Meador Manor

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of a horseshoe curve just 1,500 feet from Turner Falls, where Highway 77 swoops its way through the old roots of the Arbuckle Mountains.

The 6-mile stretch of road was constructed by convicts back in 1925 and 1926. They lived in a tent camp near the falls. Notice how in the first of four construction slides below, from the 1920s, that back then there were no cedar trees inside the horseshoe curve.

It took two years and the blasting of four million cubic yards of rock to shoot Interstate 35 through that stretch of the Arbuckle Mountains. Its opening in August 1970 eliminated the bottleneck of the horseshoe curves on the two-lane US 77 linking the Oklahoma City and Dallas metropolitan areas.

Since the postcard was made, another access road to the falls area was built down its ravine. Here a flipped view of the area, looking south.

US 77 runs north-south across central Oklahoma from Kansas to Texas. It was the first highway in Oklahoma to be paved entirely from border to border. If you are ever on I-35 between OKC and DFW, take the opportunity to turn off onto US 77 at Turner Falls, and while you’re there, stop in at Arbuckle Mountain Fried Pies and enjoy some of the creations the Pletchers have been serving up for decades.

To me, US 77 south of OKC is full of memories. I earned my bachelor’s degree in Norman, often turning off I-35 onto 77 to enter town on Flood Avenue. My holy roller grandmother lived in tiny Paoli on down the old highway. When I stayed with her as a child, we went shopping in Purcell and Pauls Valley — the Toy & Action Figure Museum is now a great stop at the latter. A flabbergasting childhood moment was when Big Mama, who was actually a tiny woman, took me to Wacker’s Variety Store and bought me a Space:1999 laser pistol, at a time when she wouldn’t even allow a television in her home.

Big Mama’s house was only 150 feet from the centerline of old Highway 77, and before I-35 opened I remember how her house would shake as truck after truck rumbled by. The traffic on US 77 was so heavy you didn’t dare try to cross it on foot, and we had to walk three blocks north to Main Street, where there was a pedestrian underpass, to cross over to the east side of town. All that changed once I-35 opened in 1970, the stretch through Garvin County being one of its final remaining gaps in the state.

My mother was born farther south in tiny Hennepin, on a farm with no electricity or running water, and after over a dozen moves with her family across multiple states, she wound up back near where she started, graduating from Wynnewood High School. Two of my spinster aunts lived in OKC but subscribed to the Davis newspaper and bought Arbuckle Mountain Fried Pies at its OKC location. Finally, my parents often took me trailer camping at Sulphur’s Platt National Park, which became the Chickasaw National Recreation Area.

The Arbuckles are southwest of Sulphur, and they were named after General Mathew Arbuckle, an early commander at Fort Gibson, which was featured on a previous postcard. Those mountains are some of the oldest in the United States, with a core of Precambrian granite and gneiss that is 1.3 billion years old, overlain with Cambrian rhyolite that is 525 million years old. From 515 to 290 million years ago, seas periodically inundated the area, depositing limestone, dolomite, sandstone, and shale.

While taking a geology class at OU, we did a field trip that included a stop at the Arbuckles to observe the tombstone topography of its Ordovician limestone and dolomite layers. There are 15,000 feet of complexly folded and faulted sedimentary rocks, including these differentially weathered and eroded layers which were steeply dipped by mountain-building processes.

A Bartlesville Parallel

US 77 runs through Ponca City, just beyond the western border of the Osage Nation. Ponca City was the home of Marland Oil, which controlled about 1/10 of the world’s oil reserves before being merged into Conoco in 1929.

US 75 runs through Bartlesville, just beyond the eastern border of the Osage Nation. Bartlesville was the home of Phillips Petroleum, which controlled about 1/500 of the world’s oil reserves in 2002 before it merged with Conoco, which by then controlled maybe 1/300 of the reserves.

Our next postcard will take us just a few miles eastward to some much smaller waterfalls at the former national park.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of Turner Falls, where Honey Creek drops down around 60 feet near Davis in the Arbuckle Mountains, although some sources claim 77 feet, which is likely inspired by nearby highway 77. Honey Creek and the falls are a lovely oasis in the old worn-away Arbuckles, with a big swimming pool, hiking trails, caves, and the ruins of a little hillside castle.

I hiked its trails during Thanksgiving Break in 2012, but my earliest clear memory of it is from over 30 years earlier than that, when I camped there in junior high with my late friend Jeff and his parents.

The waterfalls are named after Mazeppa and Laura Turner. He was a Scottish-American farmer who married Laura Johnson, a Chickasaw woman, in Tennessee in 1860. “Zep” Turner fought for the Confederate army during the Civil War and was wounded twice. In 1870, the Turners moved to Stringtown in the Choctaw Nation to farm. Zep wanted to raise cattle, so in 1878 he moved to what is now Murray County and founded Dougherty.

Laura’s allotment included the area around the current cemetery at Dougherty. They began to build a home, but uncovered ancient Indian graves. So the Turners applied for the allotment to be moved and acquired the land around what became Turner Falls.

Laura died in 1890 at age 50, and Zep married Alice Adkins. They moved to nearby Davis in 1900, and Zep was elected to the first state legislature, making the first speech in the House of Representatives in 1907. He was responsible for the Oklahoma School for the Deaf being created in Sulphur.

Zep died in 1920, but a year earlier he had sold 710 acres around the falls to a group of Davis businessmen who planned to develop it into a resort. In 1925, Davis taxpayers voted 134 to 35 in favor of issuing $21,000 in bonds to purchase 370 acres of the property, although the newspaper reported, “Little excitement or interest was shown in the election. Very few women were eligible to vote, as a voter had to be a taxpayer.”

