Meador Manor

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of the Quanah Parker Dam in the Wichita Mountains near Lawton. Parker was a war leader of the Kwahadi Antelope band of the Comanche Nation, the son of Kwahadi chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been abducted as a nine-year-old child during the Fort Parker massacre in 1836 and assimilated into the Nokoni Wanderers tribe.

Quanah was a dominant figure in the Red River War of 1874. In 1867, the U.S. Army began hunting bison to sabotage the food sources of plains Indians, and after a new technique for tanning their hides became available, commercial hunters reduced the tens of millions of bison to near extinction. The War marked the end of free-roaming Indian populations on the southern Great Plains.

Quanah surrendered in 1875 and led the Kwahadi Comanche to a Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation at Fort Sill, which is just outside the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge where his namesake dam and its lake were constructed in 1935 on Quanah Creek in Comanche County.

The images below were taken at roughly the same time, showing Quanah in traditional Comanche and then European-American business attire, 15 years after his surrender.

Parker’s home in Cache was called the Star House, and he went on hunting trips with President Theodore Roosevelt, who often visited him. He rejected both monogamy and traditional Protestant Christianity in favor of the Native American Church movement.

The wildlife refuge is over 59,000 acres and began in 1901 as the Wichita Forest Reserve. President Theodore Roosevelt made it the nation’s first big-game animal refuge. In 1905, the New York Zoological Park offered the federal government fifteen American bison to begin a herd for the refuge if it would agree to fence it.

Quanah Parker led a First Peoples contingent greeting the newly arrived bison, and the preserve went on to successfully preserve elk, wild turkey, and a herd of Texas longhorn cattle in its prairie environment. Unsuccessful programs included pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, and the prairie chicken. The refuge also features deer, prairie dogs, raccoons, bobcats, coyotes, and rabbits. I’ve hiked all of the trails at the refuge, and I have seen most of those animals there, and I can personally attest that it also has rattlesnakes.

Quanah Parker acted in several silent films, and he died at Star House in 1911 at age 66. His remains are in the Fort Sill Post Cemetery, where his tombstone reads, “Resting here until day breaks and shadows fall and darkness disappears is Quanah Parker, Last Chief of the Comanches.”

I first visited the refuge in 1989 with my late best friend, and I returned to Quanah Parker Lake in 2011 and took Wendy there in 2013. In the summer of 2019, I had to attend a training for public school administrators in Lawton, and I took the opportunity to visit the lake again, having been impressed by the pretty little lake and its old dam with a walkway across the top.

Company #859 of the CCC built the dam, about five miles north of Star House, as a miniature remembrance of the larger dams of the west, such as Boulder Dam, now known as Hoover Dam. Oklahoma’s dam rises 52 feet, while Hoover Dam rises 726 feet. The Oklahoma lake covers 89 acres and has three miles of shoreline, with a capacity of 905 acre-feet, while Lake Mead once covered about 158,000 acres with 759 miles of shoreline. However, drought and climate change have reduced it to almost one quarter of its capacity.

A Bartlesville Connection

The obvious link between the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge and Bartlesville is that they have each played a role in preserving the American bison. In 1926, Frank Phillips established the Woolaroc Museum and Wildlife Preserve, starting with a herd of 90 bison. 183 bison came by rail from the Scotty Philip estate in Pierre, South Dakota and were split among Woolaroc, Waite Phillips’ ranch in New Mexico, and the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch mentioned in an earlier postcard post. The 3,700-acre Woolaroc ranch remains a major sanctuary for bison, elk, and longhorn cattle.

P.S. If you noticed I keep using the term bison instead of buffalo, that is because bison and buffalo are distinct species, and what many of us in American colloquially call buffalo are actually bison.

Tomorrow’s postcard is the final one in this series, and it has 14 tiny images on it surrounding some doggerel about, you guessed it, the Sooner State.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of a horseshoe curve just 1,500 feet from Turner Falls, where Highway 77 swoops its way through the old roots of the Arbuckle Mountains.

The 6-mile stretch of road was constructed by convicts back in 1925 and 1926. They lived in a tent camp near the falls. Notice how in the first of four construction slides below, from the 1920s, that back then there were no cedar trees inside the horseshoe curve.

It took two years and the blasting of four million cubic yards of rock to shoot Interstate 35 through that stretch of the Arbuckle Mountains. Its opening in August 1970 eliminated the bottleneck of the horseshoe curves on the two-lane US 77 linking the Oklahoma City and Dallas metropolitan areas.

Since the postcard was made, another access road to the falls area was built down its ravine. Here a flipped view of the area, looking south.

US 77 runs north-south across central Oklahoma from Kansas to Texas. It was the first highway in Oklahoma to be paved entirely from border to border. If you are ever on I-35 between OKC and DFW, take the opportunity to turn off onto US 77 at Turner Falls, and while you’re there, stop in at Arbuckle Mountain Fried Pies and enjoy some of the creations the Pletchers have been serving up for decades.

To me, US 77 south of OKC is full of memories. I earned my bachelor’s degree in Norman, often turning off I-35 onto 77 to enter town on Flood Avenue. My holy roller grandmother lived in tiny Paoli on down the old highway. When I stayed with her as a child, we went shopping in Purcell and Pauls Valley — the Toy & Action Figure Museum is now a great stop at the latter. A flabbergasting childhood moment was when Big Mama, who was actually a tiny woman, took me to Wacker’s Variety Store and bought me a Space:1999 laser pistol, at a time when she wouldn’t even allow a television in her home.

Big Mama’s house was only 150 feet from the centerline of old Highway 77, and before I-35 opened I remember how her house would shake as truck after truck rumbled by. The traffic on US 77 was so heavy you didn’t dare try to cross it on foot, and we had to walk three blocks north to Main Street, where there was a pedestrian underpass, to cross over to the east side of town. All that changed once I-35 opened in 1970, the stretch through Garvin County being one of its final remaining gaps in the state.

