OKOklahoma Fun Facts

Oklahoma is landlocked and still spends its weekends on the water. More than 200 man-made lakes sit inside the state line, most built by the Army Corps of Engineers after the Dust Bowl years for flood control and drinking water, and no other state has as many. A plains state where the standard summer plan involves a boat ramp.

Facts most people get wrong

• Sooner started as an insult. During the 1889 land run, Sooners slipped across the line early and staked claims before the gun. Settlers who had lobbied honestly to open the land were called Boomers. Oklahoma took the cheaters' name for its university teams and then for the whole state.
• Statehood was a merger, not an expansion. Oklahoma joined on 16 November 1907 as the 46th state, formed by welding Oklahoma Territory in the west to Indian Territory in the east. Two years earlier, delegates from the Five Tribes had written a full constitution for a separate Native state called Sequoyah. Congress never acted on it.
• The Dust Bowl was mostly the Panhandle. The worst blowing soil hit the far northwest counties, yet the label Okie got attached to every migrant heading west. Many of those families were tenant farmers pushed off the land by tractors and collapsing cotton prices, not only by dust.
• Oklahoma City was not the first capital. Guthrie held the seat at statehood in 1907. A statewide vote in 1910 moved it, and by local legend the state seal left Guthrie the same night the result came in.
• It is not flat. The southeast has the Ouachita Mountains and pine forest, the northeast has Ozark hills and clear rivers, and the high point, Black Mesa, reaches 4,973 feet at the far tip of the Panhandle.
• Oklahoma does not lead the country in tornado count. Texas records more every year, mostly because it is bigger. What Oklahoma holds is the extreme: 301 miles per hour, measured by mobile radar in the Bridge Creek and Moore tornado of 3 May 1999, the fastest wind ever recorded near the surface of the Earth.

Records and firsts

• The parking meter, 1935. Park-O-Meter No. 1 went up at First Street and Robinson Avenue in Oklahoma City on 16 July 1935. Carl Magee designed it to stop downtown workers from parking in one space all day.
• The shopping cart, 1937. Sylvan Goldman, who ran the Humpty Dumpty grocery chain in Oklahoma City, bolted wheels to folding baskets. Shoppers refused to touch them until he hired people to push them around the store.
• Over 200 man-made lakes, more than any other state, nearly all built after the 1930s.
• Route 66 was numbered by an Oklahoman. Cyrus Avery of Tulsa sat on the federal committee that laid out the national highway system in 1926 and pushed the number 66 through for the Chicago to Los Angeles route.
• Every tornado watch in the country is issued from Norman. The NOAA Storm Prediction Center and the National Weather Center share a building on the University of Oklahoma campus.
• 39 federally recognised tribal nations have their headquarters in Oklahoma, more than in any other state.

Geography that surprises

• The Panhandle exists because of slavery politics. Texas gave up the strip in 1850 because it lay north of the 36 degrees 30 minutes line set by the Missouri Compromise, and no state or territory claimed it for forty years. Maps called it No Man's Land. It runs 166 miles by 34.
• Six states touch Oklahoma: Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. The last two only because the Panhandle reaches out to meet them.
• One town keeps the wrong clock. Oklahoma is officially Central Time border to border, but Kenton, the last settlement at the western end of the Panhandle, runs on Mountain Time out of habit and convenience.
• The Texas border moves. The line follows the Red River, and because the channel shifts, the exact boundary has been argued in front of the Supreme Court more than once.
• Black Mesa, 4,973 feet, is a lava-capped tableland closer to the Rockies than to Tulsa.

Where the name comes from

Oklahoma is Choctaw. Allen Wright, a Choctaw chief and translator, put together okla, meaning people, and humma, meaning red, during treaty negotiations in Washington in 1866 when the federal government wanted a name for a proposed Indian territory. The phrase means red people. Congress used it, the territorial act of 1890 made it official, and the state kept it in 1907.

The detail that gets left out: Wright was born in Mississippi and walked to Indian Territory as a child on the removal route. The state's name was coined by a man the government had forced onto that land.

Quick stats

• Population: 1 to 5 million
• Area rank: #20 of 50
• Admitted: 1907, the 46th state
• Capital: Oklahoma City
• Largest city: Oklahoma City
• Time zone: Central

Bordering states

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