The 826 photograph collections that this guide thus details encompass Native American culture; frontier and pioneer life in Oklahoma and Indian territories; Wild West shows; the range cattle industry; the petroleum industry; and gunfighters, outlaws, and lawmen. New additions include the Lucille Clough Collection of 1,800 prints, postcards, and stereograph cards of American Indians and Alaska Natives, and First Peoples of Canada.
The 826 photograph collections that this guide thus details encompass Native American culture; frontier and pioneer life in Oklahoma and Indian territories; Wild West shows; the range cattle industry; the petroleum industry; and gunfighters, outlaws, and lawmen. New additions include the Lucille Clough Collection of 1,800 prints, postcards, and stereograph cards of American Indians and Alaska Natives, and First Peoples of Canada.
Guide to Photographs in the Western History Collections of the University of Oklahoma: Second Edition
254
Guide to Photographs in the Western History Collections of the University of Oklahoma: Second Edition
254eBookSecond Edition (Second Edition)
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Overview
The 826 photograph collections that this guide thus details encompass Native American culture; frontier and pioneer life in Oklahoma and Indian territories; Wild West shows; the range cattle industry; the petroleum industry; and gunfighters, outlaws, and lawmen. New additions include the Lucille Clough Collection of 1,800 prints, postcards, and stereograph cards of American Indians and Alaska Natives, and First Peoples of Canada.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806145952 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 01/24/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 254 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Kristina L. Southwell is Associate Professor of Bibliography and Assistant Curator at the Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries.
A Rhodes Scholar, David Boren has served as President of the University of Oklahoma (1994–2018), U.S. Senator from Oklahoma (1979–1994), and Governor of Oklahoma (1975–1979) and chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 1987 to 1993. He is the author of A Letter to America.
Read an Excerpt
Guide to Photographs in the Western History Collections of the University of Oklahoma
By Kristina L. Southwell, Jacquelyn Reese
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2002 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4595-2
INTRODUCTION
Donald J. Pisani and Donald L. DeWitt
Written in 2002 to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Western History Collections
First-rate universities need good students, an accomplished faculty, and outstanding libraries. The Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma have provided the university with a national reputation in the study of Oklahoma, the Great Plains, the American Southwest, and the Far West. This guide is a testament to the vision and devotion of people inside and outside the university. The vision and devotion of E. E. Dale and Frank Phillips in the 1920s endure today in the many benefactors, library staff, and faculty who consider the Western History Collections vital to the intellectual life of this state and region.
That many of the most notable western history collections date to the early decades of the twentieth century is not accidental. The definition of the American West as a distinct region depended on the widely held belief, developed during the 1890s, that the frontier phase of United States history had ended. Simultaneously, the Spanish-American War (1898) marked the emergence of the United States as a world power. The United States entered a militant, nationalist period of its history, and Latin America assumed far greater importance in American diplomacy. Therefore, American universities began to place more emphasis on the history of Mexico, Latin America, and the Southwest, as well as the West. Only when the West was incorporated into the nation, and only when the United States began to look overseas, did the region's history begin to attract historians as well as collectors.
Only a handful of distinguished university libraries focus on the study of the American West. They include the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the Barker Texas History Collection at the University of Texas, and the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma. These institutions have much in common. All depended on the dreams and shared values of dedicated faculty members, private donors, university administrators, and library staff. Without that common purpose, many collections would have been broken up and scattered before they could be consolidated and made available to scholars. Most began as private collections. For example, William Robertson Coe gave the core of Yale's celebrated Western Americana Collection, a treasure of rare books, maps, and manuscripts related to the Trans-Mississippi West, to the Yale Library in annual installments beginning in 1942. Yale had several advantages over other American universities in the acquisition of western materials. First, the university had been in existence for nearly two and a half centuries when Coe made his gift; therefore, it already possessed a large number of books and manuscripts pertaining to the West. It was logical for private collectors like Coe to turn to Yale rather than newer universities in the West. Second, many Yale faculty members, including Benjamin Silliman, Jr., William H. Brewer, and Othniel Marsh, had been active in exploring and developing the West. Finally, many Yale alumni had collected significant libraries that they or their heirs transferred to the university. The Frederick W. Beinecke collections, which were particularly rich in the area of the Great Plains, Rockies, and Spanish Southwest, complemented as well as built on the Coe Collection, which contained little on the Spanish Southwest outside Texas.
