WASHITA BATTLEFIELD Washita Symposium: Past, Present, and Future November 12-14, 1998

JERRY ROGERS
Intermountain Support Office, NPS

I want to share a vignette that underscores the difficulty of the job of a historian in trying to ferret out the nearest approximation to truth from documents and stories. In 1874 Frank Dwight Baldwin led a detachment of troops down the Canadian River. His formal report said he encountered and routed a small band of Indians, that they had fled, abandoning their arms and equipment. Billy Dixon, the civilian scout riding with the same column who had nothing at stake from sounding glorious in the report, said they came across two Indians who were cooking a rabbit. The Indians jumped up and ran away leaving behind two blankets and a butcher knife. Truth can be a matter of where you put the emphasis.

The future of Washita Battlefield National Historic Site will be determined by the staff, by the community, by the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, by our partner the Oklahoma Historical Society, and by the landowners whose lands are incorporated within the actual national historic site. I want to emphasize that the national historic site is not just the 300+ acres the National Park Service owns in fee simple; that is the National Park Service property within the national historic site. In the legislation, the national historic site is defined to include a much larger piece of land, within which we must rely on our partners. It is not the goal of the National Park Service to acquire all those lands; it is the goal of the National Park Service to work with the partners to produce the best result for the public good of the people of the United States and all of the parties at interest here.

The National Park Service owns and expects to own only a fraction over 300 acres. That says something about the notion of "cultural landscapes," which taken in the larger historic scenes beyond the areas that the National Park Service or any other public entity can own and operate. There are difficulties inherent in trying to deal with preservation goals on land that you do not own, but those are the skills that we have to learn as the future comes upon us. The nation is getting too full, land values are getting too high, competing needs for uses of lands are getting too acute to count on preserving things anymore by buying them and then running them exactly the way we want to.

The National Park Service used to think of a traditional national park as being, for example, Yellowstone, in which we have almost 3 million acres, in which we own every single acre, and in which we exercise exclusive jurisdiction. We enforce the laws there. The superintendent of Yellowstone is like the governor of the third smallest state in the United States. He has a jail he puts people in; he does all kinds of things that one does not normally think of as part of managing a park. Somehow that has been the ideal we have had in our minds for most of the eight decades of the history of the national park system, and yet it has never been the reality. Almost all parks have had to deal with the reality of managing lands they do not own, encouraging preservation of resources they cannot own and, indeed, cannot even manage.

Here at Washita we are trying one of the more progressive and more extreme experiments, in which the National Park Service will own only the core area, a concept that in itself has developed only recently in the American Battlefield Protection Program. Some situations have grown from unrealistic expectations at the time they were created. It was assumed, for example, in the 1920s and 1930s and even more recently that most park units would be established in rural areas and would be protected by the rural nature of their environment, by remoteness, by being far from cities and far from things that create visual intrusions that make a place less able to reflect its historic nature.

That is very true of Civil War battlefields; I think of Richmond National Battlefield near the city of Richmond, Virginia, which is in fact a string of pocket parks of only a handful of acres each now totally surrounded by suburbia. The growth of suburbia, in essence, has destroyed almost all of the real reason for creating Richmond National Battlefield Park. Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania, also in northern Virginia, is overrun by strip developments and shopping malls. The National Park Service owns only fragments. Those places for the most part have been lost.

Other places are threatened. At Little Bighorn, the National Park Service has jurisdiction over 640 acres in one parcel and 160 acres in another parcel four miles away but the battlefield covers 11,000 acres.

The problem is not limited to battlefields. The American landscape is getting so full that the options are getting fewer. Not long ago I saw a news report of an event in Grand Teton National Park in northwestern Wyoming. We think of Grand Teton as being a long way from population pressures. A citizen who lived on the edge of Grand Teton National Park was being interviewed. Using today's electronic technology, that citizen was running a business in Los Angeles, California, but he chose to live where the national park created a guarantee of a beautiful environment on the other side of his fence. He did not worry much about the fact that his house and his development had become a detriment to those inside the park looking outward across the fence.

