When the tornado of 1957 tore through the Pure Oil Camp east of Madill and left wreckage strewn across First Street, Little City itself was not the direct target of the wind, but it was never untouched. The funnel did not carve its path through Little City’s streets, yet the violence that struck the camp struck the heart of the community that depended upon it. When the debris was cleared and the sirens fell silent, Little City did not vanish. It did what small communities have always done when the sky has finished its violence: it stepped back into the work of living. Splintered lumber was hauled off in wagon loads and truck beds. Broken glass was swept up again and again because storms leave their teeth buried in the soil. Twisted metal was straightened where it could be straightened and dragged away where it could not. People counted the living, named the dead, tended the bruised, stitched the cut, and then began again—because rural life has never offered the luxury of waiting for ideal conditions. The hum of the oil field resumed in whatever capacity it could. Children rode buses back to school. The Pure Camp, though scarred and forever altered, continued. From a distance, it may have appeared that the community—camp and town together—had endured a terrible night and simply turned the page. But the storm had struck the engine beside Little City, and when an engine shudders, even the town it fuels feels the tremor.
But history rarely moves in clean arcs. What the storm interrupted,economicswould soon test. What the wind shook loose, time would quietly unfasten. The tornado had been terrible—sudden enough to feel like the end of the world—but it was not the only force capable of changing a town. Sometimes the first true ending is not loud at all. Sometimes it arrives slowly—so slowly you can live inside it for years without realizing you are watching a light being turned down one notch at a time.
Little City had been born in direct response to the Pure Oil Camp. It did not emerge accidentally. Reuel and Quinton Little did not plant survey stakes in open pasture out of abstraction or vanity. They saw the oil field coming in 1940, saw men and families arriving, saw payrolls forming, saw steam rising from cracking towers, and understood something old Oklahoma has always known: wherever industrial extraction takes root, human settlement follows. Oil fields do not remain abstract economic spaces. They require homes, groceries, churches, schools, and governance. Workers need houses. Families need groceries. Children need schools and churches. Oil fields generate camps; camps generate towns. Little City was the civic companion to Pure Camp. It rose because the oil rose. It was incorporated because the oil field seemed certain to endure. The confidence of those early months in 1940 was not foolishness; it was grounded in visible prosperity. Wells were productive. Paychecks came. Houses were rented before completion. There was no empty house in town. The dream was not a fantasy—it was momentum.
That momentum carried Little City through war and into the postwar decade. In those years, Little City had the look and feel of what it had always hoped to be: not a boomtown forever burning itself out, not a temporary camp, but a home. It was stitched together by routine and by the simple fact that everyone knew everyone else. Grief was shared. Good news traveled faster than any printed sheet could carry it. And the community learned the old disciplines of belonging—potlucks,Sunday schools, Scout meetings, men’s work and women’s work—those steady patterns that make a town feel permanent even while it is still young.
By 1950, something happened that matters more than most people realize, because it fixed Little City not only in local memory but in the nation’s record-keeping. It is important to remember that in 1950, Little City was still incorporated. The incorporation that followed its founding in the early 1940s—when optimism was high, oil was strong, and municipal elections felt like the natural next step—was still intact. Little City still possessed its legal charter. It still existed in Oklahoma law as a municipality with boundaries and authority.
Yet alongside that state recognition came a second kind of acknowledgment— federal, statistical, and quietly enduring. In the 1950 United States Census, Little City was listed as a distinct Census Designated Place. The phrase can sound dry, but its meaning runs deeper than the language suggests. A Census Designated Place is not something the federal government invents; it is something the government observes and names because it is there. It is the Census Bureau’s way of saying that this cluster of homes and families is not merely countryside, not merely part of a larger rural blur, but a place with a shared identity and a population concentration significant enough to be counted as itself.
The census does not create communities;itrecordsthem. When Little City appeared in the 1950 census tables with 101 residents under its own name, it meant that on federal maps, demographic charts, and national records, Little City stood as a defined location. It was not swallowed into a vague category of “unincorporated Marshall County.” It was not reduced to an unnamed scattering of farmsteads.Itwascounted.It was labeled. It was included in the country’s documentary architecture.
