Claremore: Will Rogers and the Road Named for Him

The highway you are driving through northeastern Oklahoma was renamed in honor of a man born a few miles from here in a log cabin in Indian Territory in November of eighteen seventy-nine. He was Will Rogers, and his story is one of the great American arcs, from a Cherokee ranch boy who never finished high school to the most quoted, most recognized, and arguably most beloved entertainer in the country during the nineteen twenties and thirties.

Will Rogers was born William Penn Adair Rogers, the son of Clement Vann Rogers, a prominent Cherokee statesman, rancher, and judge who would later help draft the Oklahoma state constitution. Will was nine thirty-second Cherokee by lineage and always led with that identity. He grew up on the family ranch near Oologah, about twelve miles from Claremore, learning rope tricks from a Black cowhand named Dan Walker and developing an obsessive skill with a lasso that would become his ticket to the world.

After stints doing Wild West shows in Argentina and South Africa, Rogers landed in New York vaudeville around nineteen oh five and found his voice. He was a trick roper who talked while he roped, and the talking turned out to be the real act. His deadpan political observations, delivered in an Oklahoma drawl with impeccable timing, made him a sensation. Florenz Ziegfeld put him in the Follies from nineteen sixteen through nineteen twenty-five. By the nineteen thirties he was writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column read by forty million people, hosting a Gulf Oil radio program, and making films for Fox. He was the highest-paid performer in Hollywood.

His most famous line came without the humor. He said, I never met a man I didn't like. He meant it.

Rogers died on August fifteenth, nineteen thirty-five, when the plane he was traveling in with aviator Wiley Post crashed near Point Barrow, Alaska. He was fifty-five years old and at the absolute peak of his fame. The grief was national. His body was brought home to Claremore, where he is buried at the Will Rogers Memorial. The US Highway Sixty-Six Association formally renamed the road the Will Rogers Highway in his honor.

Claremore carries the name of an Osage chief, Clermont, and it was spelled wrong from the start, a postal error that stuck permanently.