Oklahoma is not lacking in characters.

On one hot summer afternoon, I had been reading the paper. The Oklahoman still prints a prayer on the front page. On Saturday, the front page news in the religion section concerns a Brazilian faith healer, Sylvania Machado, the "woman with gold." Followers claim gold dust falls from her hair when she prays. A line of the devout waits outside her hotel rooms to brush "goldlike dust" into their Bibles. Machado recently had an invitation to Canada canceled when a University of Toronto geochemist announced these specks contained not gold, but a kind of glittery plastic film.

"To me, it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s from God," Machado said in response.

Another afternoon, I spent some time at a cattle auction and got a glimpse of a man in the cattle industry.

"We’ve been in business since 1910, and we’re still the world’s largest stockyard. More than a million cattle come through here every year," says Gary Christopher, livestock manager of the Oklahoma National Stockyards. "We still work with the little guy, raising 10-100 head. The two meat packing plants which put this city on the map are closed now, but this is still Cattle City," he told me that afternoon.

Describing stockyard manager Gary Christopher as beefy wouldn’t be fair. His large hands and round shoulders fit together. He’s kind but no-nonsense, and I bet not much happens here, from a stubborn calf to a deadbeat bidder, without him knowing. He graciously stops to explain the scene.

"Do people ever stray into the auction room and bid but don’t pay?" I asked.

"No, we pretty much know our bidders. See that couple in the corner? They’re tourists; I don’t think we’d take their bid."

I look where he points. The tourists stand out like a pink cow, with hats reading, "Oklahoma," and "Oklahoma City." The rest of the room favors feedlots and suppliers on their heads.

Three minutes later, new cows are driven into the moat, and bidding resumes. I leave by a gangplank that sways in the wind. Below me, a stereophonic blend of yowls and grunts make a symphony of cow.

Back on Oklahoma 66, I stop at a crowded roadside café, the size of a living room, a couple of Indians come in. One of them looks like a friend, the broad-shouldered Cherokee historian Dave Edmunds, one of the country’s prominent Indian historians. Everyone who visits the Natural Cowboy Hall of Fame outside Oklahoma City has read his words engraved into a wall by the statue, "The End of the Trail."

I remember our discussion about the Oklahoma plains. Edmunds grew up in Illinois, not far from Route 66, but his heart and soul are here in Oklahoma, with his Indian Cherokee relatives. He has taught at a half dozen universities, finally settling at the University of Texas-Dallas. Working with me on a radio series five years ago, Writing the Southwest, I discovered he’s one of those rare historians whose compass swings towards the public. We were sitting by a fire in his cozy home in Plano, north of Dallas. He bent towards me, the way a friend will when he has good gossip or news to share. We talked of the first peoples to travel the path of Route 66, long before the Joads’ truck. As he spoke, his words quickened, and his hands came together, as if praying unconsciously.

"West of modern, urban Oklahoma is a more open rolling area, and so the people living there would be primarily hunting buffalo and plains-oriented.

"East of Oklahoma City were the more wooded prairie settlements of the five southern tribes or the five civilized tribes. These people were basically a combination of Native American and white Southern culture transplanted via the Trail of Tears into Eastern Oklahoma. From a white perspective, they were an "island of civilization"; the literacy rate for Cherokees was higher than the white South up to the Civil War and afterwards.