"Boomer and Sooner"

[WishBone]

The words "Boomer" and "Sooner" have a lot of history at the University of Oklahoma. They echo through Oklahoma Memorial Stadium during every football game and the Pride of Oklahoma plays “Boomer Sooner” at every opportunity. They’re the namesake of OU’s anthropomorphized pony mascot duo and Sooner is the official name carried by all OU students and alumni.

It’s a name inexorably tied to the university, but it also carries weight beyond the campus of crimson and cream.

Oklahoma is officially known as the Sooner State. It’s a point of state pride and an identity.

But it wasn’t always so. When the term was first coined it was synonymous with lying, cheating and criminality.

At noon on April 22, 1889, settlers bolted from the starting line, eager to claim uninhabited lands opened for settlement by the federal government. There were between 50,000 and 75,000 sections of land available, but about twice that many settlers showed up. The Sooners weren’t going to let the rules get in the way.

“Utter pandemonium was the result,” former OU history professor William W. Savage Jr. said. “They had to let people in for a period of time so they could look around to see what they wanted to try for. You don’t just have everybody running in grabbing the first thing they see. You’re looking for land that’s got water on it and maybe some timber.”

Savage said it was a kind of open house. After the open house period, everyone was supposed to head back to the starting line.

“Some of them didn’t leave,” Savage said. ‘Others had different ideas. Leave and then sneak back, maybe under cover of darkness the day before the run. Then, they would take up residence in a hiding place near the quarter section marker that you wanted to claim and when you hear the hoof beats coming, you jump out and pretend you just got there. That’s a Sooner.”

If convicted in court, Sooners would be denied a chance to participate in all future government land allotments. Sometimes, it was handled in a more direct fashion.

“If you walked into a bar in El Reno back then and walked up to the biggest person you could find and said ‘You’re a Sooner,’ you’d have been better off calling him a dirty son of a b••••," Savage said. "You call somebody a Sooner and they would kill you. And a lot of people disappeared, just disappeared. Sooners were terrible people in the eyes of everybody else.”

So, how did a term so venomous become a source of state pride? OU history professor Sterling Evans said that the term started to shift from a derogatory insult to a celebrated moniker around the time of statehood in 1907.

“Sooner became a popular because it was a way to celebrate statehood,” Evans said. “Sure, some people came early, but it has kind of a frontier mentality, the code of the West where people would celebrate the notion of beating the system.”

The fight song was penned in 1905 by OU history student Arthur M. Alden, who fittingly stole the tune from Yale’s fight song.

That’s what a lot of people think of when they hear the phrase, but Savage said the OU tradition doesn’t change its original meaning and it shouldn’t be forgotten.

“I noticed the other day that (OU President) David Boren had said the meaning of all of it had changed over the years. I don’t believe it,” Savage said. “I think part of the problem is the way Oklahoma history is taught in the secondary schools. You can’t make money writing Oklahoma history unless you write a textbook. If it’s going to be a textbook, it has to be approved by the state government. So, it’s all what I would call ‘happy history.’ Oklahomans spend a lot of time trying to put a good face on a bad thing and never admitting that it’s a bad thing.”

Evans said that bad government policies, aimed at assimilating native populations were to blame for the plight of native peoples, but said there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding the land run.

It was the result of many devastating dominoes that ultimately displaced Indians across the United States.

“The pictures in The Transcript of protestors waving posters and saying land run equals genocide and things like that, I can appreciate where they’re coming from, but land runs were not genocide. That’s just false,” Evans said. “I don’t mind that protesters are against the name Sooner and the land runs as a policy, the treatment of Indians in the big picture, of course.

“As a professor I teach the truth about that and I’m very sympathetic to what they’re saying. At the same time, it wasn’t genocide. There were not massive killings of people. That happened more with removal. That happened other places and other times. That predates the land run. That came about with the Indians Appropriations Act, the Dawes Act, the Curtis Act, all of these things.”

