Agricultural Heritage - Unit 2, Lesson 4; Oklahoma Passage Telecourse #109 Agricultural Heritage - Unit 2, Lesson 4

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. Welcome to Unit 2 Lesson 4 of Oklahoma Passage, a telecourse on Oklahoma history. I'm your host Dean Lewis. Today, our attention turns to the cornerstone of Oklahoma's economic and cultural development, farming and ranching. Before we explore that topic, let's once again begin with another episode from OETA's DocuDrama, Oklahoma Passage. In the previous lesson, John Benton married Rose and became a farmer near Park Hill. But, under last struck again, a passion fired by the adventures of war and fueled by life on the open range. How long will you be gone? A year. Maybe more. Well, what about me? What am I supposed to do while you're gone? Stay with Jessica. John left Rose and their son, Thomas, with sister Jessica, and went to work on a rail-laying crew,

where he renewed his friendship with Jake Henry. Partners again, they dreamt of new frontiers and made plans for the upcoming land run of 1889. Thousands and thousands of people have wanted. The government's trying to hold them back, trying to hold the old treaties. That won't last. The people want the land. They're probably going to get it. Yeah, the government's bound to open it up sooner or later. But if they don't hurry, there'll be more people waiting at the line that good land's going to be tough to come by. That's why I'm going to get there sooner than anyone else. Already picked out my parcel. Matter of fact, I'd even get a plan on just how to do it. That is, if you help me. Thousands began to crowd into towns like Purcell and Silver City,

to stock up on all the supplies they would need. Many had to sell everything they owned, just to buy food, and a few things to make the run. Crowds of women, soldiers, cowboys, build the streets. Then the day of the run finally came. It was bigger than most expected. Thousands lining up at different locations waiting for high noon, and the sound of a gunshot or a cannon to send them on their way. You see, John had a spot already picked out, and he would be on the land hiding, staking the claim. Now, Jake Henry was supposed to fetch girls and Thomas, and make the legal run. And when Jake Henry drove away into the meeting place, that would make the claim official.

Folks about ready? Just about. I don't like it, Rose, not one bit. This is no place for a woman in your condition. What do you worry about me, Jake Henry? You just drive like the delights. See? It's just like I said. It just ain't right. What if something happens to you or the baby? What do I tell John then? Jake Henry, you don't worry about nothing, so get us away from all these people. Once I'm out in the open, I'm gonna feel a lot better. It's almost noon. You best get on in the back with the boy. Oh, Thomas, let's get back.

What's going on? Jake Henry, stop, he got to stop, please. Jake Henry, stop.

Hold on, Rose, I'm coming. Rose, are you okay? It's time. Good lord. What do I do? Come down, Ty Henry. I'm the one having the baby here. You just go get some water and build a fire, okay? All right. Don't go anywhere. Oh, Thomas, why don't you go out and help? I can't rebuild that fire.

Go on now. Jake Henry delivered a little girl. A little girl that was to be my man. That's a girl. You done well, Jake Henry. Of all the things he ever did in his life, he was to be most proud of what he did on that day. Rose Benton, I believe we have just found the baby.

Rose Benton, I believe we have just found the most beautiful place on earth. John was back on the other claim, and by now he was getting pretty worried. Afternoon, gentlemen. I'm going to do it for you. I'm a deputy US Marshal. What's your name? I'm John Benton. Is this the same man? It's him, all right.

Is this your claim here, Benton? It's right. I brought in from Fort Reno. What's this all about? Well, this man tells me he wrote in from Fort Reno, too. Only when he left out there, wasn't anybody ahead of him. And got here and saw that you already staked out this quarter section. You look here. You got here early. This land isn't mine. Is there a right, Benton? It's got to be some mistake. My friend and family will be here shortly. I wrote on a head. They're behind me. Look, Benton. We got a long way to go today, so I'm sure you'll excuse me if I just get right to the point. Now, what you did here is illegal. Well, I assure you you're not alone. There's hundreds of folks all over this area just like you. I'm sure we won't catch all of them, but we did catch you. Look, Marshal. My wife and family will be here soon. We need this land. It's all we got in the world.