Only one public institution in the West can compete with the collections at Yale. The Bancroft Library at the University of California also owes its existence to private collectors. In an age when few westerners had any interest in preserving documents pertaining to the settlement of the Far West, Hubert Howe Bancroft was the great exception. After trying his hand at a variety of jobs in the goldfields of California, he went into the stationery and book business in San Francisco. But he soon became an academic entrepreneur as well as a collector. His great dream was to write a comprehensive history of the Pacific Coast. To lay the foundation for that project, he began collecting everything he could find on the American West. Within a decade he had acquired sixteen thousand volumes, some of which he acquired on trips east and to Europe. Not only did Bancroft accumulate books, maps, pamphlets, manuscripts, and periodicals, but he had an army of copyists transcribe documents in private hands and in government and church archives. He was also one of the first to transcribe the memories of pioneers. In the 1870s and 1880s, his staff interviewed virtually every important pioneer in the history of California. His "history factory," as he called it, produced dozens of volumes on Northern Mexico, Native Americans, and the settlement of the Far West and California. None of this work would have been possible without the documents he collected.
In 1905, at the end of his writing career, Bancroft, then in his early seventies, sold his collection to the University of California for $250,000. Bancroft reduced the price by giving the university $100,000 and permitting it to pay for the collection over three years. The library was a monument as much to the wisdom of the university president, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, and the university regents, as to Bancroft. Once acquired, the library's growth depended on Professors Herbert E. Bolton, George P. Hammond, and James D. Hart, who began to collect microfilm of Spanish and Mexican archives, as well as western art and literature, including the famous Mark Twain Collection.
At the University of Texas, the Barker Texas History Collection dates to 1899, when Lester G. Bugbee, a member of the history department, secured the transfer of the Bexar Archives to the University of Texas Library. This collection contained more than eighty thousand documents accumulated in San Antonio during the Spanish and Mexican periods (1700-1836). In 1906, the university wisely decided to cooperate, rather than compete, with other special collections libraries. It signed an agreement with the University of California, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Library of Congress to copy and share documents from the Mexican Archives and other repositories. The Stephen and Moses Austin Collections, acquired by the private collector Guy M. Price, also served as the foundation for the Barker Texas History Collection. As with the other libraries, the acquisition of major holdings immediately posed two problems: where to house them and how to catalog them. A full catalog of the Bexar Archives was not completed until 1932, three decades after the university acquired the first collections, and a public catalog to the entire Barker Texas History Collection was not ready until 1963. In this project, the University of Texas history department was greatly involved, particularly George P. Garrison and Eugene C. Barker.
The history of the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma has much in common with the experiences of Yale University, the University of California, and the University of Texas. When Edward E. Dale, who came to Oklahoma as a boy and had been a doctoral student of Frederick Jackson Turner at Harvard, became chair of the University of Oklahoma Department of History in 1924, one of his goals was to build up the department's graduate program. Not only was Oklahoma rich in Indian history, but it was at the seams of the American West. One seam joined East and West; another joined South to West; and a third joined the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountain West. Since Oklahoma was one of the last American territories, and one of the last territories to enter the Union, its frontier past was still fresh in the minds of many of its residents. But Dale wanted to create a library devoted to the study of the entire Great Plains and Southwest, not just of Oklahoma.
Dale first attempted to secure an appropriation from the Oklahoma legislature to create his library. That effort failed, and soon thereafter, with the help of the prominent Tulsa attorney Patrick J. Hurley, Dale approached Frank Phillips, an Oklahoma oilman who had begun to assemble a notable Oklahoma history collection during the 1920s. Phillips agreed to give limited financial support to Dale's proposal, and on April 5, 1927, the Frank Phillips Collection of Oklahoma and Indian History was established at the university.
