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Tracing Tulsa's Creek Roots

Allison Herrera
Council Oak Tree at 18th and Cheyenne in Tulsa, Oklahoma

This story was written by Russell Cobb and the audio portion was produced by Allison Herrera.

Way before the Western Swing of Bob Wills, before the bluesy pickings of JJ Cale and Leon Russell there was the stomp dance. The original Tulsa Sound. Dancers shuffle and stomp in a circle. Women dancers have turtle shells filled with pebbles strapped to their legs. No one knows when the first stomp dance happened, but it was held somewhere in the Southeastern U.S. centuries ago before the white man ever set foot in America.

David Proctor, cultural preservationist for the Muscogee Creek Nation explains. His job is to educate Creek and non-Creek citizens about the history of the tribe.

“The town of Tulsa originated from, they’re called Tallasi Indians. It’s a tribal town, a ceremonial ground and a group of people that lived back in the south. They were probably some of the first people that migrated from out east. They located themselves along the Arkansas near Tulsa. Legend has it that they spread their ashes there and they ended up calling the place Lochapoka. Lochapoka is also a tribal town back east. Lochapoka and Tallasi Indians are kind of related. So they ended up rekindling the Lochapoka fire and calling their settlement after their town. They started…the name of it was Tallasi. Then they went to Tulsey town and then it evolved into Tulsa.”

Credit Robot House Creative
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Robot House Creative
The map for Creek Town to Tulsa Town bike tour featuring some important Creek sites in the city.

When the original fire for Tallasi-Lockapoka was lit, the Creeks were a loose confederation of tribes throughout Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. Tallasi was just one of three hundred or so towns that all had a similar urban design.

JD Colbert, a Creek Indian who, after years of working in banking outside Oklahoma, has started to reconnect Tulsa to its not so distant past as a town of the Lochapoka people in northern Florida. On a recent sunny Friday afternoon, he explained what the towns would’ve looked like as we stood at Council Oak Park at 18th and Cheyenne in Tulsa.

“Each of the tribal towns with the Creeks-they would always have a town square. For meetings and ceremonies-including the stomp dance. Immediately next to the town square the typical arrangement for the Creek towns was the Mekko. Emanating out from there, there would have been houses for the government officials. Further out the houses for the townspeople. And there would have been a communal gardens. Everything that it takes to create a thriving community.”

To make a long story short, the Confederacy of Creek tribes was not always a happy one. Traditionalist Upper Creeks fought with mixed-blood Lower Creeks, who wanted to reconcile with the encroachment of white civilization. A few lower Creeks volunteered to leave their homeland and move to Indian Territory before President Andrew Jackson forced all them out in 1830.              

As more and more Creeks flowed into Indian Territory, they painstakingly recreated the towns they left behind.

Trail of Tears monument Morning Prayer created by Creek artist Dan Brook

Robert Trepp is a direct descendent of the Perrymans, a Creek family known around Tulsa. He says that even into statehood, you could have seen and heard a stomp dance near the Council Oak tree on 18th and Cheyenne.

“They found this location, just north of the council oak is where they built their fire.  They actually carried their fire all the way from Alabama. I don’t know if you’ve seen those old punctured tin lanterns? They would line those with moss and keep the coals burning inside and keep feeding those coals just to keep that one fire going all the way here.”

Credit Robert Trepp
Perryman Family Photo

The Perryman family, often labeled as "Tulsa's first family," tried to hold on to traditions like the stomp dance while learning English and going to a Christian church. Trepp explained that it was like keeping a foot in both canoes.

“They respected their traditions. They clung to their traditions. There was a story about aunt Rachel that she would not speak English. She not only made sure that her children participated at the ceremonial grounds, but she supported the Presbyterian missionaries here in town and the public school.”

As Tallasi became Tulsey Town and finally white Tulsa, Creek culture became an endangered species. Stomp dance grounds had to be moved to an undisclosed location near Okmulgee. Creek lands were stolen by court-appointed guardians, and the language, once the unofficial tongue of Tulsey Town, almost disappeared.  

Creek Tulsa had its share of trauma. First, the Civil War led to absolute destruction of the traditional town. It was only the bravery of the leader by Opothleyahola who fought off Confederate Indians and Texans at Round Mountain around present-day Keystone that saved early Tulsans from total genocide.

Opothleyahola was someone Eli Grayson looked up to. Grayson’s family had an allotment near Conway Park on 31st and Mingo. Grayson can trace much of his Creek roots here in Tulsa even though he grew up in New Orleans. Since moving back to Tulsa a few years ago, he’s absorbed himself in tribal politics. He’s also a supporter of Creek Freedmen gaining citizenship to the tribe.

