Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Tonkawa, OK

Tonkawa is a city in southwestern Kay County in north-central Oklahoma, sitting on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River about fourteen miles west of Ponca City.

Tonkawa was named for the Tonkawa tribe and was platted in March 1894 by Kansas farmers Eli V. Blake and Wiley William Gregory after the Cherokee Outlet land opening of 1893.

Before the Tonkawa tribe was settled on the reservation there in 1885, the same land had been home to the Nez Perce from 1879 to 1885 after their removal from the Pacific Northwest.

In 1901 the Oklahoma Territorial Legislature established the University Preparatory School in Tonkawa, which opened in 1902 with 217 students and seven faculty members.

That school is now Northern Oklahoma College, a public community college headquartered in Tonkawa with additional campuses in Enid and Stillwater and about 3,100 students as of fall 2023; its teams are the Mavericks.

A 1920s oil boom briefly pushed Tonkawa's population to an estimated fifteen thousand before it settled back to 3,311 by 1930.

In September 1942, Camp Tonkawa, one of Oklahoma's eight prisoner-of-war base camps, was built at Tonkawa to house German prisoners during World War II.

Tonkawa's population peaked at 3,643 in 1950, and the 2020 census counted 3,026 residents.

The Tonkawa Tribe of Oklahoma, headquartered at the Fort Oakland complex near town, was nearly exterminated in the Tonkawa Massacre of October 1862, when about 150 tribal members were killed.

Tonkawa's A. D. Buck Museum of Science and History, on the Northern Oklahoma College campus, is joined in town by the Tonkawa Historical Museum and the Tonkawa Tribal Museum.