Volume 13 , Issue 25

A History of Oklahoma

We found another history book on Google Books. This history book is A History of Oklahoma, by Joseph Bradgield Thoburn, Isaac Mason Holcomb with a photo of Sequoyah (George Guess) holding a tablet on the frontcover. It was published in 1908 by Doub & Scompany of San Francisco. Joseph B. Thoburn was a former secretary of the Oklahoma Board of Agriculture. Isaac M. Holcomb was a former Superintendent of the Oklahoma City Schools.

There is a poem entitled "Oklahoma" by George R. Hall, on the first pages that this NW Okie has never read or seen before. Maybe someone out there might have seen this poem, which I transcribed below.

OKLAHOMA
Land of the mistletoe, smiling in splendor,
Out from the borderland, mystic and old,
Sweet are the memories, precious and tender,
Linked with thy summers of azure and gold.

O, Oklahoma, fair land of my dreaming,
Land of the lover, the loved and the lost:
Cherish thy legends with tragedy teeming,
Legends where love reckoned not of the cost.

Land of Sequoyah, my heart's in they keeping.
O, Tulledega, how can I forget!
Calm are they vales where the silences sleeping,
Wake into melodies tinged with regret.

Let the deep chorus of life's music throbbing,
Swell to full harmony born of the years;
Or for the loved and lost, tenderly sobbing,
Drop to that cadence that whispers of tears.

Land of the mistletoe, here's to thy glory!
Here's to thy daughters as fair as the dawn!
Here's to thy pioneer sons, in whose story
Valor and love shall live endlessly on!

The story of Oklahoma is a land of many peoples! Within its limits live the remnants or descendants of not less than fifty different tribes and nations of Indians. Their former homes of these peoples were scattered over thirty different states. I suppose you could say, "Every state in the Union is represented by the white people who settled in Oklahoma."

The citizenship of Oklahoma is made up of blended blood of the Puritan, the Cavalier, the patroon, the Covenanter and many of its people trace their descent from the American Indian as well.

The Indian has played an important part in the earlier history of every state of the American Union. It was only in Oklahoma that his race played a part in its construction.


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