Dwyer pens ‘heroic’ history of state

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  • The Story of Oklahoma and Its People
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Recently, Oklahoma City Community College responded to complaints and concerns from its student population about the presence of a Land Run monument on the college’s campus on Oklahoma City’s south side.

As reported in several articles in Southwest Ledger, OCCC’s administration decided to remove the granite monument because of concerns that it represented “cruelty and oppression” because of the way the white and Black settlers came into Oklahoma Territory in 1889 with a chance to build homes, towns and businesses on land that had been earlier designated for Native American tribes.

The monument, believed to have been installed at the college in the 1980s by some of its oldest alumni, urged students and faculty to embrace the “can-do spirit” of the ’89ers who helped settle and build what would become Oklahoma – to remember that spirit of the pioneers.

And so when one reads author and historian John J. Dwyer’s 2016 book The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People, you not only get the perspective of the Land Run settlers but a very broad history of the land and peoples who have called Oklahoma home, even before it was a state. A state, Dwyer explains, is steeped in dramatic history, and one with a strong Christian influence.

Dwyer had quite the task putting this book together, one which features a foreword from former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating.

“John Dwyer has written a wonderful story. It is the story of the crash and conflict of peoples, ideas, ambitions, and technologies (oil would become the state’s dominant export). Few places personify the symbol of an egalitarian, no classes society better than Oklahoma.”

Dwyer has achieved in writing a “wonderful story” and so much more. Following a timeline beginning in pre-Columbian times, Dwyer lays out, from the beginning, how immigrating people from the Asian continent traversed across the Bering Land Bridge and made their way through what is now Alaska and Canada and down to various parts of the North American continent, including the area of the Southern Plains now known as the state of Oklahoma.

He notes the appearance of the Spiro people who lived in this area from approximately 900 A.D. to 1450 A.D. and left a series of burial mounds – and many unanswered questions – after they vanished into history. Dwyer calls the Spiro Age the “Golden Age” of the state’s prerecorded history.

By the 16th century, Spanish conquistadors were traversing those same lands, this time led by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado who left New Spain (Mexico) and entered this region looking for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola with its streets of gold. They did not find what they were seeking, rather they found a remarkable landscape and people who lived on it, along with the interesting animals that lived there. Dwyer notes that it was at this point, in the 1500s, that the recorded history of Oklahoma truly began.

With a deep appreciation of history and highlighting all races and cultures that would be part of and continue to be part of Oklahoma’s story, Dwyer dives deep but remains exceedingly readable in a school textbook-like fashion. The American Civil War (many Native Americans did join the Confederacy), the Trail of Tears, slave revolts, cattle drives and the Chisholm Trail, Dwyer covers it all and in an objective way – history as history.

Of course the Five Tribes and other tribes are covered in-depth. Their successes and their challenges, particularly in the 19th century when America was rapidly growing and changing.

Oh, and Gen. Stand Watie? As Dwyer notes, this Cherokee known as the “Red Fox,” was the only American Indian general on either side of the war and the last Confederate general to surrender, nearly three months after Robert E. Lee in Virginia.

Throughout this 300-page book, which consists of 12 chapters leading up to 1910, just three years after statehood, Dwyer utilizes graphics, photographs and artwork to further illustrate the historical implications and events that took place over centuries on what is now Oklahoma. The artwork includes those of Mike Wimmer, Wayne Cooper, Richard Luce, John Paul Strain, Charles Banks Wilson, G.N. Taylor and Andy Thomas, among others. Dwyer also received editing contributions from Steve Byas.

Oh, and regarding my earlier comments on the removal of the Land Run monument at OCCC? Dwyer is helping spearhead an effort in the Waukomis area to bring that monument and many others to a place called “Patriot Park.” Dwyer recognizes that history is full of good, bad and in-between, and that it all deserves to be displayed as a teaching tool about his- tory. This book is simply an extension of Dwyer’s desire to better inform and educate Oklahomans young and old, many of whom will likely find The Oklahomans to be a revelation.

In his introduction, Dwyer– a native of Duncan and now living in Waukomis – reminds the reader that the story of the Oklahomans is one of “a heroic land of people – black and white, red and yellow and brown, rich and poor, Northerner and Southerner, liberal and conservative – who have fought against all the odds and who stand unique in themselves, even as they exemplify all that it is to be American, in the best and sometimes worst sense of that word.”

Heroic and unique. I’d say that exemplifies much about the people of this great state. The Oklahomans is just the sort of scholarly, informative volume (a second volume is in the works, I am told) that deserves to be on the shelves of all denizens of the Sooner State who make this wonderful place their home.

For more information, go to www.johnjdwyer.com.