And the numbers that followed tell a story that refuses to be simple. Between 1950 and 2020, Little City’s population did not collapse into nothing. It grew modestly to 136 residents, and the 2026 estimate stands at 158. That growth is not explosive, but it is steady—and in demographic terms, steadiness is survival. Entire Oklahoma towns have vanished from census rolls altogether, erased by contraction or depopulation. Little City did not vanish. It adjusted. It remained inhabited. It remained named. It remained counted. It remained, in the language of federal recordkeeping and in the language of the people who lived there, a place.
But while a census can document existence, it cannot guarantee momentum. While federal recognition fixed Little City’s name in the nation’s books, the forces that had given the town its original velocity were already beginning to shift beneath the surface. Oil fields do not always die spectacularly. More often, they age. Production slows. Reservoir pressure drops. Companies adjust. And what once required a full camp with clerks, engineers, warehousemen,andforemen onsitecan,overtime,bemanaged more efficiently from larger hubs. You can feel that change long before it appears in bold print. It shows up in transfer papers. It shows up when a family that has lived in camp housing for years loads a moving truck bound for Oklahoma City. It shows up when fewer new faces arrive than leave. It shows up in the subtle difference between acampthathumsandacamp that merely operates.
By the late 1950s, anyone who read the Madill Record with care could sense the alteration in tone. The early years had spoken in the confident vocabulary of discovery— new wells, completions, production figures that sounded like victory. When theCumberlandfieldreached its peak production in 1945— 11,000 barrels a day—the numbers themselves carried confidence. The field was young. The reservoirs were strong. Payrolls were swelling. The company employed more than a hundred men locally andmaintainedhousing for 42 families, along with a dormitory and, for a time, a boarding house. There was forward motion in every statistic. The oil rose, and Little City rose with it.
But oil fields, like men, do not remain young.
After peak production comes maturity. After maturity comes management. And management has its own language—measured, technical, deliberate. In May of 1958, the Madill Record carried a notice “BEFORE THECORPORATIONCOMMISSION OF THE STATE OF OKLAHOMA.” The Pure Oil Company applied “for an order establishing drilling and spacing units and providing rules and regulations governingthedevelopmentof and the production of natural gas and condensate” from the “McLishSandoftheSimpson Formation,” in a defined section of Marshall County. The notice said plainly that spacing units were sought “in the interest of securing the greatest ultimate recovery,” “the prevention of waste,” “the protection of correlative rights,” and the establishing of “a uniform drilling pattern for an orderly development” of the common source of supply.
Those phrases—greatest ultimate recovery, prevention of waste, protection of correlative rights—were not the language of a boom. They were the language of conservation and coordination. They told anyone who knew how to read between the lines that the first flush was past. The objective was no longer to find oil; it was to maximize what remained. A similar notice followed in July 1958, again concerning the McLish Sand in Sections 13 and 12 of Township 6 South, Range 6 East. The repetition mattered. This was not a one-off adjustment. It was a pattern.
Then came the language of unitization. In August 1963, the paper reported that Pure had filed an application “calling for creation of three units for unitized management”: Cumberland-Bromide, Cumberland-McLish, and Cumberland-Oil Creek. The purpose was stated plainly—“unitized management, operation and further development” of the common source of supply. Unitization is a decisive step in the life of a field. Instead of each leaseholder operating independently, the reservoir is treated as a single coordinated body. Production is allocated. Costs are shared. Decisions are centralized. When a field is new, competition drives drilling. When a field is mature, coordination preserves what pressure remains.
And beneath those legal notices, beneath hearings scheduled for “10 a.m. September 20 in the commission hearing room at Oklahoma City,” another transformation was taking place in the soil itself. In June 1958, the Madill Record announced: “Pure Oil Laying 36,000 Feet of Pipe for Water Flood.” The installation involved replacing the existing water injection system. “Pipe being installed varies from eight inches to two inches in diameter,” the paper explained. “The old system is being left in the ground.” The new lines would “modernize its water injection facilities.”
Water flooding is not undertaken in a field that gushes under its own pressure. It is a secondary recovery method, used when natural reservoir energy has declined. By injecting water back into the formation, operators maintain pressure and push remaining oil toward producing wells. It is both an admission and an act of resolve. It says: the reservoir no longer flows freely, but we will not surrender it. We will sustain it. We will coax from it what remains. The fact that the old system was left buried while 36,000 feet of new pipe were laid above it tells its own story. This was not improvisation. It was modernization in the face of decline—an investment in longevity rather than expansion.
