Boomer Sooner. The Next Chapter. On the edge of Kingfisher County, facing towards the parched riverbed of the Cimarron River, the wind blows hard across the Oklahoma plain. The sun shines down intensely. I’m standing here with multiple generations of my father’s family lying in gravestones behind me. There’s “Richard Sturgeon,” a Civil War veteran who fought for both armies (it’s complicated) and lived until his eighties. A few yards away is another “Richard Sturgeon,” his grandson, who fell down a well and drowned at age 15 months. An angel is scrawled on the headstone. My own grandparents are buried just yards away. The Sturgeons were classic “Sooners” – ambitious homesteaders who flooded Oklahoma in the 1880’s, even before it formally opened for settlement. In their zeal, the Sooners cleared forests, cultivated small farms, and created communities on the edge of the frontier. They also met and intermarried with the Southern tribes (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek) who arrived generations before. A new society was created literally overnight. Looking over the empty plain, it’s odd to see that that world is now gone. The ranch where my grandmother Hazel grew up and my father spent his youthful summers, is now abandoned. The windows are broken and the screen door falling down. The only visitors for the past few years appear to be cattle who amble over from a neighboring farm. Even the River, where my dad and his cousins went quail hunting, is all dried up. Other than sixty headstones in the town cemetery, there’s no sign of human life. That’s not unique. Here in northwest Oklahoma, a community came and went, passing into history in about four generations. And this is happening all over the Great Plains. And yet, even as these frontier farming communities disappear, the state of Oklahoma is wealthier than ever. Its cities are packed with new office buildings, new hotels, new restaurants. Its universities have some of the largest endowments in the nation. Oklahoma City is Tysons Corner, only with a pro basketball team and cheap steaks. This wealth is the booming energy economy which has succeeded where subsistence farming failed. The same rural townships which could not survive in the 20th century are home to plentiful oil and gas fields now reached with 21st century technologies like horizontal drilling. Those resources are extracted, refined and sold to markets around the nation and world. Ironically, the heartland of the USA, long given up for dead by economists and political scientists, may well be the catalyst for this nation’s recovery and economic re-emergence. Back in the graveyard, the summer wind passes over the lonely stones. “Rest easy,” one stone says. “Eternity is at hand.”
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 12:48:50 +0000
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