Red Dirt And Round Bales

Why does Oklahoma have the Oklahoma State Fair in Oklahoma City and another State Fair in Tulsa? The answer begins with agriculture, not Ferris wheels. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken traces Tulsa’s fair tradition from an early community fair through the International Dry Farming Congress, Oklahoma’s 1915 Free Fair Law and a statewide system that encouraged agricultural com...

Long before Oklahoma had interstate highways, a nearly 200-mile transportation corridor through the Choctaw Nation formed part of one of America’s fastest transcontinental mail routes. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken follows the Butterfield Overland Mail from Fort Smith through southeastern Indian Territory toward the Red River. Coaches changed horses at stations every few...

One of America’s best-known gospel songs began in the mind of an Oklahoma farm boy working long rows in southeastern Oklahoma. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken tells the story of Albert E. Brumley, who grew up near Spiro surrounded by hard farm work, church music and the shape-note singing tradition. Brumley studied gospel composition in Arkansas, taught singing schools and...

Oklahoma’s Czech heritage was not preserved by simply putting old objects in a museum. Around Yukon, it survived in wheat fields, family recipes, music, language, traditional clothing and Saturday-night dances. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken traces Czech and Moravian immigration into the Yukon area and the farming economy that helped those families build new lives. Yukon’s...

Before sunrise on the western Oklahoma prairie, male lesser prairie-chickens gather on traditional breeding grounds called leks and perform a spring courtship dance that has occurred for generations. But the open country surrounding those leks has become increasingly fragmented by cropland conversion, woody encroachment, roads, energy infrastructure and other development. In this episode of Red Di...

Eastern redcedar can reduce forage, alter wildlife habitat and change wildfire behavior, but Oklahoma State University researchers are studying another consequence happening beneath the trees: more ticks. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken talks with Oklahoma State University’s Scott Loss Ph. D. about research inspired in part by what western Oklahoma farmers and ranchers had...

Every fall, Oklahoma becomes a refueling stop for one of North America’s most remarkable migrations. Monarch butterflies moving south toward central Mexico may have thousands of miles to travel, and the goldenrod, asters, blazing star, sunflowers and other late-blooming plants along Oklahoma roadsides and field edges can provide the nectar they need to continue. In this episode of Red Dirt and Rou...

In the middle of an Oklahoma summer, the Great Salt Plains can look as though winter never left. The white surface is not snow or sand but salt, and beneath that crust grows something found in a distinctive form nowhere else: hourglass selenite crystals. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken explores a landscape valued long before modern roads or recreation. Native peoples used t...

At noon on September 16, 1893, more than 100,000 people surged into the Cherokee Outlet chasing roughly 40,000 homesteads and town lots. But the famous race is only part of the story. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken looks at the economic hardship that brought families to the starting line, the long registration lines and brutal September heat, and the Cherokee Nation’s hist...

The Miller Brothers 101 Ranch was never just a cattle operation. At its height, the sprawling northern Oklahoma enterprise combined livestock, wheat, corn, orchards, dairies, food processing, saddle making, agricultural experimentation, entertainment and eventually oil. Then the Millers turned part of that working ranch into a show that carried an image of Oklahoma around the world. In this episod...

For generations of Oklahomans, TG&Y was the kind of store where one trip might cover thread, household supplies, hardware and toys. But before those three letters became familiar across hundreds of communities, TG&Y began with three Oklahoma variety-store operators trying to solve a basic small-business problem. Dave Deken tells how Rawdon Tomlinson of Frederick, Les Gosselin of Cordell and Raymon...

Ring-necked pheasants came to Oklahoma from half a world away, but the agricultural landscape of northwestern Oklahoma gave them the combination they needed to stay. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken looks at how wheat, sorghum, grass, fence rows, ditches and weedy corners can work together as food, nesting cover, brood habitat and winter shelter. The story is also a reminder...

