Chapter 1 | Section 3
Political Boundaries of Today’s Oklahoma
For thousands of years, the borderlands just described embraced the sovereign territories of Native nations. But Europeans soon secured the power, at least on their maps, to name the region that embraces Oklahoma today—northern New Spain, New France, French Louisiana, Spanish Louisiana, and the United States. Political boundaries are often shaped by rivers or landforms but are also created through diplomacy and war.
Location of Oklahoma. Oklahoma shares a partial border with six states. It sits at a crossroads between southern and western states, and combines the cultures of both regions.
Courtesy of Brad Watkins, PhD.
In the lands that would become Oklahoma, these borders pressed upon the western edges of the French and Spanish empires. Today Oklahoma borders Kansas and a portion of southeastern Colorado on the north, Arkansas and a portion of southwestern Missouri on the east, Texas on the south, and the Texas Panhandle and a portion of northeastern New Mexico on the west. The Red River is the state’s southern border with Texas.
The dimensions of Oklahoma, with distances shown in miles. In contrast to many states of the same size or larger, Oklahoma contains a variety of terrains and hosts an abundance of wildlife, plants, and trees.
Courtesy of Brad Watkins, PhD.
Geography
The highest point in Oklahoma is Black Mesa (4,973 feet above sea level) in the westernmost part of the Oklahoma Panhandle. The lowest point is the Little River (289 feet above sea level) in southeastern Oklahoma.
Oklahoma’s rivers for the most part flow from the northwest to the southeast. Elevation accounts for this flow: the western part of the state is higher than the eastern part of the state. Oklahoma contains several natural salt plains and saline rivers in the west and six scenic rivers in the east. It also contains two main river systems, the Arkansas River and the Red River. The Arkansas River is the state’s largest river system, and most Oklahoma streams are its tributaries. The Red River forms the southern boundary of the state. Others, such as the Washita River, are tributaries of the Red River, which carries Oklahoma water southeast through northeast Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana before emptying into the Mississippi River. Nations that inhabited the Red River Basin of the southern plains include the Wichitas, Comanches, Spanish, French, and the United States.
Geographical regions and their landforms in Oklahoma. Oklahoma has varied and distinctive landforms across its different regions, which include plains, mountains, hills, and forests. These regions hold an array of natural resources, plants, and animals.
Courtesy of Brad Watkins, PhD.
Waterways eased human access to the land. Environmental history describes the interactions between humans and the land. Humans shaped the landscape. And humans shared the landscape, the land and the water, with animals such as bison, bears, deer, coyotes, wolves, rabbits, turtles, snakes, birds, and fish.
Mineral resources in Oklahoma. Oklahoma is rich in natural resources. The state has impressive deposits of oil and natural gas as well as coal, salt, gypsum, and other minerals. This map also shows oil and gas fields across Oklahoma.
Courtesy of Brad Watkins, PhD.
Oklahoma is part of the southern Great Plains. Environmental historians describe the western half of Oklahoma as grasslands, with mixed-grass prairie as a transitional zone between the tallgrass prairies to the north and east and the shortgrass high plains to the south and west. Mixed-grass prairies contain a variety of plant species, including the tallgrass varieties switchgrass and big bluestem and shortgrass such as buffalo grass. The grasslands of Oklahoma nourished grazing animals such as deer and bison and later horses and cattle.
The lands that would become Oklahoma are rich in mineral resources including petroleum (crude oil and natural gas), coal, and nonfuel minerals, including limestone, gypsum, salt, clays, iodine, sand and gravel, lead, zinc, and copper. Oklahoma has mineral wealth in all seventy-seven counties. Today petroleum production in Oklahoma represents more than 90 percent of Oklahoma’s annual mineral output.
Aerial view of DeNoya (also called Whizbang), which was located in the Burbank Field in the Osage oil fields, and developed in the 1920s by future governor E. W. Marland and Marland Oil Company. By 1930 more than three dozen Osage oil fields existed, including Avant and Skiatook. The Osage Nation retained collective ownership of subsurface mineral rights, and some have called their land resources an “underground reservation” that produced great wealth.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Tribal Museums and Cultural Centers
The Osage Nation established the first tribal museum in the United States in Pawhuska, the nation’s capital city, in 1938. The Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, a state-of-the art museum, research center, and traditional village dedicated to Chickasaw history and culture, opened in 2010. In September 2021, the First Americans Museum on the Oklahoma (North Fork of the Canadian) River in Oklahoma City opened to the public. A team of Native museum studies professionals curates its exhibits and educational activities.
Located in Oklahoma City at the crossroads of I-35 and I-40, First Americans Museum exists on the homeland of thirty-nine Native nations in what is today called Oklahoma.
Courtesy of First Americans Museum.
Lawrence Hart (Cheyenne), Peace Chief of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, closed the ground-blessing ceremony on the site of the future First Americans Museum in 2005 by reflecting on the meaning of the museum: “This marks a moment of many future ‘Teachable Moments’ for us to share with the world of who we are: Native Americans of Oklahoma.”
Senior curator at First Americans Museum heather ahtone says that we have a responsibility to study, learn, and question the history of Oklahoma: “The present state of Oklahoma encompasses the geographic base historically identified as Indian and Oklahoma Territories—the target site for the relocation of all the tribes that stood in the way of the imperialistic ambitions of the nascent United States. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson and the partisan divided Congress ratified the Indian Removal Act.” She goes on to explain that “Jackson used the military might of the nation to forcibly remove 67 tribes into the land mass represented by these two territories. By 1907, when the State of Oklahoma was established, only 39 tribes remained.”