Hello, I'm Robert Henry, and I'm a federal Court of appeals judge.

But before I was a judge, I was a legislator in this very building behind you.

And while I was a legislator, I fell under the tutelage of Betty Price, then the director of the State Arts Council.

And as always, our leading proponent of public art.

Along the way, I found myself coauthoring a bill to found the Capital Preservation Commission, commissioning paintings myself and getting to know many of the artists and some of their subjects.

Sometimes I'm called upon to take dignitaries on tours of this art and history.

But today I'm going to take you on a tour of the people's art, this priceless collection in your state capitol.

Okay, welcome to our tour of the Capitol.

This is our first stop on our walking tour.

And guess what?

We get to sit down.

I want to start with this magnificent sculpture by artist Sara Van Zandt.

And you would think with the record of that body of our country, that we might have tried women in leadership roles a little bit earlier than we did.

But if you want to know who the very first woman elected ever elected to any statewide office was, you have to come to Oklahoma.

And a really good place is to come right here, because this is she.

This is Miss Kate Bernard, our angel.

Kate.

She was called.

She was a young, Catholic, educated woman who was very concerned with the poor, with the oppressed, with prisoners.

And she became the only woman allowed to address the constitutional convention in Guthrie.

She was dynamic.

She was invited back.

She was popular.

And the delegates decided to allow one spot.

One elective office could be held by a woman.

And they created the office of the Commissioner of Charities and Corrections.

They actually created the office for her.

And when she ran for election in the first election, with all the other statewide offices, she got more votes than anybody else.

She got more votes than governor Haskell did.

She led the ticket for the Democrats.

And what is also significant about that is who couldn't vote for her because at that time, women couldn't vote in Oklahoma.

So she was elected, leading the ticket in male chauvinist Oklahoma in 1980.

So single handedly, she turned things around.

We built our prison at McAllister.

We began a prison system that worked.

And she continued to work and lobby for the poor, for the depressed, for to protect the people from improper and illegal charities, always trying to make things better for those that have been left behind.

And the tragic economic conditions of those times.

She continued to be a gadfly to get at the leadership.

Governor Haskell was succeeded in his animosity to her by speaker of the House alfalfa Bill Murray.

Murray cut her budget, tried to frustrate her.

And finally she died of probably a broken heart and of working herself to death.

She was buried in an unmarked and unnoticed grave until people began to read her story.

Her story of social justice and now the grave is marked.

And this magnificent statue, perhaps the favorite single piece of art in the Capitol, sits here to honor her.

And young women like you often like to come and sit down and talk to our angel Kate, and get some angelic advice from her.

Our angel Kate.

Well, our next stop is right down the hall.

As well as our British friends might say.

And now for something completely different.

Our last sculpture was concerned with people.

With our angel Kate.

And with her ministry to people.

This painting has a person in it.

But that's not the focus of the painting.

The title tells all the earth and I are one, and it's by noted seminal artist Enoch Kelley Haney.

Kelley Haney is now chief of the Seminole Nation, having been a state representative and a state senator.

In the painting, Kelley tells an important lesson, and that lesson is that we are a part of the Earth.

The Earth is a part of us.

We are a part of the Earth.

And you see the young Indian man, the wind blowing his hair.

He's meditating or praying or thinking or contemplating.

He is sitting cross-legged.

And below we see this field of Indian blanket galleria, our state wildflower.

The state wildflower has both the colors of the rising and the setting sun.

In it we see the beautiful lake.

We see the forest.

The moon shines through his torso and as he comes above, we see the clouds.

But the bald eagle, the symbol of the United States, and also a bird that loves to winter in Oklahoma and the scissor tailed flycatcher, our state's bird.

This painting teaches a lesson.

We have only one world.

We better be careful with it.

We better treat it carefully.

The Indians knew this.

The Indians did this.

And they speak with moral high ground to us.

The earth and I are one.

This is a remarkable painting, teaching a remarkable and important lesson.

Well, I see you beat me to the second floor, and that's great.

