USA > Oklahoma > Oklahoma County > Oklahoma City > The story of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma : "the biggest little city in the world" > Part 2
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24
A history of Oklahoma City, touching commercial and in- dustrial activities, during the last twenty years is a history in major part of the Chamber of Commerce. The author admits that this is a revelation to him. It was Mr. Charles G. Jones and Mr. Henry Overholser whose initiative induced the Frisco to build hither, but their efforts might have been fruitless had not the commercial organization of that day helped them to exeente the contract. It was the Chamber of Commerce that secured the two great packing plants. It was the Chamber of Commerce that put brains and energy and money into the campaign that won the state capital. And that body during the World war divested itself of virtually all other purposes and sent its membership into the several war-work enterprises. The Chamber of Commerce did not win the war, nor did any other single organization win it, but its services were of such magnificent proportions, directly and through unnumbered ramifications, that what it accomplished may be candidly classified as the third of its three greatest endeavors during the last twenty years.
The commercial appetites of the pioneers were insatiable.
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This singular characteristic was no more extraordinary than their appraisal of the size of the bites they could chew or the capacity of their stomachs. They were in an unpeopled out- doors with everything under the sun to ask for and 10,000 aeres on which to place all they received. But the number of things they received was so small compared to the number they asked for that it would be infinitesimal if it were not so consequential. As one frolies back over the years to form the acquaintance of men and to envision little spots of progress and wide aeres of mediocrity, he is drawn now into a group of sober-minded men asking for a great portion of the fulness of the earth and then into another group of hurrahing men who appear to have even a greater portion than the other group sought. Railroads was an obsession. During a period of ten years no less than fifteen paper railroads were laid through Oklahoma City, and the wonder is that there was practically as much enthusiasm over one serap of paper as another. The policy of the pioneers was to let nothing slip, to take a shot at everything that had a face of silver even if it lacked a heart of gold and didn't cost in excess of a million dollars. They were liberal-hearted if sometimes flat-pocketed. given to the sport of voting bonds and to the setting of corner- lot posts ten miles into the country! They foresaw a city of a quarter of a million by such and such a year and made praise and rejoicing over the suspected jealousy of St. Louis, Kansas City and Denver.
Optimism probably was an equal of ideas in the kit of con- struction tools. You were made a believer whether you willed it or not. A large party of editors of the country came this way once and held their meeting in Guthrie, after which they were taken over an arch of the western part of the Territory. Oklahoma City was the terminus of the tour. As they entered the city, Charles G. Jones walked with heroic tread through the long line of coaches and announced in his homespun Eng- lish that the visitors were now entering an honest-to-goodness city. "We have showed you the towns of the Territory, " he said, "and now take pleasure in presenting the metropolis of the Territory." At that time census-takers doubtless would have had to pad the returns to make a total of 12,000 souls. But the population disported itself with cosmopolitan grace
RESIDENCE OF E. H. COOKE
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RESIDENTIAL STREET
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and Delmar Garden never put on airs to a better advantage. No editor who wrote of his experiences upon returning home was so ungracions as to omit a paragraph of praise for this wonderful spot, and the Chamber of Commerce was kept busy for weeks sorting its press clippings. It was a few years later, when paying was extended beyond Thirteenth Street and motor-cars fell into the hands of real estate dealers, that a gentleman from Kentucky, having had it proven to him that Fortieth Street was but five minutes out, paid a fine figure for a raw corner lot and then discovered that the property was four miles from Main and Broadway. But the Kentnekian, remembering the speed possibilities of gasoline and its decep- tion in distances, took the "skinning" with good grace and awaited an opportunity to heap coals of fire. When, vet a little later, there were populated streets beyond the sixties he pocketed his 700 per cent of profit, reenacted the clauses of his wrath against Oklahoma realty men and spread the news of good fortune throughout the Blue Grass country. Some persons hold that this accounts for Oklahoma's large number of ex-Kentuckians!
