Durant Area Chamber of Commerce

Choctaws, also known as Chakchiuma, came to Oklahoma from the Mississippi Valley and parts of Alabama following the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830. During the infamous Trail of Tears many died from disease, white men, and hostile Indians including the Comanche. They were the first of the five tribes to locate in Oklahoma.

The other tribes to move to Oklahoma were the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creek, and Seminole. Forts were built in the new location to help protect the 5 Civilized Tribes from attacks by the plains Indians. The Choctaws homeland was named Nunia Waya, which means Productive Mound for the hills that surrounded their region.

The Choctaws have their headquarters in Durant and are the most progressive of the tribes in Oklahoma. Their Chief is Gregory E. Pyle.

Click on Any Image to Enlarge

Blacksmith shop in Platter, 1913. It was owned by M.C. Conwill (third from left).	A passenger train took a spill near Caddo in August, 1902, and drew a photographer and lots of visitors. That's a very young Dick Bilbo on the cowcatcher.	Schuler Park isn't much any more and the lake was filled in many years ago. This 1906 photograph is of a baptismal service.

Bryan County was created from Choctaw lands in 1907, the same time as statehood, and was named after William Jennings Bryan. He was nominated three times for President of the United States and at the age of 36 lost to William McKinley. He also lost to Woodrow Wilson, and William H. Taft. Woodrow Wilson appointed Bryan as Secretary of State.

Bryan assisted in what was referred to as the Scopes-Monkey trial. Clarence Darrow defended Scopes. The issue was because Scopes, a teacher, taught evolution in school. Bryan won the case and died just a few days after the trial in 1925.

Butterfield Stage traveled from St. Louis to San Francisco in 25 days and made the trip via the southern route, which meant they traveled over 2500 miles.

The trip was made twice a week. One year after the contract was signed for $600,000 they began service. The amazing facts about this is that the route had to be laid out, roads built, 100 stagecoaches had to be built, obtain 1500 horses and mules, build corrals and station houses and employ the men to make it happen.

These station houses were located approximately 12 miles apart where teams of horses were changed and then back on the road. They traveled 24 hours a day. A driver and conductor who were heavily armed manned the stage. The Butterfield Stage route passed through Bryan County with stops at Nail’s Crossing, Silo, and crossed the Red River into Texas at Colbert’s Ferry.

One of Durant’s own was Robert L. Williams. He was born in 1868 in Alabama and moved to Oklahoma in 1893 during the Cherokee Outlet Opening. He was the third governor of Oklahoma and was the first governor in the new Capital building. He was responsible for the Capital building being dome less because he was saving money, which was scarce because of First World War.

He also served as Chief Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court and was appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to serve as United States District Judge for the Eastern District and was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to serve as United States Circuit Judge. During his time as Governor, he enacted the Highway Construction Act, the office of Pardon and Parole, the State Insurance Bond as well as other progressive acts. He died at his home in Durant in 1948 and is buried in Highland Cemetery.

Durant’s local airport is named after Ira Eaker. Ira Clarence Eaker was an aviation pioneer and United States Air Force General. He was born in 1896 in Field Creek, Texas and moved to southeastern Oklahoma in 1912.

He attended school in Kenefic, a community in Bryan County. He graduated from Southeastern State Teachers College (now Southeastern Oklahoma State University) in Durant. He entered the armed forces in 1917.

Eaker was the first aviator to make a transcontinental flight that depended solely on aerial refueling. In 1943 General Eaker assumed overall command of both American air forces in the United Kingdom, the Eighth and the Ninth.

He took over as commander of the joint Mediterranean Allied Air Forces on January 15,1944. With 321,429 officers and men and 12,598 aircraft, MAAF was the world’s largest air force. General Eaker was recognized on the cover of Life Magazine in 1943, and a copy of the cover is in the Durant Area Chamber of Commerce.

In the beginning, a family of French-Choctaw origin followed the immigration of the Choctaw Nation from the Valley of the Great River, the Mississippi. The Choctaw’s journey chronicled as “the Trail of Tears, heartaches and death,” ended in a new country west of the Territory of Arkansas and situated between the Red River on the south and the South Canadian River on the north. The claim extended west to Mexico, which is now the eastern boundary line of the northwest Texas territory commonly known and called the “panhandle.”

Pierre Durant, pronounced DuRant in French, and his four sons made the trudge down the Mississippi on the way to the southeastern part of the Choctaw Nation in 1832. The brothers, grown, with families of their own, established homesteads from the

Arkansas line to Durant.

One son, Fisher, married to a full blood Choctaw, found a beautiful location for a home between Durant’s present eight and ninth avenues. His son, Dixon Durant is recognized as the founder of Durant and is honored with his namesake. As an early day minister, businessman and civic leader, Dixon Durant is credited with pastorates in local Presbyterian,

Congregationalist and Methodist churches; establishment of the first store selling general merchandise; and possibly influencing the 1872 erection of a Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy) railroad siding at Durant, thus producing the initial impetus for establishing the community.