On the second floor rotunda, we come to the four marvelous paintings by Oklahoma artist Wilson Hartley.

Now, Oklahoma does have some mountains, but they're not very tall.

But a friend of mine says that what Oklahoma loses in mountains, it gains in sunsets.

And perhaps that's what Wilson Hartley had in mind when he painted sunset at Roman Nose State Park.

These paintings illustrate four geographic areas of Oklahoma from northwest to southeast, from southwest to northeast.

This is the northwest quadrant of Oklahoma.

A little less rainfall.

A lot of granitic boulders, some red soil, and quartz mountain live oak trees.

Of this painting hurriedly recalled that the sky was bright in the setting sun.

The trees were in full leaf and the evening was calm.

The white capped Brock, lying on the dark red earth, slowly sank into the peaceful twilight, showing the essential, quiet, everlasting loveliness of Oklahoma.

The next painting we see is entitled A Storm Passing Northwest of Anadarko.

This is in Caddo County and southwestern Oklahoma, and Hurley painted in light rain to capture the Oklahoma storm with what he called its terrible beauty.

The next painting is in the northeast quadrant of Oklahoma, and it's entitled Autumn woods north of Tahlequah.

This painting illustrates the most beautiful time of the year in Oklahoma the Indian summer, right after a light frost but before the winter comes in it, Hurley saw, as he said, an array of sumac, oak, sycamore and one old maple bright red in the quiet, cool sunlight that lingers for a few days before winter comes The southeast quadrant of Oklahoma is presented by Spring Mountain along the muddy, boggy.

Now, Wilson Hurley's father was born in the old Choctaw Nation near this very spot, Hurley said.

There is in the spring the low clouds that were racing northeast and the sun was swinging great shafts of light across the shadowed land.

One burst of light washed over a field of yellow flowers, like an all forgiving and comforting blessing, an affirmation of how beautiful Oklahoma is.

Okay, we're going to be moving from two dimensions to three.

Again.

This is another work by Anna Kelly Haney, who is currently the chief of the Seminole Nation.

We looked at his environmental painting The Earth and I are one below.

Now we're looking at the nine foot bronze edition of The Guardian.

Now, the 22ft, nine inch bronze edition of the Guardian stands on top of the newly designed dome.

Solomon and wanted a dome on his capitol, but we ran out of money at the time the Capitol was built and didn't have one for a long time.

But now the Guardian graces the top of the new dome, and I think he has his eye on the future, as well as his eye on the gate.

Now the Capitol faces south, so the Guardian is facing south, watching the southern exposure guarding the Capitol.

But his feet are aimed to the east.

The traditional place that Indians point themselves when they pray.

So the Guardian has his mind on religious things as well as temporal things on the present, as well as the future.

Now, Kelly Haney used his children for models.

One provided the eyes, one provided the cheeks, and his guardian is shown with his spear down by his legging with an eye shall not be moved.

I am here as long as I need to be here.

I will fight till the death if I have to.

I'm standing.

I'm strong.

My eye is to protect, to guard.

I think it is a magnificent sculpture.

And I want to read from the dedication the Chief Haney wrote when it was when the statue was dedicated, his closing, his closing words before the statue was hoisted to the top.

He said, soon I will be raised to the top of this Capitol building.

Inside are many guardians of this state our governor, our legislators, our judges.

They are charged with a very sacred task.

I will stand guard here, over our great state, over our majestic land, over our values.

My lance pierces my legging and is planted in the ground.

I will not be moved from my duty, from my love of Oklahoma and all its people.

I will stand my ground.

I will not be moved.

From this day on I will stand guard.

I will stand strong and be proud of Oklahoma.

Our home.

Proud of Oklahoma, our home.

The Guardian.

Okay, we are climbing the grand staircase.

All right.

This is the oldest painting in the Capitol.

1928 Pro Patria by Thomas Gilbert White.

Pro patria is a Latin phrase.

This is a great Roman building, so we might as well have a Roman phrase.

