CHAPTER XX

IN OKLAHOMA

Oklahoma City.

Oklahoma City is 43 years old,1 In that
brief time it has evolved from a state of savagery
to what would be judged) by prevailing standards,
a high state of civilization, amply supplied, as I
well know from the entertainment afforded me,
with all the urbanities and creature comforts
dear to the children of the Old Adam as they
walk the earth in our day and generation—from
symphony concerts to morning tea (if you ask
for it) served at your bedside by a waiter in spot-
less uniform. The history of the City is a highly
compressed record of violence, brutality, rapacity,
romance and heroic achievement—an epic in a
nutshell. Edna Ferber's powerful novel Cimarron
will give you the colour, spirit and swing of it,
and reveal something incidentally of the astonish-
ing vicissitudes in human life caused by the
presence of oil in the deep places of the earth.

Was it not here2 that a local minister, paying

1 In 1932.

* No, it was not. I find on referring to my diary that the story
TOLS told to me in Shreveport, Louisiana, another oil-nourished
city. But I feel pretty sure that similar things must often have
happened in Oklahoma. So I leave the text unaltered.

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