InDecember1963,theMadill RecordreportedthatPure had “obtained a hearing regarding production,” seeking authorization “for production of underages (sub-allowable production)inthefield.”Even the phrase underages speaks to a regulated, mature field operating within allowables set by the Corporation Commission. Thiswasnotthewild pace of early drilling; it was disciplined management.
By May 1964, the paper reported that Pure had filed a “Request for Pooling,” seeking permission to pool production sections in Marshall and Bryan counties, with a hearing scheduled for June 9 in Oklahoma City. Pooling was not the language of discovery; it was the language of consolidation. It meant combining multiple tracts and mineral interests into unified operational units so the reservoir could be produced efficiently as a whole rather than piecemeal. It prevented waste. It protected rights. It rationalized decline. It was the clearest signal that the era of expansion was over and the era of optimization had begun.
Above ground, the same theme played out in human terms. In May 1960, the Madill Record reported that the number of Pure personnel had been reduced. “Following a trend set by other companies,” the paper noted, “services of a number of employees were terminated recently… It was a matter of general reduction or retrenchment rather than a company move.” Names were printed. Families were affected. The word retrenchment is clinical, but its impact was not.
Then, on July 5, 1962, the headline was unmistakable: “Pure Oil Is Closing Cumberland Office.” The office, effective July 23, would close “after more than 20 years of operation in Marshall County.” Eight employees wouldbeaffected.Operations would consolidate into one mainofficeinOklahomaCity, handling production records for Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas.
At one time—so the paper reminded its readers with an almost wistful clarity—Pure Oil had employed 140 people locally and maintained housing for 42 families, along with amen’sdormitory.Thatnumber— 140—once represented the industrial heartbeat of eastern Marshall County. It meant pay envelopes on kitchen tables, steady grocery accounts, school buses filling at dawn, and porch lights burning late. It meant churches with full pews and a commercial strip that could justify its existence.
By 1959, that payroll list had decreased to around 80.
By 1962, the force had been reduced to 39 employees.
Andsixmorewoulddepart with the office transfer.
That is how decline often appears—not as a catastrophe, but as arithmetic. Not as smoke rising from wreckage, but as columns of numbers narrowing year by year. A reduction here. A consolidation there. A transfer accepted. A resignation submitted rather than uproot a family again. The math does not shout. It subtracts.
Andafterthe1957tornado destroyed fifteen company houses and killed two residents, the company made a choice in 1958 not to fully rebuild the housing camp. Structures were sold or dismantled. Housesweremoved into Madill and Cumberland. The camp’s footprint shrank along with its payroll. None of this made the kind of noise a tornado makes. There were nosirens.NoNationalGuard. No portable kitchens. There were hearings in Oklahoma City, notices in small print, and quiet departures—families packing furniture while the pumps kept moving beneath them.
Taken one by one, each decision made sense. Modernize the water flood. Protect correlative rights. Prevent waste. Consolidate offices. Reduce overhead. Extend the reservoir’s productive life. None of it signaled abandonment. The Cumberland field did not die in the late 1950s or early1960s.Itwaspreserved, disciplined, and extended. Water injection kept oil moving beneath Marshall County soil. Pooling kept production orderly. Unitization protected ultimate recovery. The oil did not vanish. It was managed.
Above ground, however, the energy that had birthed Little City softened.
When a field enters its managed phase, the corporate mind turns toward efficiency rather than expansion. Clerical work can be handled from Oklahoma City rather than from a field office ten miles east of Madill. Engineering oversight can be centralized. Production can be maintained with fewer hands. On paper, consolidation is rational. And consolidation almost always means fewer local jobs.
For Little City—born in response to Pure Camp’s vigor—this shift was foundational. The town existed because the camp existed in strength. Its groceries, churches, and incorporation had been justified by the concentration: hundreds of workersandfamiliesneeding a civic companion nearby. When the camp shifted from expansion to optimization, its gravitational pull weakened. The camp did not close; it thinned. But thinning matters. A boomtown’s energy is not measured only in barrels. It is measured in bodies. When those bodies decrease, the town beside them feels it.
