Oklahoma City & the Cross Timbers

Oklahoma City sits on the Oklahoma River where Interstates 35, 40 and 44 cross, and the region spreads out from it in three directions. To the west and north lie the run country and the cattle road: El Reno and Fort Reno, Kingfisher and the line of the Chisholm Trail. To the south is Norman. To the east the land roughens into the Cross Timbers, a mosaic of post oak, blackjack and prairie that Washington Irving, crossing it in 1832, said was like struggling through forests of cast iron.

The city was born at noon on April 22, 1889, when an estimated fifty thousand people raced into the Unassigned Lands, ground the Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations had once been assigned by treaty and lost after the Civil War. The First Americans Museum by the river tells the story of all 39 nations in the state on their own terms. East of the city are the nations' own places: the Citizen Potawatomi Nation's heritage center in Shawnee, the Seminole Nation's capital at Wewoka and, inside the Muscogee (Creek) reservation, Okfuskee County. The Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes govern from Concho, and the old Darlington agency ground lies by Fort Reno.

The region also holds the Oklahoma City National Memorial, and Boley, the largest of the All-Black towns that rose in Indian Territory.

What to See in Oklahoma City & the Cross Timbers

8 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Historic Sites

Boley Historic District

Boley

The downtown of the largest of Oklahoma's All-Black towns, praised by Booker T. Washington, squeezed by Jim Crow and white land oaths, bankrupt in 1939 and still living today.

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Historic Fort Reno

El Reno

The Army post beside the Cheyenne and Arapaho agency at Darlington, from which troops chased the Northern Cheyenne north in 1878, later a remount station and a prisoner-of-war camp.

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Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum

Oklahoma City

The outdoor memorial and museum on the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where 168 people were killed at 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, shaped by the families and survivors.

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Oklahoma Territorial Museum and Carnegie Library

Guthrie

The 1902 Carnegie Library in Guthrie where Oklahoma's statehood was proclaimed in 1907, saved from demolition in 1972 by adding a museum of the seventeen territorial years beside it.

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The Chisholm

Kingfisher

Kingfisher's farming and ranching museum on the Chisholm Trail's stage branch, with a heritage village and Horizon Hill, the mansion a territorial governor built for a capital that never came.

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Towns & Gateways

Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Heritage Center

Shawnee

The Citizen Potawatomi Nation's national museum and archive in Shawnee, telling a Great Lakes people's road through Kansas to Indian Territory in the Nation's own words and objects.

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First Americans Museum

Oklahoma City

The museum of the 39 First American nations in Oklahoma today, on the Oklahoma River, with galleries shaped by each nation, Smithsonian objects brought home and a 90-foot mound.

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Seminole Nation Museum

Wewoka

A community museum in Wewoka, capital of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, telling the Seminole story from Florida to Indian Territory and the town that John Horse's people founded in 1849.

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Scenic Drives through Oklahoma City & the Cross Timbers

Stories from Oklahoma City & the Cross Timbers

Oklahoma City & the Cross Timbers rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.