But this is classical or actually neoclassical art.

Pro means for patria means father.

So actually this means for the fatherland or for your country.

And the painting shows this is a World War one era painting.

The painting shows the state of Oklahoma.

The Fatherland is the United States, the state of Oklahoma is typically shown an allegory as a woman and an angelic woman carrying the banner of our flag.

There is tyranny.

There is evil and mischief in the world.

In Europe.

And America needs to go help and battle.

And so the state of Oklahoma is is saying, who will come and fight for the fatherland?

Who will come and fight for the country?

And this young man has heeded the call.

He's shown in his military gear is backs as knapsack on his back.

The rounded helmets, his wife and his young son and his daughter are with him.

His young son doesn't contemplate what's going on.

He just sees daddy and he's reaching for daddy to pat him on the face.

The wife knows and the older sister knows.

She's crying.

She's scared.

She's worried.

And the on the right side of the picture, the soldier's father and mother look on the old man.

He hears the call too, but he's old.

He walks with three legs, not one.

He has a cane and his hat.

He is proud of his son.

He wishes he could go, but he can't.

You see the troops massed and marching.

This is a call, a patriotic call to sacrifice family and maybe life itself in order to save the fatherland, to save your country.

1928 gift of Frank Phillips.

Okay, we're now in the fourth floor rotunda.

It doesn't get any better than this artistically in the Capitol.

It's what I call the pantheon.

I want you to look around.

Look at the portraits, the murals, the dome, the alcoves.

And we'll meet in a moment in front of one of the portraits and continue the tour.

[music] Hi, guys.

Do you know who this gentleman is?

Yeah, but how did you know it was Carl Albert from school?

Well, I'm glad you learned about Carl Albert in school, because that's why these paintings are here, too.

So that our young people and our older people will learn about the heroes and sheroes who made Oklahoma great.

Carl Albert was five feet, four inches tall.

But his nickname, as his biography shows, was Little Giant.

He was known as the Little Giant from Little Dixie, the southeastern area of Oklahoma, and he was known that because of his prodigious intellect and his powerful, booming voice, he was the greatest orator of his day, and Oklahoma has produced some great ones.

And this painting by our master artist, Charles Banks Wilson shows the little schoolhouse bug tussle where Carl Albert went to school.

And here on the first row there's young Carl Albert, a coal miner's son who lived in Pittsburg County, went to that one room school, and because of what he learned there and his hard work and his character, his intellect, his speaking ability, he ended up there at the United States Capitol as the speaker of the House of Representatives, and twice in his career where there was when there was no sitting vice president, he was a heartbeat away from the presidency.

If anything had happened to President Nixon, he would have been president of the United States.

A remarkable man, brilliant intellect, great speaker.

After he retired, he still worked for Oklahoma.

One of my favorite stories is he went to a small school in rural Oklahoma, and he made a speech.

And after it was over, a young tow headed lad came up to him and he said, Mr.

Albert, that speech you made sure was inspiring was the speaker wanted to know what he said so that he could repeat it the next time he had a young audience.

And he said, well, young man, what did I say that so inspired you?

And the little boy said, well, it wasn't so much what you said.

It's just that if a little shrimp like you could grow up to be a congressman, well, then I could grow up to be president of the United States.

And the speaker laughed and said with an attitude like that in this country, he can.

This man did as much for equal rights as any living American great Oklahoman whom we honor in the pantheon, the rotunda of the Oklahoma Capitol, Carl Albert, the Little Giant from little Dixie.

Well, I see you found the portrait of Angie DeVoe.

Well, there are many interesting things you could say about her, but perhaps the most interesting thing for our present purposes is that this is the first portrait of a woman to hang in the state Capitol, and it didn't happen until the 1980s.

Well, Angie Debo was our greatest historian.

She told the truth about Oklahoma.

Some of it wasn't all that pleasant, and she told the truth about bad things that were done to our Native American peoples.

One of her books, And Still the Waters Run, was so controversial it couldn't even be published in Oklahoma.

