A history of colonial inscription: ‘The wedding’ and ‘The buddy narrative’ in Oklahoma statehood commemorations

ABSTRACT

This essay examines archival materials about the mock wedding staged to commemorate the creation of the State of Oklahoma in November 1907 in the town of Guthrie. It suggests that ‘The Wedding’ performs a number of ideological moves in establishing settler common sense for the state and for the nation. Most obviously, it updates the ‘Pocahontas marriage’, a founding myth of the United States from the seventeenth century, adapting it to modern colonial needs in state creation. The essay roots the durability of The Wedding in its Edenic underpinnings, expressed first as an iconic founding couple, and secondly via a longed-for prelapsarian Adam figure, endowed with lands and empowered to name, sans Eve. Finally, The Wedding is a kind of proof text for the effacement of wives in the modern state’s entailments and dis-entailments via civil marriage, colonial sense-making and immigration law. By reading the cultural script of The Wedding as a phase of Anglo-American colonial inscription, the essay suggests that the tropes of Matrimony and Discovery inform and support one another in the US case. Neither shows signs of weakening as settler common sense, despite critiques by Native Americans and African Americans in Oklahoma.

KEYWORDS:

• Miscegenation
• women
• slavery
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Patricia Schechter is professor of history at Portland State University, where she has taught since 1995.

Notes

1. Edna Ferber, Cimarron, [1929], New York: Triangle Press, 1943, p 317.

2. Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

3. Ann Laura Stoler (ed), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, introduction and passim. See also Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

4. Genesis 2:15-20. Woman is created in 2:22. Adam names her Eve in 3:20.

5. Lynn Zastoupil, ‘Intimacy and Colonial Knowledge’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3(2), 2002.

6. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p 99 and chapter four, passim.

7. On medical discourses in the Philippine context, see Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. On ‘benevolence’ and ‘civiliSation’ as ‘love’ involving the disciplining of native bodies and desires – and engendering resistance – see Vincente L Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

8. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992, pp 33, 97 and passim.

9. Deena J González, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

10. Mahmood Mandani, ‘Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 43(4), October 2001, pp 651–664, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Muddle of Modernity’, American Historical Review 116(3), 1 June 2011, pp 663–675.

11. This is my interpretation of Veracini’s discussion of settler-colonial narratives as a palindrome, something that reads the same forwards and backwards. See his Settler Colonialism, pp 100–101.

12. Lauren Coates, ‘National Graffiti: The Textual Lives of Lewis and Clark’, J19: The Journal of Nineteeth-Century Americanists 3(2), 2015, pp 277–305. Coates sifts the archives of the expedition to reveal the carefully shaped and manicured presentation of Lewis and Clark’s journals, field notes and other writings to represent a story of national unity, harmony and so forth. The phrase ‘most enduring American adventures’ is from the praise for the Ken Burns PBS documentary ‘Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery’, 2001.

13. For a corrective, see Darrell M Millner, York of the Corps of Discovery, Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 2003.

14. Lewis and Clark in statuary at expedition launch point in St Louis. Available at: http://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/columns/joe-holleman/lewis-and-clark-statue-lined-up-for-westward-migration-from/article_9c75a4c9-be6e-5ba4-a011-3f81345a789c.html. Lewis and Clark at expedition end point in Oregon. Available at: http://www.lewisandclarktrail.com/section4/orcities/seaside/endofthetrail.htm.

15. Nancy K Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh, New York: Penguin, 1977.

16. Quoted in ‘The Road to Statehood’, Oklahoma Territorial Museum Exhibit Text, transcript completed 7 June 2006, copy in Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, ‘Statehood’ (#3). Unless otherwise indicated, all references to the text/script of The Wedding will be this version.

17. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon and Minoo Moallem (eds), Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 1999; Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; Stephanie M H Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004; Antonia I Castañeda, ‘Engendering the History of Alta California, 1769–1848: Gender, Sexuality, and the Family’, California Histor 76(2/3),1997, pp 230–591; Breny Mendoza, ‘Transnational Feminisms in Question’, Feminist Theory 3(3), 2002, pp 295–314.

18. Amy Kaplan and Donald E Pease (eds), Cultures of United States Imperialism, Durham: Duke University Press Books, 1994; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York: Routledge, 1995. See also Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. And Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2005.

19. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1998; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’, The American Historical Review 106(3) 2001, pp 866–905; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Corpus Nullius: The Exception of Indians and Other Aliens in US Constitutional Discourse’, Postcolonial Studies 10(2) 2007, pp 127–151; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; Fiona Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific, Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2009; Ian R Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

20. Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006; Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, Oxford, England ; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009; Margaret D Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011; Anne Farrar Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011; Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption, Durham: Duke University Press, 2012; Ann McGrath, Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

21. Early, foundational works include Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Sharon Harley and Andrea Benton Rushing (eds), Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987, and Ruth Roach Pierson, Nupur Chaudhuri, and Beth McAuley (eds), Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. On Indigenous feminism and critiques of colonialism, see Paige Raibmon, ‘The Practice of Everyday Colonialism: Indigenous Women at Work in the Hop Fields and Tourist Industry of Puget Sound’, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 3(3), 2006, pp 23–56; Shari M Huhndorf, Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009; Jodi A Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. On black women and the diaspora, see Emilia María Durán-Almarza and Esther Álvarez López (eds), Diasporic Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic, New York: Routledge, 2013; Mia E Bay, Farah J Griffin, Martha S Jones and Barbara D Savage. (eds), Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

22. An important new corrective is to be found in Sterling Evans (ed), Farming across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2017, though Oklahoma is not mentioned.

23. Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

24. For general treatments, see Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes, [1940], Palala Press, 2016; Clara Sue Kidwell and Lindsay G. Robertson, The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855–1970, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008; Murray R Wickett, Contested Territory: Whites, Native Americans, and African Americans in Oklahoma 1865–1907, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000; David A Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832–1929, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010; Jeffrey Burton, Indian Territory and the United States, 1866–1906: Courts, Government, and the Movement for Oklahoma Statehood, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997; Davis D Joyce (ed), An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before: Alternative Views of Oklahoma History, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

In addition, see Celia E Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008; Fay Yarbrough, ‘Legislating Women’s Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Social History 38(2), 2004, pp 385–405; Devon A Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851–1909, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Arthur Lincoln Tolson, The Black Oklahomans: A History. 1541–1972, n.p., 1974; Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2001; Izumi Ishii, Bad Fruits of the Civilized Tree: Alcohol and the Sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008; Linda Williams Reese, Trail Sisters: Freedwomen in Indian Territory, Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2017.

25. Kerry Wynn, ‘“Miss Indian Territory” and “Mr. Oklahoma Territory”: Marriage, Settlement and Citizenship in the Cherokee nation and United States’, In Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire, ed. Tony Ballentyne and Antoinette M Burton, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009, p 173.

26. Malia K Bennett, ‘The Mock Wedding of Indian and Oklahoma Territories’, in Main Street Oklahoma: Stories of Twentieth-Century America, ed. Linda W Reese and Patricia Loughlin, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013, chapter two, especially pp 31, 44.

27. D H Boyer, ‘On Pending Statehood’ and letter from D. H. Boyer to Dear Friends, 18 September 1982, in Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, ‘Statehood’, (#1).

28. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, p 16.

29. The Daily Oklahoman newspaper advertised the event noting that the character ‘Oklahoma will be represented by C.G. Jones of Oklahoma City’, a real person with a name, but that ‘the bride will be a full blood Choctaw Indian girl’, an anonymous type and a mere youth, making her resistance unlikely and her presence really only half there. The Oklahoman, 15 November 1907, p 15. Available at: archive.newsok.com (accessed 3 February 2018). William A Durant (1866/1948) read these lines, a Choctaw tribal member and politically active Democrat. He served in the Oklahoma legislature and was appointed Chief in 1937 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

30. Jerald C Walker, ‘The Difficulty of Celebrating an Invasion’, In ‘An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before’: Alternative Views of Oklahoma History, ed. Davis D Joyce, Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1994, pp 15–26 and Bill Mullins, ‘Celebrating the Oklahoma Semi-Centennial’, Chronicles of Oklahoma 85(2), 2007, pp 132–57. The Library of Congress adopted a basic technological progress narrative for Oklahoma, as in ‘tanktown to metropolis’, for the capital city, and then stirred in an Americanisation scheme for the state of Oklahoma itself, ‘from Spanish Frontier to Sooner State’. See Oklahoma: The Semicentennial of Statehood, 1907–1957: An Exhibition in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: The Library of Congress, 1957.

31. See Candice Lewis Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, especially chapter three.

32. A foundational text is Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988, especially pp. 154–188. See also her subsequent work with Charles W Mills, Contract and Domination, Cambridge: Polity, 2007, pp 35–78.

