Oklahoma's First

STATES & CITIES

Bang, bang, bang went the gavel. To a raucous crowd of leather-skinned oil promoters, sharpers, frontier businessmen and Indian chiefs William Henry Murray, convention chairman, announced that, by a thumping majority, they had approved the constitution which was to make Oklahoma the 46th State* of the United States of America. Place: Guthrie, Okla. Time: 1906.

Up jumped bushy-browed "C. N." Haskell who had artfully persuaded 100,000 Indians to join the cause of Statehood. "That constitution is mine," he bawled. "I want to be Governor so I can enforce it." The crowd cheered lustily. Later "C. N." Haskell was elected the State's first Governor and "Alfalfa Bill" Murray, who also thought the constitution was his, was chosen first Speaker of the Legislature. Slinging a belt and a six-shooter around his waist, Governor Haskell took office in 1907.

Within three years Governor Haskell defied his own constitution. That document provided that Guthrie was to be the State capital, but a popular movement favored Oklahoma City. In the dark hours of a June morning Governor Haskell ordered his Secretary of State to put the State seal in a wheezing little tin-can of an automobile and drive it to Oklahoma City. Meanwhile the Governor chartered a special train from Tulsa. At daybreak Haskell and the seal were in a hotel room together, and by his proclamation, Oklahoma City became the capital.*

Last week Death, as it must to all men, came to feeble, impoverished Charles Nathaniel Haskell, 73, in a room in Okla homa City's Skirvin Hotel. He had been ill with pneumonia less than 24 hours. In 1912, Governor Haskell, already scandal-tainted (as were to be most of his successors), celebrated the end of his term by borrowing money from the State to go on a vacation. The next Oklahomans heard of him, he and his family had settled down to a life of wealth on a half-million dollar estate at Glen Cove, L. I. Having been for a time personal attorney to Oil man Harry Sinclair, he became the head of Oklahoma oil interests valued at $70,000,000, helped organize Middle States Oil Corp., gambled in oil stocks. His bub ble broke when Middle States went into receivership. The courts investigated, dis covered that the firm's books had been shipped to Paris. Oklahoma's Haskell saw his Long Island estate auctioned off, went back west to recoup his fortunes.

It was at Muskogee that his Oklahoma career had begun when he built the town's first big hotel, put up its first skyscraper office building and a $40,000 opera house. There, as age crept upon him, he confined himself to a room in the hotel he had built, played solitaire with a soiled and antiquated pack of cards which measured three inches through.

*Forty-seventh state: New Mexico. Forty-eighth: Arizona. *The site of Oklahoma City was opened to settlement on April 22, 1889. By night it had a population of 10,000 under tents. By 1910 it had 62,205 inhabitants, was the State's biggest and most prosperous city. Even more phenomenal was the growth of Tulsa whose 1,390 inhabitants multiplied 13-fold between 1900 and 1910. Score to date: Oklahoma City, 185,389; Tulsa, 141,258.

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