A Very OK Podcast
Episode 40: “The California Road”
October 15, 2024
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson. I’m the executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society. And here with me, as always, is Dr. Bob Blackburn. Bob, it seems like the time flies between our visits. And here we are again talking about another wonderful, another wonderful topic in Oklahoma history. And I’m glad to be with you.
Dr. Bob Blackburn: Well, Trait, you always choose good topics, find good guests to come on. I’m just privileged to be here to provide a little context and a few comments here and there. You know, as I always say in my speeches, connecting the dots of history, that’s kind of what we’re doing with podcasts. You go back, what, 30 some episodes we’ve done now.
Thompson: Almost 40.
Blackburn: Almost 40. Well, those are 40 dots of history that people can, probably over a 200-year time span, but, you know, people can listen and start connecting the dots.
Thompson: Yeah. One of the things I love about all the episodes that we have been able to amass so far is whatever you‘re interested in, we most likely have an episode that you would connect with, whether it’s music history or sports history or military history or, like today, we’re going to talk about westward expansion, and the Gold Rush and the California Road in Oklahoma. But we try to make it a variety of topics so that we’re not just covering one aspect of history, but you’re getting something that you may not know much about or that may hit your interest level. And I hope, those of you, if you’re listening to this episode, that you’ll go back and listen to some of the other episodes we’ve done, because I’ve had people tell me, I listened to that golf podcast you guys did, and I wasn’t really interested in golf all that much, but that was pretty fascinating. So you might discover something that you didn’t know before, and you might find an interest you didn’t know you had.
Blackburn: Well, that’s one reason I enjoy these. I’m always learning. You know, after 50 years in the history business, is that I find that I never get tired of learning. I just this last week, finished a book manuscript on the history of parks in Oklahoma City, and that book just opened my eyes to so many new things. It took some characters that I’ve written about for one reason or another and seen them in another part of their life. And I keep learning, and I just enjoy it so much. Every time I get into these projects, I remember why I love history so much. Yeah, it’s just a continual learning process.
Thompson: You’re exactly right. It’s the stories that we get to learn about and even familiar characters, seeing them from a different angle. And, you know, the people that we’re talking about are complex characters, just like you and I and the people that we meet in everyday life. And so I think sometimes when we’re learning about history, we tend to make our characters one-dimensional. This person was a bad person. This person was a good person. But really, they’re as nuanced and as complex and as weird as we all are. And it’s fun to learn about them, and it’s fun to tell their stories. And even more so, it’s really interesting to be able to see what lessons we can glean and to see the parallels of the past as we’re looking to the future.
Blackburn: Yeah, and one reason I like your topic today is that both my wife and I went to school at Southwestern State College at the time. Now Oklahoma State, or SWOSU, Southwestern Oklahoma State University. And my four years there, ’69 to ’73, I probably did more outside of the classroom than in, as most college students like to do, but a lot of it was going out in the daytime and exploring the canyons and rivers and creeks for around, not only Custer County, but Caddo County, Washita County. And those canyons were part of my own story, in climbing the mounds that you can still see off of I-40, that our guest a little later in the podcast will describe in more detail. But like stupid kids, we’d just hop a fence and go climb these mounds. We’re fortunate we didn’t get shot.
And I became so enamored with this one mound that’s right off of Bethel Road about, oh, I guess two or three miles south of Hydro, is that I was a painter at the time, watercolors. My roommate, Gary, was an excellent watercolorist. I was a mediocre, but I could still paint, and I painted that mound three or four times trying trying to capture what it meant to me. I don’t think I ever captured it. I wasn’t that good of an artist, but I kept going back and back and painting it, and it becomes part of who you are. Even today, my wife and I will drive out to Red Rock Canyon numerous times a year, and since it went from tourism department to private, not ownership, but at least management, we wanted to help them. So we joined an annual membership that year saying here, take a donation. We want to help. We get to do this. And now they have glamping there. They have a cabin. They have camping sites, and it’s one of the most beautiful spots. And it looks like a page out of ancient history. You’re in this canyon with these almost vertical red rock walls. Like, how did this come about? It’s a geological wonder, and it’s a botanical wonder. And today we’re going to add a little chapter there on the history.
Thompson: Well, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, in all my travels in Oklahoma, I haven’t been to Red Rock Canyon yet. So, after today’s topic, it makes me want to go visit it all the more. And I’m definitely going to put it on my list as you know, I drive to Clinton fairly often, you know, two or three times a year at least to visit our Route 66 museum. And it’s not that far off the highway to go and have a little jaunt down there to explore Hinton and go into the canyon. So I’m going to put that on my list next time I’m around, and then hopefully go camping there at some time soon.
But as you mentioned, our topic is the California Road. And the California Road was really necessitated by the fact that in 1840, January 24,1848, James Wilson Marshall found flakes of gold in the American River at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains near Coloma, California. And he was working for a man named John Sutter, who was a German-born citizen and who was building a mill there. And at first they tried to keep, you know, let’s keep this gold thing between us, and as you know, the phrase “gold fever,” it means what it is, which is everybody, the word got out, and gold fever starts going, and so people start coming in droves. In fact, by the end of 1849, the population of California territory was 100,000 people, which the pre-1848 figure was less than a thousand people who were, white citizens, at least, of that territory. And so you can see how many people wanted to make their way across the United States. They found this idea of finding gold. This was sort of like, you know, what we think of winning the lottery today. All of your problems are going to be over. You’re going to be rich beyond your wildest imagination. All we have to do is get a team of oxen, put everything we’ve ever owned into one of these big Conestoga wagons and lumber across the United States, and try not to get snake bit, develop, you know, get cholera, get, you know, killed in some manner, form, or fashion. And if you can do all that, and of course make it to California before the winter sets in, then maybe, just maybe, you will strike it rich, but most likely you wouldn’t.
Blackburn: That’s right. And too, what people need to remember about this time period, Trait, is that the options for transportation were very limited. This was well before railroads, long before the transcontinental railroad. And so to get to California from the from the east coast or the populated Midwest, you could go by water, but you go around the tip of South America and then up a very dangerous voyage, which would take months to make that voyage. And you do have steam vehicles. You’re not just relying on sail anymore, but even with the steam engines, it would take forever to get around the Cape, and very expensive. And most of the people who wanted to go to the gold fields typically did not have a lot of resources. They were adventurous. They say, hey, let’s just leave our little cabin here in the Ohio River Valley or down here and in the southern Appalachian Plateau, and let’s go out there. Well, if you could not afford to go by water, then the only other way was to go as far on the rivers as you could, which meant coming either down the Ohio River or up on the other rivers to the Mississippi, taking the Mississippi to the Arkansas, up the Arkansas River to Fort Smith. Right time of year, you could get all the way up to the Three Forks, present-day town of Muskogee. And then from there, you could not go any farther west, at least getting, you know, you could go up the Missouri, but that’d take you way out of the way of the Oregon Country. And so then that would be the embarkation point where people would get off of water if they could afford even that, and then they’d have to get outfitted with a wagon with oxen or mules and be part of a wagon train and then head west.
