While it was nearly a hundred years ago, the Great Depression is unsettlingly familiar when we take a good look at it. We recall our elders' memories of their lives during those years and think of all the work it takes to pay our bills. Conversations then and now loop in circles around what we should do about poverty and what we owe to the members of our communities who lack day-to-day necessities and the proverbial bootstraps to pull up on.  

When I think of the 1930s and methods used to rebalance our economy, I tend to think of the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. But another part of the New Deal was a national network of camps to house and employ the thousands who had nowhere to work or live and as a result would go from place to place following temporary and seasonal jobs. These neighbors aren’t usually part of our local stories besides statistics, editorials, and warnings against traveling salesmen. Yet they are a legitimate part of our history. And now we can read some of their very own words. 

While inventorying the magazines and newsletters of yesteryear in our archival collections, we came across an odd bundle of about a dozen issues from 1934-1935 titled The Sooner Trail. They’re made of plain sheets of letter-sized paper stapled together along one side, mimeographed copies of hand-typed text, hand-drawn illustrations, and the bold tagline of being “the voice of the Oklahoma transients.” Each issue contains editorials, cartoons, poetry, community news, and more, all submitted and put together by residents of Oklahoma transient camps.  

Publications like this one – made roughly or in a DIY way, not by professional authors but by and for a community that would not have otherwise been published or preserved, with more content than just an organizational newsletter, and distributed for free – are what we would nowadays call a zine (sounds like magazine). The term “zine” was coined in the early 1940s, but zines themselves go back much further. Anyone can make a zine about anything (silly or serious) with pretty much any materials. In the Oklahoma Underground Music Archive and the DoodlePunk Zine Archive, we have zines from different decades discussing current events, music, books, television shows, anime, and more.  

We have the only known copies of The Sooner Trail, a priceless insight into those who lived in Oklahoma’s transient camps. They weren’t the only ones reading The Sooner Trail, though – local newspapers would occasionally pick up and reprint stories they liked from its pages, like a nonagenarian who was staying in the camp hospital after being hit by a car who spun yarns about playing marbles with a young Abraham Lincoln and being close friends with Jesse and Frank James. The Sooner Trail also gained recognition as one of the top three publications of its type across the country. 

The Sooner Trail wasn’t the only contribution made by residents of Oklahoma transient camps though. They made a much more literal impact on our local landscape. According to an article from The Oklahoma News in June 1935, workers from the Oklahoma City transient camp contributed at least $500,000 worth of labor on “city improvements and beautification.” In today’s currency, that translates to about $11,829,270. Their labor was mostly used to create walkways, roads, and small dams, but there is one particularly visible project where we are still enjoying the fruits of their labor today. 

The last issue we have of The Sooner Trail is from the middle of 1935, but there may have been a few more issues after that. As far as we can tell, The Sooner Trail came to the same abrupt end as the transient camps themselves. A change of policy was announced in early 1936 to close the camps, instructing residents to either find paid lodgings and employment or move to a different state. The Oklahoma City camp was closed in April 1936; that summer, the site and its surroundings (planned by F. Donald Gordon and developed by residents of the transient camp) became a city park, which we now call Will Rogers Park.  

If you would like to read The Sooner Trail, you are more than welcome to come by in person (just let us know ahead of time) or read them online via our Digital Collections.