Angie Debo Collection: A Biography of Angie Debo

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by Heather M. Lloyd

Angie Debo (1890-1988) was a child when her parents moved to Marshall, Oklahoma Territory in 1899, ten years after the land was opened by the "Run of 1889." She saw a rough frontier evolve into an active vigorous state and remembered well what she observed. Debo was a lady with strong beliefs who followed her convictions, which led her to write about the history of Oklahoma, of Marshall, and of American Indians and the relations between them and the federal government.

Debo wrote, in 1980:

I was born on a farm near Beattie, Kansas, January 30, 1890; in 1895 I was taken from the Beattie vicinity by my parents to a farm about twenty miles south of Manhattan. In 1899 my father bought a farm near Marshall, Oklahoma Territory, and brought his family -- my mother, my younger brother, and me -- there in a covered wagon. We arrived on November 8, 1899, and I have a distinct memory of the warm, sunny day, the lively little new town, and the greening wheat fields we passed as we lumbered slowly down the road to our new home. I attended rural one-room schools in Kansas and Oklahoma; passed a territorial examination and received a common school diploma at the age of twelve (1902); and then waited hopelessly around for a high school to open. I finally got one year of high school in the village school at Marshall, riding 3 1/2 miles on my pony, then waited around some more. There was no library, no magazines, and only the one book our parents managed to buy for each of us children as a Christmas present.

Finally I became sixteen, then the legal age for a teacher's certificate. I took another territorial examination and started out as a rural school teacher, teaching in Logan and Garfield counties near Marshall. Then Marshall finally worked up to a four-year high school, and I went back and graduated with the first class in 1913, at the advanced age of twenty-three. There followed two more years of rural teaching. Then I entered the University of Oklahoma in 1915, and was graduated in 1918. There my college major was history, and I came under the influence of Edward Everett Dale and looked ahead to a career of historical writing. I continued teaching, however; I served as village principal at North Enid one year (1918-19), then taught history four years in the Enid High School (1919-23).

I spent the year 1923-24 at the University of Chicago, received my master's degree in 1924. My master's thesis turned out well and was published (with J. Fred Rippy, my supervisor, as co-author) in the Smith College Studies in History, under the title, The Historical Background of the American Policy of Isolation. It was published in 1924.

During 1924-33 I was a member of the history department of the West Texas State Teachers College (now West Texas State University) at Canyon. The following year (1933-34) I served as curator of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum on the same campus. During this time I worked on my doctorate at the University of Oklahoma, receiving my degree in 1933. My doctoral dissertation was published as The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1934. It was awarded the John H. Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association and was so well received by reviewers that I resigned from my academic position and went into free lance writing. During this time of writing I had some institutional connections one summer on the history faculty at Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College at Nacogdoches, Texas; some summers on the history faculty of Oklahoma State University (then Oklahoma A. and M. College); and a year or more as state director of the Federal Writers Project in Oklahoma.

I returned to an institutional connection in 1947 when I became a member of the library staff at Oklahoma State University and served there until my retirement in 1955. (I have had no library training, but this position did not require it; I served as curator of maps.) Later, I spent another year at OSU to fill a leave of absence vacancy in the history department during 1957-58. But since 1955 I have spent most of my time at Marshall, where I still live.

I am sometimes asked to state my "goals and ambitions in writing." I suppose I have only one: to discover truth and publish it. My research is objective, but when I find all the truth on one side, as has sometimes happened in my study of Indian history, I have the same obligation to become involved as any other citizen. For that reason I have served on the board of directors of the Association on American Indian Affairs, and have made surveys for this association and for the Indian Rights Association.

Debo's research projects were numerous. Paramount among them was the research in preparation for publication of And Still the Waters Run, which exposed the injustices suffered by the Five Civilized Tribes at the hands of the federal and state officials. This book and her The Road to Disappearance: A History of the Creek Indians served as a basis for a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, "Harjo vs. Kleppe," in which important land rights for the Creek nation were recognized.

Debo was sincere about being factual. She made notes in her books and journals, and worked with her publishers to incorporate corrections into subsequent printings of her books. In her 85th year Debo finished writing Geronimo, her last book. During her career she wrote nine books about history, especially that of Oklahoma and Native Americans, co-authored another, and edited three more. Through the years she also made speeches on a variety of topics and contributed numerous articles and reviews to newspapers, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and periodicals.

In her later years Debo traveled widely to speak and to meet people of other countries. Very concerned about civil rights, she was active in the American Civil Liberties Union and its Oklahoma chapter and was directly involved in lobbying congress to obtain water rights for the Pima and Havasupai Indians in Arizona and land for the Alaska Natives.

Debo received numerous honors and awards. Among them was what she called her "public hanging," the dedication of her portrait which hangs in the rotunda of the Oklahoma State Capitol. She was the subject of an oral history project from 1981 to 1985 and of a PBS television documentary in 1988 entitled "Indians, Outlaws, and Angie Debo" which aired as part of the American Experience Series.

Debo received the American Historical Association's Award for Scholarly Distinction in 1987. It was presented to her by Governor Henry L. Bellmon in a special ceremony in January 1988 in Marshall, OK. where she lived until her death on February 21, 1988.

She bequeathed her papers, books, and literary rights to Oklahoma State University, "with the sincere wish that anything which proves worth keeping in this bequest will be of use to future students of the University."

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