This is uncharted territory, largely, but it’s not a desert. It’s not lacking people. You have the Five Civilized Tribes already in eastern Oklahoma by this time. Trail of Tears really had started in the in the teens and pretty well completed in the ’30s. So by the ’40s, you have towns and plantations, you have people living along water courses. So a lot of people would have been there. A lot of the Cherokees would go off to the to the gold fields. Some famous Cherokees would go out and become famous newspaper writers in the gold fields. But you have people leaving there. But then just west of what, you know, really Oklahoma City in this area, you get into the High Plains, and there when you start encountering bands of Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne-Arapaho, Osage, even by that time, even though they’re largely to the north, you still have bands of Osage hunting the buffalo that are just, the southern herd is huge. And so you get this north and south migration of Indian, small Indian bands, you know, mobile with horses, and then other Indians that are leaving their prairie hunts and going out to hunt the buffalo.
So this is a thinly populated area, but it is populated. So there are people. There are trading posts, not quite to Oklahoma City at the time, in ’49 and ’50, but close. So you could get some provisions. But where you head up really through no man’s land, you’re on your own all the way from really what’s now Oklahoma City coming out of the Cross Timbers all the way to the gold fields, and so these were desperate people, you know, trying to change their lives and taking a real risk.
Thompson: Yeah. And I would say too, if you wanted to get in on the Gold Rush, you’d better be quick about it, because by 1850, most of the surface gold out there was gone, which was the gold that you could either see kind of laying in a river or, you know, something that you could go into a cave or a mine and find pretty easily. By after 1850, you were going to have to mine for gold to get anything. And so, really, the, the Gold Rush peaks by 1852, when about 80 million, $81 million worth of gold is pulled from the ground. And by 1857, it’s pretty much over with, other than some of the very, very, destructive ways of getting gold out of the ground that, you know, most normal people, even pick and shovel, aren’t going to be able to get to.
So this was something that, if you wanted to get in on it, you better get in on it quick. And so the federal government decided that we’re going to help this out a little bit. And there was a man named Josiah Gregg in 1839, and he was a trader that used the Santa Fe Trail quite a bit. And that was the trail from Independence, Missouri, over to Santa Fe, what is now New Mexico. And he started exploring a route south of the Canadian River. And after that, Congress instructed the War Department to find a trail from Fort Smith to Santa Fe going south of the Canadian River. And they turned to Captain Randolph B. Marcy, who was the commander of the Fifth Infantry and said, okay, we want you to take this first group of gold seekers starting in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and we want you to find this route to get to Santa Fe, New Mexico. And to do that, they got the Corps of Topographical Engineers who became part of Marcy’s command in 1849, and that was led by Lieutenant James Simpson, who today we really rely on because, and you’ve talked about this before, the military are meticulous mapmakers, note takers, journalers. They note everything along the way. And one of the great things is we still have those records today.
So, this was, as you’re starting out, remember, you’re going to be, all of your possessions are going to be in a wagon. Most likely there’s going to be someone driving the wagon. Maybe a little kid might be riding in a wagon, but you are going to be walking to California. You’re not going to be riding. Most likely not going to be riding a horse, most likely not going to be riding in the wagon. And you were going to have quite a few with you. Turn to my notes here and see, but the first, in this crew, that left on April 11, 1849, there were 75 wagons, 500 oxen to draw the wagons, and a very festive atmosphere. They were very excited to be setting out on this journey. And your first obstacle is to get across the Poteau River.
Blackburn: And people in western Oklahoma, When we say river, most people look at it and say that’s a creek. Poteau River is a real river.
Thompson: Yes.
Blackburn: I’ve stood on that promontory right there by the fort grounds. You look out at where the Poteau River joins the Arkansas, and it’s a big body of water. I would guess at high water, half a mile across.
Thompson: Yeah. And so, you know, there’s a difference between the Washita River in western Oklahoma that, in many places, I can hop across, and in the Poteau River for sure. So how did they get across it? They had to be ferried across. They did not drive their wagons into the river. They used ropes to pull the wagons and the animals out of the mud. They ferried across the river. One of the interesting things is, one of the big fears of going on this trail was Indian attacks, and that really wasn’t that big of a deal. I think that was an overwrought fear. Wasn’t too many people that ended up dying of Indian attacks. More people would die of sickness and disease or snakebite than would die by Indian attack along this road.
And so, they start heading out in that direction. Let’s see here. The whole distance, this is from, James Simpson’s journal. “The whole distance from Fort Smith to Santa Fe, having been measured by a chain, and the bearings taken as far as to Topofki creek, by Captain Dent...afforded me the means of getting up a series of maps which I believe will not be without their value to the emigrant and traveler.” And what he was doing along the way as he’s making these maps. Because, remember, he has tasked with with finding this route. So everywhere they’re going, when they have a campsite, he’s noting, okay, what kind of timber is there? What kind of grass is there? What’s the quality of the water? Is it clean? Is it brackish? Does it taste funny? And so this is going to serve as a roadmap and a guide to all of those wagon trains that are coming afterwards, which, by the way, there was a whole line of them that was set to come. They would leave about a week apart so that they could be sure to preserve the grass along the way for all the animals that would be coming behind them.
Blackburn: You know, you mentioned the military. The military, these expeditions were not just for wayfinding. They were really promoting economic development. They were the arm of the federal government. Go out and explore. See what the resources are and to find it. And part of this, going from coast to coast with the American nation over the years, these soldiers, starting with Zebulon Pike and James Wilkinson, who came down the Arkansas from Pike’s Expedition, which had been 1805, 1806. You know, they were out there looking for these resources, and if they could find something of value. Jefferson Salt Mountain is a good example. When they got to the Great Salt Plains with one expedition, they thought that salt was a resource that people could exploit. So that was very typical of this time period.
Thompson: Yeah. And one of the things that I want to mention is that, so they come up to what’s called Shawnee Town on the California Road and this is where, the Absentee Shawnee had set up a settlement, south of current Shawnee, Oklahoma, a little bit south of current Shawnee, Oklahoma. And then one of the things that Lieutenant Simpson writes in his journal is, “But the chief characteristic of the route we have followed is the unrivaled beauty of the scenery, which is everywhere being presented to you.” And so this is something that I think we take for granted today, because we may drive through Oklahoma, and we may think, oh, it’s not that pretty. But to these people who are seeing this country for the first time, it was really striking to them. And you have to think too, that there was timber, there was grass, you know, there was plentiful water.
Blackburn: Would have been in the spring, and prettiest part of the year.