Well, I'm sorry, Benton. I'm just doing my job. You got a choice. You can pick up your claim and move out now. I'm afraid I'm going to have to take you in with me. What's it going to be? This is my friend gets here, I'll leave. Congratulations, John. Jake Henry, congratulations. You just had a baby girl. What? Where are they? Are they all right? Just over there. Let's go.

Oh, oh. She's beautiful. I think I like to name her patience. Patience? Why? Because she didn't have enough of it to wait until we got it here. It's our new home. You just rest. I need to go talk to Jake Henry. Jake Henry. We haven't got a new home.

What are you talking about? Everything happened just the way you said. I'm afraid not. Somebody wrote in from Fort Reno and they had a deputy Marshal with him. They knew I'd gotten there too early. I had to give up the claim. I guess this is your lucky day, John Benton. We have found the most beautiful piece of land that ever laid out of doors. This is your claim. Your little girl was born on this land. I staked it out. Rose was with me so that means she owns half of it. I got it fair and square. Rose owns half. And your little girl owns a portion that means you are the majority owner. No, no. It's your land. I don't want it. It's yours. I didn't want it anyway. Consider it a gift for the baby. That claim is the very land we're sitting on right now.

That claim is the very land we're sitting on right now. For the most part it was difficult to tell you really claim the land first. The courts were full of lawsuits and counter-suits. There were feuds and a few killings. Illegal settlers banded together in secret societies to protect their claims from honest settlers.

It wasn't long after that when young Thomas became very ill. They were living in a tent at the time. Is it doing any better, Rose? Back then doctors were hard to find and usually a long way off. Rose tried the best she could, but he only got worse. Where are you going? Where are you going? Where are you going, Jake? Time for me to go, John.

You can't stay in one place forever, you know me. I thought you were going to stay through the winter. Change my mind. Look, John, I ain't never been one to tell somebody their business. But maybe you should be thinking about going home. They say no place for wife and kids, but things are going to get worse. See, it's my home. It's everything I've ever wanted, you know that. Your boy don't sound too good, John. Is that what you want? Of course not. This is our land now. We've come a long way to get it and we're not giving it up. We'll manage one way or another. But people have endured a lot more than this. Cherokee have always found a way.

Where were you going? Don't know for sure. I here tell Pawnee Bill is putting his wall west shore back together again. But maybe I'd go up there and try to get me a job. Who knows? Might even go to California. Dick for gold. Well, miss you, Jake Henry. Would you say goodbye to Rose? No. Never was much of that sort of thing. You tell her for me. Good luck. You too. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

He has grasped the fruit of his plant. The grace of grasped the Lord. He has seen the face of life. That night young Thomas died. They were beginning to pay a price for the land they love so much. The life and death survive in a new land.

That was the challenge facing John, his family, and the other pioneers who had made the land run. And to a large degree, that survival depended on the success or failure of farming and ranching. Agriculture's impact on our history goes far beyond economic survival. The ways that people have tilled the land, raised livestock, have shaped the cultures of successive generations. For settlers making the land run of 1889, the labor-intensive non-mechanized farming of that era spread the population evenly over the land, encouraging the formation of small rural communities, and a distinctive way of life, that his sense been disappearing, as farming and ranching changed. This dominant influence of our agricultural heritage, especially before World War II, can be traced to the earliest prehistoric farmers. Dr. Bob Blackburn summarizes the evolution of farming and its impact on the history of Oklahoma. If you exclude the history of oil in Oklahoma, our boom and bust cycle of economic development is really the story of agriculture.

And it's not a story that began in 1889 and 1907. It's a story of farmers that we can trace 2,000 years ago, because the first Indian civilizations who settled in the river courses of the state were there because of farming. They learned to farm, grow corn, pumpkins, beans, squash, domesticate, some of the wild resources of the area. And once they adapted agriculture, then their civilization began developing, because once they could stay in one spot, they could establish towns and villages, then they had the time for the arts to develop social systems, to learn how to work together as a community. And so, culture flowered with agriculture. It was the first boom. And the peak of that boom was probably reached about 1100 AD with a spiral culture in the Arkansas River Valley, where they were such efficient farmers. They used the produce of the land to establish a trading network that went from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast.