33. Jill Elaine Hasday, ‘Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital Rape’, California Law Review 88, 2000, pp 1373–1505.

34. Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979. On the complexity of racial politics within the Cherokee nation, see two very different views, found in Circe Sturm, ‘Blood Politics, Racial Classification, and Cherokee National Identity: The Trials and Tribulations of the Cherokee Freedmen’, In Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America, ed. James Brooks, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002, pp 223–257 and Ward Churchill, ‘The Crucible of American Indian Identity: Native Tradition versus Colonial Imposition in Postconquest North America’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23(1), 1999, pp 3–67.

35. Wickett, Contested Territory, chapter 7.

36. In addition to items in notes 15 and 17 above, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917, New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.

37. ‘I Give you Miss Indian Territory’, Oklahoma News, 15 November 1936, Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, ‘Statehood Day, Territories, Wedding’.

38. Melissa Nicole Stuckey, ‘All Men Up: Race, Rights and Power in the All Black Town of Boley, Oklahoma, 1903–1939’, PhD Dissertation, Yale University, 2009, p 94.

39. ‘I Give You Miss Indian Territory’.

40. See the cover cartoon of Puck magazine for 1 December 1897, entitled ‘Another Shotgun Wedding with Neither Party Willing’, in which Uncle Sam and an Indigenous Hawaiian woman kneel before a minister with an armed sentry labelled ‘Bluster’ stands over them.

41. Pocahontas is better remembered in the dominant culture for her earlier ‘saving’ of John Smith; their brush with death forges a kind of shadow marriage bond and unites the two in the popular imagination. Rayna Green, ‘The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture’, In Contested Images: Women of Color in Popular Culture, ed. Alma M Garcia, Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2012, pp 157–165. See also Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat, San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003.

42. Hearing on Prohibition in the Proposed State of Oklahoma Hearings before the United States House Committee on the Territories, Fifty-Ninth Congress, First Session, on Dec. 13, 15, 1905, Washington: US GPO, 1905, p 76.

43. Quoted in Wickett, Contested Territory, p 66.

44. ‘Indian Territory and Oklahoma are Symbolically Wed’, clipping, c.1925 in Vertical File ‘Statehood’, Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, ‘Statehood Day, Territory, Wedding.’

45. ‘In the matter of the application of Anna C. Bennett for the enrollment of herself and two children and her sister, Nevermore Trainor, as Cherokee citizens before Commissioner C. R. Breckenridge’, Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, ‘Statehood Day, Territories, Wedding’.

46. Ancestry.com, Oklahoma, County Marriage Records, 1890-1995 [database on-line], Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016 (accessed 3 February 2018).

47. Bill Thomas, ‘“Mama” was a Sooner Belle’, The Daily Oklahoman, 17 November 1957, pp 4–5. Available at: archive.newsok.com (accessed 3 February 2018). Mrs Medlock hinted that her mother agreed to perform in The Wedding the first time as a favour to her second husband, Leo C Bennett, who was a local political office-holder and a friend of the governor.

48. Detail quoted in ‘What ever happened to Miss Indian Territory?’, Muskogee Phoenix, 26 November 2007, in Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, ‘Statehood’ (#2).

49. The phrase ‘dark Eve’ is from Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, chapter one. For an up-to-date treatment, Rebecca K Jager, Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea: Indian Women as Cultural Intermediaries and National Symbols, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015.

50. ‘The Fair Ladies Celebrate Statehood in a Big Way’, clipping in Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, Statehood (#1).

51. Michelle Wallace quoted in Michael Moon, ‘Whose History? The Case of Oklahoma’, In A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Martin Duberman, New York: New York University Press, 1997, p 24.

52. ‘Minutes of Called Meeting for Statehood Celebration, 1926’, Anna Brosius Korn Papers, box 1, Oklahoma Historical Society.

53. Deborah Olsen, ‘Fair Connections: Women’s Separatism and the Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905’, Oregon Historical Quarterly 109(2), 2008, pp 174–203. In the early 1930s, a statue featuring a seated ‘Pioneer Mother’ was installed at Eugene.

54. Oklahoma Memorial Association, Religious Freedom Day program, 13 April 1930, Korn Papers, box 1.

55. ‘First Inaugural Ball Presents Scene Dazzling in its Splendor’, The Oklahoman (1907) in Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, ‘Statehood’ (#3). See also Danney Goble, ‘The Southern Influence on Oklahoma’, In ‘An Oklahoma I’d Never Seen Before’, pp 280–301.