Thompson: Yeah. You know, one of their main things they would have to contend against is rains swelling the creeks and the rivers and making the making the travel uncomfortable, and of course, bogging down in the mud and so on and so forth. But there was quite a bit of elements to contend with. By the time they get into, as you said, coming out of the Cross Timbers, coming south of what would have been Oklahoma City, which Oklahoma City wasn’t even a dream at that particular point in time. They get to these formations that are west of where Hinton is. And one of the most famous formations is Rock Mary. And this was a, it was a sandstone jut out of the land. It was about, it was about 60 feet high and 200 feet in diameter. One of the people on the trail was Mary Conway, and she was the 17-year-old daughter of Dr. John Conway, who happened to be the brother of two Arkansas governors and the nephew of Nellie Conway, who was President James Madison’s mother, and they had ten children on the trip, four sons and six daughters. And Mary was the eldest daughter. And as you can imagine, she caught quite the attention of not only the immigrants who were on the trail, but also the military men who were on the trail. A beautiful young lady in camp. And so as they come to this formation called Rock Mary, there was an opportunity for Lieutenant Simpson to go up to the top of that ridge, and this is his journal entry about getting up to the top of Rock Mary. “The novel character of the hill is contorted appearance. Its sudden reemergence from the plain around it. My having reached its pinnacle, it being an object of interest to beholders in the distance. All this had its complex influence upon me, and I felt correspondingly elated. Captain Marcy, seeing me near the apex, suggested to me to unfurl.” And he puts in parentheses, “What I was about to do. A flag and give it to the breeze. This I did, and soon I could see one person after another, Lieutenant Harrison and Dr. Rogers among them, leaving the train to get a look from its summit. A person present suggesting that it be named after an Arkansas young lady, as much esteemed by the immigrants with whom she is in company as she is by the officers. I immediately fell in with the suggestion, and thereupon with waving flag, proclaimed it to all concerned that henceforth in honor of the settler lady, the rock should be known as Rock Mary.” And today it is still known as Rock Mary, and it’s on private property today, and it is one of the most unique features of the mounds out there in that particular area.
And so, Bob, they end up reaching the destination of Santa Fe in June of 1849, after having set out in April of 1849. So about a two and a half month trip to get there from Fort Smith to their final destination. And one of the things I want to mention is Black Beaver, because Black Beaver was a Delaware Indian. He was a scout that Captain Marcy picked up somewhere around what is today the Edwards Store. And he was the one who helped guide them on into Santa Fe. And he’s, looking into my research on this particular man, he’s a fascinating character. He is a combination of what I would call a little bit of a Renaissance man, but also this prototypical frontiersman who, he spoke seven languages. So, I’m sorry, 11 languages. Eight of them were Native American languages, and then he also spoke English, French, and Spanish. He was a trader. He was an explorer. He knew all of the land like the back of his hand. And so he was one who Captain Marcy relied on to help get them to where they were going. But he’s got an even more fascinating story than that, which is pretty great. He was a part of the Dodge-Leavenworth Expedition in 1834. He was part of the Indian volunteers that fought in the Mexican War during 1846. And then when the Civil War comes, he is one of the main ones who helps escort Colonel William H. Emory’s federal troops from Fort Cobb, Kansas, in 1861, to help them escape Confederate attack. And in retaliation, the Confederates destroy Black Beaver’s property, that he had. He had built himself a nice house and had a nice farm here in Oklahoma. And so, by the way, for the rest of his life, he tried to get he was never compensated for any of his military service, any of his service to the country. And he tried to get compensation and was never successful for that. He was a witness to the Medicine Lodge Treaty negotiations in 1867, and then later he became a Baptist minister toward the end of his life. And he died, he converted in Christianity in 1876, and he died in 1880 near Anadarko. One of the stories that I liked here was one that, about his prowess in terms of being able to spot landmarks and being able to know his way around. And I will, I’ll warn our listeners that this, this is, I’m going to quote the words of Black Beaver himself as he’s being sarcastic to Captain Marcy, but the words are what we would say today are a little bit insensitive, but I want to warn everybody about that. The quote says that “Marcy got into trouble with Black Beaver once more on the trip, when he condescendingly asked how Indians got around without knowing how to make maps. Black Beaver patiently explained that he memorized landmarks by looking at them from several directions. Demonstrating, he pointed out a lone tree some 200 yards off, and told Marcy that their outward trail lay on the opposite side of it. Disbelieving, Marcy checked and when the trace of their outward bound track was there. When Marcy came back to camp, Black Beaver suckly chided him by saying, ‘Huh, Injun. Him don’t know nothing,’ and then stomped off.” basically making fun of Marcy for thinking that he didn’t know what he was doing because he was an Indian and putting that stereotype to bed, and so I would say that a large part of the success of getting that wagon train to Santa Fe is probably due to Black Beaver’s efforts and someone who was a good citizen of the United States, even though he probably had many, many reasons not to be.
Blackburn: Well, he was out there making a living. He and Jesse Chisholm were very close and the Delaware especially, even more so than the Cherokee were known for being very mobile. When Stan Hoig, my good friend who passed away several years ago, wrote the history of Black Beaver and Jesse Chisholm, he would find that they would be in Washington, DC, at some conference. Two months later, they’d be in Fort Smith, and two months later, they’d be in Santa Fe. He was all over the country. And if you added up all the trips that we know that he took, he could have gone around the world probably. But he was one of those adventurers that just had no fear.
Thompson: Yeah.
Blackburn: And got along as well with the Comanches as they would have with the American soldiers. So he was one of those middlemen that was kind of making sure things worked on the frontier as well as they possibly could.
Thompson: Yeah. And Jesse Chisholm being Cherokee.
Blackburn: Yeah.
Thompson: So another person that I wanted to mention before we get into talking to our guest is Captain Randolph Marcy, and he’s a fascinating person. Once again, kind of a Renaissance man in and of himself. He was born in 1812 in Greenwich, Massachusetts. He went to the United States Military Academy and graduated in 1832. During the Mexican War, he served with General Zachary Taylor’s army. And then, of course, he is tasked with leading this expedition on the California Road in 1849. And in fact, even some people call it Marcy’s Trail instead of the California Road. And in 1852, he was assigned command of a 70-man exploring expedition across the Great Plains in search of the source of the Red River. And he was directed to collect and report on everything that he found. And in that expedition, he identified 25 new species of mammals on that trip, ten new species of reptiles. He was the, he compiled the first Wichita dictionary on that trip. And so, and he also returned with information on Cynthia Ann Parker along the way, which, of course, was the, white woman who had been kidnapped by the Comanches and then was raised as a Comanche, mother of Quanah Parker.