And so farming was the story for the first boom, you might say, in Oklahoma history. It was also the cost of the first bust that occurred starting about 1400 AD, a period of drought, started on the southern plains. The large cities of the spiral people and other cultures, such as the Anasawasi farther west, began to disperse, because when the rains didn't come, year after year, harvest got smaller, people could not live in the cities of 1,000 and 2,000 people, because the economy would not support them. And so, we went into our first bust cycle, about 1400 AD, the Indians scattered across the water courses all the way out into the high plains on the Washington River Valley, the other rivers, and continued to plant but in smaller communities. And with that, culture began to decline a bit. We didn't have time for the arts and the trade and all the other elements of culture. Well, the next big change in our agricultural history came with the five civilized tribes who were removed to the territory in the 1820s, 30s and 40s.

The five civilized tribes brought with them a highly developed agricultural system that was very much like the southern cash crop economy in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and the old south, because the five civilized tribes had adapted a cash crop agricultural economy on large plantations. By the 1840s, the Choctaw National Lone was producing over 1,000 bales of cotton a year. Robert Love, a Chickasaw mixed blood, operated two plantations along the Red River Valley with over 200 slaves. Robert Jones, a Choctaw, had five plantations in the Red River Valley with over 500 slaves. Jones even had his own fleet of river boats hauling the cash crops from the Choctaw Nation to markets in New Orleans. Even in the Cherokee Nation, planters such as Stan Wady were making good money and becoming wealthy planters by producing crops and marketing them either at the forts or in water towns in Arkansas and Kansas. And so the five civilized tribes brought that next boom in our economy and it was based on agriculture.

The next big change probably came with the land openings, beginning in 1889 with the land run into the unassigned lands. These settlers mainly from the Midwest brought with them their farming techniques that they had adapted in the Mississippi River Valley in the Northwest, Kansas, Nebraska. It was a combination of crops. Usually the typical pioneer would concentrate on corn, surprisingly because corn could be fed to livestock, it could be sold for cash crops in town. But quickly farmers found that Oklahoma's environment was best adapted to wheat culture. Wheat was the leading cash crop in the 1890s, especially in the West where rainfall drops to 30 inches, 28 inches a year. And without irrigation you could grow winter wheat. As the farmers had discovered in Kansas and Nebraska as they moved that onto the plains in the 1860s and 70s. So wheat became very important. But during the golden age of Oklahoma's agriculture, roughly from 1896 to World War I, cotton was keen.

You can make more money with cotton, $50 an acre compared to about $15 an acre for wheat, about $12 an acre for corn. So farmers where they could, where the weather in the soils permitted, they put as much acreages they could into cotton. And cotton increased in production year after year until World War I when the European markets were closed for cotton products. The other major crop which would eventually become king in Oklahoma was wheat. The earliest farmers who came with the land runs had grown wheat on the plains of Kansas and Nebraska they had learned dry land farming techniques. The rainfall dropped under 30 inches, which was about the limit for cotton. And they knew how to adapt to the climate in the lands. And wheat production increased every year. In three brief years, from 1913 to 1916, as World War I began and the markets of Europe were demanding more food stuff. Our armies were assembled and we needed bread and we needed food. The price of wheat skyrocketed. The acreage planted the wheat during that period went from a little over a million acres, almost four million acres overnight.

And it would continue expanding into the 1920s. As farmers adapted new machinery for extensive farming, as the rains increased in the early 20s farther out onto the plains. The wheat bananza, a western Oklahoma, people were farming wheat in the Oklahoma panhandle on the plains of southwestern Arkansas, southeastern Colorado and New Mexico. And so wheat was dominant at this time. But the story of wheat in that boom and bust cycle would be pretty much the history of Oklahoma's boom and bust cycle at this time. In the 1920s, as production went up, as farming mechanization allowed them to increase production, prices went down. And then by the late 20s, the rains quit coming and drought descended on the land. And so you have the combinations of over production, under consumption, and then weather. The rains affect the wheat crop, the bowl weevil, the lower prices, over production affect cotton.