My mother was born farther south in tiny Hennepin, on a farm with no electricity or running water, and after over a dozen moves with her family across multiple states, she wound up back near where she started, graduating from Wynnewood High School. Two of my spinster aunts lived in OKC but subscribed to the Davis newspaper and bought Arbuckle Mountain Fried Pies at its OKC location. Finally, my parents often took me trailer camping at Sulphur’s Platt National Park, which became the Chickasaw National Recreation Area.

The Arbuckles are southwest of Sulphur, and they were named after General Mathew Arbuckle, an early commander at Fort Gibson, which was featured on a previous postcard. Those mountains are some of the oldest in the United States, with a core of Precambrian granite and gneiss that is 1.3 billion years old, overlain with Cambrian rhyolite that is 525 million years old. From 515 to 290 million years ago, seas periodically inundated the area, depositing limestone, dolomite, sandstone, and shale.

While taking a geology class at OU, we did a field trip that included a stop at the Arbuckles to observe the tombstone topography of its Ordovician limestone and dolomite layers. There are 15,000 feet of complexly folded and faulted sedimentary rocks, including these differentially weathered and eroded layers which were steeply dipped by mountain-building processes.

A Bartlesville Parallel

US 77 runs through Ponca City, just beyond the western border of the Osage Nation. Ponca City was the home of Marland Oil, which controlled about 1/10 of the world’s oil reserves before being merged into Conoco in 1929.

US 75 runs through Bartlesville, just beyond the eastern border of the Osage Nation. Bartlesville was the home of Phillips Petroleum, which controlled about 1/500 of the world’s oil reserves in 2002 before it merged with Conoco, which by then controlled maybe 1/300 of the reserves.

Our next postcard will take us just a few miles eastward to some much smaller waterfalls at the former national park.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of Turner Falls, where Honey Creek drops down around 60 feet near Davis in the Arbuckle Mountains, although some sources claim 77 feet, which is likely inspired by nearby highway 77. Honey Creek and the falls are a lovely oasis in the old worn-away Arbuckles, with a big swimming pool, hiking trails, caves, and the ruins of a little hillside castle.

I hiked its trails during Thanksgiving Break in 2012, but my earliest clear memory of it is from over 30 years earlier than that, when I camped there in junior high with my late friend Jeff and his parents.

The waterfalls are named after Mazeppa and Laura Turner. He was a Scottish-American farmer who married Laura Johnson, a Chickasaw woman, in Tennessee in 1860. “Zep” Turner fought for the Confederate army during the Civil War and was wounded twice. In 1870, the Turners moved to Stringtown in the Choctaw Nation to farm. Zep wanted to raise cattle, so in 1878 he moved to what is now Murray County and founded Dougherty.

Laura’s allotment included the area around the current cemetery at Dougherty. They began to build a home, but uncovered ancient Indian graves. So the Turners applied for the allotment to be moved and acquired the land around what became Turner Falls.

Laura died in 1890 at age 50, and Zep married Alice Adkins. They moved to nearby Davis in 1900, and Zep was elected to the first state legislature, making the first speech in the House of Representatives in 1907. He was responsible for the Oklahoma School for the Deaf being created in Sulphur.

Zep died in 1920, but a year earlier he had sold 710 acres around the falls to a group of Davis businessmen who planned to develop it into a resort. In 1925, Davis taxpayers voted 134 to 35 in favor of issuing $21,000 in bonds to purchase 370 acres of the property, although the newspaper reported, “Little excitement or interest was shown in the election. Very few women were eligible to vote, as a voter had to be a taxpayer.”

In 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps built walls, roads, and trails in the park, including miles of trail along Honey Creek, enlarging the Blue Hole swimming pool with a new dam, and building an entry road requiring a quarter mile of retaining walls up to fourteen feet high. The city operated the park until 1950, leased it out until 1978, and then resumed managing it.

To a kid, one of the best features of Turner Falls is Collings Castle, the ruins of the vacation home of the founder of the College of Education at the University of Oklahoma. As an undergraduate, I attended several classes in Collings Hall at OU, at the time having no idea its namesake was associated with Turner Falls.

The grounds of the vacation home were less than an acre, with the main house having one of its fireplaces embellished with rose rocks. There were once two bunk houses and two outhouses, with a steep stairway leading up the hillside to a stable area that later served as a garage.

Dr. Ellsworth Collings formed the College of Education in 1929, and in the 1930s he had his oddball vacation and summer home constructed with very low ceilings and doorways leading to extremely steep and narrow spiral stairways, features which have attracted countless young explorers to its ruins.

Collings hired a Mr. and Mrs. Parsons and their son, from Norman, to help him construct his castle, with Collings bringing concrete mix down on the weekends for Mr. Parsons to use during the week. The rocks were cut on an adjacent parcel and hauled up and down by hand and wheelbarrow, and the Parsons lived in a tent at Turner Falls during the construction.

Other education college faculty had nearby cabins, such as Wyldacre, and Collings also had the large Bar C Ranch on the higher ground above, with a larger cabin serving as his personal museum with spurs, branding irons, and miniature saddles.

A Bartlesville Connection

Collings also had a massive collection of western paintings, ornamental longhorns, etc. In yet another Bartlesville connection, much of his collection is displayed at Woolaroc as well as at Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

The castle was eventually sold by Collings’ grandson and passed through multiple owners until the City of Davis bought it in 1977 and it became part of the Turner Falls Park.

You can read more about Turner Falls in my 2012 day hiking post. Tomorrow’s postcard is from US 77 just above the falls.