Oklahoma
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118 free Oklahoma trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
61 free Oklahoma trivia questions with answers. Sixty-one questions on Oklahoma, the state that filled with 50,000 people in a single afternoon in 1889 and has been surprising outsiders ever since. The set covers how the state got its name and why it was the 46th to join, the Five Tribes and the Trail of Tears, the panhandle that Texas gave away, the oil strikes that made Tulsa rich and put derricks on the capitol lawn, the Dust Bowl and the Joads, and the darker chapters of Greenwood in 1921 and the Murrah Building in 1995. There is plenty of lighter material too: the first parking meter and the first shopping cart, a Route 66 whale, a golden oil worker taller than most buildings, the state meal that runs to a dozen dishes, a tornado that set a world wind-speed record, and the people Oklahoma produced, from Will Rogers and Woody Guthrie to Mickey Mantle, Jim Thorpe, Garth Brooks and the Thunder. It opens easy and works up to questions for people who know which county touches four other states. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and official sources, and the page used is shown under each explanation. Play it solo or use it as a ready-made state round.
30 of 118 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which president signed the 1907 proclamation that made Oklahoma the 46th state?
Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed Oklahoma a state on November 16, 1907, merging Oklahoma Territory with Indian Territory, whose leaders had petitioned to enter the Union separately.
Q 02The name Oklahoma comes from two words in which Native American language?
Choctaw
Choctaw: okla means 'people' and humma 'red'. Choctaw chief Allen Wright proposed the name in treaty talks after the Civil War, decades before there was a state to wear it.
Q 03Oklahoma's state nickname comes from settlers who did what during the 1889 land opening?
Slipped in before the start
Slipped in before the start: the cheats hid on the land, then popped up once the run began to stake their claims, and in 1908 the state university's football team took their nickname as its own.
Q 04At what time of day did the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 begin?
High noon
High noon on April 22, 1889: by sundown Oklahoma City and other townsites, empty prairie that morning, held thousands of people living in tents.
Q 05Which 1835 agreement gave the Cherokee two years to move to Indian Territory before removal?
New Echota
New Echota: a minority faction signed it at the Cherokee capital in Georgia without Principal Chief John Ross's authority, and Ross gathered thousands of Cherokee signatures against it.
Q 06What is the forced Cherokee march of 1838–39 to present-day Oklahoma called?
Trail of Tears
The Trail of Tears: in 1838 soldiers forced the Cherokee from their homes at gunpoint, held them in camps, then marched them west on a journey that killed an estimated 4,000.
Q 07Which president signed the 1830 Indian Removal Act that sent the southeastern tribes to Indian Territory?
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act on May 28, 1830, but he had left office by the time troops drove the Cherokee west in 1838 on the orders of his successor, Martin Van Buren.
Q 08In 1905 Indian Territory leaders drafted a constitution for a state to be named after which man?
Sequoyah
Sequoyah, inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, gave his name to the state proposed at Muskogee; voters backed it about six to one, but Congress refused even to consider the bill.
Q 09What left Guthrie for Oklahoma City on the day of the 1910 capital vote?
State seal
The state seal left Guthrie on June 11, 1910, the very day of the vote, even though the act of Congress that created the state had fixed the capital at Guthrie until 1913.
Q 10Which state gave up the future Oklahoma Panhandle so slavery could stay legal within its borders?
Texas
Texas entered the Union as a slave state, and federal law barred slavery north of 36°30', so in the Compromise of 1850 it gave up the strip, which sat ownerless as No Man's Land until 1890.
Q 11Which Oklahoma county is the only one in the United States that borders four different states?
Cimarron
Cimarron County fills the western tip of a Panhandle only about 34 miles tall, so Colorado and Kansas lie along its north edge and New Mexico along its west, with a fourth neighbour to the south.
Q 12Oklahoma's highest point is on which landform at the western tip of the Panhandle?
Black Mesa
Black Mesa is a basalt lava flow that ran in from a volcano in southeastern Colorado, and nowhere else in Oklahoma is there evidence of volcanic activity so recent.
Q 13Which panhandle town was accidentally bombed by a U.S. B-17 crew on a training flight in July 1943?
Boise City
Q 21Oklahoma's State Capitol opened in 1917 without which feature, finally added in 2002?
