TO GET to Tiger Mountain, you head east from Oklahoma City, pass the myriad churches, restaurants (The Pig-Out Palace) and hotels (Caged Wrestling Here!) on Interstate 40 and, after about 80 miles, turn off when you get to the place where Crazy Snake had his last battle against the white man's government.
This is Indian territory. Always was. Look at the old maps of the West, when it was still wild, before Oklahoma became the 46th state in the union, and that's what it's called: Indian Territories. When the Americans wanted to move the Choctaws, the C
herokees, the Comanche, the Seminole and 35 other Indian tribes to their own Bantustan, this is where they sent them: a land of tallgrass prairie, cypress swamps, high plains and tornadoes where the white man said he wouldn't settle - and then broke his word.
Once you've turned off the I-40, you're not too far from Tiger Mountain Ranch, Henryetta. It's an idyllic setting, ridiculously comfortable, run by some truly memorable people. Sharon Glidden, its owner, is the only former psychiatric nurse I can think of who has trained a bobcat to use an indoor toilet. Kenny Fields, who helps her with the horses, is a real singing cowboy and the only former rodeo rounder I know who never broke a bone in 25 years on the circuit
But if you really want to be impressed, wait until you meet Jim Standing Bear and Moses Little Bear.
Kenny is still out with the horses when we arrive, but the rest are on the veranda overlooking the lake. Jim and Moses have already spent an hour putting on their ceremonial robes and their spirit faces - the ones that, if they died in battle, would help God recognise them. Only a white man would call it war paint.
We talk for an hour or so outdoors as the sun sets. Indoors, Kenny's wife Rose ("She's never opened a cookbook in her life," boasts Sharon) is preparing a delicious meatloaf with tomato gravy for the evening meal. Outside Moses and Jim are talking about being native Americans in 21st-century Oklahoma.
Even though, these days, it's more dances for tourists than Dances with Wolves, if you really want to find out more about native American culture, Oklahoma is still the best place to start. Because so many tribes were located there, it has more federally recognised Indian nations (39) than any other US state - each with its own jurisdiction and local power, many rich with their own casinos.
Jim and Moses fill me in on much more. I'm always suspicious of the potted history fed to tourists anywhere, but theirs has the ring of truth. And of poetry: after dinner, we go across the lake to a tipi encampment, where they tell the stories that have been told for centuries as the sparks from the campfire drift up to the stars: about how man, trying to get in touch with God, asked the eagle to fly up to the heavens. The eagle, the holy bird: the one whose feathers God breathed on and sent back to the red man as a token of his love.
Oddly, perhaps, none of this feels fake. It doesn't feel as though it's specially laid on for the tourists, even though that is exactly what we are, myself and Frieda and Don, up from the Florida panhandle ("the redneck Riviera, we call it") in their 32ft Winnebago, and watching the Eagle Dance next to me. You can, I think, tell when people are going through the motions, and when they really want to explain a misunderstood culture. This is one of those times: a magical night.
Back on the veranda overlooking the darkening lake, Jim Standing Bear is telling me about differences in tribal beliefs. "But there're some things we have in common. One is, never take more than you need. And owning land just doesn't make sense. Because how can you own something that was there before you were born and will be there after you're gone?"
Never take more than you need... But Oklahoma was built on doing just that. You only have to go to the National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City (not just cowboy history, but a superlative collection of frontier art) to see the first hints of the white man's excesses: the pyramids of buffalo bones presided over by grinning mid-19th-century hunters). You only have to order a main course at country singer Toby Keith's restaurant in the centre of town later that evening to realise this lives on after a fashion, in the portions of food you're eating. This is, after all, the land of anything-but-minimalist cuisine on two-foot-wide plates. Or to order breakfast at the Cattlemen's Steakhouse by Stockyard City the next morning. Or even, come to that, just to see the stockyard itself: almost unimaginable numbers of cattle in hundreds of pens, awaiting the auctioneer's gavel before being carted off either to the abattoir or for a final fattening on the nearby prairie.
Yet that excess is as nothing by comparison with the lives of Oklahoma's first oilmen. People like Frank Philips, the Illinois barber who founded the petrol company that still bears his name, lived on a truly epic scale. You can catch a flavour of that at his ranch in Woolaroc, crammed with arts and artefacts from the old West and as over the top as any plutocrat's palace you'd see at Newport, Rhode Island. And if you want to write a best-selling novel, here's a hint: drive 60 miles north to the Marland Mansion in Ponca City and study the life of Lydie Marland, the beautiful wife (and adopted daughter: how's that for scandal?) of one of the richest men in the world, who was in her latter years a bag lady in New York.
Mercifully, Oklahoma isn't all about excess. Small-town America isn't, and in Oklahoma you're going to find plenty towns still free of shopping-mall culture, where Main Street still matters and you don't have to eat fast-food to survive.
Oklahoma's target market in Scotland, say its tourism experts, are people who have already been to the States five times but who are now looking for something different. But when you feel like wandering off the main tourist trail, remember that Oklahoma has, on a square-mile basis, the most variable terrain in the country, from terraces to pine forests, deserts to lakes, tallgrass prairies to mountains. Winding through them is more of the original Route 66 than you'll find in any other state, living among them the country's biggest range of native American tribes.
So make the most of it. Check into a log cabin like the excellent lakeside ones at Tom Warren's Meadowlake Ranch near Tulsa. Try your hand at deerhunting, trophy bass fishing or even just watching the wildlife instead of shooting it. Take an early-morning horseback ride with Kenny Fields at Tiger Mountain, or - best of all - listen to Moses Little Bear tell the old Comanche and Cherokee stories around a campfire deep in the woods, so far away from the white man's cities that you can look up and see all the stars in the sky and easily imagine what the world was like before the white man came to build America. You won't regret it.
Fact file Continental (
www.continental.com, 0845 6076760) flies from Glasgow to Oklahoma City (via Newark) with prices ranging from £370 in January to £779 in July. Staying at Tiger Mountain Ranch (001 918 652 2533,
www.tigermountainranch.com) costs 150 (£73) per room, with breakfast 5, lunch 10 and dinner 15. Horse-and-rider trails cost 45, and a two-day wild-boar hunt with guide costs 250. Cowboy-and-Indian packages are also available. For great log cabin accommodation, see
www.meadowlakeranch.com.
