.

One of the Confederate veterans buried at Lone Oak Cemetery is Rice R. Turner. While details of Turner’s life are sketchy, several facts can be gleaned from U. S. Census Records, the National Park Service, and Texas history websites. He was born in Mississippi in 1839. He joined the 11^th Confederate Infantry in Texas on February 26, 1862. Texas seceded from the Union soon after Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1861, even before the war officially started. The 11^th Texas Infantry was mustered into service in the winter of 1861-1862 near Houston. Ten companies with recruits from several Texas counties comprised the regiment. Turner was among those recruits. His rank upon joining the army was Private, but at the end of his tour of duty, his rank was 2^nd Lieutenant, a fact that indicates a field promotion. A field promotion would generally be granted for outstanding service in combat, allowing a soldier to skip the traditional channels of rank and promotion.

According to the Texas State Historical Association, the 11^th Texas Infantry was stationed in East Texas until August 1862. There the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville furnished the soldiers with “cloth for tents, knapsacks, and for some clothing.” One wonders if the soldiers had to use the cloth to sew their own clothes and equipment or possibly hire it done. The regiment went on to engage in several battles in Louisiana and Arkansas, suffering a large number of casualties. In the spring of 1864, they participated in the Red River Campaign in Louisiana. They assisted in the capture of “2,000 prisoners, 20 pieces of artillery, and 200 wagons of arms.” Then in 1865, they guarded prisoners at Tyler, Texas. The war ended in April 1865 with Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, and the 11^th Texas Infantry surrendered June 2, 1865, at Galveston, Texas. As a Confederate soldier, Turner was considered a prisoner of war by the United States. Upon signing a pledge to never serve in a “military capacity” against the United States, he was paroled and set free on July 7, 1865, at Marshall, Texas.

After the war, Turner remained in Texas and married Martha Jane Collier in 1865. The couple made their home in Pennington, Texas, despite the fact that the Reconstruction era in Texas was one of anger and tumult. Texas residents had to take a pledge of loyalty to the United States and profess the illegality of secession. Many Texas residents, primarily German immigrants and Tejanos, had been opposed to secession. Violence had erupted in the state over political disagreements, and old wounds still festered after the war. In addition, disagreements between Texas and Native Americans that had taken a back seat to the war rose up again with renewed violence.

Yet Turner and his family remained. The 1870 U. S. Census lists Turner’s profession as saddler. The Texas Land Title Abstracts indicates that Turner owned 160 acres of land in the Nacogdoches District of Angelina County, and the 1880 census lists him as a farmer. Having a stable, essential vocation could account for his remaining in Texas. Turner and Martha gave birth to nine children during the years of 1866 to 1885: John Marshall, William Pickney, Samuel Isham, Mary Lena, Florence Almarena, Leonidas Earl, Pascal Gustave, Phocion Pericles, and Amelia. Amelia is listed in the 1870 census but not in the 1880 census, a fact that could indicate she died during the years between censuses.

A fire destroyed the 1890 census, so no information on Turner and his family is available for that year. However, the 1900 census shows him living in Texola Township, Oklahoma Territory, with his son. Rice Turner died November 22, 1905, at the age of 65-66. He had received a Confederate Veteran’s pension until his death, and his wife Martha received a Confederate widow’s pension until she died December 9, 1923.

Why so many Civil War veterans moved to Oklahoma Territory is pure conjecture. Some surely came for opportunity, and others followed adult children. Perhaps some sought peace beyond the strife of war and reconstruction. Union and Confederate veterans apparently lived in harmony and even lie near one another in Beckham County cemeteries.

Sources

“Alabama, Texas, and Virginia, U.S., Confederate Pensions, 1884-1958.” Ancestry.com

            26 June 2022.

“Confederate SFervice Grave Markers.” Sons of Confederate Veterans Adam Washington

Ballenger Camp #68. Sons of Confederate Veterans. http://www.schistory.net/scv/markers.htm. 26 June 2022.

“Cross, Southern Cross of Honor (Confederate States of America)” City of Grove.

            http://www.cityofgroveok.gov 26 June 2022.

Derbes, Brett J. “Eleventh Texas Infantry.” Texas State Historical Society.

            http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook 26 June 2022.

“Rice R. Turner.” Find a Grave. http://www.findagrave.com 26 June 2022.