And so after that expedition in 1852, he wrote a report, which would, kind of was turned into a book called With Reports on the Natural History of the Country. And it was published in 1853, and it quickly became a classic of American Western literature, and people would use that as a guidepost. With the outbreak of the Civil War, he was named inspector general of McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, and in 1871, he accompanied General William T. Sherman on a fact-finding tour of the Texas frontier. He wrote several more books along the way, and then he, in 1878, he was promoted to brigadier general, named inspector general of the army, and died in 1881. So he had a long and illustrious career as well, and the California Road was just one of the many, many accomplishments in his career during his military service.
Blackburn: So for our young listeners here, Trait, I think we need to make the parallel between the Texas Road and the interstate highway system. Different technology, different time, different speed. They were lucky if they would make ten miles a day with a wagon train. Where today, you know, if we want to, we can make 500 miles a day. A different speed, but the concept of the same getting from here to there to get to something you want to see or do or to learn.
Thompson: Yeah. And you said the Texas Road. I think you meant the California Road. But you know what? We talk about the Texas Road a lot on this podcast from time to time too. That was more in eastern Oklahoma. And of course, if you listen to our Battle of Honey Springs episode, you know that that battle took place pretty much right on the Texas Road. And there’s a reason for it is because that was the easiest way to march troops up and down through eastern Oklahoma. So that’s just a side note of trivia for you there. We’re not going to charge you extra.
Blackburn: Connecting the dots of history.
Thompson: Exactly right. Well, Bob, I think we’ve got a great guest today and I think we should go and talk to him.
Blackburn: Let’s do that.
Thompson: We have with us today on the podcast, and this man is an expert. If there ever was an expert on the California Road, we are very privileged to have Art Peters with us. He’s the president and the curator of the Hinton Historical Museum. He’s been there for 21 years. He’s won a Heartland Regional Emmy Award for his role in OETA’s documentary Digging the Wagon Road.” He also has written three books. One is called Legends of the Mounds. Another is Legends of the Canyons, both about those particular formations in Caddo County. And the third book is The Night after Rock Mary. And so he’s also an advocational archaeologist, which try and say that three times fast, but he is someone who has done so much research and so much work on the California Road in this time of westward expansion in Oklahoma. And Art, we’re just very excited to have you with us today. Thanks for being here.
Art Peters: Thank you. My pleasure.
Thompson: Well, Art, I’d love to know a little bit about your background. Can you tell us a little bit, where did you grow up, and what, before you got at, went to the museum, what was your career? What did you do before that?
Peters: I grew up in El Reno, Oklahoma. I, after high school, hired on at Western Electric, which became AT&T, which became Lucent, the manufacturing plant in Oklahoma City. I liked that job. But since I was a child, I always wanted to get our neighborhood kids together and play cowboys and Indians so I could be an Indian. I’ve always wanted to tie a rock on a stick so I could have a tomahawk. I always wanted to grab a couple fenceposts and throw a canvas over for a teepee. I just loved any culture that was before my time. And, so cowboys and Indians was the rage on TV when I was growing up during the ’60s. And so that has always kind of, like, stuck with me.
When I was up in high school in El Reno, I had a really cool Oklahoma history teacher, who was a student teacher for a semester, and she took us to our El Reno museum. And when I got to see where history was made, the railroad depot in that town is next to the railroad that brought people in to the first Oklahoma land run. And at that museum, they had this little wagon, like a child’s wagon, that had a wood bed on it, spoke wheels on it, and a five-gallon galvanized water can, and a five-gallon crock. And a man from another country had the idea. He had the smarts for going up and down the line of people waiting for the noon land run the start to sell $0.05 a cup of water or lemonade.
Thompson: Capitalism.
Peters: Yeah. And when I, when I’m standing there where history was made, and I get to see something that was actually used where history is made, I got goosebumps. That was the eighth grade, I got goosebumps, and that never left me. I just always had a fascination for history. And I want to see where history was made and find something that was used where the history was made, if I could. You know, Bob, it reminds me sometimes we might forget, especially those of us who have been in the museum world for a while. We might forget the impact that we’re having on people and what seeing something historic or being in a historic location might do to spur some, like Art here, to spur his creativity, to spur his interest.
Blackburn: Yeah, and being, as Art said, being at the right place with the right objects is important. Having that sense of history that was right here at the crossroads of history. Kind of like James Michener would write a novel. He puts the reader at one spot, and history flows over you. The more you get that sense of time and place, it becomes special and becomes a passion. And Art, obviously you followed your passion on that.
Peters: Yes.
Thompson: Well, being at the Hinton Historical Museum and of course, you’ve done so much research. So, you got interested in history. You worked for several companies that became AT&T. When did you make the switch to now you’re just going to follow your passion and just do history?
Peters: Well, I was working at the manufacturing plant. Anyone who has worked there for 30 years could retire full pension. I was going to be 56 or 57, and I thought when I retire, I really wanted to go get on a college archaeology team and maybe just push wheelbarrows or go get more tools from the truck. I just want to be somewhere around the cliff-dwelling Indians. Then when the plant closed down early, I got to retire. Luckily, by six weeks that went past my service date. Six weeks. I got to early retirement at 46-years-old, and I thought, now I can go to Arizona, where I was hoping to get to be on site when things are being found by the professionals. And, but I dilly dallied for a few years. Went to Red Rock Canyon for a camp out, went up to the Hinton Museum, which was having a semi-open house for the community to come see the finished structure of the new building that we’re in now. And they said they needed a few old cars to go with the horse carriage collection that was coming. And my family, also in El Reno during the 1972 to 1975 time period, had an antique car museum.
Thompson: Okay.
Peters: And so I had a little bit of museum experience, and I volunteered to bring a Model A. I’m the only one of my family, after my father sold the museum out, that still has a car from our museum days. And I also like to collect and restore antique bicycles. So I brought those to the museum to be displayed there. They needed two more volunteers so they can now keep that museum open five days a week. And at their grand opening, they got me to come on as a volunteer, which I could now do since I was retired. And, they did not get a second volunteer during that day, so I volunteered for two days.
Thompson: Okay.
Peters: After I was there six months.
Thompson: You’re our favorite kind of person in the museum world.
Peters: After I was there about six months, they needed to write a grant, and they needed one full-time person if they could have one. And so they asked me to be the curator. So I was now there five or six days a week. And after a couple of years, I then was the president. So after I was there two years, I learned about the mound named after a young 17-year-old girl by the first wagon train being escorted to California on the Gold Rush. Mary Conway was her name. And after I was there two years, I started researching that. And I thought to myself, it goes right through our town. Red Rock Canyon State Park has ten-inch-deep wagon ruts showing where they came in.
Thompson: Yeah.
Peters: Dragging the back wheels, so they’re locking up the back wheels. Would not have the heavy wagon pushing the animals out of the way when it got a little too steep. So dragging the back wheels was digging ruts that are still there today. So I started thinking, you know, I have never heard of anybody, mapping, tracking, finding campsites for wagon train set camps. So I thought there still should be something to be found. And to my surprise, there’s a lot to be found.
