Oklahoma Centennial....1000 cowboys, cowgirls and Indians...

At 8:00 am on the morning of Independence Day, the streets of this tiny, sleepy, southwestern Oklahoma town were quiet and hot, as befits a July morning. Not a cop in sight and so the 12 year-old Ann drove us to breakfast at the local cafe.

By 10:00 am, though, the picture was much different. People jammed our single Main Street until one of our 85 year-old patriarchs had no choice but to park six blocks away. Main Street was roped off and cars lined the side streets to the major highway.

Alabama, Illinois, Kansas, Arkansas and of course, Texas, and more Alabama. The roots of this place called her people home. I think I met everyone of them, traded stories and bespoke my pedigree.

One ancient woman in a wheelchair tugged at my Centennial Shirt. She was clearly a stroke victim and could not form the words I could see she desperately wanted to speak. Finally her son asked me who I was. Bending forward, I answered with the name I was born with. That was not enough and the old lady made sounds that for a moment I could not understand. Finally, realization dawned. Then I told her, I am the great-great granddaughter of Susan Anna Liza O'Neal Phillips, 1900 Indian Territory pioneer.

The old woman's eyes filled with tears. Her son explained that she has gone beyond her time and my great-great grandmother was once her neighbor when she was very young. I felt the unexpected urge to cry myself and hugged the old woman. My great-great grandmother died at the age of 98 when I was seven.

A collective shout tore us from ruminations of a past I was not alive to witness. The cattle are coming. Why did that matter so much? I don't know, but it did. The county sheriff had closed the highway to the west so the way from the Chisholm Trail to Alex was clear. And when the herd, surrounded by wary cowboys, cowgirls, Buffalo Soldiers and more than a few Indians, topped the hill, my heart swelled. Trailed by covered wagons, the wranglers eased the Longhorns down the street.

This is who we are. This is who I am. The Longhorns were nervous yet proud, rangy, wild-eyed and smelling of short-grass prairie. The leather on every western saddle creaked as the riders sat easy, at home in an Oklahoma way astride smallish ponies bred to tend cattle. The clip-clop of horses' hooves filled the air and, at least for a short time, the sun burned down on us all.

At the bottom of the hill, the cattle milled and a few attempted to dash away, so we were given a display of fancy horse-work that made me smile. Then, slowly, slowly, the herd pushed down the street to be penned in a rail yard that no longer sprawls along our river valley and is only an old memory. Had this been 1907, the rail head would have been bustling with farmers and ranchers crowding the tracks with cattle, watermelons and wheat to be shipped on the Rock Island. But, the train no longer runs through Alex and in the 40's, even the tracks were hauled away. But we remembered and, because of that, it was real again.

A chuck wagon accompanied the herd and within an hour of their arrival in town, fires burned on the ground and great vats of cowboy stew and red beans were bubbling, ready to be wolfed down by the crowd along with sourdough biscuits, peach cobbler and the inevitable sweet tea.

It was a grand day. Oklahoma was readmitted to the union with one of our own high schoolers standing in for President Theodore Roosevelt. Speeches rang in the dense air as Miss Indian Territory was officially married to Mr. Oklahoma Territory by a circuit riding preacher watched over by a Choctaw Judge dressed in tails and a top-hat, his traditional native braids spilling down the front of his suit. Miss Indian Territory (an Native American girl who plays on the high school basketball team) wore a locally made copy of the dress used in the original Statehood celebration on November 16, 1907. My nephew Will played the part of Mr. Haskell, Oklahoma's first governor, and gave a rendition of Haskell's speech welcoming Oklahoma to the United States of America.

The Star-Spangled Banner got lost among rousing Oklahoma songs led by Ann and other children. We heralded the "brand new state" with Rodgers and Hammerstein. The crowd joined in as the ceremony closed with Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land.

There were gunfights, a bank robbery, a stick-horse rodeo, live music, lots of icy watermelon (yuck), lemonade, cotton candy and my photo exhibit, which people poured over for hours. The photos made an historical mosaic on the white walls of the community center, surrounded by 100 year-old quilts, fragile deeds from pre-statehood and my grandfather's 1924 football sweater, to name only a few of the items on display. Looking at strangers related to me by our collective history peering into the fascination of those carefully matted black and whites, I felt a swell of pride at what I'd done. Maybe I managed to bring honor to a bit of our history. I made no peep about it being my project but word got around and people were nice to thank me. I pointed out that it's OUR history.

Only the dark clouds that piled up around 3:00 pm seemed out of Oklahoma character, shortening the outdoor performance of a country gospel band with huge, splatting drops of rain that quickly gathered into a downpour. Afterward, the streets steamed and people dragged away for a late afternoon nap or a visit with family. But as the shadows lengthened, most returned again. Oh, not the boisterous 1000-soul crowd that had gathered that morning, but the old timers, those with roots here deeper than Statehood, the people who make this place okla homa, the home of the red people.