In Oklahoma, began sliding into depression in the 1920s, not in 29 with the stock market crash, but in the early 20s with the agricultural crash. And as Oklahoma slips into depression in the 20s, the economy begins to suffer. If it had not been for oil in the 1920s, we would mark the depression in Oklahoma probably from 1921-1922. But oil carried the urban economy through to 1929-1930, the opening of the Oklahoma City Field, the other oil patches. And we do fairly well in the urban economy until 1931, when oil goes into depression, compounds the problem of the agricultural depression in Oklahoma sinks to the bottom of the economic tale of our history. Agricultural policy would change during the 30s. This was a watershed period when federal farm policies are established, the federal government becomes a major player in our farming history. Farmers adapt to the changing times. No longer can you make a living with 40 acres in a mule, farming 40 acres of cotton, which you could in 1890-1900.

The people begin leaving the farms. We get the migration to California, the story of the Joed family, John Steinbeck's novel, John Ford's movie. It was a story of people displaced, not by the Dust Bowl, not by the urban depression, but by this change in agriculture. So we get the movement off of the land, to the cities, to California, people adapt, land use, adapt, mechanization adapt, federal farm policy adapt, and you have this entire change in Oklahoma's agricultural history. Food and fiber have not been the only products of the land. The earliest nomads, as well as 19th century pioneers, understood that there was another resource indispensable to their survival, livestock. In a sense, the buffalo that roamed freely on an ocean of grass with a livestock for Indian hunters, then came stockmen, both Indian and white, who transformed the grass into beef and horses that could be consumed and sold. Dr. Norbert Manken follows this evolutionary dependence on ranch and range.

The importance of grassland and its potential for grazing and its potential for economic importance was reported by the very first Europeans to visit the area of Oklahoma. The Castaneda, a Spanish chronicler who came with Coronado, a solid of Armandosa, who was sent out by Onati from Santa Fe to find buffalo fat and food, as they visited the Western Oklahoma. They commented on the tremendous grass resources, the tremendous quantities of pump back cattle, as they called them, that were hurting on that particular grassland. And in it, they saw some of the future of what was later to become Oklahoma. The importance of buffalo and the grazing area was obviously illustrated in the fact that the first immigrants who came to Oklahoma, Kyowa Indians, Cheyenne and Arapaho, were attracted to the southern plains by the combination of milder climate and the abundant buffaloes of that area. The important phase of the use of Oklahoma's grasslands ended in a short period from 1872 to 1877, when the southern herds were decimated by the systematic slaughter of the professional hunters of that time.

And as a result, since that time, we have seen our buffalo only in areas such as this here, where you may notice in the distance there are part of the buffalo herd, which had been built up here at the Lloroc Museum. The actual use of grasslands in Oklahoma by cattle interests came with the covering of the five civilized tribes to Eastern Oklahoma. These people, as they came out of the southern regions of the United States, brought their cattle with them, or invested portion of the funds that they received for the Eastern lands in livestock. The availability of market, a market, for instance, for oxen, for people traveling on the Texas Trail to Texas meant that many early chalk doll, early Cherokee, found it a pretty profitable venture to swap one good sound steer for two-foot-sour steer that were dragging away the rough roads of Eastern Oklahoma. We perhaps tend to minimize the importance of the pre-Civil War cattle industry in Oklahoma, but statistics, particularly those growing out of the Civil War, stressed this very fact.

The Indian agents to the Cherokee reported that as a result of the ruthless stripping of the area of cattle during the Civil War years, perhaps 300,000 head of cattle were lost by the five civilized tribes. As part of the general plunder and destruction, which that conflict entailed in Oklahoma, the five civilized tribes necessarily proceeded to rebuild, however slowly, that industry after the Civil War. It was there, and it was an important part of the war years. And yet, when most of us think of the cattle industry and the coming of cattle to Oklahoma, we think perhaps of these long horns, their ancestors, and the period immediately after the Civil War. We're all familiar with the millions, perhaps of cattle that were driven north over the various trails through Oklahoma, the E. Shawnee, West Shawnee Chisholm, and Great Western Trails, between 1865 and 1885, when the trails tended to shift to farther west.

