Chrisandra's Best of Both Worlds Roadtrip: Extreme Social Distancing in Oklahoma and Arkansas

Aloha all,

Oklahoma will always hold a special place in our hearts as the 50th state for us to get to. It was last, but definitely not least, so we are glad to return so quickly to this underrated place. If you just want to see that Oklahoma is prettier than most people think, you can just look at the pictures below, if you want to find out why we like it so much, you’ll have to look at all those words in between the pictures, too.

The aptly named American BeautyBerry

Our timing was lucky on our first night back in Oklahoma: The motorcycle rally at the campground we stayed at had just finished and we got the best campsite: All by ourselves; right by the river. I love floating down rivers and we still had our tubes from last year. I was very excited and did not mind that it took me at least 15 minutes to blow it up. However, my enthusiasm was quickly deflated when after just a few minutes, I floated right into a sharp stick. But we’re still excited to be back in Oklahoma!

Before and after the Sharp Stick

We visited the very interesting Choctaw Capitol Museum. The history of Oklahoma as “Indian Territory” makes this state very unique and there’s always more to learn. I knew this area was part of the Louisiana Purchase, but I was not aware that using it to relocate native tribes was part of Thomas Jefferson’s reasoning for buying it. As brutal (and for many fatal) as the Trail of Tears was, apparently this forced removal and shameful treatment of Native Americans was the more humane option. Letting them keep their native homelands was apparently never seriously considered. Deceases that were accidentally introduced (and even intentionally spread) together with the forced removal from their homelands have decimated native populations, but from our brief experiences and limited perspective, it seems like the tribes in Oklahoma today are doing very well.

Capitol of the Choctaw Nation

The Museum in the Choctaw Capitol had an exhibition about the “Original Codetalkers”. They have gotten a lot less recognition, but three decades before the Navajo Codetalkers helped in WW2, the Choctaw helped with secret communications in the first world war. We heard some Choctaw being spoken and I can confirm, there’s no way Germans ears could have picked up any of that. The ironic part is that the military used the Choctaw Codetalkers only a few decades after the official policy forbid the Choctaw and other tribes to use their native language.

Speaking of native languages: We also visited “Sequoya’s Cabin”. He was a Cherokee tribal member who is credited with putting the Cherokee language in writing in the early 1800’s. To accomplish that, he did not use the Latin alphabet, like most other native languages, but he created a whole new syllabary.

ᎠᏍᎦᏯ ᎩᎦᎨᏱ

If your device displayed the word above, you can see how pretty it looks and it proves that the Cherokee language lives on and adapts even in the digital age by being included in the Unicode, the world’s standard for digital text.

Another sad and ironic twist: Sequoya volunteered to fight for Andrew Jackson. A few years later, when Jackson had become president, he returned the favor by pushing for the forceful removal of native tribes, including the Cherokee and Sequoya, resulting in the tragic Trail of Tears.

The drive to our next site was supposed to take us through Arkansas for just about 10 minutes. Then we saw one of those brown signs and ended up spending two days in Fort Smith. Just proves that any National Park Service site is worth visiting, even though the actual visitor center was closed due to the pandemic. Again, we were lucky to run into a volunteer who gave us a private tour of the fort. Actually, not just any volunteer, it was historian and author Markus ‘MC’ Woodward. Not only did he take almost 3 hours to tell us about the history of the fort, he even pretended to enjoy himself, saying he hasn’t talked this much since he retired from teaching.

Our personal tour guide at Fort Smith NHS

With our curiosity awoken, we explored more of the town of Fort Smith. We visited the local history museum, where I particularly enjoyed the exhibition about the myth and the facts about Judge Parker, the so called “Hanging Judge”. While it is true that in the Wild West era of Fort Smith, there were some hangings, a lot of the folklore was added by Hollywood and by the local tourism authority to entice travelers to ‘hang around a while’.

