wife and daughter and he is driving along this new road that he has helped to create that was in veiled in 1926 and he has come across a teamster coming out of the oil patch, hauling crude and the horse -- the horse is startled by this board. it's not used to seeing it come down the road and it represents the old and the new meeting. that is why this point is so important here to the city and to the road. because this is where we call east meets west, right here, on the banks of the arkansas river. this is where it all happens for salsa. stephen avery was -- it is often overused, but he really was a renaissance man. he came to missouri as a young

man with his family. came down into rural indian territory. we associate him and his adult life with tulsa, where he became a very important civic and business leader. but most of all he believed in roads. he liked roads. he came along at a time where we had the big roads moving. we were starting to get more and more automobiles. a teamster could buy one. a farmer could buy one. a schoolteacher could buy one. people took to the roads. everybody had to get a car. that is where america's love affair with the internal

combustion engine began. i do not think that has ever ended, to my dismay. so the people like avery got involved in this movement. he became a highway commissioner. and he tried to get as many there are roads paved as possible. and of course is a guest triumph was route 66 -- his biggest triumph was route 66, which came along in 1920 six. building longer roads, interstate roads. that is what happened with route 66. it is a road that connected with chicago, ran down through illinois, across the ozark plateau, nipped the corner of kansas, came right across the state. for 10 miles to the texas -- 410

miles to the texas line. into the great hobby of california up through barstow san bernardino, and then into the foothills all the way to pasadena down through hollywood. america's main street was born. i think the best way to look at route 66 is to look at our time period. the road -- the layers of the road. it was a road that was born, if you well, when the nation was between wars and on the wagon the roaring 1920's. flagpole sitting, marathon dancing, the charleston, blue

leg booze. -- bootleg booze. between the one-two punch of the great depression and the dustbowl west of us, that is when the road began paying its dues. that is when it learned the moniker that john steinbeck gave it in his immortal novel "the grapes of wrath" in 1939. "the mother road." a nurturing road. a ribbon of highway that took in these dustbowl migrants from western oklahoma, the texas panhandle, the southern plains, and in this part of the country took in tenant farmers, unemployed, and they got on the road and they headed west following the scent of orange blossoms and lemons, going to

work in the fields in california where they were met with ridicule and clobbered with early clubs and spittle by border guards -- billy clubs and spittle by border guards and generally reviled as okies or arkies from arkansas. it is still a badge of courage does it still -- because it still stands for the resiliency of these oklahoma people. and it transitions into that next incarnation, the war years. even before we had gotten into the war, on route 66 and other places in the country, we were training troops to take on the action. in oklahoma on route 66, we trained young air cadets to fly spitfires in the battle of britain. some of them died in air

accidents up there. you go there today, the graveyards, you will see the graves of young airmen who will be 19 years old forever with a union jack flag by each gravestone. right on the concrete, route 66. the graves of young german and italian soldiers who died of their wounds at a pow camp during the war. out at mohave, general patton training his desert warriors to take on rommel in north africa. and that is who supplied those prisoners for our prison camps. those captured troops from north africa italy from sicily. it was a remarkable time because on the road, there was not civilian traffic. there were tire rations. gasoline rations. the whole nation was involved in

the war. route 66, filled with troop convoys, our g.i.'s taking one last visit before they shipped out. the war ended, what happened? america had prosperity, of course. those g.i.'s came home. what did they come home to? they came home to the g.i. bill. they got to go to college. they got to buy a house that he good rate. they got to marry their sweetheart. then everybody got a brand-new car. cars were made again. and we had to show our family where we trained at the great lakes or oklahoma or california. and people took to the road and that wartime blended right into peacetime and into the great come along heyday of route 66, late 1940's, throughout the

1950's, 1960's, even into the 1970's. even after president eisenhower in 1956 signed actually the death wore it for the roads, the interstate highway act which led to the creation of five interstate highways that tried to take route 66's place from chicago to santa monica. but it was not until the mid-1980's that the last -- that the blast shields went down. that is when the decertification was in plea. at the federal shields were down. now we have the interstate. 55 and 54 and 40 and 10. route 66 went into a bit of a limbo. it is so many things. the road is so many things. much more than just the physical road itself. for many people.

for many people, it is traveling and a lot of yuks and buying souvenirs. whatever it takes. but for many people, it is a reminder that progress is good. route 66 can no longer handle the traffic. but along with progress -- >> all weekend, and american history tv is featuring tulsa oklahoma. tulsa was an oil boom town in the early 20th century. it led to elaborate art deco structures constructed in downtown. c-span's cities tour staff recently visited many sites showcasing the city's history. learn more about tulsa, oklahoma

all weekend right here on american history tv. robert trepp: there are more native people in tulsa's 20 mile radius than anywhere else in the country. it is completely inside the boundaries of the muskogee, cherokee, or another reservation and it is the only city in the united states that has that status. the tribes that were native to this area were the osage. there were scattered bands of wichita, lots of tribes lived in this area because of the rich resources of not only the arkansas river, but the grand the other rivers down south. there was a huge political conflict in the muskogee nation. one signed a treaty saying all of the lands would be gone and

they would move out west. that chief was executed. the united states, the only time they repealed a treaty, the united states did repeal that treaty, even though it had been ratified. the negotiations following that, his followers were allowed to move west to oklahoma, and they settled in the area -- towns like broken arrow started growing up there. in 1830, they set up a system where land in the east would be exchanged for an equivalent amount of land in the west. so the tribes have lands that were proportional to the lands they were giving up back. originally it was set where the

cherokee would take lands north of the arkansas river and the muskogee would take lands between the arkansas and the south canadian and the choctaw and the chickasaw would take lands between the south canadian and the red river. but the time that the federal got out here to negotiate boundaries, a lot of cherokee had already sold between the arkansas and the south canadian and a lot of muskogee had already settled. so, in 1833, a treaty was negotiated that set the eastern boundary and brought it up to a point very close to show till, at the home a -- oklahoma. it went due west all the way to what is now the texas state line. north of that would be cherokee

land. that was what is now kansas. and then south to the canadian rivers would be muskogee land. the perrymans re: family descended from or named for a family -- are a family descended from our name for a family of welsh traders. when they came here, they brought their cattle and they began ranching, raising their herds of these wonderful pastor lands out here. one of their sons, lewis went into the trading business, setting up trading posts in competition with shoko, who had the trade with the osage for years and years. back then, the superhighway was

trade for the rivers. in the 1830's and epidemic moved up the river and affected the people in springtown and a lot of errands and families moved over here to the arkansas. not only to avoid that, but to resettle. they wound up marrying into the tribe, which was set up here around the council treaty and have established their community up and down the arkansas river. because of the allotment act in the early 1900s we no longer own this land in common as a reservation would. the lands were split up into 160-acre parcels, and under certain restrictions, some of those lands could be sold at different times, and gradually almost all of the indian land individual lands in tulsa had been bought up.

you can, it's not easy for a native family to hang out their lands in eastern,. it has been described to me, and laws are written is to make sure the purchaser gets a good title. we are at my great-grandfather's allotment. he was the father of three dollars. one of them was my grandmother. he died in 1901, two weeks after my grandmother was born. he selected 120 acres here, and in order to have a place