24 hours in Tulsa

Oklahoma will always be a red state on the political map, but the colour goes deeper than that. Everything here was red: red earth, red brick, red dust, red rust. At Little Sahara State Park, 1,600 geologically anomalous acres of iron-rich sand dunes were pinky-orange, the colour of thousand-island dressing.

The sitcom Friends had a storyline in which a character accidentally went to Oklahoma, the implication being that that’s the only reason anyone would go there. The state’s position as an unfashionable backwater became a running joke over eight episodes, after which the Friend headed back to civilisation.

It was not always thus. So-called ‘wildcatters’ were poking around in the red dirt for black gold at the beginning of the last century. In November 1905, two such prospectors, chancing their arm on Indian land just south of Tulsa, hit the jackpot with what was at the time the world’s biggest oil strike.