Volume 15 , Issue 24

1913 Many Ex-Texans Now Oklahomans

If you checked the front page headlines of the Amarillo Daily News, dated Tuesday, June 17, 1913, in Amarillo, Texas, you might have noticed this little headline: "Many Ex-Texans Now Oklahomans." It also mentioned that Sooner state thickly populated by emigrants from this state, and overcrowding is the cause. A. S. Stinett says, "Great Panhandle Fair would bring stream of immigration to this section of Texas."

Stinett wrote, "Did it ever occur to the people of the Panhandle that the quick settlement and development of the State of Oklahoma was mainly by and through the people emigrating thither from Texas! There is a large sprinting of Texas people in the northern and northeastern section of Oklahoma, but most of the people of the Old Indian Territory subdivision of Oklahoma are ex-Texans, and it is this division of the state that carries the heaviest population, and has the development and wealth, and such is largely true of Western Oklahoma."

It was reported back in 1913 that Oklahoma had a population of something like two million people, and it would be no exaggeration to state that 500,000 of the said population were ex-Texans.

The news article also mentioned that there were at least 100 counties in the state of Texas that had every tillable acre, and in their extremity, many acres that were not tillable, under cultivation in a desperate effort to keep the rising generation at home, and the overflow from these counties was then growing and increasing each year, and this overflow was still seeking a resting place in Oklahoma in one direction. California, Washington, Oregan and other Northwestern states, in another direction, and there was a steady and increasing stream of Texans passing through the Panhandle to the Northwestern States, and this was known to be true, as the editor of the news piece had met them with increasing numbers over the past several years around 1913.   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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