99% Invisible - 325- The Worst Way to Start a City

Episode Date: October 17, 2018

Sam Anderson, author of Boom Town, guides us through the chaotic founding of Oklahoma City, which happened all in one day in 1889, in an event called the Land Run. Plus, we talk about Operation Bongo, the supersonic flight tests that rattled OKC residents in the 1960s. Anderson calls Operation Bongo his favorite research discovery of his entire career. The Worst Way to Start a City

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. For most of his life, Sam Anderson didn't think about Oklahoma City much at all. Sam is a journalist. He lived in New York City for a long time, and Oklahoma City just wasn't on his radar. But then, in 2012, he was assigned to do a story about the Oklahoma City Thunder. The city's new basketball team had just gone to the NBA finals. And they had this amazing trio of young stars, Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Hardin.

They were all really different players with really different temperaments and styles, but there was something kind of magical and unstoppable about the way they played together. Final second Durant got a good look at the three, and they make you pay. They set that up so beautifully. So Sam got on a plane and as he was flying to Oklahoma City to meet the guys and to ride about their team, he was reading a book about the history of Oklahoma to get more familiar with the place. And it was talking about the origin of tornadoes and it was saying that tornadoes

are caused by this collision of three separate very different weather forces. You've got kind of dry air coming from the desert. You've got this cold Arctic air coming down from Canada and you've got this warm, heavy hot Gulf air coming from the South. And they all collide over Oklahoma in a way that those forces don't collide really anywhere else in the world. And at that moment Sam had a realization and he wrote it down in the margin of the book, Harden Durant Westbrook, which was the three big basketball stars on the thunder who were

a similar trio of strangely clashing forces that basketball had never really seen before. So in that little leap, like I was noticing these thematic echoes between things about the history of Oklahoma and things about the basketball team and the kind of civics of the modern city. Sam started seeing these kinds of connections everywhere. The history of Oklahoma City started to seem so interwoven with the contemporary life of the place in these fascinating and unexpected ways that he decided he wanted to write a whole book about it. Not just about the basketball team,

but about the city itself, from its founding, which was a really very weird event, to the present day. The book is called Boomtown, and it's one of my favorite things I've read in the past year. I think it'll go down to history as one of the great pieces of narrative nonfiction, actually. So today, we're dedicating the entire episode to my conversation with Sam. There are so many interesting chapters and anecdotes in this book, but I wanted to focus

primarily on the insane fountain of Oklahoma City, in an event that's known as the Land Run of 1889. To understand that story, you have to go back just a little bit further to earlier in the 1800s, when Oklahoma wasn't even a state yet It was a place known as Indian territory and the US government was kind of using it as this spot on the Great Plains that it could force Indigenous peoples into to make room for American settlers as they took over the country so

You had dozens of tribes that were forced into there all the trails of led to Oklahoma. So that's what it was in the 1800s. Then during the Civil War, a couple of tribes in Indian territory made alliances with the south rather than the north, and as punishment after the war, the federal government stripped them of their land. This left an enormous patch of unoccupied space right in the middle of the territory. Roughly half the size of Connecticut. So it's a fairly big space, and suddenly it just had nobody in it.

And everybody referred to this patch of Indian territory as the unassigned lands. In the 1860s and 70s, white settlers from the surrounding areas like Kansas and Texas started making illegal raids into the unassigned lands. In the 1860s and 70s, white settlers from the surrounding areas, like Kansas and Texas, started making illegal raids into the unassigned lands to try to seize it as their own. And the leader of this group, known as the Boomers, was a guy named David Paine. Yeah, so David Paine was apparently this incredibly charismatic guy. I mean, the pictures of him, he's quite striking, he's really intense eyes in this kind of beautiful hair.

He looks like he could be an indie singer or something, you know, playing a banjo and wooing young girls. So, you know, he would ride around Kansas and get up on a wagon and he would shout out these speeches to these struggling farmers about how there was this patch of America that belonged to the American people, but the government wouldn't let them have it. And he managed to convince many, many, many people to buy into his vision of Oklahoma as this

kind of sacred holy land for white settlers in the middle of Indian territory. In this is the beginning of the scheme that was the land run, which you talk about is being the craziest way that a city could possibly have been born. So could you describe what are the kind of the ground rules of the land run and how did it start Oklahoma City? Yeah, so modern historians looking back, basically all agree that this was the worst way