On an Oklahoma Friday night, high school football can make a small town feel much larger. The lights come on, pickups arrive, the band starts playing and people who spent the week in entirely different worlds wind up sitting only a few feet apart in the same bleachers. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken traces Oklahoma high school football from games played before statehood th...

County fair season puts a year’s worth of ordinary work on display. A calf had to be fed in winter and summer heat. Tomatoes had to be planted and canned. Bread required practice, a photograph required an eye for the right moment and a quilt may represent months of patient work. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken looks beyond midway lights to the agricultural and educational p...

Lake Altus-Lugert holds more than irrigation water. Beneath it lies part of the story of a Southwest Oklahoma town, a devastating tornado and decades of effort to make agriculture more dependable in country where water has never been guaranteed. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken traces the story from Austrian immigrant Frank Lugert and the community he helped build after the...

Johnny Bench grew up in Binger, Oklahoma, learning a position that was often valued more for defense and toughness than glamour. His father taught him to catch, giving him an understanding of the entire game from behind the plate. By high school, Bench was an all-state athlete in baseball and basketball, and in 1965 the Cincinnati Reds selected him in the second round of Major League Baseball’s fi...

Black bears once lived across Oklahoma, but by the early 1900s habitat loss, fragmentation and unregulated hunting had reduced them to little more than a memory in much of the state. Their return happened in an unusual way. Oklahoma did not launch a large bear-restoration program of its own. Instead, bears released in neighboring Arkansas expanded westward into eastern Oklahoma. In this episode, D...

At the far western edge of Oklahoma, the landscape begins to feel like another state entirely. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken travels toward Black Mesa and the country around Kenton, where shortgrass prairie meets higher, drier country and Oklahoma reaches its highest elevation. The story moves beyond Black Mesa’s 4,973-foot summit to explore the people and forces that sha...

Bob Wills arrived in Oklahoma looking for another opportunity. Tulsa gave him one — and helped give American music western swing. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken follows Wills from Texas into Oklahoma City and eventually Tulsa, where a midnight trial broadcast on KVOO in 1934 turned into a regular radio program. The signal carried his blend of fiddle music, jazz, blues, ste...

Beneath the dry plains of northwest Oklahoma lies one of the resources that helped transform agriculture in the Panhandle: the Ogallala Aquifer. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken traces the shift from agriculture dependent almost entirely on uncertain rainfall to farms supported by deep wells and center-pivot irrigation. Groundwater helped make crops more dependable, supporte...

Electric lights reached most Oklahoma towns well before they reached the farms surrounding them. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken looks back at a time when rural families still depended on kerosene lamps, hand-pumped water and muscle for jobs that electricity would eventually transform. The problem was not the technology — it was the distance between customers. Farmers and r...

Cushing, Oklahoma, may be a relatively small town, but what happens beneath and around it connects directly to the global oil market. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken traces Cushing’s petroleum story from Tom Slick’s 1912 discovery well through the explosive growth of the Cushing-Drumright field. Oil came out of the ground so quickly that moving it became nearly as important...

Long before GPS, highways or state lines could tell travelers where they were, Oklahoma’s Cross Timbers served as a landmark that was difficult to miss. Stretching in bands from Kansas through Oklahoma and into Texas, the region blended post oak and blackjack oak woodland with open prairie. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken examines how Native peoples, explorers, traders, sol...

Oklahoma farmers spend plenty of time waiting for rain, but OSU Extension soil and water conservation specialist Daniel Adamson Ph. D. says rainfall is only useful to a crop if the soil can capture it. Speaking from a soil pit at OSU’s Summer Crop Demo Day in Chickasha, Adamson explains how aggregates, cracks and natural channels allow water to infiltrate into the root zone rather than running acr...

Hollywood has been telling stories about Oklahoma for more than a century, but the Oklahoma seen on screen is usually a mixture of history, stereotype and movie-making. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken looks at five familiar examples: Oklahoma!, True Grit, Far and Away, The Grapes of Wrath and Twister. Each borrowed something recognizable from the state — frontier change, In...