Thompson: Yeah, yeah. And when we’re talking about Captain Marcy and the the Fifth Infantry regiment and the topographical army regiment that came through there, they were pretty meticulous in the recordkeeping.
Peters: They were, surprising how accurate they actually were with their GPS readings, which were back then survey readings.
Thompson: So you were able to find, based on some of those old documents, you were able to find some of these campsites?
Peters: Yes.
Thompson: And what do you look for to see where it might have been?
Peters: First of all, I get on Google Earth, and I follow the divide between the South Canadian River. Back in the day, it was the Canadian and the North Fork of the Canadian. Today we have North Canadian, South Canadian, and between the South Canadian and the Washita River, the upland or the high ground, the divide between where the water sheds during a rain to flow either direction. That’s where the wagons are traveling to stay on the smoothest part of the terrain. And so I get on Google Earth, and I track that. And then when I can find an area that looks like it’s near enough to a branch of the canyons that begin their journey, streams begin their journey down to the rivers. There’s pretty much going to be live springs around there, and that’s a good water source. So being on a high place where the Indians could have a good view of their surroundings. Good grass for grazing and close to water. Not next to water necessarily, but close enough. You could send kids with buckets, or the entire wagon train could stop the next morning to water their barrels. Those three elements was what made a good campsite.
And when I see a site that looks promising on Google Earth, I actually have to drive out and look at it, best I can, from a mile section road to see is that where I would want to park my wagon? One thing I have found a couple times when I went out to search, and if there’s a steep drop off at one edge of that high place, that was not a good campsite.
Thompson: And why was that? Because they could be easily ambushed by unfriendly Indians that maybe want to ambush. If you’re too small of a wagon train, if you’re in a vulnerable place, just because you’re an easy target, you will be probably attacked. And so these things are, those three elements are what you want to look for. So when I look for campsites, I have to drive out to see it in person before I decide I think this is a campsite.
Thompson: And when they camped, would they have circled the wagons like you see in some of the old westerns?
Peters: Yes, they would always circle the wagons. It’s not necessarily for a fort. It would become a fort, sure, if you needed it to be, but the wagon train circle would be the corral for the loose animals at night.
Thompson: Okay.
Peters: It would pick a stake, or they pick it. They would take a foot-long stake and stake animals out around the campsite so they can graze until it got dark. And then they put them inside the circle of wagons, and that’s a corral, natural corral. The people would camp. We hear, we read stories where sometimes the men would sleep under the wagon, and the women were asleep in the wagon. That’s how Mary Conway’s family did it.
Blackburn: And Art, you know too, that if a band of Indians were to attack, they wouldn’t be there to kill people so much as they wanted those horses and mules. That’s what they wanted, because they could convert that into trade goods, which could be a form of wealth. It was part of their economic system to try to steal those horses. And it wasn’t because they were evil. It was just part of the culture. And they didn’t want to get into a fight, somebody, because they might get killed. So, you know, take the stock and get away as quick as good. If they’re inside that wagon circle, it’s not quite as easy.
Peters: Right.
Thompson: And I think one of the things that we, when you see it on westerns, sometimes, I’m talking about western movies. The inside of the circle doesn’t look all that big, but it could be multiple acres inside. If you had a large wagon train, you could have ten acres inside that circle, correct?
Peters: Yes. A lot of the wagon trains, but also if they are very big, we don’t read about it. The Chronicles of Oklahoma summer of 1960 has a great article. That became my wagon road bible for my first few years of doing the research. We don’t read about it there, but they had 497 people with 75 wagons. Big, very big wagon train. One-hundred people with about 25 wagons was about the smallest you wanted to be. So when you have a wagon train that big, sometimes that would actually make two circles of wagons.
Thompson: Okay. Now what sorts of things are people bringing with them? Presumably they’re moving their whole lives out to California and it’s a gamble. It’s a huge gamble that you’re going to either find gold or you’re going to find land or, you know, in this case, they were they were propelled by the hope that they were going to find gold. But what are they bringing in these wagons to help them start a new life?
Peters: They’re bringing, they’re bringing food. They’re bringing grain for their animals if they’re using mules. If you’re using oxen, they can just live off the grass if it’s plentiful. They’re bringing guns and ammunition. They’re bringing trunks with clothing in them that perhaps will be for when they get to their destination, not clothing they will want to wear on the trail. That’s going to get very dirty, very tattered. They are bringing a lot of people heading out on a adventure, on a quest like this don’t know what to bring and what not to bring. The number one thing that was discarded from wagons was cast-iron stoves. It’s very heavy.
Thompson: Yeah.
Peters: You know, I have found cast iron stove parts. The biggest cast iron stove part I found is a complete very decorative leg, like a claw foot from a bathtub, the claw foot without the claws. Just a decorative curve leg, probably eight to 10 inch, probably about eight inches tall. And, that was the number one discarded item. There’s a famous painting called The Oregon Trail where a couple of wagons are being pulled during sunset with a pretty bluff beside them. And if you look close, you’ll see a cast iron cookstove dumped on the side of the road, kind of mangled. That is showing a visual of the number one discarded item. I find cast iron parts of stoves a lot. And one thing, when I am showing these things at the museum to people, some people, sometimes kids, sometimes adults, where’s the rest of the stove?
As we find little snippets, little pieces of bigger items. When the wagon trains were passing through and people were discarding items, I have found evidence of a surrey-style wagon that was abandoned in a campsite. Whoever is the person that gains that property in the land run, if they have a property that had a wagon camp, there’s going to be a lot of things to clean up. Yeah, you don’t want metal rings from your wagon wheels laying around for your animals to step on. So before you can start grazing animals or farming, you need to clean up the big things. And whatever gets left behind by those folks who cleaned up is what I find. I found the grandfather clock gear from the inner works of a grandfather clock.
Thompson: Wow.
Peters: I was hoping, because there is a little pointer on it, when I found that, I thought, oh man, I hope this is out of an old safe. I went to a clock repair young lady who is very knowledgeable about clocks, and just looking at it, she started rattling off. Oh, that’s from a German-made grandfather clock from the 1850s.
Thompson: So do you, someone tried to bring their grandfather clock on the trail?
Peters: Yes.
Thompson: Oh, wow.
Peters: Or I imagine freight wagons bringing freight out, you know, from not on a wagon train going to California, but other people, early homesteaders. They had to bring their pianos. They had to bring their furniture. Anything, a freight wagon was the same as a semi truck today. Everything came by wagons until automobiles. It could be a freight wagon driver who damaged that clock, and now it’s not worth anything to somebody. So he ditched it, and all the pieces are gone except that one gear, and she said that’s one of the little pointer hit the lever that activated the chimes on the clock. You know, like, wow, this young lady who looks like she’s barely out of college is very up on antique clocks, but so we find little pieces of bigger things.