56. Constitution of the Oklahoma Memorial Association (1927), p 5, in Korn Papers, box 1.

57. See discussion in Chang, Color of the Land, p 77–78.

58. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, chapter 5.

59. ‘I Give you Miss Indian Territory’, The Oklahoma News, 15 November 1936, clipping in Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, ‘Statehood Day, Territories, Wedding’.

60. Bertha K Killian, ‘A Marriage of State Reference’, 1937, single page transcript in ibid. See also Research Department, Federal Theater of Oklahoma, ‘Thirteen Fifteen-Minute Plays, Including folk stories from which the plays are dramatized’, Publication 17, Oklahoma City: Works Progress Administration, March, 1939. For general treatment, see Angie Debo, The WPA Guide to 1930s Oklahoma, Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 1986.

61. W E B DuBois, Darkwater: Voices from Behind the Veil, New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe, 1920, p 30.

62. Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory, New York: Random House, 1986, 131. See also song lyrics cited in Solomon Northups’s Twelve Years a Slave, p 219, electronic edition, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html (accessed 28 February 2018).

63. Mae C Turnor, ‘Oklahoma gives birth to America’s First Interracial Flag for World Peace Representing More Harmonious Co-Existence for a Divided World and a Divided Nation’, c. 1952, pamphlet in Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, ‘Statehood’ (#3). See also her memoir Memory Lane in My Southern World, New York: Vantage press, 1968, especially the forward and p 136.

64. ‘New Chance Cities … The Plains Truth’, handbill in Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, ‘Statehood’ (#3). Revising Oklahoma statehood history along the lines described in Miles, House on Diamond Hill, pp 187–198, has been slow. See Lee Roy Chapman, ‘Nightmare of Dreamland’, This Land Press, 18 April 2012.

65. The Oregon production similarly drew on the recuperative scholarship by black researchers inside and outside the academy. See the review of the musical by Mary Hughley, The Oregonian, 23 September 2011, and a discussion of racial politics in the Portland Mercury, 23 September 2011 by critic Noah Dunham and response by Rodney Hicks. Hicks noted he cited Hannibal Johnson, Acres of Inspiration: All Black Towns of Oklahoma, Eakin Press, 2007.

66. For a powerful account, see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt: Growing up Okie, London: Verso, 1997.

67. The phrase ‘white men’s countries’ is from Lake and Richardson, Drawing the Global Color Line. On Oregon, see Elizabeth McLagan, A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788–1940, Portland, OR: Georgian Press, 1980.

68. Malcolm Clark, Eden Seekers: The Settlement of Oregon, 1818–1862, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. James J Kopp, Eden within Eden: Oregon’s Utopian Heritage, Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2009, and Tom Austin, ‘American Eden’, Travel & Leisure 37(8), 2007, p 204.

69. ‘Happy Ever Afterward’, Daily Oklahoman, 16 November 1930, clipping in Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, ‘Statehood Day, Territories, Wedding’.

70. Rita Gieger, Social Studies Specialist, ‘Activities for Statehood Day’ in Oklahoma Historical Society, Vertical File, ‘Statehood’ (#3).

71. See news reports in the Daily Oklahoman, 6 November 1982, p 23, 10 November 1984, p 24, and 16 November 1985, p 13, archive.newsok.com (accessed 3 February 2018).

72. The Oklahoma land rush of 1889 was technically open to unmarried women and a number of them took up claims, resulting even in a short-lived ‘all woman town’ on the Cherokee strip. However, female homesteaders are not well documented in the archives nor ritually memorialised in public. A ‘Pioneer Woman’ statue was commissioned in Oklahoma in the 1930s, portraying a mother with a child by the hand; it stands outside the Pioneer Woman Museum in Ponca City, Oklahoma, established in 1958. On women homesteaders in Oklahoma, see http://okgazette.com/2009/06/04/single-frontier-women-took-part-in-oklahoma-1893-land-run/.

73. Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America’s Frontier’s Past, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. See also Moon, ‘Whose Oklahoma?’

74. Kerry Wynn, ‘The State of Oklahoma’, In The Uniting States: The Story of Statehood for the Fifty States, ed. Benjamin F. Shearer, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004, pp 967–1024.