1,000 Places to See in the U.S.A. & Canada Before You Die (80 page)

Marland’s luck ran out when he borrowed money from the wily eastern banker J. P. Morgan; he lost both his company and his palace not long after the paint was dry. Today most of the furnishings have been returned, and it’s easy to imagine the extravagant balls
and lively fox hunts Marland enjoyed here, however briefly, with his scandalously wed second wife, Lydie (his adopted daughter and his first wife’s niece). Marland’s first home in Ponca City, a 22-room white stucco mansion known as Marland’s Grand Home, holds a large oil painting of a Marland fox hunt and memorabilia from the once world-renowned 101 Ranch and Wild West Show.

Ponca City is famous for two colossal bronzes,
Pioneer Woman
and
Standing Bear,
which honor the great Ponca tribal leader who in 1879 was the first to successfully argue in court that Indians are actually “persons” under the law. The 22-foot bronzes by modern master Oreland C. Joe and the surrounding 63-acre park commemorate the Indian removals following the Civil War. Tribes like the Ponca, Kaw, Tonkawa, Osage, Pawnee, and Otoe-Missouria were forced to leave their homelands and relocate to this area.

The Marland Estate Mansion contains 10 bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, 7 fireplaces, and 3 kitchens.

After lunching on meaty pork ribs and unsurpassed homemade onion rings at Chick & Millie’s Blue Moon Restaurant, a Ponca City institution, head downtown to the Ponca City Library, a 1935 brick building with an array of art on its walls that rivals its raison d’etre. Take a stroll down East Grand Avenue, and you’ll pass the Poncan Theatre, a 1927 beauty where Oklahoma’s most famous son, Will Rogers, once twirled his lasso.

W
HERE
: 90 miles north of Oklahoma City.
Visitor info:
Tel 866–763-8092 or 580–765-4400;
www.poncacitytourism.com
.
M
ARLAND
E
STATE
M
ANSION
: Tel 800–422-8340 or 580–767-0420;
www.marlandmansion.com
.
M
ARLAND’S
G
RAND
H
OME
: Tel 580–767-0427;
www.marlandgrandhome.com
.
S
TANDING
B
EAR
M
EMORIAL
P
ARK
: Tel 580–762-1514.
B
LUE
M
OON
: Tel 580–762-2425.
Cost:
rib dinner $15.
P
ONCA
C
ITY
L
IBRARY
: Tel 580–767-0345;
www.poncacity.lib.ok.us
.
P
ONCAN
T
HEATRE
: Tel 580–765-0943;
www.poncantheatre.org
.
B
EST TIMES
: 1st weekend in June for the Herb Festival and the Draggin’ Grand Classic Car Show; 3rd weekend in Aug for the 101 Ranch Rodeo; last weekend in Sept for the Standing Bear Powwow.

World’s Greatest Collection of Art Devoted to the American West

Tulsa, Oklahoma

An unsurpassed repository for the best of the Old West, the Gilcrease Museum is the lasting legacy of a one-eighth Creek Indian who struck it rich when oil was found on his 160-acre allotment 20 miles south of
Tulsa. Thomas Gilcrease started his own oil company in 1922 and spent his profits gleefully amassing the world’s largest selection of fine art, artifacts, and archives devoted to the American West. (Some 327,000 items make up the Gilcrease treasure, if you count every last arrowhead and piece of pottery.)

Buying great Western art at a time when
few others were interested, Gilcrease quickly built a major collection that included the iconic oil painting
Black Hawk and His Son Whirling Thunder
by John Wesley Jarvis, 18 of the 23 different Frederic Remington sculptures, and a remarkable group of works by Charlie Russell and Thomas Moran, whose paintings helped make the case to America that Yellowstone was worth protecting.

The depth and breadth of Gilcrease’s taste outstripped his ability to pay, however, when the price of oil declined precipitously in the 1950s. Rather than sell off a single piece, he deeded the entire collection to the city of Tulsa, which approved a $2.25 million bond issue to cover his debts. Gilcrease put his oil revenue toward museum maintenance until the bond was repaid; he died, debt-free, in 1962.

Long known for its magnificent oil paintings, the Gilcrease offers equal riches in its vast anthropology collections, previously available only to scholars. Now the public can browse the razor-sharp Aztec obsidian blades used for human sacrifice, richly beaded Cheyenne moccasins, or 2,700-year-old effigy ceramics from western Mexico by randomly opening glass-covered drawers down in the Kravis Discovery Center.

Oil money is also behind Tulsa’s other world-class collection, the Philbrook Museum of Art, an ornate 72-room Italian Rennaissance villa from the 1920s that was once the home of oilman Waite Phillips. (His brother Frank made a fortune up in Bartlesville; see p. 644.) When Waite and his wife decamped to California in 1938, they gave Tulsa their fabulous home for use as a new arts center, known today for its fine Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings.

With money and civic pride in unlimited supply, a proliferation of art deco masterpieces from the 1920s to 1940s were built throughout Tulsa to remind the world of the town’s status as “Oil Capital of the World.” One of the more curious remnants is the Warehouse Market Building, a former farmers market on old Route 66 that has housed Lyon’s Indian Store since 1994. A beloved Oklahoma tradition since 1916, the Indian Store is considered the best place in Tulsa to buy every size, shape, and color of turquoise, studded concho belt, Pendleton blanket, and Oklahoma beadwork your heart desires.