But it was published by Princeton University Press.

And so when we decided to honor a woman, we decided to honor the one that was teaching us about ourselves, that was teaching us about the best and about the worst of ourselves, and a person who was calling on us to become better Oklahomans.

She wrote a baker's dozen of books, 13 books, all of which were major scholarly efforts that changed the face of Oklahoma.

She sat for this portrait by our master, Charles Banks Wilson, again at the age of 92, and she told Charles Wilson she said, Mr.

Wilson, please don't paint me as I look today because I have wrinkles that I didn't have when I was doing my major work.

And he said, Miss Debo, I have to paint what I see.

I have to paint your character.

I won't have to put all those wrinkles in, but I do have to paint what I see.

Well, it turns out she loved the painting.

After it was hung and dedicated, she wrote him a note and she said, I'm not a pretty woman, but the portrait is wonderful.

You captured my essence and I thank you very much.

And then she remembered she hadn't told him what he had captured, and she wrote a piece to her letter, postal script, and she said, the trade that you captured was drive, drive.

And you see it in her eyes.

As a young woman, she became convinced that there was injustice in the world, that needed to be addressed, and she dedicated her life, all 98 years of it, to preparing Oklahoma for a better day.

Okay, I have so many favorite paintings here in the Capitol and this is another one.

This is a painting of Ada, Lois Scipio.

She later married and her name became Ada Loius Scipial Fisher.

And this woman was denied admission into the law school here.

She was qualified, excellent student.

But she was told that she couldn't go to law school because she was black.

Oklahoma was racist in those days, and they said, even though you're qualified, there's a state law that prohibits you from going to this law school.

So she went to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Her lawyer was the most famous and greatest lawyer of the last century of America, Thurgood Marshall Thurgood Marshall later became a Supreme Court Justice of the United States.

But Marshall won.

And if you look on the Supreme Court building, it says equal justice.

Under the law.

Justice was supposed to be provided equally.

It should make no difference whether you're African American or Korean American or white American or Japanese American, as is the artist of this painting, Matsuno ishi reading.

So she won her case, but again, Oklahoma tried to prevent it.

They said, well, we'll create an equal law school for you.

A law school with only one student.

You.

And again, they went to the Supreme Court and the court said, that's wrong.

And so this woman did more to integrate Oklahoma, to truly create equal justice under the law.

And so this painting by Matsuno Reddy is in the rotunda.

And it honors this great woman who heroically took it upon herself as a young woman to go all the way up to the Supreme Court twice, so that other women and men of color could have an equal educational opportunity in Oklahoma.

Ada Loius Supiel Fisher Okay, now we come to the fourth floor rotunda, the pantheon, the most important circle in the building for in this pantheon, the four great portraits of great Oklahomans selected by the legislature adorn these halls and speak to countless tourists and schoolchildren about the kinds of public virtues that Oklahoma wants to represent.

In 1963, the legislature commissioned these portraits by Charles Banks Wilson, the noted painter from Miami, Oklahoma.

And the portrait that we began is Jim Thorpe, Oklahoma's famed athlete, the greatest athlete in the United States and the greatest athlete in the world.

In 1912, in the Olympics, he won not only the five event pentathlon but the ten event decathlon, the ultimate test of the ancient Greek athletes.

His margins have not been equaled since that time.

The King of Sweden at the games said you, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world.

When Jim Thorpe captured the nation's imagination, it was just 20 years after the Battle of Wounded Knee when he won those Olympic medals.

Indians couldn't vote.

The success that he made of sports at Carlisle at the Olympics thereafter, and professional sports caused the dominant white culture to completely rethink its ideas and attitudes about Indians.

What a man, what an Oklahoman.

Let's go on to the next picture.

Now we stand before and perhaps in awe of a giant of a man, Robert Samuel Kerr, the uncrowned king of the Senate, the most dominant political force in Oklahoma history.

Our first native born governor, powerful United States senator, powerful Southern Baptist layman.

One of the things I love about Wilson's paintings, they tell us so much about the individual.