The legal contract that created the new library outlined several goals for the collection. It was expected to celebrate and commemorate the past, not just serve impartial historians. The contract promised that the Phillips Collection would preserve "memorials of [Oklahoma's] pioneers, and romantic past"; demonstrate the state's progress in "industry, arts, civics, and literature, and all the elements of progressive civilization"; "institute and encourage historical inquiry"; "inculcate interest and pride in our history"; "mark the passing of a race of people and the genesis and growth of a new civilization"; and teach children "our debt to those who have gone before, and our responsibilities to the future." To accomplish these ends, Frank Phillips gave $2,000 annually for five years to acquire "letters, records, documents, books, pamphlets, manuscripts, maps, and prints, pertaining directly or indirectly to the history of that part of the Southwest now included within the state of Oklahoma."
The fund was to be administered by the president of the university, the head of the history department, and a third party to be appointed by Phillips. The first board consisted of President William Bennett Bizzell, Professor Dale, and Patrick Hurley. Initially, the books were housed in a glass case within Dale's Monnet Hall office. Subsequently, the collection was assigned to a room on the east side of the ground floor of Monnet Hall, and by 1936 its size required it to be moved into the main library building.
From the beginning, there was tension over whether the library would focus on Oklahoma, the Southwest, or the entire West. But E. E. Dale, who administered the collection until his retirement in 1952, insisted on taking the broader view. He believed in collecting materials pertaining not only to the entire West but also to Native Americans outside Oklahoma. He was aided by the Brookings Institution, which contributed 625 volumes on Native Americans; these volumes had been collected in the 1920s to aid the work of the Merriam Commission, of which Dale was a member. Other acquisitions were serendipitous. For example, in 1933, Dale purchased three trunks of letters and Ridge-Watie-Boudinot family papers from a woman in Grove, Oklahoma, for $350. He considered this collection, along with the Indian-Pioneer Papers and the Brookings Institution volumes, as the most important acquisitions during his tenure as "director" from 1927 to 1952. When Dale retired, the collection he had built contained 8,500 books and pamphlets, 30,000 manuscripts, 4,500 photographs, and a wide assortment of typescripts, maps, and newspapers.
By the 1940s, Dale recognized the need for a full-time curator and specialized staff to care for the Phillips Collection, but it languished during the 1950s. Cataloging proved impossible. The process had begun with high hopes in 1952, only to stall in 1955 because of financial problems. At the time, private donations had dried up, and the university's top priority was constructing a new library rather than expanding the special collections.
The 1940s, however, brought one significant development for the Phillips Collection. In 1948, the University of Oklahoma received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to establish a Division of Manuscripts within the University Library. Arthur McAnally, the university librarian, appointed Gaston Litton, one of Dale's former students, as archivist for the Division of Manuscripts. Litton proved to be a capable and aggressive collector of personal papers, maps, and photographs. By the time Litton left the University of Oklahoma in 1956, the Division of Manuscripts rivaled the Phillips Collection as a resource for historians.
Although the Division of Manuscripts and the Phillips Collection continued to operate independently of each other, Litton's resignation set the stage for a significant change in the administration of the two collections. In 1957, the University of Oklahoma appointed Arrell M. Gibson as curator of the Frank Phillips Collection and head of the Division of Manuscripts. Jack D. Haley joined Gibson as assistant archivist. Gibson enlisted the support of University of Oklahoma president George Lynn Cross, who hoped that with additional funding the Phillips Collection might one day rival the great collections on the American West at Yale, the University of Texas, and the University of California. Fundraising problems persisted, but the two collections were then under one director.