That sort of thing is happening everywhere in the United States and most of the world, and it is to be expected. There is not much park people can do about it except to reach out beyond the boundaries of the parks, beyond what we own in fee simple, and make league with other people who care deeply about the reason the National Park Service is there in the first place, whether that be the scenic beauty, endangered species, or the special personal nature of a place like Washita, or the message that we must deliver to future generations. Park people and preservationists must reach out and make league with people who have the same interest and find ways to cooperate.

The National Park Service has been in the business of trying to preserve things through conservation easements for quite a while. We created a lot of easements several decades ago and then treated them as though they were simply money in the bank and needed no attention. And what happened? The easements were forgotten and violated and development occurred. We reached a point where we could not make someone reverse the damage they had done contrary to the easements they had agreed upon, and basically by neglect we lost the effect of those easements.

At Buffalo National River in Arkansas a couple of decades ago the National Park Service made an extraordinary decision after deciding it had purchased more land than was needed for the purpose of protecting Buffalo National River. The Service initiated a program to sell back excess land to the very people from whom it had been purchased, but the Service sold it with a conservation easement by which the owners agreed to continue the agricultural use and to maintain the scenic and cultural landscape values. That has worked rather well. These easement have not been ignored, but have been managed. An easement is, after all, an interest in land and it makes the United States or the easement holder an owner of a small portion of the fee simple interest in the land. An easement holder cannot responsibly ignore it. But there in Arkansas the easement managers, I believe quite wisely, realized that in a rural area an easement is managed best by being a good neighbor, and never by being an inspector.

We are fortunate that our principal partner at Washita battlefield is the Oklahoma Historical Society. The Society keenly knows the point I just made to be true and will manage its easements as a neighbor. The National Park Service will have to act in the same way.

The Washita Battlefield National Historic Site means more, I believe, for the future of the National Park Service than just the way it deals with its neighbors and manages a few easements. I hope that Washita signals the beginning of a more comprehensive treatment of American history. When we look at the presence of American Indian history in National Park System units, especially in the legislation that created them and that specifies the reason for each one's creation, we see precious little American Indian history and culture as the basis. And yet such history is everywhere. In New Mexico and a few other places we have a few ancestral puebloan sites. Here at Washita, and at Sand Creek if we are fortunate enough to get that as a park system unit, we will relate the history of conflict between the United States and American Indians, certainly an important part of history. But where do we turn to find the history and the culture of the tribes themselves? I realize there is an increasing amount of tribal involvement in existing national park lands. Most of the national parks, especially in this region, are conscientiously trying to create relationships not just with neighboring tribes, but with tribes who are known to have ancestral lands in the national parks, to get a more complete story. That is happening not just for implementation of the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, although that has been a big motivator, but more fully to understand the nature of the site itself and the stories the site might tell.

We know that not every tribe will want every story to be told, but we believe most tribes will want a lot more stories to be told than are told right now. We have heard here today just how many more stories there are. My friend LaDonna Harris, a Comanche who now lives in New Mexico and is well known among Oklahomans, told me her grandfather was the youngest participant at Adobe Walls. He was not supposed to be there, but he and another ten-year-old kid tagged along behind the war party and just would not obey when they were told to go home. So they went with the war party and camped behind the big butte east of Adobe Walls where the war party waited for dawn to attack. Everyone was told to be very quiet and stay right where they were. But the kids said, "Let those old guys stay here and be quiet until dawn; we're going to go steal some horses." So they crawled forward through the grass on their hands and knees. Harris's grandfather told her that while crawling like that, he put his hand on what he quickly realized was a white man's beard. Of course he jumped up and ran away, but somehow did not give the alarm so that when the attack came at dawn it was still a surprise.