We see Kerr in his Senate office with the things that are most important to him, his black Angus bookends.

And what are those bookends covering the book?

Most important to Bob Kerr, the Bible, with its index tabs car, was the master of biblical quotation and could evoke scriptures to defend any proposition on the floor of the Senate or on the hustings in Eastern Oklahoma.

We see him in his feed sack, blue shirt and just the edge of his red galaxies.

His suspenders car would take that coat off when he was out on the hustings, the blue shirt shining in the sun and the moon and those galaxies, as he would punctuate points with his glasses and quote from Holy Writ.

Behind him we see the map that shows his Arkansas River project, a project that made a port out of the city of Tulsa.

Cars wit was legendary, and you took after him at your peril.

Once the Kentucky writer Irvin S Cobb was speaking about Kerr in a battle of verbal battle, and Cobb said with his Kentucky accent, he said, I am a gentleman from Kentucky, and I know about thoroughbred horses and Thoroughbred women and thoroughbred dogs.

And where I come from, we culled all the curves, punning on the poet's word for a dog, Kerr.

Well, Kerr responded, and he said, well, I'm not from Kentucky, I'm from Ada, Oklahoma.

He said, I don't know anything about thoroughbred horses or thoroughbred women or thoroughbred dogs, but I do know what me and my folks did with the cobs.

The uncrowned king of the Senate, a man whose death on January 1st, 1963, forever changed Oklahoma politics.

But despite that death, we still have the monumental accomplishments that he created.

One of our greatest Oklahomans.

And our third painting is truly mythic.

For only in myth do we have a story of a single person bringing language to an entire people.

The Greeks credited Cadmus with giving them their alphabet.

We know who gave the Cherokees their language, their syllabary.

It was George Guess or Sequoyah, one of the two statues that graced the United States capital from Oklahoma.

Sequoyah and his fellow Cherokee, Will Rogers.

Again, in Wilson's marvelous painting, you see the great teacher writing in the ground, a sort of palimpsest where he can write his letters and erase them.

We see his cabin near Sallisaw.

We see the beautiful trees and forests of northeastern Oklahoma and on his chest, the silver medal given to him by his people for creating a language for them, a remarkable man.

He died on his way to Mexico to find some other lost Cherokees, to bring them back to the new nation that was theirs in Oklahoma.

How appropriate that in Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol, this great Indian stands and represents Oklahoma.

Okay, I had to get you in front of this portrait.

I guess my favorite Oklahoman, if I had to pick one, would be this guy here, Will Rogers, America's favorite humorist, America's favorite actor in his day, a Hollywood actor, America's leading newspaper columnist, America's leading radio show.

He dominated the entertainment business, starred in 71 films and found time to do some other things, too, like began Hollywood philanthropy.

He was the first great Hollywood philanthropist, and it's kind of amazing.

He was a Cherokee Indian, a member of the Cherokee tribe.

It's kind of amazing that America's most famous cowboy was an Indian.

In fact, Rogers joked about that.

He once said in a movie and also at Symphony Hall.

He said, now, my people didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they did meet the boat.

He said, I'm a member of no organized political party.

I'm a Democrat.

Talking about how the Democrats seem to always have trouble getting things organized.

He also famously said, all I know is what I read in the newspapers and what I get from traveling around the world a bit.

And so you see our master portraitist, Charles Banks Wilson, he's got the newspaper in his pocket, he's got his shoes.

And actually, these are the shoes that, were found with Rogers when he died.

And August 15th, 1935, he died in a plane crash.

And you see the plane, in the background.

Rogers was a huge believer in aviation.

He tried to promote it.

He tried to promote passenger, Air Airways.

He thought that aviation was the coming thing.

And so it was natural for him to fly at every opportunity.

And he flew with his good friend Wiley Post, one of the world's greatest aviators, on a trip.

They were going to Russia and they had a terrible accident near Barrow, Alaska, and both were killed in a plane crash.

