Oklahoma City, Region Floor Overview
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Oklahoma City sits at almost exactly the geographic center of the continental United States, which is not a coincidence, and not merely a fact. It explains something about the city's character: this is a place that has served as a crossroads for as long as people have moved across the Great Plains. The Kiowa, the Comanche, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Apache, and dozens of other tribal nations used the river bottoms and upland prairies of central Oklahoma as hunting grounds, trade routes, and seasonal camps for thousands of years before European contact.
The Five Civilized Tribes arrived from the Southeast on federal removal orders in the eighteen thirties. The cattle drives of the eighteen seventies and eighties passed through on their way from Texas to Kansas. The railroad arrived in eighteen eighty-seven.
The Land Run of eighteen eighty-nine created the city in an afternoon. What grew from those circumstances is a city of roughly seven hundred thousand people in the city proper and about one point four million in the metropolitan area, the largest city in Oklahoma and one of the twenty-five largest in the United States by land area. It is an oil city, a cattle city, a government city, and increasingly a technology and aerospace city.
Tinker Air Force Base, one of the largest military installations in the country, lies a few miles to the southeast. The city's identity has been shaped by several large facts. It was created instantly, which means it has no medieval core, no colonial layer, no antebellum history to look back on, it is almost entirely a product of the twentieth century.
It sits in the middle of Tornado Alley, which has made it simultaneously physically vulnerable and psychologically resilient. It was the site of the worst domestic terrorist attack in American history, and it chose to respond to that fact with a memorial of unusual restraint and honesty. And it is home to thirty-nine tribal nations with deep Oklahoma roots, a fact that the city is only beginning to fully absorb into its sense of itself.
The red earth runs under all of it.