If LaDonna Harris has that one story, then how many other hundreds of stories are just waiting to enrich the greater story? It is one thing to hear Frank Baldwin's notion of what happened on that day in 1874, but it makes it a little richer to hear Billy Dixon's version. And what about the numerous stories of the Indian participants? Heroism existed there, poignancy existed there; there are stories that have the ability to touch the heart of every visitor, not just those of the same ethnic identification. I see Washita as a forerunner to an additional cadre of national park system units that will be created specifically to address important American Indian stories that American Indians want to share.

There also is another special kind of National Park Service partnership that most people do not know about. Under the National Historic Preservation Act we work to identify and assist and encourage the preservation of historic places of not only national significance like the national park units, but also state and local significance. Places that are important in one's own hometown are, to some degree, the business of the National Park Service through the network of state historic preservation offices. In Oklahoma the State Historic Preservation Office is the Oklahoma Historical Society, and the key mechanism is the National Register of Historic Places. That partnership is now thirty years old.

A similar partnership with American Indian tribes is barely ten years old. Gordon Yellowman has described himself as a "tribal cultural heritage officer." That means he is the official link with the state historic preservation officer and the National Park Service in an extended network—a partnership by which we can all work together to preserve historic and cultural places. Another Oklahoman, Charles Blackwell, whose title is "Ambassador of the Chickasaw Nation to the United States," mused several years ago as we were discussing ways to create a tribal partnership, "There ought to be some kind of historical society by which Indians write and keep and share their own history." That statement is the origin of the tribal cultural heritage organization called Keepers of the Treasures, which met last year in Santa Fe and is a thriving, vigorous, and increasingly professional organization.

By way of conclusion, I want to hearken back to ideas that several speakers have addressed in one way or another. Mine is a story that speaks to past, present, and future. About twelve years ago I had the opportunity to deliver the dedication address for a national historic landmark at a place the secretary of the interior had decided he did not want to go. Manzanar Relocation Camp near Bishop, California, Manzanar was one of those many camps to which American citizens of Japanese origin were relegated during World War II because it was assumed that some number of them might be loyal to the Empire of Japan and that they might engage in espionage or sabotage contrary to American interests. (No evidence of that ever surfaced. People were drafted from those camps, but were not permitted to fight in the Pacific; but in Europe they became the most decorated unit.) People's civil rights were simply suspended, and they were moved to the camps and kept there until the end of the war. Unable to tend to their properties at home, most of them lost many of their holdings and were terribly impacted by it. Hindsight tells us, history tells us, that there was no reason at all to have done that.

What I said there at Manzanar—and I considered it a great privilege to do so—was that every nation uses history in one way or another. The most dictatorial regimes, the least free ones, are the ones that write the official versions of their history and permit no disagreement, but they use history as a propagandistic device to support themselves. Mediocre nations use history to celebrate their greatness and pound their chests about how wonderful "we" are, which is in itself a divisive action because it separates them from the rest of humanity. The greatest nations are those that can say, "This is our complete history, good and bad, and we are going to preserve it, not because it proves how wonderful we are, but because we need to learn from it."

If we can practice total war on one population, we can practice it on another, and someone else can practice it on us. If we can suspend one person's civil rights, we can suspend another's, and it might be our turn to lose our rights someday. The job of the National Park Service at Washita is clear. It is not to answer the questions that have been debated today so brilliantly and in such good spirit, but rather to engage the minds of all visitors in answering those questions for themselves. It is what each visitor concludes that really matters, and it is our duty to help them. It is every historian's duty to tell the story—or the multiple stories—of a place truthfully as best truth can be discovered and understood.

SARAH CRAIGHEAD
Washita Battlefield National Historic Site, NPS

Some days I believe it would require a crystal ball to know the future of Washita Battlefield National Historic Site. On days like this I believe the future of the park is very positive.

The mission of the National Park Service is to preserve and protect park areas, as well to provide for the enjoyment of the public. That is what we have tried to focus on this year. It has been a very exciting year for the park. There were many planning sessions involving park staff, National Park Service employees and regional office employees, tribal officials and members, state and local supporters, and interested members of the public, all of which helped give us direction for the work to be done.

