Haunted Oklahoma City
By Jeff Provine and Tanya McCoy
3/5
()
About this ebook
Oklahoma City boasts a rich heritage of gumption and perseverance, but there are many tales only whispered from shadows. A spectral woman may be seen in the upper window of the Overholser Mansion, looking for her long-lost love. The spirit of one of Oklahoma’s feistiest leaders is said to dwell in the Governor’s Mansion, where he trips guests on the stairs. Perhaps still thirsty for the drink a fatal gunshot interrupted, the ghost of a cheating mobster rattles the glasses at Gabriella’s off Route 66. Jeff Provine and Tanya McCoy uncover the curious and creepy tales of the Sooner State capital.
Jeff Provine
Jeff Provine is a farm kid turned college professor. After growing up on a farm dating back to the Land Run of 1893, he attended the School of Science and Math before going on to complete his master's at the University of Oklahoma. In 2009 he began the OU Ghost Tour. He writes webcomics, blogs regularly, campaigns for the integration of internet media into the classroom and has developed courses on the history of comic books and the life of Charlie Chaplin.
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Haunted Oklahoma City - Jeff Provine
INTRODUCTION
HISTORY OF THE CITY
The word Oklahoma
was coined during the negotiations of 1866 as new treaties were being determined between the Five Civilized Tribes and the federal government after the Civil War. The Choctaw Nation had sent its principal chief, Allen Wright, as part of the delegation, and when asked what the collective lands of the tribes could be called, he suggested Okla, meaning people,
and homa, meaning red.
The new word was adopted by all parties and soon became recognized around the country.
The Treaty of 1866 carried several stipulations, including granting railroad right of ways, upholding the U.S. Constitution and enforcing the sale of the less populated western lands, which would be used as future reservations. While more Native Americans were moved into Indian Territory, there remained nearly three thousand square miles of Unassigned Lands.
These lands were far from empty. For millennia, buffalo herds had roamed the area, which was dubbed the Osage Plains
on maps. While the Osage in the north stood as the strongest force in the area, it was also visited by hunting parties of Comanches, Kiowas, Tonkawas and more. Even white men ventured into the area to explore, as Washington Irving recounted in a story of joining a buffalo hunt in present-day Moore, Oklahoma, in his famous book Tour of the Prairies. Jesse Chisholm worked to settle the area more permanently with one of his trading posts in 1858. It stood just east of the North Canadian River, where, today, it is crossed by Northwest Tenth, a ford said to be called Dead Man’s Crossing, as a body was discovered there. The Civil War interrupted his settlement, but he reestablished it when the conflict had ended.
Chisholm was not the only one looking to colonize the plains. The Boomer movement began with David L. Payne, whose interpretation of the Homestead Act of 1862 stated that the Unassigned Lands were federal property available to settlers at 160 acres apiece. Legally, the area was set aside for future tribal use, but that did not stop Payne from starting an Oklahoma Colony company. Would-be settlers paid twenty-five dollars for a town lot in the future capital of the territory, and a two-dollar subscription entitled them to entry to the colony and 160 acres. Payne was estimated to have taken in over $100,000 in dues, though none of his colonies lasted more than a few weeks.
The first Payne expedition crossed into the Unassigned Lands in 1880 and pushed on to the North Canadian River, beginning a settlement near what today would be Trosper Park. Cavalry from Fort Reno arrived two weeks later, arrested the small populace and escorted it back to Kansas. Despite Payne’s death while promoting in Arkansas, the Boomer movement lived on under William Couch. More colonies popped up over the years in areas that would become Stiles Park, Council Grove and the ghost town Ewing, which still has its cemetery near Northeast Sixty-Third Street. There seemed to be something about the area that drew settlers.
Land once claimed by Boomers now stands as Trosper Park.
While the Boomers struggled, the famed cattle drives of the 1860s and ’70s showed that the land was suitable for hardy folk. Technology supplanted the cattle drives as the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway sought to connect its railhead at Arkansas City, Kansas, with Fort Worth, Texas. To do so, the railroad would have to establish several new stops along the way to resupply the steam engines with fresh water and coal. Little settlements were established in 1887 at Deer Creek Station (which would become Guthrie), Norman Station and, near the North Canadian River, Oklahoma Station.
In 1889, the Boomers at last won out. Anticipating that the land would likely be seized anyhow, a delegation from the Creek Nation went to Washington that January to suggest the lands be resold to the federal government, free and clear. A rider was attached to the annual Indian Appropriation Bill approving $1.25 per acre for the nearly 1.4 million acres to the Creeks, and the Seminoles received a $2 million total payment for their share. President Benjamin Harrison, only three weeks into his term, signed the proclamation that the land would be opened for settlement at noon on April 22. Any adult head of household could claim 160 acres, provided they would prove it up
by building a house and planting crops. Smaller town plots were laid out in planned communities, and those along the railway were the most valuable of all.
