Reddit reviews Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895--1943

Arizona and New Mexico were both open to white settlement many, many decades before Oklahoma, and only joined the Union later because they decided to do so as separate states (our Enabling Act was the same as theirs, at first). "The Last Frontier" shows up in Oklahoma: A Guide to the Sooner State, produced as part of the New Deal in the 30s and the first comprehensive history of the 46th state, and it shows up in our history other places too. Frontier lawlessness s an important part of the Commission's Report on the Tulsa Race Riot, as the commonplace reporting on Tulsa's lawlessness and need for citizens to take matters into their own hands—or as they called it then, frontier justice—are a key background to understanding why, at the seeming drop of a hat, large swathes of white Tulsa would be willing to commit such terrible atrocities. This is also the same time period as the Osage Indian Murders, when the FBI's forerunner literally recruited cowboys and Indians to solve crimes in the Osage Nation. So for a while there, at least into the 40s, Oklahoma's status as the last frontier was uncontested. You still see its resonance today: central Oklahoma is branded as "Frontier Country" because it's the last land of cowboys, with its huge stockyards and high concentration of period storefronts selling western boots. Seriously, go on google street view and look at the intersection of Exchange and Agnew in OKC and tell me that isn't "Southwestern".

Oklahoma really is on a geographic continuum with eastern New Mexico, and we even share a mesa with them (though it does have a different name there). And the flora and fauna are also similar, with plenty of crossover at least as far as I35. The weather also isn't different: we may call those deep, often dry creek beds washes and they may say arroyo, but they're the same phenomenon, and they're common in the Cimarron watershed really far east into Oklahoma.

Historians also think we're part of the Southwest. James Green, a historian with a doctorate from Yale, named his book on socialism in Oklahoma and the states to our south and west Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895--1943. Oklahoma University has the Western History Collection, one of the best libraries for primary sources on the "Wild West" in the world, and any book about cowboys and their ilk worth its salt will have a bibliography chock full of monographs from the University's Press.

Consider our cultural institutions too. Gilcrease Museum is the largest collection—in the world—of Western art (western here meaning The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, not 300), and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum is in Oklahoma City. What do both of those museums have a bunch of? Stuff you'd expect to find in a Western, Fredric Remington sculptures, and Albert Bierstadt paintings. That's all really "southwestern", when your image of the Southwest is the OK Corral or Clint Eastwood squinting.

I'm not trying to say we aren't also Southern, or Midwestern, or a plains (or even southern plains!) state. We're all of them, in one big beautiful mix, and don't let anybody say we ain't.