In the early formative years the city had a railroad today and a bursted balloon tomorrow, a million-dollar cotton mill today and an untouched industrial addition tomorrow, a gush- ing gas well at its door today and an extinct crater tomorrow. On the other hand, it had a postage stamp and the price of a telegram today and six million dollars invested in meat paek- eries tomorrow, a committee seeking a few funds today and a Frisco railroad tomorrow, a little political wire-pulling today and a state capital tomorrow, a little more effort, a little more pep, a little more brain, a little more cash today and a 100,000 population tomorrow.
What outcomes these late years reveal! A black-haired young man who once carried the pistol of a deputy marshal and swapped town lots on dusty corners of dull days to terrify the wolf ereets a million-dollar office building, hobnobs with the leading captains of industry of the country and is called Colonel Coleord. The proprietor of a livery stable, who hauled homesteaders, homeseekers, contestants, lawyers, squatters, speculators and probably outlaws over the hills and hollows of a roadless landscape and outfitted young men in spotless
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clothes for Sunday afternoon buggy rides with their sweet- hearts and friends, builds the city's first big hotel and one of its first Main Street office buildings, accumulates a fortune otherwise and moves up to Kansas City where they respect- fully prefix a mister to the once plain Oscar Lee. A cow- puncher from the sandy lands and sapoaks of Grayson County, Texas, who, contrary to all habits and traits of his kind, ac- quires the Spencerian art and passes it on to others, becomes an accountant of parts and is promoted to the office of treas- urer of his state-introducing the honorable William L. Alex- ander. Somehow it was expected that Henry Overholser would accumulate a fortime; he was gifted in such fashion. But it would have required uncommon prophecy to picture him in a palatial home set upon a long verdured ridge that once tempered the sting of the "northers," and more than a mile away from Main Street! Thither also went Edward Cooke. the banker, and topped the ridge with a brick residence of English persuasion that furnished a topic for conversation intervals at many an afternoon tea. Some eight or ten years later Edith Johnson discovered that the ridge had become the pick of the exclusive rich and in their midst flowered culture and social fantasmies, dwelt period furniture and reading lamps and servants and lions on guard at the gates. Some day every conscientious and consistent promoter will sit on the beach and witness the arrival of his ship. Some such a pro- verbial notion was entertained by the contemporaries of C. G. Jones and they praised him in a spirit of realized anticipa- tion when he more than once saw the gang plank inelined from the bow. And through the interlocking years run the careers of J. M. Owen and A. L. Welch and Ed Overholser and Dr. A. C. Scott and George Cooke, and a score of others, who wrestled with a mediocrity that prevailed on Main Street in '89 and conquered it in piecemeal before frost formed upon their temples. No feats were extraordinary. The city isn't set apart and billboarded with announcements that it, of all middle west cities, stands alone as a veritable wonder of the age. But the men that sledge-hammered the spikes into the sills, raised the walls, stretched the joists, elevated the rafters, nailed on the shingles and painted and furnished the house are entitled to have their names written on the box that the post-
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man uses; indeed, if it so gratifies them, to have their initials carved into the very sides of the gate-guarding lions. It has become an honor for one to say he is an eighty-niner, as much so in pleasant memories and mental apartness as if one were descended from a Mayflower passenger or a hero of the Amer- ican Revolution. Graver responsibilities were upon those that came after them. Their numbers waxed smaller and smaller as the tides of the '90s aseended and so much smaller in the next three decades that their ontstanding ones were the first scattered stars of evening ..