you could ever start a city. And even within those confines, I went very poorly. So there really were not many rules. I mean, so the government finally says, yes, all right, you can have the onesign lands. Anybody who wants a piece of it, who's what we're going to do? Come line up at the border of the Anasine lands. This is a 300 mile long circumference. In most places it's not marked. Where it is marked, it's like a stack of rocks or a creek or something. So come line up around this border on April 22nd, 1889. And at noon, we will give a signal

and anybody who wants some of this land can rush in and hammer down some wooden stakes and claim some of this territory. If you're out in the country, you can have 160 acres. If you're in what's been designated a town site, you can have a smaller patch of that town site. And that's pretty much it. Even the basics of this is amazing because who decides what noon is in 1889?

You know what I'm saying? Yeah right, right. There's not like a standardized atomic clock somewhere. You know, they can set off a digital precise signal. So people had to kind of figure out for themselves what noon was. And people came from all over the world, this set off like a real movement around the globe. You had people in Europe like coming to Liverpool and coming to Hamburg to like ship out to get to Oklahoma. You had people putting classified ads in major newspapers

in Chicago and New York to let's meet up and form an alliance and make a plan and go to Oklahoma and claim some land. And for the day itself, you had something like 100,000 people show up to line up at the border and make a run for it. So, noon strikes, maybe at different times for different people, like lot of 300-mile border. What happens next? So noon strikes, quote-unquote noon. And in some places, there are soldiers giving the signal, so everyone has to wait. Up north, the soldiers have this long rope that they've pulled across.

Part of the border, the people are held behind, down south, there's a river that people are sitting on their horses, like in the middle of the river, sort of sinking in quicksand, waiting for the signal. And then in some cases they fired guns, in some cases they blew a bugle and they were off. And you had, you know, rich people, poor people, people riding the family wagon, you had people on race horses that they had just bought like the day before, you had people riding the family wagon, you had people on race horses that they just bought like

the day before, you had people riding broken down mules, there were people on bicycles, there were people on foot, and they just burst across the border and start racing. And this land is rough, it's like, I mean, they're dry creek beds all over it, they're buffalo wallows, we're buffalo roll around. And immediately these wagons start hitting these ruts and just busting apart. I mean, these are not vehicles intended for rough riding at high speeds. So these vehicles are busting apart

and people are flying out of them and rolling across the prairie and getting up and running forward. It's just wild. I mean, people are shooting guns to speed up their horses and accidentally shooting each other. Horses are dying of exhaustion. I think it's just about the wildest scene you can imagine.

And this is complicated even more by the people who really cheated, who started way before noon, and they became known pretty derisively at first as the Sooners. And the Sooners are still part of the modern day mythology of Oklahoma even today. Yeah, right. I mean, Boomer and Sooner are words that you'll hear a lot if you're in Oklahoma. If you go to a college football game, it's actually a thing that the crowd yells back and forth.

Boomer, Sooner, Boomer, Sooner. Right. The University of Oklahoma football team is actually called the Sooners. football game, it's actually a thing that the crowd yells back and forth, boomer, sooner, boomer, sooner. Right, the University of Oklahoma football team is actually called the Sooners. It's this identity that Oklahoma's really embraced it. Boomer! You know, you'll hear that like on ringtones and people's phones and stuff. So, yeah, there is a real through line in the identity of Oklahoma's. So the boomers were the ones who agitated for the opening of the unassigned lands.

Sooners were people who, when the date of the land run was finally set, managed to cheat. A lot of them happened to be boomers as well, because the boomers felt particularly entitled to this land, because they're the ones who did the work to get the government to allow them in. So they kind of resented all these other people who were just showing up the last minute.

So they found all kinds of ways to cheat. I mean, there were stories of like a hot air balloonist hovering over Oklahoma just before noon so that he could just touch down on his favorite spot when the bugle was blown. I mean, there were many, many, many camps of people who were hiding out in these kind of gullies and along creeks, these kind of sooner camps that the federal troops would come through and disperse in the weeks leading up to the land run and then they would reassemble. William Couch, who had taken over the boomer movement

when David Payne died, was one of the main cheaters and he was deeply connected to the railroads And so he and his businessmen cronies Actually went in many times. There's this incredible picture of him and one of his associates standing In what is now downtown Oklahoma City and was just then this absolute empty scrubby grass prairie a month before the landrun Mapping out how they wanted the city to look. And so, when the signal is given, theoretically it should have taken people maybe an hour plus to get there because it was 15 miles from the closest border, and yet the moment the