“Rice R. Turner.” Fold 3. Ancestry.com 26 June 2022.

“Rice R. Turner.” Texas, U. S., Land Title Abstracts, 1700-2008. Ancestry.com 26 June 20

 

Civil War Veterans Buried in Beckham County

by Judy Haught

Oklahoma became a state in 1907, more than forty years after the Civil War and miles from most of the action, so it is a bit surprising that so many Civil War veterans are buried in western Oklahoma cemeteries. A rough count of the Civil War veterans’ graves in Beckham County, both Union and Confederate, is twenty-seven. The total will surely go up when Roger Mills County cemeteries are included. A story lurks beneath each headstone. The biggest question is perhaps why they spent their last days in western Oklahoma. Investigation of many of the veterans reveal that they were living with sons or daughters that had migrated to Oklahoma; however, some came of their own accord seeking opportunity.

One such veteran is Union soldier William Allison Young, interred in Fairlawn Cemetery in Elk City. Born in Indiana, Young and his parents moved to Kansas when he was a child. Northeastern Kansas was a violent place leading up to and during the Civil War. Border bandits, led by William Quantrill and claiming ties with the Confederate Army, terrorized and pillaged Kansas towns. One of his most infamous raids was on the town of Lawrence. They burned houses and looted banks and saloons. On hundred fifty men were left burned and bloodied in the streets.

In response to the massacre, the U. S. War Department gave Governor Carney permission to form a cavalry to protect the Kansas border. The 15^th Kansas Cavalry grew out of the Lawrence atrocity. That is where twenty-two-year-old William Young entered the picture. He enlisted in the 15^th Kansas Cavalry and was assigned to company H. Company H spent frontier garrison duty at Fort Leavenworth. According to Young’s obituary, which appeared in the December 5, 1935, Cheyenne Star, Young guarded stage coaches carrying the U. S. mail.

Most of the regiment mustered out of the Army on October 19, 1865; however, Company H joined the Powder River Expedition in its invasion of the Cheyenne, Lakota Sioux, and Arapaho Indians. Powder River runs through Montana and Wyoming, and the area was designated Indian Territory. The Indians would gather in that remote area after raids and uprisings.

Company H, along with William Young, mustered out of the U. S. Army on December 7, 1865. William returned home to Kansas and married Elizabeth Hopkins on January 1, 1867. The newlyweds lived in Wakarusa, Kansas, until 1872. By that time they had two sons, Clyde and Guy. Seeking employment and a better life, Will and Lizzie, accompanied by Will’s brother John, moved their family to Colorado. In the ensuing years, Will and Lizzie added three more children, Leon, Roy, and Verna. The family migrated between Colorado, Kansas, Texas, and finally Oklahoma Territory. According to his obituary, Will “rode with the Goodnight, Cresswell, and Pollard herds from Colorado to the Texas Panhandle.” In 1892 Will and Lizzie settled along Dead Indian Creek and created the Y-Cross Ranch. They eventually owned between 3,000 and 5,000 acres of ranchland.

Will’s obituary sums up Will’s life and philosophy in this way. “The code of the West held him during his lifetime. He had only the greatest of contempt for dishonesty, evasion of debts, and littleness in dealing.”

Sources

“Kansas, U.S. Civil War Enlisted Papers, 1862, 1863, 1868.” Ancestry.com. Web. 23 March 2022.

“Military History of the Fifteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry.” Fifteenth Regiment Kansas

            Cavalry: Official Military History of Kansas Regiments During the War for the

            Suppression of the Great Rebellion. 2015.

            www.ksgenweb.org/archives/statewide/military/civilwar/adjutant/15/history.htm.

            22 March 2022.

“Powder River Expedition (1865).” Wikipedia. 1 April 2022. Web. 21 May 2022.

Purcell, Wanda. “ Pioneer Resident of Roger Mills Passes.” Cheyenne Star. 5 Dec. 1935. Web.

            3 March 2022.

Savage, O. Ronald and Margaret Manuel Larason. Prairie Fire.  Western Oklahoma

            Historical Society, 1978.

“William Quantrill and the Lawrence Massacre.” American Studies of the University of Virginia.

            University of Virginia.

            http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/CONTEXTS/Kansas/quantril.html

            3 March 2022.