The researcher heartily regrets their demise, but no sooner are the tears wiped away than their successors greet him. The names of Overholser, Brown, Scott, Owen, Cooke. Alexander, Wilkin, Clarke, Colcord, Lee, Welch and Pettee go streaking through the years like super-huntsmen of a chase traversing a thousand miles of mountain crags. But ere many miles are left at rear new names are flashed upon the peaks-Classen. Shartel, Ames, Stone, Bass, Heyman, Brock, Frederickson. Warren, Gaylord, Workman, these and many others, brief ac- counts of whose endeavors are found in these modest and pos- sibly mediocre pages. Sitting in judgment from the vantage point of the historian one glimpses new angles of character and appraises some of them in the fullness of their careers as these lay indited upon the spread of the years. One reaches an inevitable conclusion that a man cannot occupy an exalted position in business or the professions for twenty years or thirty years, with his name gold-lettered upon the paramount transactions of the times, save and except his virtues vastly outweigh his viees. Equally inevitable is the conclusion that a display of selfishness now and then, which may inure to con- siderable profit, is insignificant when one views a paramount transaction completed and observes the measure of its public benefaction. One is tempted to set up in the literature of the years little monuments of cheer built over the buried small- ness of evil and dedicated to the mountain-size bignesses of good.
The pleasurable task of jotting down a few paragraphs of upstanding things in the history of Oklahoma City has had its disappointments. They are based on the potent fact of incompleteness. For instance, one could have written a vol-
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ume relating to litigation affecting the several individual tracts of land that now comprise the entity of the city, and it would have been replete with the atmosphere of tragedy. strat- egy, deception and romance; but an attempt has been made to introduce the reader to the subject, to relate only important facts and dismiss it out of regard to the pressing call of an- other subject equally interesting and equally important. Some excellent themes have been cruelly deserted as they hung suspended over the precipice of a chapter end. Others have been grounded for lack of substantial facts to bear them far- ther. But in nearly every case the reader's reasoning will fill the gaps and afford satisfactory conclusions. The author has sought to tell in essential detail of important enterprises that were accomplished-such as the securing of railroads, the achievement of the capital and the establishment of the pack- eries-and to minimize even the glamorous enthusiasm over enterprises that failed. There was a Putnam City bubble. There was a cotton mill bubble. There were railroad bubbles in amazing numbers. There were oil and gas bubbles that spent as much gas before they burst as the average Oklahoma gas well produces. A hundred important things were started and never finished, such as a newspaper railroad into the northwestern part of the state. Most of our failures have no virtue as guides to posterity and therefore have been scantily touched in these narratives. Similar disposition has been made of crime and scandal. the muchness of which in an early decade stained the Territory's reputation abroad.
Oklahoma City is an example for nearly all other cities and towns of the State. As such its influence cannot be measured in the realm of commerce, education, society of religion. Demonstration of its leadership was never more marked than during the World war. It is doubtful if more than a few of its business leaders appreciate its position, doubtful if they have given a serious thought to the fact that chronicles of their daily doings are carried by the newspapers into tens of thousands of homes out in the state and that these chronicles and the per- sonality of the individuals mentioned in them are topics of street-corner, community-honse and fireside discussions. It is remarked often that one goes out into the state to learn details of what is going on at home. It is of vital concern to
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the State, therefore, that what Oklahoma City does should be done cautiously, properly and with due regard to its effect upon what we may appropriately call her constituency. The character of a city should be as sacred as that of an individual. Disillusionments frequently are fatal to reputation.
A COTTAGE FOR TWO
On the barkless white trunk of a veteran oak, long since superannuated to the service of the weary, sat Mary Lake. An October day was departing. Long shadows covered the open spaces of the little forest at the edge of the prairie. Her blue sunbonnet hung below the broad white collar of a blue waist and her brown curls dropped carelessly into little tangles under the ripples of lazy breezes. She looked with lowered eyes into miniature excavations in the loose soil where two shoe tips aimlessly carried on a process of engineering. On her mind was a problem as old as the ages. In her heart was an experience more precious than great riches. The mind and the heart were in controversy, and the subject was as ancient as the beginnings of the sex and as modern as the mighty moment.
"It's desperately hard, Louis, but I feel it imperative to say it. About your people, your ancestry. I know nothing of them. What were your beginnings, how were you reared, where have you been, what have you done ?"
She spoke it quickly, almost in a breath, and when it was ont at last, the marks of intense seriousness left her face. She turned toward the lad sitting on the root of an ash two yards distant. Tears slipped out timidly and arraved themselves like silver beads upon her cheeks. A smile disarranged them and they fell playfully into her lap. Something suggesting a new dawn was warped into that smile, something emblemati- cal of infinite relief.
