| state and the area that had been named Oklahoma Territory on the west. |
| Many Indians came to occupy the Land of the Red Men. They were followed by white men from many diverse backgrounds. How Oklahoma and Oklahomans came to be, from the mixing of strains of humanity, their beliefs, practices, customs, and traditions, is the story to be told in this book. |
| From its very beginning, the story of Oklahoma is the story of peoples in movement. The first Oklahomans, of course, were the Indians. Like all the peoples who followed them, they first came here from somewhere else. If men had been content to stand still, there would have been no Oklahoma. |
| When Oklahoma was admitted to the Union in 1907, it became the forty-sixth of the United States. New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii followed it within fifty-five years. But Oklahoma was the first state to step across the threshold of the twentieth century. Its people today are people of the modern world. The story of Oklahoma's statehood, in 1971, spans a brief sixty-four years. |
| To tell the story of Oklahoma today, we must first tell the story of the four hundred years that went before statehood. Then we can tell and understand the story of the state, of the movements that have gone on, and of the world forces embodied in the brief time of statehood, both inside Oklahoma and beyond its borders. |
| It has aptly been said that if you scratch a newspaperman you will find a historian. Never was this more certain than in the cases of Otis Sullivant, the veteran State House reporter for the Daily Oklahoman and Times; Bruce Palmer, the news director of KWTV in Oklahoma City; Jenkin Loyd Jones, publisher of the Tulsa Tribune; and Gilbert Hill, also of the Daily Oklahoman and Times. These able observers of Oklahoma's recent history, |
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