G
ILCREASE
M
USEUM
: 1400 N. Gilcrease Museum Rd. Tel 918–596-2700;
www.gilcrease.org
.
P
HILBROOK
M
USEUM OF
A
RT
: Tel 918–748-5309;
www.philbrook.org
.
When:
closed Mon.
L
YON’S
I
NDIAN
S
TORE
: Tel 918–582-6372;
www.lyonsindianstore.com
.
When:
closed Sun.

The Nation’s First Wildlife Preserve

Oklahoma

Rugged islands of ancient rock surrounded by a sea of grass, the Wichita Mountains are the nation’s first and oldest wildlife preserve. The buffalo still roam here, as do the elk and herds of Texas longhorns. Prairie
dogs bark high-pitched warnings at your approach. It’s a magical landscape of timeless beauty where you can drive, hike, rock climb, bike, camp, and even bushwhack through one
of the few mixed-grass prairies in the country to have escaped the plow.

Deeply moved by a letter from great Comanche Chief Quanah Parker bemoaning the decimation of buffalo, President Theodore Roosevelt named the Wichita Mountains the country’s first national wildlife preserve in 1907. Fifteen bison were returned to the plains (from the New York City Zoo, ironically), and in the 1920s the endangered Texas longhorn cattle joined them on the 60,000-acre refuge. Numbers for both are now so high that there’s an annual roundup and auction to keep the refuge from being overgrazed. The buyers are usually ranchers or sometimes Indian tribes who want to return buffalo to their own lands.

Give yourself plenty of time to walk the Dog Run Hollow Trail System and drive to the top of Mount Scott. The range’s highest peak at 2,464 feet, it offers broad views of lakes dotting the boulder-studded grasslands below.

Don’t leave these parts without a longhorn “Meersburger” from the Meers Store, a ramshackle piece of Americana serving Oklahoma’s—some say America’s—best burger. Owners Joe and Margie Maranto keep their own herds of grass-fed longhorns just down the road, and then grind the beef themselves because Joe’s daddy was a butcher, and that’s the way you do it. The half-pound Meersburgers are so big they’re served in aluminum pie pans and quartered just so you can pick them up.

Nearby in Lawton, the famous warrior Geronimo is buried in an Apache cemetery in an evocative corner of Fort Sill. Geronimo was the daring leader of the last Indian fighting force to formally capitulate to the U.S., back in 1886. Because he fought against such daunting odds and held out the longest, he was the most famous—and feared—Apache of all. Wayfarers pay tribute to him by leaving a coin on his monument, a cobblestone pyramid topped with a proud eagle.

W
HERE
: 15 miles northwest of Lawton; junction of routes 49 and 115. Tel 580–429-3222; wichitamountains.fws.gov.
M
EERS
S
TORE
: Tel 580–429-8051.
Cost:
Meersburger $7.
G
ERONIMO’S
G
RAVE
: Lawton. Tel 580–581-3460;
www.museumgreatplains.org
.
B
EST TIMES
: spring and fall for weather; Sept–Oct for bison and longhorn auctions at the Refuge.

Nature’s High Drama

South Dakota

To the Lakota Sioux, who controlled this part of the Dakotas before the white man arrived, they were the
mako shika,
“the bad lands.” To the French-Canadian fur trappers who came later, they were
les mauvaises terres à traverser,
“bad lands to travel across.” But in 1935, the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright came here and described what he saw with an artist’s eye: “an indescribable sense of mysterious elsewhere … [an] endless supernatural world more spiritual than earth but created out of it.”

Once upon a time this area rested under an inland sea, and once upon another time it was a lush forest full of animal life; but despite the fossilized richness that lies beneath the surface, it’s the “bones of the Badlands” themselves that draw us. Sculpted by 75 million years of sedimentation and erosion, 243,000 acres are crammed full of cones, ridges, buttes, gorges, gulches, pinnacles, and precipices in an eerily sparse yet
breathtakingly beautiful landscape. Some formations rise more than 1,000 feet into the sky, while in other places the forces of erosion have, over thousands of years, brushed away the surface to reveal band upon band of stratified mineral deposits, weaving through the ridges and ravines like nature’s brushstrokes.

You can explore the park up close and in depth on a day or overnight hike, from a short quarter-mile loop to the little-used 10-mile Castle Trail to an unmarked crosscountry trek. Or you can see and experience the majesty from your car on the 31-mile Badlands Loop, which provides an ample eyeful of nature’s theatricality, especially at dawn, dusk, and just after a rainfall, when the interplay of light and shadow on the earth is most poetic.

American Indians lived on this land for 11,000 years, but they were forced onto reservations when white homesteaders began arriving in the late 19th century. As their situation became desperate, many became followers of the Paiute prophet Wovoka, who preached that by adhering to virtuous principles and performing a “Ghost Dance” he’d seen in a dream, the Indians’ traditional way of life would be restored. As the movement grew, fearing that the dancers’ religious fervor could be an incitement to war, the government sent in the troops. In December 1890, a band of Sioux dancers was taken into custody by the Seventh Cavalry. While they were camping at Wounded Knee Creek, a scuffle between a soldier and an Indian escalated into a wholesale slaughter in which at least 150 Indians were killed, many of them women and children. Today a simple memorial marks the site, approximately 45 miles south of the park, off Route 27.

W
HERE
: 80 miles southeast of Rapid City. Tel 605–433-5361;
www.nps.gov/badl
.
B
EST TIMES
: spring and fall for weather. If you crave solitude, come in winter.