#chocktaw

Coronado’s Trek While other maps depicting Coronado’s journey differ, the one above is probably the most accurate. It places key sections of the conquistadors’ trek in present-day Oklahoma. According to historians Herbert Belton and Edwin C. McReynolds, they traveled up the future 98th Meridian/Chisholm Trail/U.S. Highway 81 the length of the state near modern-day Duncan, Chickasha, El Reno, Kingfisher, and Enid. A 1907 Temple newspaper reported the unearthing in that area of an apparent Spanish headstone that dated back to 1542. They later rode across the Panhandle and northwest section of present-day Oklahoma near the modern communities of Tyrone, Optima, Hooker, Guymon, Goodwell, and Texhoma. They traveled amongst mesquite, cactus, and other bushes in present-day Oklahoma. Turkeys, prairie dogs, jackrabbits, antelope, deer, and wild hogs roamed the land, over the blue grass and buffalo grass that covers the Southern American Great Plains because taller grasses and their greater root system cannot endure those scalding parched climes. The intrepid Coronado indeed found “Quivera" — such as it was. He considered it the best land he found in the present-day Southwest U.S.: “well settled… Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer’s The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.

The Chickasaws  The power of this tribe, too, far exceeded its small numbers. The Chickasaws included at most forty-five hundred men, women, and children during the time of their southeastern residence and interaction with Europeans and white and black Americans. Like the Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, the Chickasaws spoke a Muskhogean language. Their homeland included western Kentucky and Tennessee, northern Mississippi, and northwestern Alabama. The Chickasaws were at least as closely related to the Choctaws as the Seminoles were to the Creeks. The Chickasaws and Choctaws formed a single tribe until sometime prior to Spaniard Hernando DeSoto’s 1540 discovery of them. The tribe’s very name probably means “they left as a tribe not a very great while ago.“ But the Chickasaws possessed a much keener commitment to the art of war than the Choctaws, and they were feared by the latter (despite the Choctaws’ numerical superiority), other tribes in their region, and even eventually Europe’s most powerful nations. As Britain and France competed for control of North America-and in particular the lower Mississippi River and Valley and the Gulf ports to the south-in the early 1700s, the French cultivated the Choctaws as native allies, and the British did the same with the Chickasaws. So troublesome did the Chickasaws become to French efforts in the region, their governor of Louisiana declared in 1735 that the tribe’s “entire destruction … becomes every day more necessary to our interests and I am going to exert all diligence to accomplish it.” From 1720 to 1763 several French armies marched into Chickasaw country from southern Louisiana and Mississippi to conquer the tribe. Choctaws, white militia, and black slaves supported the armies. All these efforts failed, and the tribe remained unvanquished when France surrendered its claims on the continent to the victorious British after losing the Seven Years War-including its North American theater, the French and Indian War-to them. Horatio Cushman in his 1899 chronicle History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians, noted how, contrary to the Chickasaws’ long conflict with the French European powers, “neither the Choctaws nor Chickasaws ever engaged in war against the American people, but always stood as their faithful allies.’ Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer’s The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.

Oklahoma Governors: Martin E. Trapp (1923-1927) - When Martin Trapp’s father staked a claim a few miles west of Guthrie in the Land Run of 1889, his twelve-year-old, Kansas-born son came with him as an Oklahoma… Read the full story at John Dwyer’s The Oklahomans https://www.johnjdwyer.com/post/trapp

The Chickasaws  The power of this tribe, too, far exceeded its small numbers. The Chickasaws included at most forty-five hundred men, women, and children during the time of their southeastern residence and interaction with Europeans and white and black Americans. Like the Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, the Chickasaws spoke a Muskhogean language. Their homeland included western Kentucky and Tennessee, northern Mississippi, and northwestern Alabama. The Chickasaws were at least as closely related to the Choctaws as the Seminoles were to the Creeks. The Chickasaws and Choctaws formed a single tribe until sometime prior to Spaniard Hernando DeSoto’s 1540 discovery of them. The tribe’s very name probably means “they left as a tribe not a very great while ago.“ But the Chickasaws possessed a much keener commitment to the art of war than the Choctaws, and they were feared by the latter (despite the Choctaws’ numerical superiority), other tribes in their region, and even eventually Europe’s most powerful nations. As Britain and France competed for control of North America-and in particular the lower Mississippi River and Valley and the Gulf ports to the south-in the early 1700s, the French cultivated the Choctaws as native allies, and the British did the same with the Chickasaws. So troublesome did the Chickasaws become to French efforts in the region, their governor of Louisiana declared in 1735 that the tribe’s “entire destruction … becomes every day more necessary to our interests and I am going to exert all diligence to accomplish it.” From 1720 to 1763 several French armies marched into Chickasaw country from southern Louisiana and Mississippi to conquer the tribe. Choctaws, white militia, and black slaves supported the armies. All these efforts failed, and the tribe remained unvanquished when France surrendered its claims on the continent to the victorious British after losing the Seven Years War-including its North American theater, the French and Indian War-to them. Horatio Cushman in his 1899 chronicle History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians, noted how, contrary to the Chickasaws’ long conflict with the French European powers, “neither the Choctaws nor Chickasaws ever engaged in war against the American people, but always stood as their faithful allies.’ Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer’s The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.

Osage-Cherokee War  The arrival of white-dominated American civilization did not inaugurate encroachment upon and conquest of Indian lands in the American Southwestor elsewhere on the North American continent. Long before, the tribes themselves threatened, feuded with, stole from, conquered, enslaved, and slaughtered one another. Over a span of centuries, the Osages migrated all the way from the Ohio Valley to present-day Oklahoma, attacking and displacing other tribes as they went. In Oklahoma they violently forced two of the area’s earliest inhabitants—the Wichitas and Caddos—south, across Red River. Claremore Mound, a few miles northwest of present Claremore, where a seven hundred-strong force of Cherokees and their allies decimated the population of an Osage village in the 1817 Battle of Claremore Mound. As so often was the case in the sanguinary Western wars, both between tribes and between Natives and whites, one side attacked when the other’s warriors were mostly absent and the women, children, and elderly men present. Far from settling conflicts, such horrors typically sparked reprisals or at least attempted reprisals. Most of the Osage dead and captured at Claremore Mound were women and children. Courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society. Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer’s The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.

First Secret Mission of the Civil War—in Oklahoma! – Podcast - Black Beaver, famed Delaware scout, interpreter, frontiersman, and future Baptist minister Did you know that the first secret mission of the Civil War took… Read the full story at John Dwyer’s The Oklahomans https://www.johnjdwyer.com/post/first-secret-mission

Thomas Jefferson & Oklahoma’s Salt Plains - Podcast - Nathan Boone, soldier-explorer son of Daniel Boone leads American Dragoons through the salt flats of the Cimarron River west of present-day Freedom in 1843.… Read the full story at John Dwyer’s The Oklahomans https://www.johnjdwyer.com/post/oklahomas-salt-plains-podcast

Blazing Action: Oklahoma Lawmen vs. the Dixie Mafia - One of the great struggles between good and evil in Oklahoma History roared through the 1960s and 1970s between the people of Oklahoma and a loose, violent… Read the full story at John Dwyer’s The Oklahomans https://www.johnjdwyer.com/post/oklahoma-lawmen-vs-the-dixie-mafia