bugle blew, you had people, including William Couch and his cronies, leaping out of the bushes, jumping out of train cars, falling out of trees. It's like this mythological origin story where people just suddenly appear out of the landscape. And the soldiers don't know what to do, because there's so many of them, and they're just planting tents all over and hammering stakes. And William Couch and his crew have a whole team of surveyors

who have all their equipment, their chains and poles and everything, and they're laying out streets and lots as they have mapped it in the months preceding the land run. And then part of the labor of making Oklahoma into a real place after this was adjudicating all of that cheating. Who cheated and who didn't? Who deserved to keep their land and who didn't, who deserved to keep their land, and who didn't. Because they settled the land as settlers, not as city builders exactly. Like they didn't account for the things that make a city function. They really just plotted out their own land

for their own private use. Yeah, it's such a nice little metaphor in a way for, I don't know, the American experiment, the American temperament. Because exactly, you had this huge wave of people rushing in. I mean, waves from all sides. And what everyone was thinking about was, I need to get mine. I got to anchor down in this place so that whatever comes of it, I'll have my piece of

it. So there was no central planning, there was no foresight whatsoever. And so by the end of the day on the site that would become Oklahoma City, you had something like 10,000 settlers and they had claimed pretty much every single patch of land. I mean, they were like, it was just like tent flap to tent flap almost,

and you didn't have any of the negative space that you really need for a city to work. You didn't have streets, you didn't have alleys. Other than the part of the city that had been mapped out by these cheaters, and they managed to sell certificates to own lots on the land that they had plotted out. But otherwise, it was just a giant absolute mess that could never going forward function as a place where humans live. So this huge influx of people all claimed different parts of the land, and this is on day one of the founding of Oklahoma City. What happens that first night? So you get this incredible chaotic rush of people. They all managed to claim a spot. Now in some

spots, you know, there's there's five separate settlers claiming that they were there first. So you have all these disputes, all kinds of activity. When the sun sets that night, you get this kind of general relaxation. Everybody stops jockeying for plots. Everyone stops their work. People kind of relax and look around and rest. And again, because this was so recent, we have all these eyewitness accounts. We have news accounts.

There were reporters on the ground. So we know things like there were centipedes crawling around everywhere because of course the whole ecosystem has just been shocked into agitation by this injection of humans into it for no reason. And so you have this incredible scene of just tense as far as you can see, masses of brand new people who've never been to this place before, most of them, most of whom have

no connection to one another at all. And the one story that really stands out from that first night was sometime around 10 PM or midnight accounts very a little bit. It's quite a down, and then a voice suddenly calls out into the silence, and it's a man's voice. He's a really, really strong, loud, low voice. And what he calls out is very clear in the night air,

but also totally inscrutable. And he says, oh, Joe, here's your mule. And everybody kind of looks around. They're very stories about what that means. It might have been a reference to an old Confederate song, or maybe the people in the camp were talking about a thing that actually happened that night. There was a guy named Joe with a neighboring lot,

and his mule had wandered off, and this guy found it. But what happens is more interesting than whatever started it, because within a few seconds, another voice echoes that one. It says, oh Joe, here's your mule. And then somebody else echoes it. And then somebody else. And soon it turns into this like absolute bizarre party

of everybody in Oklahoma City shouting, oh Joe, here's your mule over and over and over again at one another. And it's just resonating over the whole town site. And they say actually it was so loud that the federal troops who were stationed about a mile away for the night heard it. And they started calling it back to. And then settlers on the outside of town heard it. And they started calling it out too. And so you just have this cacophony of people shouting, oh, Joe, here's your mule. And some people say that it's spread that night from settler to settler all the way 100 miles north back to the Kansas line where this whole mess had begun.

So yeah, that was the first night. And this is kind of the moment that you cite is when all the settlers kind of become a town for the first time. Yeah, I mean psychologically, it's hard to put yourself there, but it's got to be the craziest day of everyone's life. And they've endured all kinds of hardship, hunger and thirst and terror. Everyone is armed to the teeth and everyone's arguing and you don't know if you're getting a good spot or a bad spot and you're wagon broke

and you almost broke your arm and et cetera, et cetera. And then suddenly at night you get this bizarre sort of communal, it's almost like a sing-along or something, you know? And yeah, so all these people who are completely unrelated to one another, who have just arrived at this new and strange place in this kind of tidal wave of selfishness, you know, are suddenly participating in this community awakening. And I feel like that must have been this incredibly intense

bonding experience that started to help this very strange collection of people become an actual collective who would go forward and become a real city. After the Ojo incident, on the second day of Oklahoma City's existence, two different leaders emerged. There was William Couch, who was the de facto leader of the Sooners, also known as the Cheaters. He had plotted and schemed in order to enrich himself by selling land certificates in this one part of the city. And then there was Angelo Scott, who had come to Oklahoma during the land run.