The site of Durant possessed no evident advantages over other nearby locations, either north or south. The same fertile bottom lands of the valleys of Blue, Boggy, Washita and Red Rivers were as favorably located in relation to other sites as to Durant.

The soil had already been proven highly productive for field crops, especially cotton and corn, before the arrival of the Katy railroad through “Durant Station” in 1872. Some commercial oil and gas development which was to come later never was to be as important as farming and ranching to the area.

The coming of the railroad assured Durant’s place as a major marketing place and shipping point for the area. The construction of the Katy railroad began early in 1870 at the Kansa line. In mid November, 1872, a railroad siding designated byrailway officials as “Durant Station” was completed by a construction crew of the big Irishman. John Scullin, sometimes dubbed the road became a part of the Frisco system.

Businessmen of the city and officials of the Missouri, Oklahoma and Gulf (M.O. & G.) Railway Company signed a contract for construction of their railroad through Durant. The contract guaranteed a right of way, a bonus of $10,000 for station grounds and a depot. Katy railroad officials objected very strenuously to this competitive railroad being built and the work was delayed for weeks by a gondola car loaded with coal derailed purposely on the Katy side track where the Gulf railroad was to cross the Katy tracks. Construction of the railroad was started through Durant on June 11, 1909 and completed during the Spring of 1912.

Katy Railway Company workmen began paving its right of way on Main Street on March 22, 1912 after about two years delay and refusal to do so.
The three Durant railroads were instructed to build and use a union depot jointly by an order of the Corporation Commission, on May 1, 1912. The M.O. and G. Railway Co. protested and finally won their contention for a separate station.

The name of the Gulf railroad was changed to Kansas, Oklahoma and Gulf Railways Company in 1919. The K.O. & G. completed its new brick depot November 25, 1927. In the heyday of railroad operation some sixteen passenger trains were scheduled each day through the city.

A memorable event in Durant’s rail history occurred on April 5, 1905. A special southbound Katy train stopped in the city with none other than President Theodore Roosevelt aboard.

The city’s leaders later fought for highways when serious construction of such routes first began around 1920. This struggle was simplified by the fact that early highways were quite likely to parallel existing railroads. Since Durant already had the railroads and was the population center, the highways centered here more or less as a matter of course. Thus the early transportation advantage gained by becoming a railroad center was maintained as a highway center when railroads diminished in importance.

As a result of their early efforts, three national high ways and one state highway now serve the city with their accompanying bus and track services.

Other communications media such as telegraph and telephone lines were built to parallel the railroads and highways, and a radio station with wide coverage increased the communication facilities of the Durant area.

The first newspaper in Durant of which there is any record was the “Durant Sentinel” published by a man named Bailey in 1892. By the middle of the century half a dozen or so city newspapers had undergone a continuous process of “great American tracklayer.” The siding was one of forty or more installed at irregular intervals averaging five or ten miles each during construction of the first railroad across what is now Oklahoma.

The first through train crossed Red River into Texas on Christmas Day, 1872 with Oklahoma trackage totaling a few miles less than two-hundred and fifty. The Katy railroad, the first built through the Territory, was followed by the St. Louis-San Francisco railroad from Fort Smith, Arkansas to Paris, Texas in 1886-87. The Gulf, Colorado, Sante-Fe extended it’s lines from Gainsville, Texas to Purcell, Oklahoma during the same years.

The Choctaws of the territory felt that they didn’t deserve to pay the excessive freight and passenger charges of the railroad. Part of the ill feeling was due to the doubled fare charged to points in Indian Territory. It cost less to buy a ticket through the territory than to points within it.

In 1876 passenger fare was reduced from 7 cents to 5 cents a mile and it remained this price until 1900 when it was reduced again to 3c a mile. The railroad did not pay taxes to the Choctaw Government until 1881. From that time the fee was $2,000.00 per year.

A post office for “Durant Station” was authorized in 1879, evidence that a village of some size had developed during the seven years since the coming of the railroad. A.E. Fulsom was post master. Discontinued in 1881, the post office re-established in 1882 with the address as “Durant, Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory.” The word “station” was never again used as part of the official name for the community.

The station grounds for the territorial state were approved by the Secretary of the Interior January 19, 1880. The right of way through which is now the city was 200 feet except from Elm & Arkansas Street where it widened to 500 feet. An old box car minus wheels was placed on the east side of the main track where Main Street intersects with the tracks. A water tank was built on the west side, north of the present station. A water line was constructed from the Mineral Bayou Creek.

Neither Durant nor the other potential cities along the Katy route had much chance to grow before the dissolution of the Choctaw Nation and the end of restrictions on white settlers which hampered economic development of the region. In 1897 the end of these restrictions was insured by the terms of the Atoka Agreement, whose provisions were incorporated into federal law by the Curtis Act of 1898. It now became possible for the little settlements to organize city governments and began to finance schools, water and sewer systems, and to assume other municipal responsibilities.