We began work on some of the basic planning documents for the park, such as the comprehensive interpretive plan and the historic resource study. All of those documents are necessary for a professional and national perspective for telling Washita's story

This year the park launched a fledgling interpretive program that included guided walks and tours of the overlook, and we developed a temporary trail. We served more than 1,000 visitors with these programs this summer, and we believe that is pretty remarkable considering our location and how few people know we have national park status. A quick survey of those visitors indicated we had about an 85 per cent satisfaction rate, again pretty good considering that we do not have a visitors center yet. But we worked with the state of Oklahoma to keep the Black Kettle Museum open seven days a week so that visitors could get some information on Washita.

We also began basic work on park resources, such as reseeding the former wheat fields with native grasses and removing railroad ties and fenceposts from the interior of the park. The Black Kettle National Grassland and the National Resource Conservation Service were our close partners in those endeavors. We are committed, through our enabling legislation, to return the area to its 1868 appearance as much as possible; some of that also will involve removing some exotic species, such as salt cedar that grows along the banks of the Washita.

We have received funding to start our general management plan, which is the overall guiding document for the park. It includes guidance for development of facilities and services, such as the visitors center and museum complex, all a part of creating a truly special national park unit. The general management plan will give us the ability to receive funding for construction, both within the National Park Service and in the community.

It is critical, however, to the success of the park that our plan be inclusive of different perspectives, even in the planning sequence, and that takes a lot of time. Education will have a strong focus in the park this year; we will work with local schools to develop programs and go beyond the boundaries of the park to tell the whole story. We continue to work with our park friends group, the Washita Battlefield Historical Society. This year we are working with the Oklahoma Historical Society to gather oral histories from the Cheyenne people, both by researching the stories already in the records and interviewing people who are alive today and have stories that have been handed down through the generations. We will continue to pursue other interpretive efforts, such as a park brochure and exhibits for overlooks and trails. We will focus on what should be inside a museum, the types of exhibits and the kinds of artifacts that would be helpful in telling the story.

Washita has many, many stories to tell, and by bringing together people to help us tell those stories we begin a partnership and a learning process that will benefit us all for generations to come.

BOB BLACKBURN
Oklahoma Historical Society

There are several issues with which we must deal at this site, and they were well articulated today and offered up for a lively debate, but always in a friendly way I believe it will provide the intellectual leadership we need to approach issues such as the partnerships, which are so critical to any public endeavor; issues such as dialogue in creating a process that is inclusive and not exclusive; issues such as management of resources, the direction of the park, and the planning process. But we have a real challenge in balancing historical objectivity with the heartfelt sensitivities of our Cheyenne neighbors. How are we going to accomplish those goals? How are we going to maintain that delicate balance? How are we going to manage the resources and the dialogue in the process, and pull all of it together?

There is one thing that cuts through all of this, and that is the potential for education at this site, not just for school kids, not just for people here, but education in terms of what this site can mean to our county, our state, our nation, and the international community. This can be a site—an educational site—with a very powerful message in the war against ignorance and injustice and hate. It can be a very powerful tool in the war for respect, for peace, and for cultural survival.

We might think that everything is going to work out, but six years ago it did not look like any of this would be possible. In fact, what we are doing today was far beyond our wildest dreams, because not only were we dealing with the general apathy of people about their own cultural heritage in general, but we were dealing with some direct opposition. I am not sure which was the more difficult challenge, the general apathy, or the direct opposition.

Following the battle in 1868, or the massacre, or the event, whatever we call it, this site remained a very important place to the Cheyenne people. Time went on. Families mourned the deaths of loved ones. Life continued in the Cheyenne way. After 1892, the land run, and general allotment, the land where the engagement took place passed from tribal to individual ownership. The Cheyenne community suffered a terrible blow with the loss of its communal lands. A process of change, of survival, began among the Cheyenne people that has continued to the present day. The land in private ownership, land hallowed by blood, was cultivated; people grazed cattle on the land, and time moved on.

