Forty-acre allotments of Quapaw land were soon distributed by the U.S. The story of the Picher mining fields begins in the 1890s, before Oklahoma was a state and the land was part of the Quapaw (O-Gah-Paw) Nation's reservation, when a significant vein of lead and zinc was discovered. Lessons unlearned, this history will be repeated. Unmitigated, the stories of the former residents of these towns will become the stories of the residents of other towns downstream. They float down small creeks, across surface waters and into rivers where they travel to and infect tourism destinations populated by unknowing visitors. Yet history has proved that environmental disasters don't just disappear when removed from the public view. The problems are too large, too complex, too expensive to be managed, some say. Or perhaps the few remaining residents are correct in thinking that the mostly evacuated small towns here - Picher, Cardin, Hockerville and others - are simply forgotten. Perhaps that's why the area remains as environmentally poisoned now as it was years ago. Grasping and understanding the history of the location and how it came nearly to being a ghost town is difficult. In the most simple terms, the problem is as prominent and overwhelming as the mountainous piles of mining tailings, known as chat, which blanket the landscape and dust what remains.Ĭloser inspection, however, reveals broken promises, shortsighted industries, waterways stained red, sinkholes as small as manholes and as large as football fields, people with permanent neurological damage and more than 30 years of national awareness yet few, if any, improvements. The devastation of small towns near the Oklahoma-Kansas state line and at the heart of the Tar Creek Superfund site appears fairly straightforward.
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