I wrote in 1960, when the second major motion picture based on the Oklahoma novel “Cimarron” appeared, that “Oklahoma Run” by Alberta Wilson Constant was a better novel in some ways.

I was pleased to learn recently that the late Arrell M. Gibson said flatly that “Oklahoma Run” was the better book.

Gibson, a University of Oklahoma historian and prize-winning author, wrote an introduction for a 1999 edition of “Oklahoma Run.”

“’Cimarron’ (published in 1930) is properly displaced by ‘Oklahoma Run' (published in 1955) as the premier Sooner chronicle,” Gibson wrote.

"Cimarron" author Edna Ferber was from Wisconsin. Constant was a native Texan who grew up in Wellston, in Lincoln County. She was an honors graduate of Oklahoma City University and took professional writing courses from Stanley Vestal and Foster-Harris at OU.

The author of “Cimarron” had little that was good to say about Oklahoma in either of her two autobiographies. Gibson said Ferber told an interviewer she hated and loathed everything about Oklahoma.

“Her admitted contempt is exposed by her icily superficial attention to pioneer reality, her detachment, even indifference, to the indomitable Sooner spirit,” Gibson wrote.

In fairness, though, it should be added that Constant liked the “Cimarron” novel and the 1931 movie starring Richard Dix and Irene Dunn that won Oscars for best picture and best screenplay.

“I loved ‘Cimarron’ when I read it,” Constant said in a letter to me. “It’s a real rip-snorter with that quality of immediacy which Miss Ferber handles so well. I wouldn’t have missed it.”

The Constants lived in Independence, Mo, when the second “Cimarron” movie premiered in Kansas City. She participated in the ceremonies as a member of the Jackson County Historical Society.

“Oklahoma Run” is set in the area settled by the second Oklahoma land run, in 1891, that became Pottawatomie and Lincoln counties.

“Alberta Constant respected this land and cherished its people,” Gibson wrote. “Her ‘Oklahoma Run’ is a testament of affection, its content a faithful recounting of the frontier epoch.”

Constant was also a successful magazine short story writer and author of several other books including “Miss Charity Comes to Stay,” about life in the Cherokee Strip after the 1893 opening and “Willie and the Wildcat,” about an early-day northeastern Oklahoma boom town. She died in 1981.

“Alberta Constant has produced a conscientious reconstruction of border society, its values, biases and faults,” Gibson said. “She has infused into the narrative the continuum of sectional rancor sustained in the Civil War. ...

“Of many values found in ‘Oklahoma Run’ none exceeds the author’s perceptive interpretation of the interaction of the three cultures — Indian, cowboy and homesteader — found on this southwestern frontier, which was being transformed from Indian Territory to Oklahoma Territory,” Gibson wrote.



Ed Montgomery writes for The Norman (Okla.) Transcript.