In the 1920s and the 1930s, the nation began to notice Indian history. A new generation of historians took on the topic of Indian history for the first time, in a critical way, not in the old nineteenth century romantic image. Some people began asking, "Was our treatment of the American Indian honorable? Were mistakes made?"

In the 1950s still another change came and it was a positive thing for this hallowed land. The Wesner family bought the site, put their protecting arms around it, and said, "We will protect this, keep the hunters off it, keep the developers off so that the site is protected." Also in the 1950s when the state of Oklahoma looked around for ways to recover from drought and the extended depression that really started in the 1920s in Oklahoma, one of the catch-all phrases was "heritage tourism." The state began opening local cultural facilities as part of the effort to prime the pump of economic development. One of those sites is here in Cheyenne, Oklahoma. The state constructed the Black Kettle Museum and, after the Wesners shared part of their legacy by selling land to the state, the overlook. The Washita site became part of our cultural landscape, a place to see the site and learn about the event.

In 1966 still another trend began across the country with the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act. People joined the National Park Service and became advocates for historic preservation. In fact, Jerry Rogers entered the service that year and began moving up the ladder within the National Park Service, all the time advocating the importance of history in this region. Starting in the 1970s Rogers was already talking about the importance of the Battle of the Washita site, as it was called in the literature at the time, as an important national legacy. The site eventually received national historic landmark status, probably due to his efforts.

In the 1970s and 1980s the discussions about the importance of the site continued and grew. People in the local community began talking about the site. Cheyenne leaders became involved with cultural preservation by trying to determine the burial sites of their people. Local archeologists like Jim Briscoe and Cheyenne youth like John Sipes began looking at cultural preservation at the grassroots level. Others also were gaining an awareness of the importance of the site. At an Oklahoma Historical Society board meeting in 1982, I remember a discussion about the importance of the site, about the need to make it a national park, about the support in the local community. But nothing happened.

In 1990 something happened at the right time. The state transferred ten properties from the Tourism Department to the Oklahoma Historical Society. Two of those sites were Spiro Mounds, which according to Roger Kennedy is the outstanding pre-Columbian site in all of North America north of Mexico, and the Black Kettle Museum and the overlook. In that year I became deputy director and Blake Wade became executive director; we had a new generation of board members starting to get more involved with outreach. We looked at the potential of each of the ten sites and pulled them into our planning process.

That same year in Washington, D.C., there was a fight over the preservation of the Manassas Battlefield. Because of poor planning and tight budgets, it looked like the nation would lose a very important part of its national legacy at that battlefield because of commercial development. Congress came to the rescue, but they paid tens of millions of dollars for land they could have purchased for a few million dollars years before with proper planning. The leadership in Washington and the National Park Service refused to allow that kind of poor planning to continue. Congress created the American Battlefield Protection Commission, which in turn led to the American Battlefield Protection Program, to identify threatened sites, evaluate their integrity, and then forge new partnerships for protection. The Oklahoma Historical Society got involved with the National Park Service as it collected data on the more than eighty Civil War sites in Oklahoma. As we started providing information, we created important relationships.

Then in 1991 another important event occurred (important as we look back, although painful at the time). The Oklahoma Historical Society suffered an 18 percent budget cut. The plan adopted by our board was to cut back facilities, the only place we could cut at the time. It affected fourteen museums and sites in the state by closing them totally or partially. One of those sites was the Black Kettle Museum. I drove to Cheyenne for a town meeting, which I survived, to announce and explain the board's decision. But out of that adversity, we got to know Frank Lucas, the local state representative who grew up right down the road. We had not worked much with Lucas up to that point, but of course when you face closing a site, you get to know the elected officials pretty well. In most cases they are in your face saying they will get your job. Lucas was the exception. I gave the forty-five minute presentation about where to cut and then each of the state officials had a chance to say "you can not do that," "you can not cut in my district." We went around the room until finally it was Lucas's turn to speak. He said, "My esteemed colleagues with their wisdom have brought here today their concerns, but the legislature had to make tough cuts; we cut the Historical Society's budget. They had to make tough cuts, and they had to close two facilities in my district. We're going to work together to try to find a solution." In Roger Mills County we talked about how we could resurrect the issue of the Washita site and do something more with it.