A dome
A dome was ruled out on cost, but the building was engineered to carry one, and 85 years later the state finally built it, topped by a 22-foot bronze figure called The Guardian.
Q 22Which Oklahoma town, the 'Pipeline Crossroads of the World', is the pricing point for US benchmark crude?
Cushing
Cushing boomed after a 1912 gusher and became a refining town; the refineries are gone, but the tanks and pipelines stayed, which is why the country's benchmark crude is priced there.
Q 23The 1897 Nellie Johnstone, Oklahoma's first commercial oil well, sat capped until Bartlesville got what?
Railroad
Boise City was hit by six practice bombs after a B-17 crew from a nearby air base mistook the lights of its town square for their target; nobody was hurt.
Q 14Which of these mountain ranges is in Oklahoma?
Arbuckle Mountains
The Arbuckle Mountains are among the oldest ranges in the United States, so worn down by erosion that their highest ground now stands only about 1,400 feet above sea level.
Q 15In 1907 the Bronx Zoo sent 15 animals by train to Oklahoma's Wichita Mountains to restart a vanished herd of what?
Bison
Bison had been hunted almost to extinction, so their return drew a crowd: Comanche leader Quanah Parker came out with many others to welcome the animals.
Q 16Which month brings Oklahoma the most tornadoes on average?
May
May averages about 24 tornadoes in Oklahoma, roughly double April's count, because the peak of the season moves north through the year and crosses the southern Plains in late spring.
Q 17The Storm Prediction Center, which issues US tornado watches, is based in which Oklahoma city?
Norman
Norman has housed the forecasters since 1997, when they left Kansas City to work alongside the National Severe Storms Laboratory, whose researchers had made the same move in 1964.
Q 18Which Oklahoma City suburb was struck by top-rated tornadoes in both 1999 and 2013?
Moore
Moore took direct hits both times, and in 2014 its council answered with a stricter building code that required new homes to withstand 135 mph gusts.
Q 19Tulsa, the 'Oil Capital of the World' for most of the 20th century, sits on which river?
Arkansas
The Arkansas River runs beside downtown Tulsa, where a 1901 strike at nearby Red Fork drew the oil companies whose boom-years money raised the city's Art Deco towers.
Q 20In the 1930s, working oil wells stood on the grounds of which Oklahoma landmark?
The State Capitol
The State Capitol sits above the Oklahoma City field, opened in 1928 just south of town; within a few years derricks had spread across the city and onto the Capitol's own grounds.
A railroad reached Bartlesville in 1899 and finally gave the oil a way to outside markets; until then the well, named for a partner's daughter, sat capped.
Q 24Which architect designed Bartlesville's Price Tower, 'the tree that escaped the crowded forest'?
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright first drew the design in the 1920s for apartment towers in New York City that were never built; three decades later it rose instead as a pipeline firm's headquarters in a small Oklahoma town.
Q 25The Tulsa race massacre of 1921 destroyed which neighborhood, known as 'Black Wall Street'?
Greenwood
Greenwood lost more than a thousand homes and businesses in about 18 hours, yet residents began rebuilding within days and restored the district themselves, against official pressure to move elsewhere.
Q 26Undercover agents from which agency broke the Osage murders case retold in Killers of the Flower Moon?
The FBI
The FBI, then the Bureau of Investigation, sent agents undercover after local authorities had rarely looked into the deaths, and their case earned rancher William Hale a life sentence.
Q 27The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing destroyed a federal building named after which judge?
Alfred P. Murrah
Alfred P. Murrah was orphaned as a boy yet became a federal judge at just 32, and he stayed on the bench until his death in 1975.
Q 28At the Oklahoma City National Memorial, which 168 objects each stand for one person killed?
Empty chairs
Empty chairs, each bearing one name, stand on the footprint of the destroyed building in nine rows, one row for each of its nine floors.
Q 29The Survivor Tree at the Oklahoma City National Memorial is what kind of tree?
Elm
Elm: this American elm shaded a parking lot across from the building, lived through the blast, and was then nearly cut down so investigators could recover evidence lodged in its branches.
Q 30Which street fixture made its world debut in downtown Oklahoma City in July 1935?
Parking meter
The parking meter was newspaperman Carl Magee's answer to downtown curbs jammed with cars; two engineers built him a working timer, and the first meters went in on July 16, 1935.