The lad at the foot of the tree received the message into a mind full of trouble, a gnawing, blighting, insidious sort of trouble, deep and penetrating and calculated to tliwart ambi- tion and drive a poor fellow to the mad house. But it was an ameliorating message, a revivifying, soul satisfying sort of a message. It was an interrogation affirmative. It answered yes to the paramount question of the centuries.
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Louis Mason burst into laughter. He leaped from the root of the tree, twirled his soft hat into a mass of brown sage grass, cast a couple of triangles with his hands upon his hips, looked triumphantly upon the girl, and the melodies of his laughter floated vibrantly upon the breeze.
She welcomed him. She divined his answer. Yet un- spoken, it removed all her doubt. And when he sat beside her, enfolded her in his arms and kissed her warm desirous lips world peace was a reality, nation became nation's neighbor, armaments were sunk in the waters of the seas, brotherly love prevailed everywhere, and heaven came down to earth and blessed it.
Close beside her in the accumulating dusk of the delight- ful autunm day, ummindful of the hour, unheeding of the sup- per bell at the ranch house a quarter of a mile away, forgetful of the mooing cows and the neighing of hungry horses, Louis Mason told her this story :
"I am a sixteenth-blood Choctaw Indian. Aboriginal an- cestry exists in both my parents. My mother is the grand- daughter of the first missionary that came among the Choc- taws. Her grandmother was the daughter of a great chieftain who was a friend of presidents and a commissioner of his tribe who sat in the councils of statesmen that framed the early treaties. The missionary she married was a college man of New Jersey, a descendent of passengers on the Mayflower. He was beloved of all the Indians, and I believe his influence for uprightness would have been marked in the race to this day had not white men without seruples taught his generation and the one before it that lying and stealing and murder were essentials to getting on well in the world.
"It was this teaching that brought community troubles and open warfare into the Choctaw country many years be- fore you and I were born. It led to the organization of a band of fullbloods, called Snakes, who imagined that the in- termixture of Caucasian blood with Indian blood in the race drove out veneration for fullblood ancestry and caused a de- parture from the ideals of the forefathers of the race.
"The Snakes listed every mixed-blood as their enemy. They made him an outcast from their society. Continued in- termarriage intensified their hatred, and the gradual growth
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in the population of mix-bloods and whites dove the Snakes into more secret hiding places and strengthened the bond of their union. At length the Snakes resolved to drive their enemies from the nation. Armed with bows and arrows, butcher knives and hatchets and a few rifles and revolvers they swept in small armies out of the Kiamichi Mountains down upon the settlements of the mixed-bloods in the valleys of Little River and the Red. They massaered men, women and children, burned their homes and their barns and put to flight those fortunate enough to escape their ferocities. Then they returned to the mountains and held a thanksgiving pow wow and ended the evil day with a dance in which braves jig jigged round the sacred' fire, holding upright sharp- pointed slender poles topped with bloody scalps.
"This was the beginning of an extended warfare which was ended by United States troops and the execution of a treaty of peace between the United States Government and the leader of the Snakes. That was the only time the Govern- ment ever made a treaty with an individual.
"My grandfather was among the mixed-bloods who es- caped the wrath of the Snakes. He crossed with his family into Texas and there remained as a peaceful farmer until the troubles were all fully ended and Indians were given allot- ments. He returned to the Choctaw country, selected allot- ments for all members of the family and settled down to a useful life in a rich and rapidly developing region. Mixed- bloods soon became predominant in affairs of the nation and the decimating band of Snakes maintained a secret but pub- liely inactive organization back in the fastness of the moun- tains. Their organization exists to this day and the oldest members of it still believe that one day the Great White Father will restore unto them their happy hunting grounds.
"My father became a judge among his people, and tradi- tion says that he was a good and wise judge. And this must have been true, for in time he was elevated to the station of supreme judge of the nation. His advice and counsel fre- quently were sought in Washington by members of Congress and the heads of departments, and considerable of the last twenty years of his life was spent in the capital.