In 1992, although we did not know it at the time, the internal machinery of the American Battlefield Protection Commission was turning; they were achieving some positive results, and at the time—even though it was not public knowledge—Honey Springs, the largest battle site of the Civil War in Indian Territory, was a priority within the National Park Service review process. I got a call one day from John Cook, director of the Intermountain Region of the National Park Service. He talked about the importance of two sites in Oklahoma—Honey Springs and the Battle of Washita—that have national significance and needed to be preserved. Cook sent to Oklahoma Neil Mangum, who was the right person at the right time for the project, and Doug Farris, a public servant who tried to do what was right for the American public. We talked about possibilities, and we started a dialogue with the local community. Mangum, Farris, and I sat in Dale and Betty Wesner's home and talked about the possibilities and the importance of the Washita site. We also talked to some of the Cheyennes. I then called on a personal friend, Lawrence Hart, who put us in contact with the business committee and the keeper of the arrows. We visited the site and talked some more, but before we left I asked point-blank, "Would you support an effort to make this a unit of the National Park Service?" They agreed. From those meetings in 1992, with the cooperation of the Wesners, the National Park Service, the Cheyenne business committee and cultural leaders, we started the process to achieve national park status.

In 1992 we met another person who became very influential, Frances Kennedy who had been named director of Civil War sites and acquisition director for the Heritage Conservation Fund in Washington. She wanted to come to Oklahoma and talk about the battlefields, primarily Honey Springs, but also the Washita site. We flew her out to the site, really all around the state, and she became involved in the project.

Then that same year, Frank Lucas left the state legislature and was elected to Congress. Randy Beutler, a young historian who had taught history and was familiar with the area and the project, was elected to the state House of Representatives and joined forces with us in 1992. That same year Bill Clinton was elected president, and he ultimately named Roger Kennedy, the husband of Frances Kennedy, director of the National Park Service.

In 1993 the Oklahoma legislature created the Oklahoma Battlefield Commission. The chairman was John Bryant, a young Republican legislator from Tulsa with no vested interest in either of the sites, but a man who cared. Under his leadership, the commission became very active by bringing staff from the House of Representatives and the Senate into the effort.

With the support of the American Battlefield Commission, with Neil Mangum within the National Park Service, and with support at the top, we began drafting bills. In the fall of 1993 Roger Kennedy announced the National Park Service's support to create parks at the Washita site and at Honey Springs. In February, 1994, we began letter-writing and telephone campaigns to friends in communities across the state; letters started pouring in to the Oklahoma delegation in Washington. Then in March, 1994, we set up a meeting with Senators David Boren and Don Nickels. At the time Congress was still controlled by the Democrats; Boren was a very high-ranking Democratic official, Senator Nickels high-ranking within the Republican Party Congressman, Mike Synar was the ranking Democrat in the Oklahoma delegation at the time, but he had an interesting dilemma. He had never taken much interest in Honey Springs, which was in his district, but he had had a very tough race in 1992. Looking ahead to the November elections of 1994, he wondered how to consolidate support. The southern part of his district had Honey Springs. The one banker in his entire district who would talk to him (because he took on the Bankers Association) was in Checotah, four miles from the battlefield. He succeeded in recruiting Synar as an ally in our effort. A number of individuals from Oklahoma—Oklahoma Historical Society board president Dr. Lewis Stiles, Lawrence Hart, John Bryant, Randy Beutler, and myself—met with the entire congressional delegation in Washington.

At the time Synar was very close to the chairman of the House committee that deals with public land, Congressman Bruce Vento. Synar indicated he could get Vento to move the bill through the hearing process. To make sure the Washita site had a chance, we attached two bills. The National Park Service agreed to one bill with two titles. We attached them at the hip, so to speak, and moved forward together—western Oklahoma and eastern Oklahoma, Frank Lucas and Mike Synar. In local politics at the time, that was an unholy alliance, but both believed enough in the sites to say, "Yes, we will work together on this." We wrote the bill and their two names appear on the original bill. We then had public hearings, one in Cheyenne, one in Checotah, before the congressional hearings on July 18, 1994. The bill got through the committee and moved on. But the next month Synar was defeated in his primary, and he was out of the equation. Of course the Congress changed hands in November, and the bill died. It looked like there was no future for the project.

