Museum of the Western Prairie

For 36 years this corner of Oklahoma was counted part of Texas. From 1860 Texas held it as Greer County, named for a former Texas lieutenant governor, and Mangum became its county seat in 1886. On March 16, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Old Greer County part of Oklahoma Territory. Through those years the Comanche and Kiowa still came to hunt it each season, and in the 1880s it was cattle country: the Ikard and Harrold ranch near present Granite ran between sixty and seventy thousand head.

The Oklahoma Historical Society's museum in Altus tells that history and the rest of the region's. Its story begins with the Wichita Mountains and the ancient sea that once surrounded them, follow Ice Age mammoths and hunters of at least eleven thousand years ago, and come to the Western Trail, which at its 1881 peak moved about three hundred thousand cattle north in a season. The homesteaders' answer to a treeless country stands on the grounds: the Criswell half-dugout and the Eddleman family's two-story limestone ranch house of 1891.

The last galleries cover water and the air base. Promises that rain would follow the plow gave way to drought and depression, and the Bureau of Reclamation's W. C. Austin Project built Altus Dam and four canals; Lake Altus, completed in 1947, irrigates about 48,000 acres. The museum's photographs of the project and the Conwell Studio, which worked in Altus from 1913 to 1978, are online, and a free audio tour runs on izi.Travel.