Osage Country: Price Tower, Woolaroc, Pawhuska & Will Rogers

The only realized skyscraper Frank Lloyd Wright ever built — a 19-story tower designed in 1929 but not built until 1956, rising incongruously from the northeastern Oklahoma prairie. The cantilevered copper floors step outward as the building rises, and Wright's interior design for the offices and apartments was exhaustively detailed. Now an arts center and hotel; the rooftop bar has the best view in Oklahoma.

Bartlesville's neighboring town of Dewey has a remarkably preserved late 19th-century downtown and the Tom Mix Museum — the cowboy film star Tom Mix's artifacts, saddles, and memorabilia occupy a small but earnest museum in the town he claimed as home.

A Bartlesville institution since 1946 — hand-cut steaks, made-from-scratch sides, and a clientele that includes the Phillips Petroleum executives and the roughneck families who have been coming since the postwar oil boom.

Frank Phillips (of Phillips Petroleum) built a 3,600-acre wildlife preserve in the Osage Hills as his private retreat — today it operates as one of the most remarkable private museums in America. The lodge-museum houses a world-class collection of Frederic Remington bronzes, Charles Russell paintings, and Western artifacts. Outside, bison, longhorn, elk, and 30 other species roam freely across the rolling tallgrass landscape.

The restaurant within the Woolaroc preserve serves Oklahoma comfort food — chicken-fried steak, hand-pies, and peach cobbler in a dining room surrounded by the original log-cabin decor Frank Phillips built for his guests.

The Osage Nation became the wealthiest per-capita people in the world in the early 20th century when oil was discovered beneath their reservation — the tribal museum documents the oil boom, the Osage Reign of Terror (the subject of the Killers of the Flower Moon book and film), and the complex cultural identity of the nation that survived it. One of the most important and least-visited museums in Oklahoma.

Ree Drummond's food-and-general-store operation in the Pawhuska downtown has turned the Osage County seat into one of the most unexpected food tourism destinations in America — the mercantile serves enormous breakfasts and lunches from a menu built around the comfort-food recipes from her television show. The line is always long and always worth it.

The Osage County courthouse square is surrounded by 1900s-era commercial buildings that still house the original functions — hardware, feed, the local newspaper. The oil-boom architecture of Pawhuska is more intact than any comparable Oklahoma town.

The Nature Conservancy's 40,000-acre Tallgrass Prairie Preserve north of Pawhuska is the largest protected tallgrass prairie on Earth — a bison herd of 2,500 animals roams freely across the preserve, and the rolling Oklahoma grassland without a fence or power line visible in any direction is a landscape that has almost entirely disappeared from North America.

A Pawhuska lunch counter that has been making onion burgers — thin beef patties smashed with caramelized onions on a flat griddle — since the 1920s. The onion burger is one of Oklahoma's genuine culinary contributions and Kumback is one of the oldest practitioners.

The finest collection of Will Rogers memorabilia and scholarship in existence — the museum in his birthplace of Claremore covers the Cherokee-heritage humorist, rope artist, film star, and political commentator who became the most beloved American public figure of the 1920s and 30s. The Ziegfeld Follies years, the radio programs, and the 72 films are all documented. A genuinely excellent small museum.

Rogers's actual birthplace, a restored 1875 dog-trot log cabin on a working ranch in Oologah — the ranch cattle and the prairie landscape surrounding the cabin give a sense of the Cherokee Nation territory Will Rogers grew up in.

A Claremore institution in a Victorian building on Will Rogers Boulevard — classic Oklahoma home cooking, the chicken and dumplings particularly, served cafeteria-style in a dining room that has fed Rogers County families for decades.

Lynn Riggs, the Cherokee playwright whose play Green Grow the Lilacs became the musical Oklahoma!, grew up in Claremore — the small memorial at his childhood home and the Lynn Riggs Regional Park mark one of the most consequential contributions any small town has made to American theater.