Blackburn: You know, Art, another way that those landscapes change, sometimes they have value like with the old bones. Where buffalo might be a buffalo kill site where the Indians at Battle of the Washita were slaughtered. In the 1930s, turned that into fertilizer. And it was value in picking it up and taking away, where we found no bones when we did the survey there. And with the metal parts during World War II, metal drives were huge. People were gathering up any metal they could find. If they had some old parts, they’d put it in a wagon, take it into town and sell it. It had value. So sites change over the years, don’t they? Not just from the elements and whatever but from scrounging.
Peters: Now have you found things that when you’ve discovered them, you have no idea what they are.
Peters: Oh yes. That happens. We have a couple items in the museum. To this day, we still don’t know what they are. I haven’t actually put out a little sign, but I do ask a lot of people when they mention that. So we have one item in our showcases that we don’t know what it is. And I’ve had multiple guesses, and the multiple guesses are pretty much all the same. To me, it looks like two can lids, very shallow, pressed together like an old compact for ladies’ makeup or ladies’ lipstick, and the one side has three bulges in it where a limestone-looking rock about a marble size protrudes out, and the metal was formed around those protrusions. And then the very center looks like a little limestone flat area. That little center does not go completely through it. A lot of people will guess a toy, wheell from a toy or a pull toy or something, but my guess is a forerunner to a potholder or a hot kettle off the stove on the countertop maybe. And it’s, it’s only probably about four inches across. So maybe two or three of these, you could set a hot item on your counter. That’s my guess. But we really have no idea what that is.
Thompson: Okay. I want to turn our attention now to some of the exploration you’ve done. And this goes to back to some of the books that you’ve written of the canyons and particularly the mounds, because you have, you know, not only been out and around the mounds, you’ve climbed up a lot of them yourself too. Can you talk to us about some of your, some of the things that you’ve discovered as you’ve explored the mounds? And these are mounds that would be west of Hinton.
Peters: Yes, west of Hinton and south of Hydro. They are natural mounds. They’re not man-made. A lot of Indian mounds are man-made, but these are natural rock formations. When Lieutenant Simpson, who was the chief surveyor on the wagon trail, the Fifth Infantry leading the wagon. When he writes about those when he first sees them in his journal, he writes that they look like immense Indian lodges. They have that tipi angle to them around their base. They all appear to be sandstone at the bottom and limestone at the top. Some of them have the tops that jaunt straight up about twenty feet and are squared off at the top. Some of them are just mounds that are just round from the left to the right and over the crest. They all have limestone, some of them just limestone chips from traffic or people or animals up there. They’re all about 100 feet tall except Rock Mary. Rock Mary was the first in line. So when the Lieutenant Simpson, who wants to impress Mary Conway, decides he will name a mound after her, he takes the first opportunity and goes to the first mound, which was the most oddly shaped. It’s all sandstone, except the top two turrets, which have limestone on the top of them. As I was researching and finding these mounds, one of them has a man-made cave at the bottom.
Thompson: Really?
Peters: And it is very obvious with the squarish door that it was man-made. A lot of people in the community would tell me their stories when I first started this, and they encouraged me to write a book, put all this in a book. The mounds and their history and stories won’t change. The canyons and their history and stories won’t change. To me, I’ve been doing this 18 years, and it’s still premature for me to write my big book. But I did my little forerunners to please the people of the community, and they were very pleased with with my stories. As I was preparing to write that, another person told me, don’t write about that mound unless you’ve personally been there and climbed it. And so I think I have climbed every one of those mounds that I have written about. And one of them was the one with the cave in it.
One of the legends about that area is a pioneer family traveling on a wagon train coming through. I don’t know what year, but probably not, it was not the first year, but it was sometime after that, mid-1850s, probably. A man or woman and their daughter were traveling in a wagon train. The daughter got a high fever, and she got too sick to travel. The man, the woman, and the daughter, the man tells the wagon train, we’re going to pull over by these mounds, and we’re going to camp here until our daughter gets better. We’ll catch another wagon train coming. And at that time, when we read from the first wagon train set out, that Mary Conway was on, the Fifth Infantry was leading every week. On the next Monday, they would send a wagon train out.
Thompson: And the only reason they waited that long was just so they could let the grass recover a little bit for all the animals here.
Peters: Yeah, and so every week a wagon train would come by. Some of these wagon trains may be caught up with the previous one if they had too many breakdowns or if people got sick. Sometimes, if a lot of people in this camp got sick, they would just hold up a day or two, but they always needed to move their camp about one mile so the animals had fresh grass.
Thompson: Yeah.
Peters: And sometimes they would move the camp and let the sick people keep their tents or wagons, let them stay and recuperate. So when the little girl got better, the mother got sick, so they continued to stay while the mother was sick. The mother stayed sick, and winter began to sit in. Wagon trains had quit coming, so this family spent the winter there. Sandstone is very soft to carve on. If the man had a shovel, and now the young daughter had a cast iron skillet, they could scratch themself a door and a small cave to stay in for a winter shelter, which is the story of what probably happened. Then when the winter, when they were in camp in the winter, the mother passed away. They took the mother over to another set of mounds. Some people call it Twin Mounds, but there’s another set called Twin Mounds. But that mound adopted a name, Dead Woman Mound, because the pioneer lady who had died on the wagon trail was buried at that mound. The rubble around the bottom of those mounds is easy digging, so it would not be too hard to dig a grave for the lady and bury her there away from where they were camping. That was also to disguise the grave from any Indians who may return in the spring with the buffaloes. And so another one of the mounds is called Ghost Mound. It was called that because the Indians who lived here before the white people showed up, told their children ghost stories about that mound. There’s, and even today, I’ve heard recently someone say they still see a white owl on the top of that mound. That mound has little divots, little bitty caves the owls will nest in. And when the owls come out at night, they fly up over the mound. The Indians would say that’s someone’s spirit rising up. And also in the middle of the summer when you have a lot of lightning bugs around, those are also someone’s spirits flying around at night. The Indians must have known what we recently discovered a couple of years ago.
On top of the mound, the limestone capstone has eight human tracks that are embedded in the limestone and two dinosaur tracks that are embedded in the limestone. Lieutenant Simpson writes in his journal, these mounds look like they are left over from a higher terrain. So the limestone at the top of these mounds must be little snippets of what all the terrain was like at one time. It’s wore down today to the level we have 100 feet below. And so a question is, how did those tracks get up 100 feet up above where we’re standing today?
Thompson: Yeah, because you’re talking human footprints, but you’ve also found dinosaur footprints.