Boomtown decline is rarely cinematic. It does not arrive with a single boarded-up storefront and a tumbleweed rolling down Main Street while someone stands in a doorway and declares the end. It comes quietly, almost politely, through subtraction. A café closes “for now,” and the hand-lettered promise of reopening fades in the glass untilnoonerememberswhat it once said. A service station trims its hours, then trims them again, until the ledger no longer justifies turning on the lights. A house that once would have sold in a week lingers for months. The street feels less crowded at supper time.Therhythmslows—not abruptly, but perceptibly.
Little City felt that slowing. Businesses began to rely less on sheer volume and more on familiar names. The grocery changed hands, then changed hands again, and eventuallythewindowswent dark. The old storefronts reflected prairie sky and passing headlights where advertisements once hung. Each closure carried its own reasonable explanation—retirement, transfer, consolidation, changing markets. Taken individually, none felt catastrophic.Takentogether, they traced a narrowing.
And that narrowing is the most emotionally honest way to describe what happened. It did not collapse. Collapse is dramatic, final, and easy to narrate. Thinning is harder. Thinningmeansliferemains, but in fewer forms. It means institutions contract rather than explode. It means three churches become one. It means several businesses become a single country store. It means incorporation gives way to unincorporated status, yet the name survives on census forms and in everyday speech. The life stayed—but it stayed with fewer storefronts, fewer paychecks circulating locally, fewer public places to gather.
Little City did not die. It learned to live smaller.
Atsomepointduringthose quiet decades, Little City lost its incorporation. There was no grand ceremony marking the end of its municipal life. In Oklahoma, incorporation grants a town legal identity and authority to elect officers, pass ordinances, levy taxes, and function as a municipal corporation distinct from the surrounding county. It is autonomy—the right to decide local questions locally, to maintain a civic identity through elected authority. It is a kind of legal backbone.
But a backbone must be supported by muscle and movement. Incorporation requires continuity. Elections must be held. Officers must be seated. Reports must be filed. Ordinances must be maintained. A town mustkeepitscivicmachinery turning year after year, even when nothing dramatic is happening. When the population declines, when the tax base shrinks, when fewer hands are willing to shoulder the work, that machinery can stall. Sometimes dissolution is formal. Sometimes it is quieter—an erosion of function until the municipality no longer operates in any meaningfulsense.Whenthat happens,theterritoryreverts to unincorporated county status. The legal spine disappears. There is no mayor, no council, no municipal authority separate from Marshall County. Streets become county roads. Services shift outward. The name may endure, but the corporate body ceases to breathe.
Little City reached that point. The same community that had stepped confidently into incorporation in October 1940—publishing notices, holding elections, claiming its own ballot box—eventually laid down that formal identity. Its legal independence faded not in disgrace, but in quiet exhaustion: fewer people, fewer resources, and fewer reasons to maintain a separate civic apparatus. The loss of incorporation meant more than paperwork. It meant the end of self-governance. No local ordinances are debated in a town chamber. No municipal elections reaffirming identity. No corporate seal pressed into official documents. Authority shifted outward into the broader framework of county governance. That shift is not merely technical. It changes how a place advocates for itself, how it negotiates maintenance and improvement, and how it is perceived both fromwithinandfromoutside.
And yet, Little City did not vanish.
That is the paradox at the heart of this final chapter. While incorporation disappeared, census recognition remained.In1950,therewere 101 residents. By 2020, 136. The 2026 estimate stands at 158. Those numbers do not describe a boomtown ascending toward prominence, and they do not describe a ghost townerasedfrommaps.They describe persistence. They describe people choosing to live there anyway—not because the boom demanded it, but because home has its own gravity.
That is why Little City today lives in a strange duality. Legally, it is no longer a municipality. Statistically, it is still a place. The census continues to count its residents separately. On federal demographicmaps,thename endures. In a sense, Little City shifted from political existence to demographic existence. It was no longer selfgoverning, but it remained identifiable—and that continuity says something deeper than paperwork. People did not abandon the name when the charter fell away. They kept saying “Little City.” They kept writing “Little City.” They kept living “Little City.”