We had a decompression period from November to the next spring. Fortunately there were enough people who said, "Let's not give up, let's try it again." Because of the changing dynamics we decided to write two separate bills. Under Lucas's guidance, we worked with his staff in dealing with new language in the National Park Service. With a Republican Congress in 1994 and 1995, we went back to the National Park Service (we had to have that alliance), which said, "We have to find a new language and redefine what we want."

In negotiations that involved new tribal people, new cultural people, and new people from the community, we came up with a new version that had no rights of condemnation. It reduced the boundaries from 3,000 acres to a little over 300, and it committed the state of Oklahoma as a partner to buy the land; there would be no federal money for acquisition. The state would have to step forward. It was not just Bob Blackburn making that commitment. It was Marvin Kroeker and the Oklahoma Historical Society board of directors; it was the legislature under the guidance of John Bryant and Randy Beutler. Bill Lees had joined our staff the year before, so we had a Ph.D. archeologist on our staff for the first time. We had a way to do the archeology that helped define the extent of the boundaries (Some people in the National Park Service had been very nervous when we did not have good data to know what the boundaries should be).

Fortunately enough people believed it would work. Again, working with the Wesners, we started working on appraisals; the local community organized friends groups; we instituted new letter-writing campaigns and door-to-door petitions to try to get the new Congress excited about the site. Lucas, who was looking for any options, promoted one deal for selling some federal land in one place and transferring credits; that ran into a buzz saw. The political courage got him into some hot water, but he said, "That's just one little battle, that's not the entire campaign."

We backed off that program and started working on other strategies. In 1996 we asked for but failed to get money from the state. We continued to work on the project through politically bumpy times in 1996. But throughout all of those failures and all of those complications on many different levels—tribal, state, and federal, we tried to keep moving forward. Eventually, we got another hearing before Congress, and the bill passed through the House on July 25, 1996. But by September of 1996, we had failed to get a Senate hearing. Everyone considered it a doomed bill. Then in October, 1996, counting down to the final days of the session, Lucas continued working behind the scenes. On the Senate side, fortunately, we had a senator who had moved into a position of leadership, Don Nickles, and he took the project under his wings. From the chairman of the Senate subcommittee dealing with the National Park Service omnibus bill, he learned, on the day it was to hit the floor, that the Washita site had been taken out. Nickels convinced his colleague to include the Washita site at the last minute. On October 11, 1996, Congress passed the bill with the Washita site in it. A week or so later the president signed it. The first cultural unit for the National Park Service in Oklahoma was a reality.

But we still had to buy the land. We went back to the state legislature and the governor, by then a Republican governor. The chairman of our battlefield commission, John Bryant, was a Republican who could go directly to the governor and seek his support. With the governor's support we put in a request for the money we had to have to buy the land, and we got it. We then turned to our good friend Frances Kennedy and said, "We still need the money from the foundation." Pat Noonan from the Conservation Fund and the director of the Mellon Foundation flew to Oklahoma to visit the site and meet the principals in the project. They was a storm moving in from the Texas Panhandle, but we jumped in a plane, flew out to the Washita site, and I did a sales pitch on the way. They contributed their grant money to the state's funds, and we closed the deal. We transferred the land to the National Park Service, and they recruited Sarah Craighead as superintendent.

The Oklahoma Historical Society and the National Park Service remain partners in this project; we still include the Cheyennes and Arapahos. It is in the bill; it is in our hearts. It was Frank Lucas's original intention to include all of our tribal friends in the process, to find that delicate balance in what we can do with this hallowed ground, a site that is important to all Americans. This site was meant to be.