Payne County History:
A Brief Review

THE FIRST official U.S. expedition through the area that was to become Payne County was led by Indian Commissioner Henry Ellsworth in 1832. His goal was to become acquainted with the newly created Indian Territory. His party included noted American writer Washington Irving, who later wrote "A Tour on the Prairies," describing his experiences and the landscape at the time.

The area provided abundant game for tribes such as the Pawnee and Osage. According to acclaimed Oklahoma historian Angie Debo, the first battle of the Civil War in Indian Territory took place near Twin Mounds, west of Yale in eastern Payne County. The site of the engagement, called the Battle of Round Mountains, is marked by a monument erected by the Payne County Historical Society.

In the 1880s, would-be settlers, called Boomers, were led by Captain David L. Payne to attempt settlement of Oklahoma. Payne died in Kansas before his dream of living in Oklahoma could be realized, but in 1996 he was reburied in the county that bears his name. The Payne County Historical Society arranged to have his body moved from Kansas and built a memorial to Captain Payne near Boomer Lake on the north side of Stillwater.

Payne County was opened to settlement in the Oklahoma land run of 1889, and the land was populated overnight. Businesses sprang up, schools and churches were built, and farmers planted crops. In December of 1890, the state's land-grant university, Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University), was established at Stillwater, the county seat.

Not all the activity in early Payne County centered around education, business, and farming. Eastern Payne County and the rough country along the Cimarron River provided a haven for outlaws like Bill Doolin, Bitter Creek Newcomb, and Arkansas Tom. The gunfight at Ingalls, between the Doolin-Dalton gang and U.S. marshals in 1893, resulted in the deaths of three lawmen and two bystanders. Today, a monument in Ingalls honors the slain lawmen.

In the teens and twenties, oil fields around Cushing, Yale, and Mehan brought the oil boom to Payne County.

In 1925, the nation's first radio broadcast by a cowboy band was made by the Billy McGinty Cowboy Band, of Ripley, a small Payne County town on the banks of the Cimarron. The band evolved into Stillwater's Otto Gray Cowboy Band, the first western band to tour on vaudeville and appear on the cover of "The Billboard" magazine. Otto Gray has been referred to as "the father of country and western music."

Other notable figures in Payne County history include Jim Thorpe, a Sac and Fox Indian called the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century. He lived in Yale in the 1920s, and his home is now a state-operated museum. Frank "Pistol Pete" Eaton was a colorful cowboy and lawman from Perkins, south of Stillwater, whose name and image provided the model for Oklahoma State University's widely known mascot, Pistol Pete.

And those are just a few of the highlights of Payne County's history. There's much more, and the more you learn about Payne County's past, the more interesting it becomes!

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