Those old steers were of a slightly different type than these. These good, healthy, long horns of a present vintage, average perhaps 1,800 to 1,900 pounds. And also those Texas long horns that came through the area of Oklahoma in the 1,800,80s, perhaps would average 850 to 1,000 pounds at best. The trail driving phase of the industry in Oklahoma, the one is one that we remember most extensively. It's provided to grist for dozens of movies, TV shows, novels with one type or another. And yet its impact on Oklahoma was at best limited in terms of its economic effect. It was when people began to think about taking the long horn and putting him on a fixed piece of grounds that the industry took on a different route and began to assume economic importance.

And this came then with the initial leasing of Indian lands in the 1880s, beginning with the lands north and west of Oklahoma City, the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Country in 1882. Between 1882, the western half of Oklahoma was put under leases, leases by the Cheyenne and Arapahoe, leases by the Kyowen Comanche to the south. And then in this immediate country, in 1884, when the first six leases of about 50,000 acres of land each were negotiated with the Osage tribe at that particular time, the open range phase of the cattle industry in Oklahoma ended quite abruptly in the period of 1886 to 1888.

The leasing of the Indian lands, other than the Osage lands, was invalidated by action to the federal government, who were officials of whom viewed that as an unfriendly policy, which was to work harm on the tribe's concern. And the industry based on the longhorn also then was bound to experience a change. The longhorn of that period brought with him perhaps the ingredients of his own destruction for the time being. He brought with him the Texas Tick, which produced Texas fever and had the effect of spreading to domestic herds and wiping them out with amazing rapidity. The longhorn steer also had the problem of shipping, the horns, the lengthy horns, made handling and shipping difficult. But above all else, that longhorn steer, which had best was the size of this one, in the back here or this one here,

weighing perhaps 700 to 800 pounds, spread over a frame here that left relatively little meat, produced thin, tough steaks, or other forms of meat here. The public, the consumer, demanding a better type of beef, brought an end then to the open industry, the open range industry based on the Texas longhorn. But the use of grasslands and the grazing industry would not die, it could not die because of the valuable resources. This rich soil, the grassland on which it was grown, and the industry comes back then, bit by bit, based on an entirely different foundation of closed, fenced branches, smaller in size, utilizing a better stock through a selective breeding and the elimination of scrubs that you had in the earlier period. For a time, during the period around the First World War, the cattle business in Oklahoma was somewhat quiet.

The amazing popularity of cotton culture in the southern half of the state, the spread of wheat culture, as a result of the First World War, can find the cattle industry to a large extent to the eastern half of the present state of Oklahoma. And this very area here, the Osage Country, becomes then one of the two key centers of the cattle industry in Oklahoma. Cattle and horses, cotton and wheat, harvesting the bounty of land, water, sun, and labor has been the dream of farmers and ranchers for generations. It's a dream that has changed dramatically during the past 70 years, a way of life that has adapted to international market forces, federal farm policy, mechanization, modern transportation, and the migration of younger generations from farm to city, in less than one lifetime, farming and ranching have undergone a revolution. Dr. Tom Eiser noted agricultural history and comments on those changes.

I think maybe agricultural machinery gets a bad name sometimes. In Oklahoma, you could call it maybe the grapes of rats, syndrome. The idea like it's the hand of God and John Deere coming in at the same time on us and driving out the small farmers. It's not really the machinery. Again, doing agriculture history just didn't quite that simple. There's other stuff going on. For one thing, since particularly time of World War II, always this increase in productive capacities way to go on. You can just turn out a heck of a lot more produced than before on the same acre. Without even trying too hard. As a result of advances in research and technology, then we have in this country chronic overproduction of every agricultural commodity. We can produce a lot more than we can use or market elsewhere. When you have chronic overproduction, farms fail over time. It doesn't just happen in a big collapse. It goes maybe by fits and start, but over in the long term, it's constant.

