Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Today in History - 1907

Oklahoma entered the Union as the forty-sixth state on this date. Derived from the Choctaw Indian words "okla," meaning people, and "humma," meaning red, Oklahoma was designated Indian Territory in 1828. By 1880, sixty tribes, forced by European immigration and the U.S. government to relocate, had moved to Oklahoma.
A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. . . . Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain