Duncan and Stephens County, Oklahoma
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About this ebook
Using primarily the archives of the Stephens County Historical Museum, the authors selected photographs that illustrate the two themes of community and oil, and how they impact each other. Highlights include the growth and development of Duncan, Marlow, and Comanche; prosperity from the oil boom; the strong
sense of community through the Depression; service in both World War I and World War II; renewed growth following World War II; and contemporary efforts to strengthen the communities.
Chris Jefferies Ph.D.
Chris Jefferies is currently the director of the On the Chisholm Trial Statue and Museum in Duncan, a board member of the Stephens County Historical Society and Museum, and the executive director of the On the Chisholm Trail Association. Pee Wee Cary is currently the curator at the Stephens County Historical Museum, a board member of the Stephens County Historical Museum, and a professional photographer. Proceeds from this book will directly benefit the Historical Society. Jefferies and Cary have created a pictorial retrospective that will be treasured in Duncan and Stephens County for years to come.
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Duncan and Stephens County, Oklahoma - Chris Jefferies Ph.D.
Commission.
INTRODUCTION
Oklahoma’s Great Plains country describes the grass-covered plains and rolling hills that cover Oklahoma’s southwest corner. Long the preserve of the nomadic plains Indians, it is the site of myriad currents of history that swirled across its surface and whose impacts are still felt today. Early explorers, trappers, nomadic Indian tribes, the U.S. Army and Cavalry, cowboys, desperados, and outlaws have all left their tracks. Its earliest non-Indian explorers were the Spanish, who established an outpost just 25 miles due south of today’s Stephens County on the Red River in the mid-1700s. They extended exploration and mining activities to the Wichita Mountains less than 30 miles due west of the county. The first eye-witness account of the region’s exploration was by a member of the 1834 Dodge-Leavenworth expedition, guided, not coincidentally, by Jesse Chisholm, for whom the Great Cattle Road running through the county was later named. Their route passed just south of present Duncan. This early account portrayed a bleak and uninviting region, shunned by all but its Native American inhabitants, and trappers and traders. Stephens County lies on the far eastern edge of these plains, adjacent to the Cross Timbers.
The Cross Timbers is a geographic phenomenon that played a significant role in the development of the county. It describes a dense, almost impenetrable growth of Black Jack Oak and Post Oak timber that extends from north-central Texas northward to the center of Oklahoma. Only about 50 to 75 miles in width, it presented such an obstacle to early east-west travel that the trails and roads through the Cross Timbers converged in the few gaps that allowed passage. Thus, the Dodge-Leavenworth expedition, and the later Fort Arbuckle-Fort Belknap, and Fort Arbuckle-Fort Sill roads passed through the county. When the forceful removal of Native American tribes from the American southeast in 1837 led in 1855 to the creation of separate Indian nations in present-day Oklahoma, future Stephens County lay on the far western edge of the Chickasaw Nation’s Pickens County. Almost isolated from the rest of the Chickasaw Nation, the region was largely ignored by the Tribal government. This neglect led, in turn, to early, if mostly illegal, settlement by a few non-Indians.
When Joseph McCoy sought to attract the large herds of cattle he hoped would be flowing north out of Texas after the Civil War to Abilene, Kansas, and his new stockyards, he sent posters and handbills south throughout Texas proclaiming a new, safer, and shorter route to the railheads. He hired surveyors to lay out a route, and they worked southward from Abilene to present-day Wichita, then south along Jesse Chisholm’s trade route to his post on the North Canadian river near present-day Yukon, Oklahoma. From there, they went largely due south on a route that took them through future Stephens County to the Red River, and a crossing north of present-day Nocona, Texas. Their route through Stephens County resulted from the surveyor’s efforts to stay close to the Cross Timbers and off the plains to the west, across which roamed the hostile Kiowas, Comanches, and Southern Cheyenne. McCoy’s enticements worked, and thus was born the Great Cattle Road, more commonly known as the Chisholm Trail, over which about 4 million cattle traveled from 1867 to the mid-1880s. Another 6 million cattle went up the Western Trail in far west Indian Territory.
It was along the Chisholm Trail,