That means to put it politely, it's farm consolidation. You've got fewer farms on the land out there and fewer people on the land. When farms fail, the farm land doesn't go away. The productive capacity is still out there, but there are fewer people out there. It's pretty darn vacant, isn't it? I guess Cherokee Strip here opened up 1893. They had tens of thousands rushing in here, taking up little quarter-section farms. They've been leaving ever since. It leads you something like this. This is the agricultural landscape today. It's wonderfully productive, but over time, it's become more and more vacant. You can look around and go a long way down a section row without coming to a farm. That is a house, I mean. Besides that, we're all the rural institutions. Where are the old country schools? Well, consolidated into town. What's it like then, a day in the life of a farm family? Well, get up in the morning and somebody's got a feed, probably still the man.

He heads into the bakery first, maybe, or the cafe, because his wife's got a job in town. She's a teacher aide or works for the register of deeds or something. She's going to get the kids out for as she leads for town. She passes him, or she goes into town, and he heads back out to feed. They pass one another. And they're passing one another on the way to town and back all day. And the kids don't even come home on the bus because they've got to stay for, maybe, football practice. In the evening, they're back into town again for the game or whatever is going on. Instead of the old country school, it's more likely consolidated high school in town. That's the center of things. And that's your Jeffersonian landscape today. It all meets in town. It doesn't mean you can't live a good life out there.

For real good life, living in those places all over Oklahoma, living on farms, but really being in town a lot. But I don't know if you really think of that old Jeffersonian ideal, then maybe farmers aren't different enough anymore to have that kind of influence he wanted. I made a slash mark across a map of Oklahoma. It divide the state up into about the way the state sits across two regions, like the northwest part of the state, really part of the great plains and southeast, much more part of the south. But agriculturally and historically, you take either one of those big things that really happened since about the 1950s. If you go up into the plains part from your study of earlier history, you'd think of that, well, that's ranching country and that's a small grain wheat farming country, right? Well, there's still that, but something else is laid on top of that now and it has to do well a whole bunch of things coming together for one thing there's groundwater out there, you know, bits of the Oklahoma aquifer and other formations. There's water for irrigation.

There's hybrid grain sorghum came in as a result of research available in the 1950s. You got to have a crop that you can pour that water on and get some benefit out of it. There's commercial fertilizers courtesy of the petrochemical industry that allow you to use that water and really make something with that sorghum and later corn coming in also. That brought the feed lots concentrating out there in the panhandle in the northwest part of a big feed lot complex stretching out of west Texas up into Kansas and eastern Colorado to western Oklahoma right in it. That took capital where the capital came from urban areas, Houston was a big center for capital origins for the feed lot industry in the southwest. After the feed lots came the packing houses like Oklahoma's feed lot industry fed Amrilla, IBP for quite a while. After that, IBP opened the world's largest meat slaughter facility just across the line up in Kansas and Finney County. More and more people came in. Hispanic laborers, later Vietnamese laborers flocking into these areas just a whole new agribusiness establishment out there that immensely diversifies the area.

Now you think about the south, you know, this cotton culture began to climb there which it definitely was already declining in the 1920s and now you have to really look to find a cotton field. There's no vacuum. It's like the cattle industries moving in down there and this is a part of the southern story in general. You know, the great grazing lands anymore and more and more think are places like Arkansas, Louisiana, East Texas and yeah, Eastern Oklahoma. We've gone in and taken old lands that maybe aren't profitable for feed for field agriculture anymore, but there's even domestic grasses, fescus and this sort of thing. That's great grazing land. So big changes in all parts of Oklahoma.

Big changes, yes, but continuity as well. The importance of farming and ranching to Oklahoma's economy is still paramount, surpassing either manufacturing or oil and gas. And although there is a vast difference in plowing unbroken sod behind a mule and driving a four-wheel drive cabin closed tractor, the challenges and rewards of working the land are pretty much the same. Until next time, I'm your host Dean Lewis with Oklahoma Passage. Major funding of Oklahoma Passage was made possible by the Samuel Robert Noble Foundation.

Gillips Petroleum Foundation, Grace B. Kerr Fund, the Macastlin Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding provided by the MacMayan Foundation and the OETA Foundation. These organizations invite you to join them in celebrating Oklahoma's past and future.