Oklahoma Facts That Widely Believed, But Aren’t Quite True

I've been in Oklahoma long enough that I've picked up a lot of "facts" about this state. If you read the stuff I post here, you know that. I'm all about that Oklahoma history, the weirder the better... But some things that seem to be "common knowledge" around here just aren't true.

Like most, you pick up on a lot of stuff in tall tales you get told over time. And it's almost always second-hand... Someone knows someone who said... They're the sort of things you've heard so many times, you stop wondering whether they're actually true.

That's where this started.

I ran across one of those Oklahoma facts the other day and found out I'd had it wrong. That got me curious, because if I'd been carrying that one around all these years, what else had I simply accepted because somebody told me it was true?

That's really how a lot of these go.

Some of these aren't obscure pieces of history, like giant sedan-sized catfish at the bottom of your local dammed reservoir... They're things that sound completely reasonable if you live here. A couple of them are close enough to the truth that I can understand why we say them. Then there's the stuff where you look at the actual history and wonder how the short version ever became the version everybody remembers.

That's what I love most about this state. You can think you know the place pretty well, then stumble across some little detail that changes the story.

So I went looking for more of them.

Not internet rumors. Not somebody's Facebook post from 2017. Just Oklahoma things that a lot of us have probably heard, believed, repeated, or never thought twice about.

Turns out I wasn't the only one who had some of these wrong.