Despite generous gifts from the Phillips Foundation, the Phillips Collection still needed a permanent endowment. Considering the Phillips Collection a library rather than a specialized research facility, the foundation placed a limit of $100 on any single item purchased with the money it gave the university; this limit precluded the purchase of manuscript collections as well as rare first editions. Earlier in the century, most collections were freely given to libraries, but such donations became less and less common as these collections increased in value and as private collectors and libraries competed to acquire them. In 1958, for example, the Ramon Adams Collection went on sale in Dallas for $30,000. It contained documents on the range cattle industry as well as crime and law enforcement in the West. But before the university could find the benefactors needed to purchase the collection, it was sold to a private collector.
In 1967, in an attempt to provide better support for the two collections, the University Libraries' administration merged the Division of Manuscripts and the Phillips Collection into one unit called the Western History Collections. Since that time, the holdings of the Western History Collections have grown dramatically. These holdings now include the Mary P. Jayne Papers, which chronicle the activities of one of the first missionaries to serve among the Plains Indians; the official papers of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek Nations; the personal papers of many notable Indian leaders, including D. W. Bushyhead and Lewis Downing of the Cherokees, Peter P. Pitchlynn and Green McCurtain of the Choctaws, J. M. Perryman and Pleasant Porter of the Creeks, and Cyrus Harris and William Byrd of the Chickasaws. The Indian Pioneer Papers, a Depression-era oral history project consisting of 166 bound volumes of interviews, offer researchers the reminiscences of those white pioneers who took part in Oklahoma's land runs and of Native Americans who were already here.
The Western History Collections are particularly rich in material pertaining to the range cattle industry, agriculture, oil, banking, frontier trading, and other industries. For example, the Collections contain the records of thirty-five representative Oklahoma banks during the territorial and early statehood periods. Scholars interested in Oklahoma agriculture can consult the records of the Oklahoma Wheat Growers Association or of the Pruitt Cotton Gin Company. Researchers seeking mining records can look at the Kali-Inla Coal Company or the Mullen Coal Company collections. Students of social history can consult the archives of the Episcopal Church of Oklahoma, the extensive files of missionaries, the papers of the State Medical Association, or the papers of such notable university presidents as William Bizzell and David Ross Boyd. But researchers interested in regions beyond the borders of Oklahoma also find plentiful material. The library has especially strong holdings of microfilmed records from the U.S. National Archives, from the Mexican and Spanish archives of New Mexico, and from Mexican and Spanish archives related to the northern provinces of New Spain and New Mexico. Holdings of other universities are also available on microfilm, including the entire Bexar Archives from the University of Texas Barker Texas History Collection and the American Indian Periodicals Collection from Princeton University.
In addition to standard works on Oklahoma and Native Americans, the library contains numerous published government reports, including those of the Bureau of American Ethnology. It also contains many scholarly journals on the West, including Western Historical Quarterly, Indian Historian, and Plains Anthropologist, as well as rich holdings of twentieth-century Native American newspapers, such as the Navajo Times, Jicarilla Chieftain, and Akwesasne Notes.
In recent years, many other parts of the Western History Collections have captured attention across the nation. The Collections' Photographic Archives contain over 800,000 glass plate and acetate negatives from the entire West. These are frequently used in television productions and scholarly research. The cartographic section includes over 5,000 maps related to Indian Territory, Oklahoma, the Southwest, and the Far West. The oral history section contains many Indian-related collections such as the Indian Oral History Collection, more than six hundred tapes financed by the Doris Duke Foundation in the 1960s; the "Indians for Indians Hour," sound recordings of a radio program that aired from the 1940s into the 1960s; and numerous other Indian-language recordings collected by linguists and anthropologists. The Western History Collections also contain many other notable audio collections ranging from a series of radio programs, entitled "Oklahoma School of the Air," to lectures by Edward Everett Dale and talks by prominent speakers at University of Oklahoma events. Recently, the Western History Collections have also begun to acquire collections of Native American art, and continue to acquire microfilm collections from the National Archives, Library of Congress, and commercial vendors.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Guide to Photographs in the Western History Collections of the University of Oklahoma by Kristina L. Southwell, Jacquelyn Reese. Copyright © 2002 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
FOREWORD,PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION,
About the Collections,
How to Use the Guide,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INTRODUCTION,
PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTIONS,
INDEX,