Fort Smith also has the unique distinction to have the only whorehouse on the National Register of Historic Places. Yes, you read that right. It’s called “Miss Laura’s Social Club and it has a fascinating history! Despite the ongoing pandemic, it was also the only place so far where at least Sandra got a quick medical check up and she was quickly cleared as healthy enough…to work as one of Miss Laura’s girls…

The only Whorehouse on the National Register of Historic Places

On a beautiful walk along the Arkansas River we discovered a good excuse why we will have to return to Fort Smith soon. The very impressive looking building of the “US Marshal Museum” is built, but the exhibitions won’t open for another year or so. Sounds like something right up our alley since we know hardly anything about the US Marshal Service and this is probably the only place where we will ever learn anything about them. Some people don’t read a book because they wait for the movie. We’ll wait for the museum.

The (future) site of the National Marshal Museum

Back in Oklahoma, the Spiro Mounds Archaeology Center is one of the most important, but also one of the most underwhelming historical sites to visit. Millions (!) of native American artifacts have been discovered here, including some of the best preserved and most ornate. For centuries, it was the cultural center of tribes ruling about half of what is America today! But don’t feel bad if you don’t know much about the Spiro Mounds, neither did we. Like the manager of the site explained: "Our problem is that the sites you can visit today are basically piles of dirt." With tourism and the Instagram factor in mind, the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde were a much better idea. Due to remote location and the lack of a place to take an impressive selfie, this important place is very sparsely visited. In fact, currently there is only one person working at the entire site. His name is Dennis Peterson and he is one of the most gifted interpreters I have ever met. Any little question of mine triggered an interesting history lesson. I am not kidding: We spent 4 hours at this site: About 30 minutes walking around the piles of dirt, 25 minutes in the tiny museum and the rest talking to Dennis or in this case more being talked to by Dennis. His enthusiasm is even more impressive knowing that he has managed this place for over 35 years! And $7 is a pretty cheap tuition for a series of history lectures by such an expert.

Yes, the sign at the entrance is the most photogenic
thing at Spiro Mounds

As Tommy commented, we can be “such suckers for superlatives”, which is kind of ironic because that seems very much like an American thing to me. But it’s true, we drove up to Cavanal Hill simply because it claims to be the “World’s Highest Hill” at 1,999 feet. It’s a dubious claim since it’s unsure from where they measure that (it’s more than 2,000 feet above sea level) and there is no official differentiation between a hill versus a mountain at 2,000 feet. I had hoped for a little better view from the top but the marker was the most impressive part, not even a shop to buy the T-shirt to prove we’ve been to the highest hill…

Maybe the highest hill or
possibly the lowest mountain in the world

And some people never learn…so the next day we went to another rock with a dubious claim to fame: The “Heavener Runestone Park” used to be a state park and the claim was that vikings had sailed to America about 1,000 years ago, came up the Mississippi and Arkansas River and engraved a traditional rune stone here. The theory has not been substantiated, so it’s no longer a state park, but a free local park run by volunteers. But even if it’s a “fake” and the rune stone is only 100 instead of 1,000 years old: This would still make it the oldest physical evidence of “fake news” west of the Mississippi, if you were to be into those kinds of superlatives.

The approx. 100 or possibly 1,000 year old Heavener Runestone

Maybe because we don’t try to do quite as much as normally and we stay away from cities and events, we have been staying at even more pretty campgrounds than we usually do. We have spent at least half our nights at campsites right on lakes, which is surprising in an area that has hardly any natural lakes at all. But we enjoy the “fake lakes” as I call the reservoirs. Most of them were built by the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control. To our benefit, around the lakes, they often built several campgrounds, hiking trails and even some disc golf courses for our enjoyment.

We took the Talimena National Scenic Byway back into Arkansas. We are slightly too early for the best fall colors, but the scenery and the weather is perfect for strolls, walks and hikes through nature. So as a reward for reading (or at least scrolling) this far, I’ll leave you with some nature pictures or ‘extreme social distancing’ pictures, since we are sometimes the only ones on a trail: