There's
one good thing about Oklahoma at least – it's got borders which means you can
leave. At least theoretically...
###Unmistakably autumn. The days are shrinking. We travel in the dark.
Radio is always one of the more reliable cultural indicators on road trips. I am in the land of no NPR and stations that ride slipstreams of static from faraway places like Dallas, Denver, New Orleans, even Chicago, randomly fading in, fading out. Mostly I’m in the land of endless Prayer 107.4 FM and Praise God’s Mercy 890 AM. Which is how for a full 15 minutes this morning I got to listen to Dr. Jim Dobson talk about the importance of foreplay.
See guys, it’s like
this: God
knows you work hard. God
sees it. Eight, nine, sometimes ten hours a day: you want to do right by your family. When you come home, you’re
tired. God knows that too. You grab a cold one from the icebox, sink yourself down by the teevee. Maybe you grab a little shuteye. And then it’s time to go to bed for real, and you know what? You’re horny! Well,
hell – that’s why you married the bitch in the first place, right? To get some when you want some. Only she’s squirming and sniffling, talking some shit about her feelings when all you really want to do is stick it in and get some relief. A man’s got his
needs –
But see, here’s the thing God needs to talk to you about – a woman’s got needs too! Sometimes ya gotta loosen her up a little beforehand. Kind of like lubricating an engine. Maybe spit in your hand a little, touch her a little
down there –
Well, okay. Dr. Jim Dobson didn’t say anything about spitting in your hand or touching her
down there. But maybe he would have – I lost his signal to a sharp left-hand turn right after the engine line so I’ll never know.
Twenty miles later we rolled into the felicitously named Beaver, Oklahoma. (Tomorrow’s town is Hooker!) I’ve been scouring the streets looking for a liquor store. I want a photograph of Beaver Liquors! I
need a photograph of Beaver Liquors!
Instead I found Beaver’s historic Presbyterian church – a simple wood white clapboard structure built in 1887 (which was well before white guys stole the Oklahoma Territory back from the Indians.) I found the United Methodist Church, somewhat smaller than the First Baptist Church, a comparative distinction tells you much about the makeup of this town. (I think it was Norman Maclean who observed that a Methodist is a Baptist who can read.) I found various assemblies of God, Christ, the Nazarene. And one liquor store, a generic liquor store, nothing with Beaver in its name.
Why does fundamentalist religion play so big a role in Oklahoma life?
Was it always this way?
Oklahoma was settled comparatively late. Wasn’t until the very beginning of the twentieth century that white men moved here in any great numbers. Before then the territory divvied up between Indians and cows.
In 1830 Andrew Jackson husbanded something called the Removal Act through the United States Congress. “Established in the midst of another and a superior race,” Jackson wrote, “and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, [Native Americans] must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear."
Though the government described it as a treaty, in fact the Removal Act was not a treaty, but rather a campaign of coercion by a nation with only dubious moral rights to the lands it coveted. To justify the expulsion and subsequent land grab, a New York journalist coined the term “manifest destiny,” a belief that the United States was on a mission and its continuing exapansion therefore somehow divinely ordained.
(See? God was in on the Oklahoma action from a very early stage.)
The Removal Act forced the Indians living throughout the Deep South – the Mississippi Choctaw, the Florida Seminoles, the Carolina Cherokees and the Creek of Alabama – to give up rights to their traditional tribal homelands in exchange for reservations scattered over the countryside between the Platte and Red rivers, south and west of Missouri and Arkansas. Like other settlers, they traveled by covered wagon, wagon trains and overcrowded steamships, so many of them dying along the way that among the Cherokee the relocation became known as the Trail of Tears.
Some of these Indians were slave owners. (Except for the Seminoles who only “owned” slaves as a means of helping them escape.) The Cherokees were particular culprits here and when the Civil War broke out, they allied themselves with the South. As a result after the Civil War ended they were forced to renegotiate their settlement treaty, and the government began pressuring them to cede their rights to it altogether. This was because white men had finally found an alternate use for the arid country.
Within a decade of the Civil War’s end, the great plains buffalo herds had disappeared. Buffalo in the wild had few natural predators – when confronted by enemies their natural instinct was not to scatter but to intimidate by standing still in their vast herds. This made them great targets for white men with guns. Once their herds were gone, enterprising settlers from Kansas and Texas moved in cattle in their place, establishing ranches in those central Oklahoma grasslands that hadn’t been designated as Indian reservations. In 1881 these cattlemen formed an organization, the Cherokee Strip Livestock Association, leasing the entire unoccupied 600,000 acres of land, grazing over 300,000 cattle.
The Cherokee Strip Livestock Association was headquartered in Caldwell, Kansas, a town the circus played last Tuesday. Hundred and fifty years ago Caldwell was right up there with Deadwood, Dodge City, Tombstone, a
wild place, filled with saloons, gambling dens, brothels, every form of sin. Stroll down deserted Main Street today (every empty shop reminding you that yet another Walmart has opened 15 miles down the interstate) and every thirty feet you’ll run across a marker telling you who died on this spot hundred twenty-five years ago, and under what bloody circumstances:
George Flatt (1853-1880), Caldwell's first city marshal, and a fearless gunfighter, was gunned down here the night of June 19, 1880, 2 months after leaving the police force. Flatt had argued with two police officers earlier in the evening and died in a hail of gunfire walking home. The mayor, new marshal, and the entire police force were arrested by the county sheriff. Only the marshal, William Horseman, faced a trial, and he was acquitted one year later.
I figure these markers are the brainchild of some enterprising city manager fixing to give Caldwell some tourist umph, maybe turn it into a Tulsa weekend destination. Why not? It’s close enough. According to the signage the good citizens sank a million bucks into spiffing up this town. But Caldwell remains what it is: a farm town in the middle of nowhere. Even if that nowhere was once somewhere. Hold your breath for a second: that subliminal
whhhssshhh is the sound of grass growing up out gunfighters’ graves.
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