A Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper, a Cherokee capital, and the country's oldest wildlife refuge
Oklahoma's three most distinctive landscapes connected by air. KBVO Bartlesville is a small city built on the H.C. Price Company's oil pipeline fortune — the only Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper ever realized rises 19 stories at 6th and Dewey, recently sold out of bankruptcy for $1.4 million and now closed for restoration. Southeast to KTQH Tahlequah, capital of the Cherokee Nation since 1839 — Indian Territory's seat after the forced removal of the tribe along the Trail of Tears. Northeastern State University here is the second-oldest college west of the Mississippi (1846). South-southwest to KLAW Lawton-Fort Sill: the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge — 60,000 acres of 500-million-year-old granite mountains and mixed-grass prairie, established by President McKinley in 1901 (the oldest unit in the entire NWR system). 15 bison arrived from the Bronx Zoo in 1907 to repopulate the southern Plains; Comanche leader Quanah Parker welcomed them. The herd is 650 today, plus 220 Texas Longhorns and 1,000 Rocky Mountain elk.