Peters: Yeah. One of my one of my good buddies that climbs that mound with me when I was able to. There’s one mound I would not climb by myself because it’s pretty rough getting up and down. He’s identified the tracks as a, I think it’s a raptor, a raptor dinosaur track.
Thompson: Okay.
Peters: I’m not up on dinosaurs, and I don’t know enough about rocks to. I know what limestone, I know what some rocks or limestone, sandstone. But I’m not a paleontologist.
Thompson: Can’t be an expert in everything, Art.
Blackburn: Art, that could be the same time period in ancient history when the dinosaur prints up around Black Mesa were found. Truman Tucker was an old timer up there who showed those to me, and you can still go out and see those tracks. Before we get too far into this, so follow those mounds and that route down through Red Rock Canyon. The reason I ask that is that when and when people hear this, I may say, I’m going to go see this place where they can see the mountains from the road but have to give permission for landowners to get on. So we don’t want people jumping fences.
Peters: That’s correct.
Blackburn: One place that is accessible is Red Rock Canyon. Run by a couple of families out there now. My wife and I join $60 a year for an annual pass to get in anytime you want. Ten bucks for a carload of people. It’s one of the most beautiful spots in western Oklahoma. But you can see those ruts, and tell us about what might have happened in the canyon as they were going, they were going through the canyon, I assume. Tell us about that, the Red Rock Canyon side of this story?
Peters: Yes. As the wagon trains traveled through, they learned that nearly all of the canyons, which there are about, besides Red Rock Canyon, there’s about nine others that the water flows south to the Washita River, and there’s about six throughout our county that flow north to the Canadian River. All of those canyons are spring-fed. At the very head of the canyons, the wagons could pull up, drop buckets on ropes down into those pools of spring water, water the water barrels. At some point, sometime after the Gold Rush began, maybe five years, maybe ten years. At some point, it was discovered they could get a complete wagon train into Red Rock Canyon. There was a natural silted-in ramp of dirt up to the rim, or it’s a little bit lower, and they could bring their entire wagon train in. They could all flow along the side of the spring-fed creek. They could all water their own water barrels, and going back to the north end of the canyon, there was a passable way where naturally silted in dirt was up to the canyon rim, and they could pass back up to get on the main trail. This was a little detour, like a family vacation to Tucson, Arizona, from Oklahoma City, you’re probably going to detour to get gas and go to Walmart. These people detoured to go get water.
Blackburn: And wood as well.
Peters: Water and wood. Any of the canyons, Lieutenant Simpson writes too, plenty of wood for fires along the trail, but he also makes a note. None of the trees exceed the rim of the canyon. But you could find a passageway, go down, get firewood, come back out. They even don’t know, it wasn’t his team. I think it was five years later, 1853. Captain Whipple came through doing a railroad survey for transcontinental railroad. I think it was one of his teams. One of the Indian scouts shone like a 28-pound raccoon out of one of the caves.
Thompson: Oh my!
Peters: So they had a feast for supper.
Thompson: That was a big raccoon.
Blackburn: So when they got into the canyon, Art, have you found any campsites where there might have been? Of course, has been so disturbed over the years. Parks Department probably ran that for 50 some years.
Peters: Yeah.
Blackburn: But a lot of tourists have come through there. But have you ever found anything in the canyon?
Peters: Red Rock Canyon is one of the hardest canyons to do research in because it is used by public over and over, 20 to 30,000 visitors a year when it was the state park. Actually, when the wagon trains came into the canyon to get water, it probably looked like a park back then. A real pleasant place to be out of the hot sun, out of the wind if it was a windy day. They would lay over and do repairs, but that’s really not a good place for wagon trains to camp. It was a vulnerable place to be. You could be rushed from the shallow end. you could be boxed in and a box canyon inside. You could be shot at from the rim so they would come in, get the water, maybe have, if it was the right time of day, maybe have a picnic lunch or make a repair and then get back out up on the main survey trail in the high places where you wanted to camp. Another interesting note about camps from the Exodus and the people who were roaming in the wilderness in the Biblical times, to the Plains Indians, to the Gold Rush people, they all selected their camps the same way.
Thompson: Interesting.
Peters: When you’re living in nature, you will just learn these things. Where is it best to camp? Now in the winter, in the winter time, you find your camp opposite. You want to be down in a low place, out of the wind, and you want to be, you want to be, if you can, in the cove of a creek or a river. So if you post a guard at night, you only have to guard one side of the camp. Anyone coming through that water will be making a noise and alert any. So it’s opposite. Pretty much only the military did their work in the winter time, but they had the means they they had higher technology than the average person did.
Thompson: And you mentioned it earlier, but I want to go back to it. In that Red Rock Canyon, you can see those wagon tracks where they would essentially skid down. And those are something that people can see if they go to the park. Correct?
Peters: Yes. I like to tell people who visit the museum if they’ve not been or even if they’re camping there, those wagon trains coming in had to come in at about a 45-degree angle. That angle will get the weight of the wagon wanting to push the animals out of the way if you just went down the hill.
Thompson: Right. Yeah.
Peters: So they would lock the back wheels up on the wagon and let the wagon slide. Every time the animals took a step, the wagon would scoot a few inches. Another step, it would scoot. So scoot, scoot, scoot keeps it in control. And when you get down to the bottom, you can just unlock the wheels and move along.
Blackburn: For the tourists who may want to go by and see those, once they go in the canyon gate, and they come down that circular route and get into the canyon, where do they go to see those?
Peters: The canyon is about a mile long, and about halfway down there’s the creek that runs through there. There’s a crossover road called Group Camp Road. If you cross there, make a right, you will cross there. You will see a big box canyon, which is very open and easy to see. And on the south side, make a right turn, go to the next creek crossing just 100 feet away. And from there, you can look out the car window when leaves are off the trees, and you can see those ruts from the car window, or they’re easy to hike to. You can actually hike to them. They may not look 10 inches deep, but when you take a string from left to right and you measure, they are about ten inches. Wagon axles were at 20 inches, so it had not been used enough to where the wagons or had gotten them deep enough to drag high center with the axles.
Blackburn: You know, if people want to find Rock Mary, another landmark in your part of the state.
Peters: Yes.
Blackburn: How do they find that?
Peters: Rock Mary’s on private property, and it’s very hard to find these days. From Red Rock Canyon, due west three miles. You can take the main street of Hinton out west. Follow the pavement two and a half miles, then make a left turn, and go south a mile and a half. When you’re on the high place on the county road, you can see the top one-third of Rock Mary. You can’t see the entire. The Blue family won that land during the land run, which was actually by 1901, a land lottery for that Caddo County area. And they had lived there, passed the farm down to the son, to the grandson. One of the grandsons sold that property in 2006 or 2007. The new property owners have changed the fence. They are very Rock Mary friendly. They appreciate the history, they respect it. They guard it as well against vandalism. But they have built a home and a barn down in the lower parts that cannot be seen from the road. So it’s private property. And if somebody wants to see Rock Mary and get a little closer view, the family trusts me to take folks out there. I’ve taken archaeologists. I’ve taken archaeology students out there. I’ve taken Boy Scouts out there.
