South Central Oklahoma is an amorphous region in the state of Oklahoma, perhaps encompassing 10 counties. It is centered on the Arbuckle Mountains, an ancient, eroded range traversing some 70 miles (110 km) across the region, and surrounded by rivers and lakes, notably Lake Texoma, Lake Murray and Lake of the Arbuckles. For tourism purposes, the Oklahoma Department of Tourism has more narrowly defined South Central Oklahoma, which they refer to as Chickasaw Country, as being a seven-county region including Pontotoc, Johnston, Marshall, Garvin, Murray, Carter, and Love counties. A ten-county definition might also include Coal, Atoka, and Bryan counties, although the Department of Tourism includes those in Choctaw Country. The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma covers the eastern third of the region. Its headquarters is in Durant, and its capitol building, now a museum, is in Tuskahoma. The Chickasaw Nation lies within the region, with the tribal capitol building located at Tishomingo and its headquarters in Ada. The Chickasaw Nation, which runs "Chickasawcountry.com"., promotes the idea of Chickasaw Country as the 13 south-central Oklahoma counties that comprise the Chickasaw Nation, being the Tourism Department’s seven counties plus Coal, Bryan, Jefferson, Stephens, Grady, and McClain counties.The region, also known by its former Oklahoma Department of Tourism designation, Arbuckle Country or Lake and Trail Country, has three distinct centers of commerce and culture, Ardmore, Ada and Durant, though it retains a largely rural nature, and is populated with many small towns and ranches. It also contains a large portion of the Cross Timbers region, transitioning from a heavily wooded area (with native oaks, elms and other eastern varieties) to a rolling savanna in the west, occasionally broken by cedar and mesquite trees. In addition to abundant water resources latent in the Arbuckle-Simpson Aquifer, the region has some of the highest oil and gas production in the state, with Carter County seated as the largest producer in the state.

Pauls Valley is a city in and the county seat of Garvin County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 6,187 at the 2010 census, a decline of 1.1 percent from the figure of 6,256 in 2000. It was settled by and named for Smith Paul, a North Carolina native who married a Chickasaw woman and became a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation before the Civil War. The town economy is largely based on agriculture and oil production.

Sherman is a U.S. city in and the county seat of Grayson County, Texas. The city's population in 2020 was 44,002. It is one of the two principal cities in the Sherman–Denison metropolitan statistical area, and it is part of the Texoma region of North Texas and southern Oklahoma.

The Red River, or sometimes the Red River of the South, is a major river in the Southern United States. It was named for its reddish water color from passing through red-bed country in its watershed. It is one of several rivers with that name. Although once a tributary of the Mississippi River, the Red River is now a tributary of the Atchafalaya River, a distributary of the Mississippi that flows separately into the Gulf of Mexico. This confluence is connected to the Mississippi River by the Old River Control Structure. The south bank of the Red River formed part of the US–Mexico border from the Adams–Onís Treaty (in force 1821) until the Texas Annexation and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Red River is the second-largest river basin in the southern Great Plains. It rises in two branches in the Texas Panhandle and flows east, where it serves as the border between the states of Texas and Oklahoma. It then forms a short border between Texas and Arkansas before entering Arkansas, turning south near Fulton and flowing into Louisiana, where it feeds the Atchafalaya River. The total length of the river is 1,360 miles (2,190 km), with a mean flow of over 57,000 cubic feet per second (1,600 m3/s) at the mouth.