The institutions tell the same story in flesh and wood and brick. At its height in the 1940s and 1950s, Little City had three churches—Baptist, Methodist, and Church of Christ—each a vessel by which a small town held its people together. Hymns rose from multiple sanctuaries. Potluck suppers rotated between fellowship halls. Revivals moved through like seasonal weather. Over time, two of those churches disappeared. Membership declined, consolidated, or relocated. Buildings were sold or repurposed. Today, in 2026, only First Baptist Churchremains.Itspresence is more than architectural. It is continuity embodied. It is memory gathered weekly. In a place that has thinned, the remaining church becomes a kind of lighthouse, holding names and stories and prayers when so much else has fallen silent.
Commerceleavesevidence too plain to soften. In earlier decades, Little City’s businesses followed the familiar churn of small-town life— stores changing hands, cafés opening and closing, service stations rising where pasture had been. A sale was not just a transaction; it was a story. A closure was not merely a sign in a window; it was a change in the town’s pulse. By 2026, the fact stands stark and simple: the only business left in Little City is Robertson’s Country Store, a convenience store, gas station, and small grill. That sentence can sound like an epitaph if you do not understand rural places. But the last store is never just a store. It becomes an informal town square. It becomes the place where people still bump into each other without planning it, where a man comes in for gas and leaves with news, where a teenager comes in for a snack and is reminded thatinasmallplace,someone still knows who you belong to. It sells fuel. It grills food. It pours coffee. It keeps a light on.
So yes—in truth, Little City is now no more than a rural housing area or neighborhood. It is a residential cluster east of Madill: homes, gravel driveways, mailboxes, quiet roads. No downtown business district in the old sense. No municipal offices. No city taxes. No corporate limits sign. No town hall. No strip of competing storefronts. What remains are houses and lives, routines and yards—and the fact that a name can outlive the structures that once made it feel like a town.
But to end there would be emotionally incomplete, because Part VI is about the arc. Little City has endured through phases that erase many places: it survived the boom, survived war, survived the deadly tornado that tore the Pure Oil Camp apart, survived the oil bust and corporate consolidation, survived the loss of incorporation, and survived the erosion of its business base until there was only one store and one church left to carry what had once belonged to many.
It began as a dream—Reuel and Quinton’s dream— born during the oil boom, and for a time that dream became real in full color: an incorporated municipality, a commercial strip, multiple churches, the confidence of self-governance, and the sense that the future was already booked. That is what makes the narrowing poignant—not because the founders were foolish, but because the world is relentless. Oil is faithful until it is not. Industry does not grieve; it calculates. Storms do not negotiate. Demography drifts. Highways pull commerce. Cities pull jobs. And small towns built on a single economic engine eventually discover, with slow heartbreak, that the engine can idle down.
Little City adapted. It transformed from an oil-field companion into a residential enclave. It transformed from a municipality to a censusrecognized community. It transformed from three churches to one, from multiple stores to one. But transformation is not erasure. It is continuity in altered form.Thenameremains.The people remain. The census still counts. The church still gathers. The country store still opens.
And now, at the end of this story, there is one last irony that feels almost like providence.
Little City was originally called Pure City, founded in response to the Pure Oil Company’s entrance into Marshall County. The town’s earliest identity was tethered openly to the company that spawned it. Pure came. Pure drilled. Pure built its camp. And beside that camp, a town rose. Reuel and Quinton Little understood the pattern: where industry plants steel, families follow. They laid out streets. They sold lots. They incorporated. They built not merely houses but a civic body. Pure Oil provided the engine; Little City provided the heartbeat.
But oil companies are not towns. Corporations are built for efficiency, not memory. They merge. They sell. They consolidate. They change names. They are absorbed. What feels permanent in one decade becomes a footnote in the next.
PureOilCompany—whose nameoncestoodontanksand paychecks and letterheads east of Madill—followed that path. In 1965, Pure was acquired byUnionOilCompany of California, better known as Unocal. Over time, the Pure name faded into corporate rebranding and consolidation. And Unocal itself, once a major American petroleum company,wasacquiredbythe ChevronCorporationin2005. Thecorporatelineagebecame a chain of absorption—Pure into Unocal, Unocal into Chevron—names dissolving into larger names, identity swallowed by efficiency.
Pure Oil is gone. Its camp is gone. Its corporate name has been folded into the vast machinery of a multinational company whose headquarters and priorities are a world away from the prairie east of Madill.
