Ponca City
city in Kay County, Oklahoma, United States
Ponca City is in the Red Carpet Country region of Oklahoma. It's a city rich in oil lore, at least as it pertains to one person, E.W. Marland, who was like a titan of the plains, tapping into vast oil reserves with his Continental Oil Co. and largely building the town from the ground up single-handedly, with Spanish Colonial style structures and things that were to his liking. His company would go on to become Conoco and then ConocoPhillips after a merger with <ding> Phillips, which later split up.
But there were other inspirations in the history of Ponca City. For one, Bill Picket was an African American cowboy/Wildwest performer who gained fame for his 'bulldogging' theatrics, grabbing bulls by the horns basically to wrestle them to the ground, an activity that cost him his life one day. And Poncan Chief Standing Bear won recognition for civil rights for Native Americans by filing a writ of habeus corpus when he was wrongly detained for leaving Ponca City to bury his father on ancestral Nebraskan land. The Poncas and other tribes in general of this area strive to share and maintain their identity and culture with annual events like pow-wows.