Ogden Nash, interestingly, had written a book of eulogies about people that weren’t dead yet but he just wrote eulogies, and his eulogy of Will Rogers always comes to my mind, he said, with rope and gum and grand and lariat, I entertained the proletariat.

And with my Oklahoma wit, I brightened up the world a bit.

And his vaudeville and his Ziegfeld Follies and even his movie roles.

He liked to chew gum.

He liked to act like he was a bit of a hayseed when he really wasn't.

He got his start as a great lariat artist and, performed with such greats as Mae West and W.C.

fields.

He was the most well traveled American of his day, and when his funeral occurred, several of the networks simply went off the air.

They just went off the air.

It's never happened in that way since and will never, never happen again.

Such was the loss, in America, when this man of goodwill of humor left the stage the final time.

So perhaps the most famous Oklahoman of all, Will Rogers again, a masterful portrait by Charles Banks Wilson.

We're now in the Senate anteroom, the Senate lobby, and it is a lobby that is dominated by the artwork of one of my favorite Oklahoma artists, Mike Wimmer.

Mike again is a realist and neo classicist who thinks that history is lives lived by real people.

And we need to learn something about the people and not just the events.

The happenstances the dates.

This is the Osage Treaty of 1825.

Now Thomas Jefferson, who presides on high over this gathering, arranged the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

And when he did that, one of the things that was done was to move some of the eastern tribes into the area, which was now Oklahoma.

Well, that didn't suit the Osages who were already here.

Thank you.

And, they there were wars and problems.

And so in 1825, they tried to arrange a treaty to move the Osages into Kansas.

Mostly and out of Oklahoma and create more land for the incoming tribes.

And so here we see William and Clark, the Indian commissioner, and the Clark of Lewis and Clark.

He made that first exploration in 1803.

William Clark is holding the pen to the great Osage chief Clermont.

Now look at Claremont.

He's got the war club in his hand.

On his breast or really abdomen is a peace medal that he was given for being a great leader.

And you see the lesser Osage chiefs, these were all painted from real Osage Indians.

Wimmer, like Wilson, goes to the well, he sees the real thing, and they're beautifully painted and represent real Osage Indians.

Interestingly, you're the model for William Clark was Senator Charles Ford.

Senator Ford has had more to do with the art and the Senate than any other person.

And there's a person who's responsible for much of what we see in this lobby that's dominated by the work of Mike Wimmer.

Look at the young lad who has just chanced upon this meeting with his little dog.

And somebody is saying something because that dog's ear is hiked up outside.

You see the chapel and the horses that look at the boy saying, those are real Indians.

I'm saying they're a great painting, a marvelous panoply of of expression showing this, the bearing and dignity of these great chiefs and an effort to try to resolve problems from the Louisiana Purchase.

Again, Thomas Jefferson was kind of a cautious eye presiding over the whole thing.

Now, before we leave the ante room, there's one more Wimmer that I've just got to show you.

Well, do you see anything familiar in this painting?

It's me.

Maybe that's why I like this painting the most.

I said, is the model for King Charles the 10th in this painting that tells the story of Mhango.

Mhango was an Osage woman who was misled by a confidence man.

He said that he said that he would put a group of osages together and take her to meet President Andrew Jackson.

Instead, he smuggled them into Europe and forced them to do a sort of Wild West show.

That was that was not what they had in mind at all.

It was improper and it was unpleasant.

Well, they were presented to King Charles the 10th, but later the great Marquis de Lafayette heard of her plight, and he arranged at his expense to get her back to America.

There Colonel Thomas McKinney met her, presented her a peace medal, and having Andrew Jackson present her a peace medal and immortalized her portrait, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

Again, you see Whitmer's artistry, but Osage models the regal ness of the king.

You know, there is a saying in Virgil's Aeneid, some of these things I saw and some of them I was, well, if you hang around art and the Oklahoma capital long enough, you might find yourself in one.

So some of these things I saw and some of them I was I don't know about King Charles the 10th, but, he does have a kindly face.

I think.