He was a hyper-educated lawyer from Kansas, who was this very high-minded and decent guy who did not approve of the cheater faction and their land schemes. So he said about trying to create some order in the chaos of this new city. So after Ojo, here's your mule, after the chaos of that first day,

everybody wakes up, everyone who's been able to sleep. And they look around and they realize, oh my gosh, this place is a mess. There's no room to fit an alley between these private properties. And Angela Scott is one of the people who steps up and says, well, let's figure this out. And he gives, actually on the second day, he hands out three bells to three kids and puts them on

little horses and sends them riding all around Oklahoma City, ringing their bells and saying, come to a big town meeting. And thousands of people come and Angelelo Scott steps up onto this wooden crate and he kind of lays it out for everybody. He says, listen, here's where we are. Our town is chaos. We have one faction of people who are trying to impose order on it by cheating. And he says one of the ironies of the places that they could have had absolute peace if they had adopted this, you know, the cheaters planned for the city, but it would have been on the

basis of absolute fraud. So they have to figure out some other way to do it. And so Angelos Scott helps organize an election in which a Citizens Committee comes together. The job of that committee is to go around the whole town, adjudicating every lot, figuring out who can stay and who can go and what land needs to be seized and turn to streets and alleys and public spaces. It's like this ad hoc on the fly town planning. And so they went lot by lot by lot and worked their way north until they reached the southern edge of the Cheaters part of town, and waiting for them there were men holding Winchester rifles who said That's fine that you've done that down there, but I think you better leave this part of town alone This could have been the moment where the city teetered into civil war, but instead

the city teetered into civil war. But instead, Angelo Scott organized another mass meeting and they came up with a compromise plan. So in the end, they had to do something that was really abhorrent to someone like Angelo Scott and to a lot of people, but it was the only way to kind of stitch the city together without actually breaking into violence. So what they did was these two different plans,

the Citizens Committee plan down south, and the boomers plan up north, part of the problem of reconciling them was that they had been laid out at slightly different angles. This meant that even if they tried to stitch these two parts of town together, it would be very difficult,

because the streets wouldn't match up. And so the compromise they settled on was to build what they called jogs, which are these kind of diagonal streets that connect the two different street grids. And Angela Scott called them the scars of a bloodless conflict. And so essentially just imagine walking down a street and then you come to an intersection and you have to turn kind of 10 feet to the left to keep walking straight along that street.

It was a nightmare for traffic. It caused traffic jams forever. And in fact, you can still go stand on these jogs in the modern Oklahoma City street grid. They have not been ironed out of the street grid. It's amazing that you can still see it to this day. Do people know why it is the way it is in Oklahoma City? I think most people don't, probably no.

It's just kind of their funky little downtown. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk with Sam Anderson about his favorite research discovery of his entire career. I think I could write 800 books and never make another discovery as amazing and improbable as Operation Bongo, so I'd be delighted to tell you the story of Operation Bongo. Stay with us. So if you remember the thing that took Sam Anderson to Oklahoma City to begin with, it wasn't the history of the land run.

It was a basketball team, the Oklahoma City Thunder. For many decades, Oklahoma City had not been considered the kind of city that could support a major pro sports team. And yet suddenly, in 2008, it had this NBA basketball team and the way it got it was by taking it from Seattle. So the Oklahoma City Thunder used to be this great classic NBA franchise called the Seattle Super Sonics. With these lovely green and yellow uniforms and some great superstar players over the years.

And so I had to write this history of the taking of a professional team from one city to another. And in the course of writing that, the question occurred to me, well, why are the Seattle SuperSonics called that? I grew up with this team, but I never thought to question the name. So I started researching, well, where did this name come from? And this led me down quite a rabbit hole.