“Opothleyahola was chief back in those days who led us out. He was my hero and he is probably the reason I live today.”

If the civil war wasn’t enough to tear Creek Tulsa apart, then came the Dawes Commission, a government initiative aimed to assimilate Indians by taking away their values of communal land ownership and giving them citizenship into the United States. Creek’s received an individual allotment of 160 acres of land in Indian Territory.  Today, the leafy neighborhood of Maple Ridge, where oil mansions sit next to 1920’s cottages, all surrounded by mature maple trees nestled against the Arkansas River was once the home of Tuckabatchee-one of the oldest Indians to ever live in Tulsa.

Gina Covington in her Maple Ridge home in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Gina Covington is a longtime resident of the Maple Ridge neighborhood. For years, she’s researched the original owner of each house and the land they sit on, before oil money gushed into town. She says people should know whose land their on. She’s researched Tuckabatchee.

“He was well known to be this great hunter. He had a pack of dogs and he was always hunting deer and turkeys because of the very dense woods. Hi family owned all of this land. He totally distrusted the white man-rightfully so. He wouldn’t even ride his horses across the bridges because he didn’t trust anything that the white man made. So he would take his horse through the river. When he dies he wanted hi knife to be buried with him and to put salt on it so they wouldn’t rob his grave.”

Tuckabatchee outlived many of his family members, who he buried in present day Maple Ridge.  Then, the Frisco Railroad wanted him to grant an easement onto his land. Today that railroad is the Midland Valley Trail, a path filled with dog walkers and cyclists in Lyrca.

Credit Allison Herrera
Perryman Cemetery on 32nd and Utica in Tulsa, Oklahoma

The opening of this area of Tulsa happened courtesy of Grant Stebbins, a developer and oil man who found himself at the center of a controversy in the 1920s. Stebbins hired two young men to pursue more Creek allotments near the burgeoning city limits. These men found a 17-year-old girl named Millie Neharkey, who stood to inherit a piece of land near Turkey Mountain, only a few miles from the oil gushers at Red Fork and Glenpool.  Several oil companies had their eyes on the girl's land so Stebbins's men kidnapped Millie a week before her 18th birthday and drove her to a resort in Missouri where she was plied with booze until she signed over the deed to her land. 

What happened to Millie wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for a legal curiosity particular to the young state of Oklahoma called guardianship. Robert Trepp, descendant of the Perryman family explains.

“They were pretty much self-appointed. They were pretty much, ‘I’m going to go down to the courthouse, you don’t have to go with me but I want to tell the judge I want to be your guardian.’ It was a mess. And what makes it even worse is our allotment agreement says that only citizens, meaning our citizens, our enrolled tribal members could act as guardians for other citizens and that was never enforced.”

White guardians were supposed to protect natives from the wave of grafters scooping up land deeds by hook or by crook. Instead of protecting the largely Creek-speaking population, though, the guardians facilitated the transfer of some two million acres of land to white owners. –

Even as scenes of dispossession played out across Tulsa, some Creek families managed to retain their land and prosper. Robert Trepp remembers Thanksgivings and Christmases on the sprawling Perryman ranch in Bixby throughout his childhood. He still hosts tours of the place today.

Credit Robert Trepp
Perryman Ranch in Jenks, Oklahoma

And then there were the precious few Creeks who held on to their allotments and became spectacularly rich. Thomas Gilcreasewas allotted 160 acres near Glenpool and parlayed his oil royalties into banking in Tulsa. His estate and museum on the north side of town have left an indelible legacy of Native American culture on the city. The gift of his collection of Indian art to the city attracts tourists and scholars from around the world.

So our story comes full circle. By the time Gilcrease died in 1962, Tulsa was no longer the Oil Capital of the World. Our little Creek Town had been eclipsed by a booming cosmopolitan city, but like the black gold that made Tulsa rich, the Creek presence remained, if only just beneath the surface.

To paraphrase William Faulkner, Tulsa's past as a Creek isn't dead. It isn't even past.
 

Russell Cobb is a writer and academic. He is Associate Professor in Spanish at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Heart in Darkness and is Contributing Editor for This Land Press. His current project is a novel about one family's role in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.

ADDITIONAL CONTENT:

  • Learn more about the Perryman Family here.
     
  • Join us on Saturday, June 25th for our bicycle tour to learn more about Creek history in Tulsa. Register on this page.
     
  • Learn more about the Muscogee Creek Nation with their Challenge Bowl study guide.

Allison Herrera covered Indigenous Affairs for KOSU from April 2020 to November 2023.
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