In the alcove across from the Pro Patria mural, we see Mike Larsen's flight of spirit.

Mike Larsen is one of my favorite artists, and as a Chickasaw, I imagine he was very glad to be able to paint this painting.

It represents our five great Indian ballerinas who graced the stages of Europe and danced with all the major ballet companies in the world.

We have Yvonne Shoto of Cherokee descent.

We have Rosella Hightower, a Choctaw muscle, and Larkin of Shawnee, Peoria descent, and then Maria and Marjorie Tallchief, sisters and proud Osages.

In the background of Larsen's painting, we see the cold wind and the harshness of the Trail of Tears, and then we see five geese whose beautiful flight also represents the flight of dance.

Then we see Indian ancestors.

Some of them are dancing the shawl dance, the fancy dance.

And finally we see children playing, and two young ballerinas would be prima ballerinas who hope to succeed the great Five, five Indian ballerinas.

One of Oklahoma's greatest cultural and artistic legacies.

We come now to the cultural and historical zenith of the people's art, and that would bring us back to Charles Banks Wilson and his fabulous murals.

They are, in my mind, something that tells the true history of Oklahoma, that tells how we got to where we are now.

It's not sugarcoated.

You see the conflict, you see the greed use.

You see the hopes that are going to be shattered.

You see Oklahoma, warts and all.

And that's what he wanted to do, to show Oklahomans where they came from so that they would know where they're going.

We began with discovery and exploration.

Now the Indians were already here.

The wichita's that you see with their grass woven hogans or huts there, but they were impeded upon by first Coronado, Francisco Coronado, shown there proudly astride the horse, the terrified Indians who'd never seen a critter like that.

For his part, Coronado was probably terrified by the bison.

He'd never seen anything like that in Spain.

The Indians were imprisoned by the Spanish, and that was a very negative side.

But it's shown there with the Indian chain and the blunderbuss behind his guard, the halberd, the the battle ax in the foreground.

We see perhaps the better part of the Spanish legacy, the Franciscan friars converted Indians who came preaching the simple faith of Saint Francis of Assisi and tried to help native peoples.

You see the great salt plains where animals came, and those salt plains would be great, greatly important to Oklahoma's future as a trading center.

That salt was valuable.

People needed it and Indians traded for it.

Wilson, ever the master of the tale, there's a blooming yucca, the state flower of New Mexico, but also a very prominent flower in western Oklahoma.

The Antelope Hills are in the back, over to the left.

Many people travel through them and right to the side of the halberd.

You see the runestones now there is a thought that perhaps the Vikings made it as far as about Haven or Oklahoma.

We're not sure about that, but somebody who knew about runestones carved them in some very hard rock.

Discovery and exploration.

From 1540 to about 1820.

This is how Wilson began to tell the story.

The Spanish coming, the French coming, the beginning of contact with the Indians, the discovery of the bison, and interestingly, Wilson has his own self-portrait in Coronado.

At least he was informed by his own self-portrait.

Discovery and exploration.

Frontier trade, 1790 to 1820.

In the middle of the painting, you see the great Osages they're trading with perhaps French traders like Jean Pierre Soto, trading for salt and furs.

And you see the Osages leaning in and listening and trying to drive a good bargain.

On the left.

In the back you see the trading posts that were established at the Three Forks area.

That's where the Arkansas and the Verdigris rivers met.

Trappers and traders would sail up there.

Sam Houston, the founder of Texas, had a trading post there.

There's a bacon tree in the middle of the painting with the 1790 U.S.

military officer.

The military came in from time to time to protect the fur trade.

Underneath the bacon tree.

The pecan is one of the great trees in Oklahoma, again, artistically and exactly painted by Wilson.

You see one of the missionaries from the Union Mission, one of the early missions that came to to teach the Indians.

In the right corner you see some Indians garbed a little differently.

Obviously, their southeastern tribes, maybe Creek or Chickasaw.

And they too came to Oklahoma for the rich hunting that was here.

