Oklahoma History
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Top Ten Deadliest Tornadoes in Oklahoma History
Rank City Date Scale Fatalities Injuries 1 Woodward 4/9/1947 F5 116 782 2 Snyder 5/10/1905 F5 97* 58* 3 Peggs 5/2/1920 F4 71 100 4 Antlers 4/12/1945 F5 69 353 5 Pryor 4/27/1942 F4 52 350 6 (Bridge Creek-Newcastle-Moore-Oklahoma City) 5/3/1999 F5 36 583 7 Oklahoma City 6/12/1942 F4 35 100 8 Cleveland County 04/25/1893 F4 33 ~100 9 (Newcastle-South Oklahoma City-Moore) 5/20/2013 EF5 24 – 10 Bethany 11/19/1930 F4 23 150 Source: National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office, Norman, OK
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The Trail of Tears
Millions of acres of American Indian ancestral land (in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida) was stolen by the Federal Government. The reason? So that white settlers could move in and use the land for their advantage in such endeavors as growing cotton. The removal of native people from their lands and homes of many generations began in the early 1830s, when nearly 125,000 Native Americans began their tragic journey known as the Trail of Tears. They were sent to live in Indian Territory what eventually would become the state of Oklahoma. Oklahoma meaning: “red people”. The translation is from the Choctaw Indian words okla and humma. Source: http://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/trail-of-tears
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Childhood Tales of the Great Depression and Drought
written by Laurie C. Brough While waiting to checkout at the grocery store I overhear a man telling the cashier how dry it is in far Western Oklahoma. He said, “It is so dry the grasshoppers don’t even bother to stop to take a nibble cause there’s nothing to eat.” Listening to their conversation took me back to one of my Mother’s childhood stories about her days of growing up during the depression and the drought of the 1930’s. “Life was hard and my parents struggled to keep food on the table. In the morning, Daddy always got up first to tend the fire in the cook stove so Momma…
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Tornado History
It has been confirmed that the Friday, May 31, 2013 tornado, that brought destruction and death to El Reno, OK, was the widest ever in recorded history. Per the National Weather Service and a leading researcher, Howard Bluestein, no other tornado has ever reached such a mammoth breadth. The El Reno tornado stretched a maximum width of 2.6 miles. Read More
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Woody Guthrie’s Only Novel Published Posthumously
Though primarily a song writer and essayist, Oklahoma’s folk hero Woody Guthrie also managed to write a work of fiction about the historic Dust Bowl. The book “House of Earth” was released Febuary 5, 2013, decades after Woody’s death on October 3, 1967. According to Guthrie’s daughter, Nora Guthrie, “He always wrote to be heard.” The historian Douglas Brinkley and actor Johnny Depp are helping to make his wish “to be heard” an even greater reality than already seen through his songs and essays. Brinkley, while working on a biography of Bob Dylan, came across the unpublished novel in his research and made the decision to pursue bringing the work to life from…