“I’m aggrieved by many aspects of our nation’s history, and I’m the first to be critical of that, but the land run was not genocide. I’m glad it wasn’t. Also, when people say that, when I see signs saying that it was genocide, I think ‘What? Are they gone?’ We still have one of the most vibrant native populations of anyone in the United States. Look at the license plate. Look at the 39 recognized tribes in this state. It was bad policy. It was policy to assimilate them. So, they may be able to argue cultural genocide, but that’s hardly true either. Indians still celebrate their culture now. I’m so glad that there hasn’t been a death of native culture in this state. That could have happened. There were non-enlightened policies, but it wasn’t genocide.

There was more of a genocidal thing going on with removal, in which thousands of people died on the Trail of Tears. Populations of people were not wiped out, but thousands died. But that predates the land run.”

OU history professor Warren Metcalf said Sooners were essentially cheaters, but it was other settlers they were cheating. He said the federal government was to native peoples what Sooners were to other settlers. But he said it’s no surprise the name still holds a sour taste for some.

“The real story of Indian Territory and removal is a complicated and often tragic one,” Metcalfe said. "It is not the simple version that people have about a tidal wave of “Boomers” sweeping over the plains and forcing Indians off of their lands. The federal government conceived of a place – an Indian Territory – in the 1820s as an alternative to localized wars of extermination. Efforts were made in the 1830s to negotiate with the tribes who lived on the southern plains, mostly Kiowas, Wichitas, Comanches, and others, to make way for Indians who would be removed from the Ohio Valley and the Southeast.

"During the time of Andrew Jackson, the government moved the Five Tribes to Indian Territory along with scores of other tribes. After the 1866 Reconstruction Treaties with the Five Tribes, federal negotiators set up reservations in the western part of the Territory for southern plains tribes and reserved the central part — the “unassigned lands” — for tribes in Kansas and tribes to be relocated in the future. Ultimately, something like 67 tribes inhabited the Territory. Not all of the land was allocated, however. The federal government cleared title for mostly unoccupied lands in the center of the state and this is the land that the government opened for settlement in 1889 with the first land run.”

Before there were Sooners, there were Boomers. And while Sooners weren’t directly responsible for stealing native lands, Boomers were trying to do just that.

A decade before the land run of 1889, Capt. David Payne, a volunteer militia member in Kansas, led settlers across the border into Oklahoma Indian Territory to “settle” uninhabited lands. The Boomers were repeatedly removed, but Payne continued his con, charging new settlers a fee for each trip.

“To get to the bottom of it, Boomers and Sooners are two kinds of criminals,” Savage said. “The lesser one in the 19th century is the Boomer, because the Boomer was just trying to steal from Indians. Sooners were trying to steal from white people, and that’s unforgivable. You can’t do that — at least, that’s how people thought about it back then.”

The history of Boomers and Sooners is a rocky one — a source of state identity and an admission of dirty dealing, both to other settlers and Native Americans. Now, Sooner is back at the center of a controversy about how its history fits in a modern cultural context. It’s a word rooted in controversy and those roots are still bearing fruit, nearly 130 years later.

“The Sooners were cheaters, but it is interesting to see the way these things change over time,” Evans said. “We are the Sooner State. It’s a part of the state identity, not just the university.”

Is it a celebration of the pioneer spirit, or a glorification of thievery? In 2016, it represents both, but Savage said it doesn’t change where it came from.

“You can’t sugarcoat a Sooner,” Savage said. “People need to tell it like it is. It doesn’t change the past and the past is something people need to learn from and live with.”

[OU Chinaman]

..."you can't sugarcoat a SOONER."

TRUTH!!!

OKLAHOMA is the Indian Nations. One of the last examples of manifest destiny.
Outlaw territory. Robbers Cave State Park is testimony.
One of the the last remnants of the old west, the pioneer spirit,... gunfighters, lawmen. and bounty hunters (Who were mostly killers themselves.)

Most OKLAHOMANS still share a suppressed affinity for those defiant enough to flaunt the law, the rules.
Remember Berry Tramel calling it the "Jesse James Syndrome".

I not only accept being a proud son of the SOONER STATE,...I embrace it.
I ain't Willy Wonka...I don't sugar coat sh*t!