Les meilleurs hôtels à Oklahoma City

Nicknamed the "Sooner State," a lot of folks think of Oklahoma as the "schooner" state, thinking it must have been named after early homesteaders who sailed in on their prairie schooners, or covered wagons. Not so. It refers instead to over-anxious settlers who made land grabs and claimed squatters' rights a tad before it was legal to do so, staking their settlements a bit "sooner" than they should have. Then came the oil boom. Rigs and pumps sprang up seemingly overnight and along with them, the city of Oklahoma City. Thus began the shift from agriculture to industry, and the urbanization of a state many easterners could think of only as a dust bowl. Despite the push to urbanize, a frontier spirit is alive and well here. One trip to the Cowboy Hall of Fame will attest to that, where the art of ropin' and pokin' and general range-ridin' is held in high regard, as is the spirit of the cowboy -- each year, the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering attracts horseback scribners from across the country. A different kind of spirit demands equal attention -- nearly 10 percent of the state's population is Native American. Each year, Oklahoma City is host to the Red Earth Festival, a traditional inter-tribal gathering which began in 1879 as a way of preserving native ceremony and ensuring that tribal heritage was not lost to subsequent generations.