In 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps built walls, roads, and trails in the park, including miles of trail along Honey Creek, enlarging the Blue Hole swimming pool with a new dam, and building an entry road requiring a quarter mile of retaining walls up to fourteen feet high. The city operated the park until 1950, leased it out until 1978, and then resumed managing it.

To a kid, one of the best features of Turner Falls is Collings Castle, the ruins of the vacation home of the founder of the College of Education at the University of Oklahoma. As an undergraduate, I attended several classes in Collings Hall at OU, at the time having no idea its namesake was associated with Turner Falls.

The grounds of the vacation home were less than an acre, with the main house having one of its fireplaces embellished with rose rocks. There were once two bunk houses and two outhouses, with a steep stairway leading up the hillside to a stable area that later served as a garage.

Dr. Ellsworth Collings formed the College of Education in 1929, and in the 1930s he had his oddball vacation and summer home constructed with very low ceilings and doorways leading to extremely steep and narrow spiral stairways, features which have attracted countless young explorers to its ruins.

Collings hired a Mr. and Mrs. Parsons and their son, from Norman, to help him construct his castle, with Collings bringing concrete mix down on the weekends for Mr. Parsons to use during the week. The rocks were cut on an adjacent parcel and hauled up and down by hand and wheelbarrow, and the Parsons lived in a tent at Turner Falls during the construction.

Other education college faculty had nearby cabins, such as Wyldacre, and Collings also had the large Bar C Ranch on the higher ground above, with a larger cabin serving as his personal museum with spurs, branding irons, and miniature saddles.

A Bartlesville Connection

Collings also had a massive collection of western paintings, ornamental longhorns, etc. In yet another Bartlesville connection, much of his collection is displayed at Woolaroc as well as at Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

The castle was eventually sold by Collings’ grandson and passed through multiple owners until the City of Davis bought it in 1977 and it became part of the Turner Falls Park.

You can read more about Turner Falls in my 2012 day hiking post. Tomorrow’s postcard is from US 77 just above the falls.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of eight Indians, including three men wearing feather war bonnets. Historically, those were only worn by the Plains Indian tribes whose ancestral territories extended into the region, not the tribes forcibly relocated to the area in the 1800s.

The tribes with feather war bonnets included the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa. War bonnets were once sacred regalia in which each eagle feather was individually earned through acts of bravery or leadership. However, they were later popularized through Wild West shows and early Hollywood, leading some non-Plains tribes to sometimes adopt them in the late 1800s for their tourist appeal. The Osage historically wore roach headdresses of porcupine hair or turbans of otter fur, Delaware men sometimes sported deer hair headdresses, while Cherokee wore wrapped cloth turbans, sometimes with a hair roach or single eagle feather.

A different reproduction of the postcard claimed the Indians were photographed at the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch, a Wild West show near Ponca City that operated off and on from 1905 to 1931. In 1881, George Washington Miller first used the 101 brand on his cattle. He and other ranchers were forced out of the Cherokee Outlet, and in 1893 he leased Ponca land. His ranch eventually covered more than 100,000 acres or over 156 square miles.

Miller’s sons helped diversify the ranch into growing various crops with fruit orchards and vegetables, plus livestock. George Washington Miller died in 1903, and his son Joe ran the operations and farming, his son Zack controlled the livestock, and his son George Lee Miller handled the finances. They added an electric plant, cannery, dairy, tannery, store, and mills to the ranch with its main house about 6 miles southwest of Ponca City. Ernest Marland searched for and found oil on the ranch land, increasing the brothers’ profits, and the basement area of Marland’s Grand Home in Ponca City is now a 101 Ranch Museum.

The ranch’s claim to fame was its Wild West shows, which began in 1905. At the first show, the famous Apache Geronimo, at age 76, killed a bison from the front seat of a car. Their show toured seasonally from 1907 to 1915 and 1926 to 1931 across the country and it travelled to Mexico, Canada, Europe, and South America. The ranch assisted with motion pictures by Will Rogers, Tom Mix, and others. In 1916, Buffalo Bill Cody combined his show with the 101 Ranch show, but in the 1920s competition from movies, circuses, and rodeos reduced the show’s popularity.

Joe died in 1927 and George Lee in 1929. The ranch went into receivership in 1931, and the land was divided and leased with much of the personal property auctioned off. Zack died in 1952.

Having old Geronimo shooting a bison from a car at age 76 was as potentially exploitive as the postcard. Maybe the Indians enjoyed such stunts and posing for photographs in traditional outfits, but it likely was an anachronistic example of generalized regalia to evoke a sense of “The Wild West” for tourists. Below is a quite different photograph of an Osage family in the early 20th century.

A Bartlesville Connection

Not only is Bartlesville located in the old Cooweescoowee district of the Cherokee Nation, just beyond the eastern border of the Osage Nation, but it is also the headquarters of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, a federally recognized tribe of the Lenape people. In 1867, the Eastern Delaware of Kansas negotiated with the Cherokee Nation to purchase 157,600 acres, with most of those plots clustered in the northwest districts of the Cherokees, in modern-day Washington, Nowata, Rogers, Craig, and Tulsa counties.

In 1868, Jacob Bartles married Nannie Journeycake Pratt, daughter of Delaware Chief Charles Journeycake. They moved from Kansas to Indian Territory in 1872, and Bartles purchased Nelson Carr’s gristmill in modern-day Bartlesville in 1875.

Tomorrow’s postcard will take us to the state’s largest waterfall.