"Here is the perpetual variety of small town Oklahoma characters, incidents, changes; the self-confidence of an American boyhood; in honest, winning revelation."–Kirkus Reviews

On September 16, 1893, over 100,000 people converged on the edges of six million acres just south of the Kansas border, a parcel officially designated the Cherokee Outlet but more commonly called the Cherokee Strip. This was the largest of the rushes, where officials threw open whole parcels of land at one time. The opening of the outlet drew people with a wide mix of motivations. Those who arrived that stifling September found heat, dust, wretched conditions, high prices--and hope. Among them was William Prettyman, whose photographs remain the most stirring record of the event. When the starting gun went off at noon, the blurred images of people and animals racing across the dusty terrain became part of the memory of a whole region.

The opening of the Cherokee Outlet, popularly known as the Cherokee Strip, on September 16, 1893 was one of the great spectacles of American history. Relive the excitement in this outstanding volume by D. Earl Newsom, which includes 160 historical and present-day photographs, a history of the Cherokee Nation and development of the Outlet, a history of the famous 101 Ranch, and much more . . .

Since well before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 secured their right to vote, women in Oklahoma have sought to change and uplift their communities through political activism. This Land Is Herland brings together the stories of thirteen women activists and explores their varied experiences from the territorial period to the present. Organized chronologically, the essays discuss Progressive reformer Kate Barnard, educator and civil rights leader Clara Luper, and Comanche leader and activist LaDonna Harris, as well as lesser-known individuals such as Cherokee historian and educator Rachel Caroline Eaton, entrepreneur and NAACP organizer California M. Taylor, and Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) champion Wanda Jo Peltier Stapleton. Edited by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin, the collection connects Oklahoma women’s individual and collective endeavors to the larger themes of intersectionality, suffrage, politics, motherhood, and civil rights in the American West and the United States. The historians explore how race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and political power shaped—and were shaped by—these women’s efforts to improve their local, state, and national communities. Underscoring the diversity of women’s experiences, the editors and contributors provide fresh and engaging perspectives on the western roots of gendered activism in Oklahoma. This volume expands and enhances our understanding of the complexities of western women’s history.

At age fifteen, Laban Samuel Records (1856-1940), the youngest of twelve children, moved west with his family from Indiana to Kansas. About sixty-six years later, writing in pencil on Big Chief tablets, he remembered this move and his other western experiences through the year 1892, when he settled with his wife and children on the claim he had staked in the Cheyenne-Arapaho Run. In the intervening years, Laban was a freighter with his brother on the Santa Fe Trail and a cowpuncher in the Dodge City stockyards. He first encountered Indians on the banks of the Verdigris River in southern Kansas, learned the Osage language, and become an agency cook at Pawhuska. Later he worked in the Cherokee Outlet as a line rider for the T-5 and Spade ranches, eventually becoming a foreman. Because of Laban's firsthand knowledge of people and events, his account adds a new perspective to several infamous episodes. For example, he barely escaped the raid Dull Knife and other Cheyenne warriors in 1878, and he knew the participants in the Medicine Lodge bank robbery, the Talbot raid at Caldwell, and the Potts-Franklin shootout on the T-5 Ranch. In addition, Laban recounted many affectionate and often humorous stories about Outlet ranchers such as Maj. Andrew Drumm, Outlet cowpunchers such as Charlie Siringo, Texas trail drivers such as "Shanghai" Pierce, and western writers such as Thomas McNeal of the Medicine Lodge Cresset, Scott Cummings (the "Pilgrim Bard"), and Pawnee Bill. But perhaps most memorable are Laban's stories of every day cowboy life: herding cattle with his dog Shep, riding his favorite horses, and surviving the rigors encountered by everyone on the western range-tornadoes, rattlesnakes, cold and snow, outlaws, and hard work. Laban concludes, "The great open range that I know so well, worked on so hard, and loved so much ... [has] vanished, as have the signs of the old cow trail." Perhaps so, but thanks to Ellen Jayne Maris Wheeler's organization of these stories, and to Laban's colorful and entertaining writing, the readers of Cherokee Outlet Cowboy can still ride that range and see that old cow trail for themselves.

The story of a teenage girl and her family moving to the Oklahoma territory to claim a homestead in the Cherokee Strip.