And they found trouble with the Missouri and the plains tribes, the plains tribal tribesmen shown on the horse with this bow.

There were outbreaks of violence there.

At the top right, you see Fort Gibson, which was later built to protect the five tribes from the marauding plains and local tribes who had been here before them.

So frontier trade presaged the most difficult chapter of Oklahoma history to come.

And shown in the next mural, which is Indian Immigration.

When cultures collide, the most painful and difficult part of our history.

It begins in the right background, the Trail of Tears, the Indians Holocaust, where first the Cherokees and later other tribes were forced to march hundreds and thousands of miles overland and bad conditions, as many as a fourth died along the way, and they come to Oklahoma allegorically under this hickory tree.

Wilson, always the arborist.

Paints a hickory tree, one of the great local trees produced nuts and wood.

And you see the Cherokee and the Choctaw and the Seminole and the young lad from the five tribes under that tree.

And what do they see?

A Comanche chief on his horse, angry with tomahawk, raised some once trying to stop him.

I don't think he's going to be successful in the middle.

An Osage chief, also in the northwestern part of Oklahoma, with his staff getting ready to lead a charge.

In this corner, you see the Kiowas with their guns in hand.

The Plains Indian teepees that the Kiowas used, and the Plains Madonna, the young Kiowa woman with her papoose and the cradleboard for which the Kiowas are so famous.

They're ready to fight.

They're ready for war.

This is our land.

These are our animals.

We don't need you interlopers coming in.

Cultures collide.

This is the saddest part of the history for the Indians of Oklahoma.

Both those who were here and doing well and didn't need new tribes brought in to compete for their hunting grounds.

And also the great five tribes who were happy in Georgia and North Carolina and Tennessee, but were forced by broken treaties to come to this new land.

Indian immigration.

The toughest time of Oklahoma's history.

Well, one of my friends tells me that the reasons we Oklahomans are so tough and resilient is that we've all been kicked out of multiple places before we got here.

And this last mural, the non-Indian settlement, clearly tells that story.

Now, you remember the Indians that were here in Oklahoma were fine.

The Osages in the northwest, the Plains tribes in the west, and throughout Oklahoma.

These tribes used the hunting grounds, but pretty much worked out their territory.

But lo and behold, the Indians were forced into them first the five tribes and then others, and then finally white settlement came and the so-called surplus lands were opened for white settlement.

They weren't surplus lands, they were the Indians lands.

But pressure came to take those lands from the Indians.

And this was done in various ways.

And there were seven land runs.

People came in on horses.

They ran some on bicycles, stagecoaches, buggies.

If you look at the train, people are all over the top of the train trying to get in to this new land, this new Oklahoma.

And you see in the foreground the boomers, the glorified outlaws led by David Payne.

And they're carrying the banner go forth to possess the promised land.

And reminding me of that old am I bound for the Promised Land?

I'm bound for the Promised Land.

Oh, who will come and go with me?

I'm bound for the Promised land.

The last part of Oklahoma's early history.

And only an artist like Charles Banks Wilson, America's greatest artist in the story, can tell this story.

Some of sadness, some of great hope for a brighter, more promising future.

Go fourth to possess the Promised Land.

Charles Banks Wilson shows us and makes us feel what it was like.

Charles Banks Wilson, absolute master of the mural, can tell a story, as no other painter that I know.

Solomon Leighton, like all master architects, knew.

If you really wanted to define a grand public space, a magnificent, awe inspiring place, you needed a dome.

And he designed one which its modern iteration captures perfectly.

The colors of the dome represent our state's wildflower.

The galleria, the Indian blanket and the yellow of the Indian blanket also captures the magnificent sunsets for which Oklahoma is so famed.

The eye of the dome.

The oculus contains a stained glass replica of our state's seal by master craftsman James Triple More than 100 major works of art are located here.

It's one of the largest and greatest capital collections in the nation.

We hope you've enjoyed our tour and that you'll come personally to view the people's Art collection, your art collection, in your state capital.

I'm Robert Henry, thank you for joining us.