Tulsa, Oklahoma

Tulsa, a city of 385,000 in northeastern Oklahoma, was for decades known as the “Oil Capital of the World.”

A band of Lockapoka Creek Indians, forced to move from Alabama, established a village in 1836 on the banks of the Arkansas River, at the northwest corner of lands set aside for the Creek Nation in Indian Territory. The Indians named the new settlement for their former Alabama home: Tallasi, meaning “old town.”

In 1848 a prominent Creek rancher, Lewis Perryman, opened a trading post just south of the Lockapoka village. In 1878 a post office at the Perryman store was named “Tulsa.” The land of the Indian Territory was irresistible to other ranchers, and in 1882 the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad extended a line to a new terminus near the Arkansas River. When the Indian lands were opened to white settlement, tribal members were given individual allocations of land, and a townsite was laid out. The city was incorporated in 1898.

Oil was discovered just across the river in 1901 and an immense oil field was found at nearby Glenpool in 1905. Breaking with the tradition of raucous, temporary tent-and-shanty oil boomtowns, Tulsa civic leaders banned oil wells within city limits and promoted the young city as a place for both oilmen and their families. A privately financed bridge gave suppliers access to the oil fields and refineries on the west side [Page 810]of the river, and a special train brought workers back home to Tulsa neighborhoods each night.

The Tulsa Commercial Club lured other railroads with donations of land and “bonuses,” setting the small town apart from dozens of others in the region. Tulsa's booster spirit was notable even in an era of boosterism, as chartered trains carrying civic leaders barnstormed the nation between 1903 and 1908 to—quite literally—beat the drum for the “Magic City.” When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, Tulsa had a population of 7,300, but it had made itself the center of oil production in a region where rich new oil fields were being discovered. By 1920, the city had grown tenfold, to 72,000, and was known as the Oil Capital of the World.

Oilmen made fortunes rapidly in the region. Besides building mansions and gracious neighborhoods for themselves, they devoted attention to the civic needs of the city. A former school for Indian girls had been relocated from Muskogee in 1907 to become the University of Tulsa; an orchestra was founded in 1914. Water, always a limiting factor for growing cities in the region, was guaranteed by a 1924 municipal project that brought water from Spavinaw Lake, 65 miles away. A 1920s building boom left Tulsa with one of the nation's premier collections of Art Deco buildings.

African Americans, hoping Oklahoma would be less overtly racist than the Deep South, had created a thriving business district along Greenwood Avenue by 1920. Though the new state had not directly inherited pre–Civil War notions about race, it quickly adopted Jim Crow laws and eventually became fertile ground for the revived Ku Klux Klan.

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