"My mother was a native of Virginia, a relative of Gen-
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eral Lee, a descendent of a hero of the American Revolution, and a member of the society of Colonial Dames. Her mother was the wife of a Choctaw Indian of ambition whom the early missionaries sent back to Virginia to school and who after graduation from the University of Virginia practised law in Richmond. A desire to learn more of her father's people and to be of service to the tribe brought her West. She came by boat up the Mississippi and Red rivers and landed in the vicin- ity of the present site of Colbert. After a few years she became the wife of Judge Mason and they lived at the old trading post near Fort Towson.
"Modesty hardly warrants my saying more about my mother. Histories of the Choctaw people, some of which f will one day present to you in commemoration of this day's event in my own life, credit her with exceptional grace and charm, with unusual talent and tact, and with being among the founders of social, educational and religious movements that have eradicated prejudice against those of aboriginal an- cestry and established for the Indians an imperishable place among the exalted races of undoubted Americanism.
"My land inheritance in the Choctaw country is intact. It is a homestead of rich grasses, fragrant flowers, perpetually running spring waters, a fertile valley of brown soil, and a horizon of western hills wherein abound wild turkey and deer. In a bit of white oak woodland stands the house, a nobby little log and chink affair with a chimney of white stone, a wide hall that leads to the rock-rinned well that is sheltered by a vine-covered roof connecting with the dining room and kitchen in the rear, and a garden of roses which my mother planted before the front porch. Some day we'll journey thither and I'l tell you a tribal legend plotted near a little waterfall hid away in my mountains.
"It was a coalition of the instinets of the two races that gave me life that led me to abandon the homestead and travel outward and upward, toward the prairies and the plains, the expansive horizons and the setting sun. It's the instinet of the explorer, the purposeful man, rather than that of the idle wanderer. The Indian blood directs a search for a new happy hunting ground : the Caucasian blood commands its adaptation to usefulness.
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"Again, ranch life appealed to me. How many times as a small boy have I sat during long evening hours and listened to stories of adventure. Our Indian lads of seventeen and up- ward went out green and ungainly and came back veteran cow- boys, and the experiences they related of life on the ranges, of roundups, of chuck wagons, of following the herds into dis- tant States, of cutting and branding, of wild stampedes, and of farflung social life, were so impelling that only the boy at the apron-string could resist the call for like adventure.
"At nineteen I started on the great adventure. On these pleasant prairies and in these grassy fertile valleys I found it. I have had three years of it now. I have learned nearly all there is to know about operating a cattle ranch. The teach- ings of your father have made me skillful, expert. alert. And I enjoy his fullest confidence. He trusts me absolutely. I am the boss of his ranch, the puncher in chief of half a hundred cattle hands. Disposition of his ten thousand cattle is a matter for my own judgment.
"I think the thoughts of the West. I speak the language of the West. I am of and for the West. If I were the great white father in Washington I would command that it never be changed. It has a civilization of its own, and it's good enough to endure. This doctrine of the advance of civilization westward is puerile bunk. These prairies were created to support this life of the ranch, the woods to support that other kind of life that is described to us as civilization.
"But the great white father, whatever may be his attitude toward us of the ranch country, is powerless to perpetuate the ranches. Kings of the cattle country have made vain ap- . beals in Washington. The ranches must go. Their days are numbered. We are told that we must move farther to the west with our herds or lay down the saddle and the spurs and take up the plow and the hoe. Hordes shortly will be over- running our pastures and real estate dealers hanging their signs on our fence posts. And we may not speculate randomly if we close our eyes and draw a mental picture of the estab- lishment on this spot of a great metropolis, 'the commercial center of the great Southwest.""
Louis Mason discoursed calmly, as if love and the win- ning of a heart were of less consequence than biography, But
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he spoke eloquently, courageously. Perhaps it was the elo- quence and the courage of the bridegroom leading his chosen into the unfolding pleasures of the honeymoon cottage.
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