But Little City remains. And that is the final, hauntingtruth.Thecompany that spawned Little City did not outlive the town. The corporate engine that once fueled it was absorbed, renamed, and essentially erased as a distinct identity. But the place—the stubborn, human place—refused to disappear. The town learned to live smaller. It lost its incorporation. It lost businesses. It lost churches. It thinned. But it did not die.
In the end, only one survived in name and presence on the land.
The corporation dissolved into merger papers, stock transactions, and distant boardrooms. And out on the ground where it all once happened, there are almost no honest markers left—no bold signposts announcing that a camp once stood here, that payrolls once moved like weather through this part of Marshall County, that derricks once stitched the skyline and water injection lines once ran beneath the soil to keepanagingfieldbreathing. Time has a way of sweeping industry clean. Steel comes down. Tanks are repainted or hauled off. Offices close, records move elsewhere, and even the great machinery of extraction leaves surprisingly little behind for a passerby to recognize.
But the town still answers when you call it by name.
If that is not a kind of victory—quiet, imperfect, deeplyhuman—thennothing is. Because what endures is not always what was strongest. What endures is sometimes simply what was loved, lived in, prayed over, and refused to be abandoned. The boom is gone. The company is gone. The camp is gone, and the landscape gives you almost no sign that it was ever anything but ordinary countryside.
But Little City lives on— still counted, still inhabited, still spoken, still there. Here is a story on the Colbert shooting which is of regional interest if you have a place for it since the suspect is 13. Thanks for your help with
By Matt Swearengin A 13-year-old Colbert boy has been taken into custody for suspicion of killing his mother, authorities said.
According to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, Bryan County Sheriff’s deputiesweredispatched at approximately 6:45 p.m. Feb. 27 to a home in the 500 block of Sims Road in Colbert about a fatality.
When deputies arrived, they found the victim, identified as 31-year-old Malary Clayton who had been shot.
The sheriff’s office requested OSBI assistance and the investigation revealed the suspect was the 13-yearold boy, according to OSBI. OSBI said the Oklahoma Highway Patrol issued an emergency alert for the suspect and as law enforcement personnel monitored calls, it was determined that he was south of the Oklahoma/ Texas border.
The Texas Department of Public Safety, Denison Police Department, and the Grayson County Sheriff’s Office immediatelybegansearching for the boy.
According to the Grayson County Sheriff’s Office, Telecommunications Officer Melissa York had completed her shift and was traveling near Highway 75 when she noticed a male walking along FM 691. She noticed that the clothing and items he was carrying matched the description of the suspect. York then contacted dispatch anddeputiestooktheboyinto custody without incident. He was taken to the juvenile detention center.
OSBI said it is still an ongoing investigation and once the investigation is complete, OSBI will provide their report to the Bryan County District Attorney’s Office to determine charges.
In a statement, Bryan County Sheriff Joey Tucker said Clayton’s death is heartbreaking.
“A young mother’s life was taken, and that is something no family, no friends, and no community should ever have to endure,” Tucker said. “On behalf of the Bryan County Sheriff’s Office, I want to extend our deepest and most sincere condolences to everyone who loved her. Our prayers are with her family and friends as they walk through unimaginable grief.”
Tucker said the case is especially tragic because of it involving a child.
“There are no winners in a situation like this,” Tucker said. “Two lives and two futures are forever changed. As a father, as a member of this community and as your sheriff, I cannot express strongly enough how heavy this weighs on all of us. We recognize that there is pain on multiple sides of this tragedy, and our hearts go out to everyone impacted.”
The sheriff praised his deputies and the other law enforcement agencies for their professionalism in the case.
“Law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Red River came together without hesitation, and because of thatcoordination,thesuspect was safely located and taken into custody,” Tucker said.
According to Tucker, his office will continue to work closely with the District Attorney’s Office as the investigation and legal process moves forward.
“Right now, our focus is on compassion, on truth, and on supporting our community through this difficult time,” Tucker said. “We ask that everyone allow space for the families involved to grieve privately and respectfully. Please keep them in your prayers. Bryan County is a strong community. In moments like this, we lean on one another, we lean on our faith, and we move forward together.”
In other news, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol is investigating a fatal hit and run that happened at 6:54 a.m. Monday on Highway 69 southbound north of exit 2 in Colbert.
According to OHP, an unidentified pedestrian male was found deceased on the shoulder of US-69 and it appeared he was struck by an unknown vehicle.