For weeks ahead of the opening, crowds gathered at the border. The law stated that no person who entered the Unassigned Lands before noon that day would be eligible for a claim due to their unfair advantage. Even employees of the Santa Fe Railway, who had a right to be in the area, were not eligible. Still, that did not stop many people from slipping in sooner than allowed, whether through the long, empty border at night or simply hopping off the train and hiding in the brush. Scores of people were said to have camped out the night before at Oklahoma Station, leaving
before dawn only to hide in the bulrushes and cottonwoods of the North Canadian River to wait.
When the soldiers sounded noon, hopeful thousands leaped into the greatest race in history, driving wagons, riding ponies and even hurrying on foot. Many of the future citizens of Oklahoma City rode the trains leaving from Purcell in the south and Ponca in the north. The trains ran overloaded, but only those resilient few stayed aboard rather than jumping off at Norman or, especially, Guthrie, which was expected to become the new territory’s capital.
The riders from the Indian Meridian fifteen miles to the east arrived at Oklahoma Station to find many of the key lots already claimed. Even the sneaky Sooners
were shocked to find as they crawled from the rushes that many of the railroad employees had staked lots in the thirty or forty minutes they had waited after noon to ensure they looked beyond suspicion. The ex-railroaders had turned in their notice before midnight and were thus no longer employed by Santa Fe on the day of the Run. Technically, they were not entering the Unassigned Lands because they were already legally there.
With forty-five figures, the Centennial Land Run Monument is one of the longest freestanding bronze sculptures in the world.
To add to the tangled mess, claim jumpers
soon appeared. Anyone letting their guard down was susceptible to someone moving in and setting up their own camp. Two runners might stake the same claim one soon after the other, and, while they argued, have both their stakes torn out by a third person who then asserted to be the owner. Worst of all, to be legally recognized as the claimant, the new owner had to leave their land behind and travel to the land office in Guthrie, where the wait to be processed could be days or even weeks.
In Harper’s Weekly, Richard Harding Davis described the scene at Oklahoma Station: Pilgrims fall on both knees, and hammer stakes into the ground and pull them up again and drive them down somewhere else, at a place which they hope will eventually become a corner lot facing the post office, and drag up the next man’s stake, and threaten him with a Winchester because he is on their land which they have owned for at least three minutes.
One clever runner first set up his cookstove and heated it red hot to make it impossible for any claim jumper to clear his place.
Amid the chaos of the land run, there were many legitimate citizens who rightfully beat the odds and claimed a new home for themselves. Davis had noted that on the morning of the Run, Oklahoma Station consisted of a home for the railroad agent and four other small buildings.
By nightfall, the area that would become Oklahoma City had an estimated twelve thousand people. Among them was colony-founder William Couch himself, who finally lived out his Boomer dream with a claim staked on what would become West Main Street.
At the time, there were no streets. The surveyors who had marked the area had neglected to mark out any between lots, meaning people had to climb over one another’s camps just to get down to the river for a drink of water. Enterprising parents sent their children down to the river with buckets to sell water door to door. One particularly enterprising fellow set up a booth at the rail depot’s public well and sold fresh, cool well water for $0.05 a pint ($1.44 in 2015). When authorities caught word of this, he was quickly escorted away from his would-be business, and the well was reopened to the public.
Within one month, Oklahoma City already had wooden and brick buildings, though many pioneers still lived in tents and dugouts. Courtesy RetroMetro OKC Resources Committee.
Depending on soldiers to keep the peace was a good stopgap measure, but the question of who would govern these citizens arose. For the time being, soldiers from Fort Reno had been stationed in a campsite between the railroad and the north bend of the river in the east. While soldiers at similar camps in Guthrie and Norman were withdrawn only weeks after the land run, those in Oklahoma City had to be reinforced by the Fifth Cavalry while two different groups were jockeying for supremacy of the wild new town.
The troubles started when the Oklahoma Colony Company began surveying a plat for the city at the railway, working westward. As the surveyors came down what would become Sheridan Avenue, they arrived face to rifle with Seminole Land and Improvement Company surveyors, who had been making their own plat in the north. The two plats did not quite line up, and neither side would budge on giving up. As they laid their own streets, there was a distinct jog along what was then called Grand Avenue. These jogs lasted until the urban renewal of the 1960s, when heavy demolition finally corrected them.
Disagreements in geography were only the beginning. At 3:00 p.m. on April 22, the Oklahoma Town Company called for an election. The Seminoles arrived shortly thereafter with a written town charter and declared their own elections. The Oklahoma Town Company then wrote its own charter and called for a new election. The two political parties sparred back and forth over any issue that could possibly arise until finally U.S. marshal R.A. Walker of Kansas arrived to enforce the electoral process. For five months, the town was run by marshals, including Deputy Charles Colcord, who would go on to serve as chief of police before striking it rich with oil and building his famed hotel. With order restored, the federal government hosted the city’s incorporation and dispatched additional land agents to judge the conflicting issues with claim jumpers and Sooners.
It was a strange start to Oklahoma (which wouldn’t add City
officially until 1923), but soon, a real town thrived on the rolling prairie. In the 1890 census, Oklahoma City had a permanent population of 5,086, just 800 behind Guthrie, which had, indeed, become the capital. A rivalry was born that would culminate with