Blackburn: My wife and I will be your next group because we’ve tried to find that several times.
Peters: Right.
Blackburn: And we know that country well, and we never have seen it.
Thompson: Well, Bob, in 1960, and I found this in The Chronicles of Oklahoma story. In 1960, the Oklahoma Historical Society Board of Directors authorized a group of experts to find Rock Mary, and they went through an expedition, and they looked at the old maps that had been developed and looked at the topography. And they went and identified what the formation that was Rock Mary. And so now, correct me if I’m wrong, Art, but there’s a couple of markers, historical markers and monuments that are at the, I think one at the base and one on the top.
Peters: That’s correct. Yes. Yeah, that was 1960, and those folks in that expedition started at Minco and followed Highway 37, which follows very close, close as it can by mile section roads, follows up through Hinton and on out, cut out to Weatherford. They followed that route, and they were using Lieutenant Simpson’s original survey readings, and they would relocate those, and that’s how they actually relocated the true Rock Mary.
Blackburn: My wife and I have followed that road, Art. You know, you just travel east out of Hinton on that road. It kind of winds back to the south.
Peters: That’s right.
Blackburn: It takes a long time to get back to Oklahoma City that way, but it’s the most beautiful drives in the state.
Peters: Yeah, a lot of motorcycle groups love to do that, love to do that road.
Thompson: Well, Art, it’s been so great talking to you, and I want to let people know where they can come find you at the museum, and what days you’re open so that they can come see it, and you have many, many artifacts, over 2,000 artifacts in the collection that you’ve found associated with the California Road. You have many wagons and buggies and freight haulers. And so tell us where we can come find you.
Peters: We are at 801 South Broadway in Hinton. We are directly between the main intersection of downtown Hinton, which there’s only one main intersection on Highway 281 south of I-40. We are five miles south of I-40, between the downtown intersection and the Red Rock Canyon driveway. Red Rock Canyon is actually at the five mile. The town of Hinton is four-and-a-half. Our claim to fame is the largest buggy collection in Oklahoma. We also have the largest barbed wire collection in the state of Oklahoma, second largest in the nation. We also have the largest telephone collection in Oklahoma of antique telephones. So we have three of Oklahoma’s largest collections in our museum. We don’t know the magical way of advertising to let people know we’re much bigger and better than your average small-town museum. People walk in, and their mouths drop open because we have two stories, and we have a building that’s 120 feet long. We only look like we’re about 20 feet long from the road because the roads are higher than our parking lot. So you’re looking down on us. We look small.
Thompson: What days are you open?
Peters: We are open typically from Monday through Saturday. But like museums, it’s hard to get volunteers. I do have a couple other volunteers to help me out. A person needs to call ahead when they know they’re going to be coming to make sure I will be there. Like today, I’m here instead of there, so the museum is closed this afternoon.
Thompson: And admission?
Peters: We have an admission of $6 for adults, $5 for seniors or a group. If you have five or more in your group, $5 apiece.
Blackburn: So us old-timers have an advantage there. We save a bunch.
Peters: The only advantages of becoming a senior citizen, isn’t it?
Thompson: But if you really, really like it, you probably take donations too.
Peters: Oh yeah. Oh yes we do. We have a donation box, and it’s surprising how many, especially children, say, mom, put something in that box.
Thompson: Yeah.
Blackburn: Trait, of course I’ve been in this business now, historical societies, for 45 years. And traveling around the state, I have such an appreciation for people like Art and those pioneers in Hinton who created that historical society, I would guess, in the ’60s. But that was typically when a lot of these local groups say hey, we have to do something. It was when that first generation was dying off, and the kids say, wait a minute, our parents or grandparents need to be remembered. And it was almost a cottage industry around the state. Today, there’s over 100 of these local museums like this. Art’s is one of the bigger and best and most professionally run. But when we started the grants program about ten years ago, I don’t remember exactly when. It’s when we paid off the bond issue of the History Center, we took that payment and created a grants-in-aid program. And Nicole Harvey still administers for you. And it’s a way for Art and the local communities to get, because Art can turn a $10,000 grant into a $100,000 action. And with that volunteer support, and so those grants, I think, how many did you do this year? Do you recall?
Thompson: Well, our grant cycle just opened. And so, I know last year, we did around $550,000. I can’t remember the exact number of grants that was. But with each grant, I think being a maximum of $20,000, you can see that that’s quite a few grants going in.
Blackburn: It helps those local communities because now we’re into the third and fourth generation of those pioneer families that you work with, Art, and you know who they are, the ones who are proud of their heritage, those that don’t care, the new people don’t know, but if we’re going to maintain that local knowledge and collect what’s in those attics and those barns and going out and seeing, you know, tie in the history to a place, we’ve got to support people like Art and that that museum in Hinton and around the state. The state of Oklahoma has an obligation. Historical Society does. You know, we as donors need to remember these groups that are out there working and doing work for us to save our community’s history. So thank you, Art, for everything you do.
Peters: Thank you. My pleasure.
Thompson: Bob, I always love meeting people who are passionate about history. And you can tell Art, not only does he know his subject, but this is a lifelong passion of his.
Blackburn: You can tell that this experience with that museum is the defining moment of his life. That’s what he’s lived for. He’s learned. You can tell he has a passion for it, and I admire people like that so much with our local historical societies. And if you take the volunteers, and any one of these organizations needs 20 to 30 people at any given time to make them really work with volunteer. You know, you’ve got thousands of Oklahomans who are giving their time, their effort, their money and resources, to preserve that local history.
Thompson: And I think people might think, oh, I have to be an expert in history, or I have to know a lot to go volunteer at a museum. That is not the case at all. I guarantee you, if you come and show up at a museum and say you want to volunteer your time and effort, they will find something for you to do that fits your talents and what you enjoy doing. And guess what? You’ll probably learn some things along the way that you may get interested in helping to tell those stories there, but I would encourage everyone out there, if you have extra time on your hand, even if it’s a few hours a week, your local museum or historical society probably need your help. And they would just do cartwheels if you would show up at their door one day and say, what can I do?
Blackburn: Yeah, and then they can learn a lot about their history.
Thompson: Well, Bob, it’s been great talking to you this month, and I can’t wait to do it again.
Blackburn: Thank you, Trait. Always enjoy it.
(upbeat music playing)
Thompson: You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast, hosted by Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Visit us at okhistory.org and find us on social media by searching for @okhistory. I encourage you to purchase a membership to OHS to help us continue our mission to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s unique and fascinating history.
(upbeat music playing)