We ate hotdogs and hamburgers sitting in long rows of lawn chairs in the shade, all tired but exhilarated. The street remained roped off and tiny children rode bicycles and played on the empty road-striped expanse under the watchful eyes of the entire town. Sitting between my third grade teacher and my elderly aunt from another town, I thought of To Kill a Mockingbird, but without the lurking evil. We spoke of simple things: the day, the cattle, the nature of cowboys and Indians.

The drenching rain might not have come as the temperature gave one final July thrust just before the sun began to set for the evening. The long, shiny fire engine at the end of the street opened its hoses, shooting water into the air to soak laughing, barefoot children, my own included.

Finally, the loudspeaker called everyone to the area of the Community Building for the monument dedication. I had taken note of the new addition to the unnaturally lush green lawn but had been able only to see the vague shape of it because it was covered with someone's nice white linen table cloth held in place by two rather gaudy pinkish ribbons with large, garish bows. In passing, the thing shrouded seemed rather ominous, like an oversized grave marker in the aftermath of a poorly attended funeral.

Perhaps anyone would think the same of a sizeable slab of granite planted forever in the ground.

The mayor gave a stuttering speech about the origins of the thing, who had the idea and who raised the money and then bestowed many thanks. Having obtained my grudging permission beforehand, she announced that the words etched precisely into the granite were mine. Heads swiveled and looked at me and I felt as much on display as the old quilts. I colored and ducked my head.

I stood next to a small, tow-headed, pudgy boy in round glasses as the Mayor began to read...

Alex, Oklahoma, was named in honor of W.V. “Uncle Red” Alexander, who came to the Alex area in 1878 after serving in the Civil War as Captain of the Second Cherokee Regiment under Confederate General Stan Watie. Through his first marriage to a Chickasaw tribal member, Alexander controlled a large tract of Indian Territory’s Washita Valley, where Alex would be born. Alexander’s original home was located a half-mile west of Alex, on Soldier Creek. In 1885, the first Alex post office was established in Alexander’s trading post near his home. The town was officially incorporated in 1910. Alexander died in his home on January 23, 1920.

My video camera still running, I looked down at the boy. He is a twin and his dark-haired, totally untouched brother stood nearby, idly inspecting the sparrows. But there is at least one member of every family who listens to the echoes of history and I could tell the boy was moved. You see, the history of each and every place in the world is both a history of geography and a history of blood. The Alexander whose story I etched in stone begat, through his daughter, a tribe of local Chitwoods, just as my kin, arriving on the prairie only a few years later, created me, the great-great granddaughter of Susie Phillips and the great-great grandaughter of Cornelius Godwin. A Chitwood, the boy over 30 years my junior who stood at my side is the great-great-great-great grandson of Alexander. Although our families have knocked shoulder-to-shoulder over the generations against tornadoes, floods and general hard times, the boy and I share only the red dust that settles on every living thing here, not blood. He is Chickasaw and I am Choctaw.

"When was my grandfather born?" the boy whispered to me.

"In 1838. In Alabama. Shhhh." I gently shushed him so the Mayor could finish her slow reading, not saying that if the first words on the stone were in honor of his grandfather, then the rest were in honor of mine....

In this 100^th year of Oklahoma statehood, this marker stands as a permanent memorial to every pioneer, cowboy or Indian, man, woman or child, who braved the wild and empty prairie to raise this small town. This is a tribute to generations of Alex families who raised the cattle, crops and produce, pumped Oklahoma Sweet Crude, nurtured our bodies, hearts and minds with the ideas of hope, health and freedom, built our railroads and bridges, and ensured our commerce and prosperity. They are our history, our present and our future.

The Mayor, who is afflicted with Parkinsons, shook a little beyond her control as she snipped the ribbons and lifted the tablecloth. I looked at the gleaming monument and felt strange, knowing that the words cut so perfectly into the granite were born on my computer, in the small places of my thinking, during nights I had sat up too late, trying to ignore work in the morning. I thought of abandoned English churchyards, their associated houses of worship long crumbled into dust, their only claim to the present the canted and moss covered headstones of those long passed. Nancy Griffith also came to mind, standing at the head of the London Philharmonic, singing a song from The Dustbowl Symphony that includes the line...

When my children's children ask me why I didn't go, I'll say the heart of every town is the people that you know, and they'll always call you home...

I will go, probably sooner rather than later. But even if my children leave as I expect them to in order to seek new blood, if fire ravages this entire small place, if red mud rises to sweep most of what we are into the angry river, if (most likely) bad wind erases any frail sight of us from the unforgiving prairie, my words will remain here at home.

That suits me.

After the dedication, we gathered for photos, the Chitwoods and their blonde, bespectacled son going first. Then my family gathered around the stone and the resulting picture is attached to this post. Me, my children, my mother (and father) and my 80+ year old aunt , who as the first crux of the Godwin and Phillips line, stood in for those long gone.

Happy 100th birthday, Oklahoma.