It turned out that Seattle had gotten its basketball team back in the 1960s, at exactly the same moment when the United States was trying to launch its new futuristic world-changing program of commercial supersonic flight. This was the idea that airplanes would zoom around the world traveling faster than the speed of sound. Boeing, which is based in Seattle, was at the center of a lot of that development. So you've got this program, the Supersonic's program, and you've got this brand new basketball team, and in this great moment of civic sports synergy, they named the basketball team, the Seattle Supersonics. So that was a neat story, and I thought, cool. And then it occurred to me, well, wait a second, what happened to the American Supersonic Program?

Like, I've never flown in a supersonic jet. Um, I don't think anyone I know has either. So why did this not happen? So then I started down that rabbit hole. And this is what led me to Operation Bongo. So if you are trying to launch a nationwide program of supersonic commercial flight where everyone's gonna be whipping around the continent

and the world in a matter of minutes or hours, then you have a lot of things to worry about. There's all kinds of engineering problems. It's very expensive, et cetera, et cetera. In addition to all of that, you have a very serious potential PR problem, which is when you break the sound barrier, famously, you create this gigantic roaring noise that comes rumbling down from the sky. It's a sonic boom. And it's where air molecules actually get crushed

by the jet, and then as they kind of scatter away from the jet and expand again, they make this thunderous noise. It's actually exactly the same mechanism that makes thunder. So the FAA and Boeing had to ask themselves, well, if we are raining down cacophonous booms all over the citizens of the United States, thousands of times a day, is everyone going to go crazy. And they figured, well, in order to test it, we're going to have to find an actual American city to be a kind of guinea pig for this program. And in Oklahoma City, Ray's his hand, it said, we can be that city.

Yeah, that's my jaw hit the floor. I couldn't believe it. Oklahoma City raised his hand. In fact, the Chamber of Commerce, who's this kind of shadow government of business powers in the town, raised its hand and said, yes, yes, pick us. They would get all kinds of incentives.

They were gonna get a lot of money and probably most importantly, this mile long supersonic runway at the airport. So the Oklahoma City, which was always trying to over achieve as a city, would suddenly kind of be in pole position in this worldwide new movement of supersonic flight. So they said, do it to us, do it to us. It didn't go through a vote.

No citizens were asked. The government didn't approve of it. The city government. They just said, pick us. And the FAA said, yeah, let's do it. So in 1964, in February, the people of Oklahoma City are awakened. First thing in the morning by a sonic boom that just comes out of nowhere, a thunder clap

out of a nice clear sky. And, you know, there are people's houses are shaking and glasses are breaking and stuff like that, no one knows where it's coming from. And that was the beginning. And this was officially known as Operation Bongo. And it was set to go for six months with booms eight times a day on a regular schedule and within a week there were

over 600 official complaints to the city from citizens because these booms were a real problem I mean there are lists there are published lists of the damage that it did to people's houses and it's like It's like you it's like, you know, plaster walls were cracking, ceiling fans were falling out and injuring children at school. Like, I talked to somebody who told me his fish bowl exploded. So it was really an intense experience.

And of course, they didn't know why it was happening. And so, finally, the city council had to figure out what was going on and said to the Chamber of Commerce, this has to stop. And the Chamber said, no, no, you don't understand. This is our chance to become a major American city and they let it go on. It went on for six months. There was one day off on Easter And it drove the people nuts. They did this systematic polling of the citizens where they asked them all these questions about how they were feeling about the apocalyptic roaring coming from the sky constantly and Turns out people really hate it There and there's this heartbreaking official document published at the end of the experiment.

It's full of graphs, all these graphs of the misery of the people of Oklahoma City, just kind of rising and rising and rising throughout the six month period. And it was so bad that by the end of it it killed the supersonic program. The Boeing never even built the prototypes for this thing. It was just unworkable.

It just couldn't happen on any large scale. So the people of Oklahoma City in the 1960s killed Seattle's supersonic program. And then 40 years later, killed the Seattle Super Sonics and turned them into the Oklahoma City Thunder. And I mean, it just, it sounds like the most made up thing of all time. I could not believe it when I discovered this.

That's amazing. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Delaney Hall, Mixed in Tech Production by Sharif Yusuf, Music by Sean Riel. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team is Avery Trufflement, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lee, Terran Mazza, and me Roman Mars. The full title of same Anderson's book is Boomtown, the fantastical saga of Oklahoma City, its chaotic founding, its apocalyptic weather,

its pornoing to basketball team, and the dream of becoming a world-class metropolis. It is truly great, go get it. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row Row in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective

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