Port of Catoosa

A port?  In Tulsa?  When we read about this museum we had to check it out.  The museum is small--essentially one room--but we learned a lot.

This life ring hangs at the museum, giving the name of the tug boat on display on the grounds. 

But how do the boats or barges needing a tug boat get to Tulsa, Oklahoma?  That is sort of a long story.  In 1943 an Arkansas River flood covered a 15-mile stretch  in Oklahoma from Muskogee to Fort Gibson.  By 1946 the Arkansas Basin Development Association had been created and the US Rivers and Harbors Act had passed by he US Congress.  Construction of the controlled waterway began in 1950 and was completed in 1970. 

The project includes 18 locks and dams and 3 reservoirs along 455 miles of the Arkansas river from Catoosa, Oklahoma, to the Mississippi River in Arkansas.  Barges, which are much more energy efficient than either trains or trucks, carry freight to ports on the Arkansas River.  Today more than 100 industries are located along the Oklahoma section of this waterway, employing more than 4,000 people with a total payroll of  more than $1.4 million.  Catoosa is the largest and most inland port in the entire 25,000 mile inland waterway system.

As a side note, in 2014 we stayed in the Toad Suck Ferry COE campground along the waterway in Conway, Arkansas.  If you click on the photo below you can see that ferry location.

The rug on the floor of the museum shows the navigable rivers in the inland waterways of our country.

Here is the Charley Border tug boat.

This is a picture of the propeller end of the Charley Border tug.

Late April is obviously field trip time in the local schools.  We have encountered groups of young people at the Oxley Nature Center, the Woody Guthrie Center and here at the Port of Catoosa.

These young people really enjoyed being in the wheel house of the Charley Border.

Woody Guthrie

We learned a lot about the Dust Bowl and the Depression during our visit to the Woody Guthrie Center in downtown Tulsa.  Many of his early songs concerned the problems faced by everyday folks during those difficult times.  Here are two well-dressed men seeing jobs.

Woody had been caught in the severe dust storm that moved across Oklahoma on April 14, 1935--Black Sunday--and one of his songs talks about that experience.  The storm was so massive it has even been included in a documentary on the Dust Bowl by Ken Burns.

I was dwarfed by this mural in the center's lobby.

This is one of the photos of that dust storm that is included in the Burns film.

In addition to writing music, Woody was quite an artist.  This is just a small section of one wall in the museum showing some of his drawings.  You can click on the photo to enlarge it and get a better view.

Guthrie wrote protest songs and supported working people against the establishment.  This is one of his banjos.

During World War II, Guthrie served in the Merchant Marine.  Twice his ships were torpedoed.  The words on the top right side of the strings of this guitar say  "Once Drowned, Twice Sunk," referring to his wartime service.

I have never really been into popular music or much folk music.  I had heard of Woody Guthrie and recognized his voice in the songs we heard in the museum.  I am really familiar with this song he wrote.  It was popular during the time I was in college.

The museum has a temporary special exhibit about Pete Seeger, another protest singer who was inspired by Guthrie.  He was writing songs about disarmament and the environment and protested the Viet Nam War. For a while he was blacklisted during the McCarthy Era.  I remember more of this music, including "If I Had a Hammer," "Turn, Turn, Turn," and "Where are All the Flowers Gone?"

We find museums like this one very informative.  They also show us how out of touch we have always been with popular culture--except for the anti-war protests during the 1960s and early 1970s when John was a Boulder policeman.

Tulsa

I have heard of Tulsa, Oklahoma, probably my whole live. But I must admit I never gave it much attention and never really thought of visiting. However, it is a good one-day trip east of Oklahoma City as we make our way to Missouri. Actually, we only planning to spend two or three days here before heading to Branson. We had reservations for a show and planned two nights in the Indian Point Campground on Table Rock Lake. However, there is a massive storm system moving from west to east. It is snowing in Colorado and raining hard off and on in Oklahoma and Missouri. It would mean we would have to travel in heavy rain. They had rain before we arrived and the ground is saturated so there are flash flood warnings through the whole area. We decided to stay put until it clears up on Monday, cancelling our two Branson reservations.

As it turns out, we have found a lot to do here.  The first two mornings we walked at the Oxley Nature Center next to the Tulsa Zoo. The environment here is very different from either Colorado or Arizona.  Look at all the green.

We checked out downtown Tulsa.  The city was growing in the 1920s and 30s and there are many Art Deco buildings like this Tulsa Union Depot.

When we first arrived, doing laundry was on the agenda.  We were delighted to find two cats hanging out in the office and laundry.  We really miss our two cats who used to travel with us so we got our kitty fix while washing clothes.  You can't really see it in this photo, but this first cat has a hair cut (fur cut?) so he looks like a lion.

This cat looks like our cat Partner.

We found a number of murals in one alley.  They all seem to relate to the Day of the Dead.

I had packed a couple of sandwiches for lunch during our trip into town.  Maybe we were still hungry because before returning to the RV we stopped in the Antoinette Bakery.  The sign in the window says "Eat Cake."  We didn't take that advice but I chose the mega Oreo cooking and John had the apple pie bar.  Both were very good.

There was more to see in Tulsa so stay tuned.

OKC Surprises

We had spent time in Oklahoma City before and visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial which marks the site of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building.  It was very moving.  This time we found several surprises that are not nearly as heavy but very interesting.  There was so much to see it will take at least two blog posts to cover it all.

We visited the Myriad Botanical Gardens in the downtown area.  The Crystal Bridge is an indoor tropical garden with many really beautiful plants.

Outside the building we saw a pond with attractive landscaping, including beautiful ornamental grasses.

You can see the Cristal Bridge in the background here.

Inside we saw amazing flowers and plants.  This is a clam claw flower.

I didn't get the names for all the attractive plants we saw.

The variety of orchids was really amazing.

This is some sort of cactus. I had never seen a white one before.  We also saw plants we think are typical in southern Arizona, including a golden barrel cactus.  I guess they are technically tropical too.

As we walked outside again, we saw a lot of amazing fish in the ponds around the Crystal Bridge.

We really enjoyed the gardens, but there was a lot more to see in the area.

It Was About Time

Yesterday we finally were free to leave Elk City, Oklahoma, and resume our summer travels. I considered that a pretty good present on my birthday! On May 8 we left Homolovi Ruins State Park in Winslow, Arizona. Yesterday was the first time since then we were free to travel wherever we wanted. Good deal.

We had been sitting in Elk City for a week, waiting for Slade at Rolling Retreats, a major Mobile Suites dealer, to check out our front landing gear. Early during our 12 day stay at the Flying J in Winslow, the passenger side front leg slipped down while the trailer was hooked up to the truck. Since that had happened last September, we wanted him to determine what was going on. He spent a couple of hours testing to see if there was a leak in the hydraulic system that operates the legs and found nothing. So that wasn't repaired. He did find another loose brake caliper and replaced that. He also suggested a company in Indiana that rebuilds seals on landing gear legs. We will be contacting that business, hoping they can ship two rebuilt legs to us in Colorado.

Getting things fixed is just a matter of finding a mechanic who knows how to fix it and has the time to do it, then finding the right parts. It is the time spent finding the right person, waiting for them to find the time to do the work, and getting the correct parts shipped in.

We have been living in a 5th wheel part time and full time since 1997. Breakdowns are just an unavoidable and unfortunate part of living on the road, pulling your home down the highways. This is the longest we have ever been unable to travel, but we have tried to make the best of our time, exploring the areas where we were sitting.
We left Rolling Retreats about noon and headed west. We are in Amarillo now. We are still a little tentative--with the leg staying up as we travel. But until it fails, it doesn't need fixing, I guess.

Amarillo is along the old Route 66. At our RV park we saw this old truck, memorabilia of times way past.

Never Disappointed

Thursday we drove to Cheyenne, in Oklahoma not Wyoming. That is the location of The Washita Battlefield National Historic Site. We had never heard of the battle but we know that it is always worth our time to check out anything operated by the National Park Service.

We had heard about Lt.Col. George Custer before, of course. One summer we volunteered at an RV park in southern Montana near Little Big Horn National Battfield where Custer died in 1876 fighting the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians. It was one of the last armed contacts between the US Army and American Indians. But in 1868 he was in Oklahoma, then known as Indian Territory. After Col. J.M. Chivington attacked and destroyed a village headed by Cheyenne chief Black Kettle on Sand Creek, Colorado, relations between the army and Indians were very rocky.  Black Kettle had been pursuing a policy of peace with the whites and believed his village to be under US Army Protection. Black Kettle survived but at least 150 Cheyenne and Arapahoe men, women and children were killed and horribly mutilated. Under treaties in 1865 and 1867, the Cheyenne, Arapahoe and other tribes agreed to settle on reservations in Indian Territory but many tribal officials refused to sign. Warrior societies of mostly young men continued hostilities.

General William Sheridan, in charge of the army in the plains, adopted a policy that "punishment must follow crime." He sent Lt. Col Custer to enforce that policy. He ended up attacking Black Kettle's village on Washita Creek at dawn on a snowy Nov. 27, 1868. Approximately 30 to 60 were killed, including Black Kettle and his wife, and Gen. Sheridan ordered the slaughter of the village's pony and mule herds, estimated at over 800 animals.

This mural in the visitor center shows the army riding through the village.

We walked the trail to the location where the battle occurred.

The path took us through the deep grass of the prairie.

In 1889 Indian Territory was opened to white settlement under a law that said they could enter the area at a designated time to claim their homestead. Those who entered before that time to get a jump on other settlers were called "sooners" and the name has stuck in Oklahoma. The Washita Battlefield site included a small stone dugout like those built by those settlers as their first homes. The windmill is a symbol of the changes white settlement made in the area.

We felt the NPS presentation of the battle was very fair to both sides and we learned a lot. We had known about Custer and the Sand Creek Massacre but not about this battle in Oklahoma. There are so many sad stories that are part of the westward white settlement of our country.

On an entirely different note, have you ever seen this before? We hadn't. There was this pig, really I guess a hog, tied with a harness and leash, at an RV site behind us a couple of days ago.