Monthly Archives: July 2007

Esther Catlege, age 15, about a decade after she made the Land Run, and Walter Hoofard

Old Grandma. That’s what my father called her. His grandmother, and the woman who raised my beloved Pawpaw, was so old that simply calling her grandma wouldn’t do. She was called Old Grandma, and she was 101 years old when she died.

I was nine, and the math nearly blew my mind. She had been alive for more than a century, ten times as long as me. I knew this because the year before my father had whispered it into my ear, in that low and fascinated voice he used for story-telling.

“Did you know Old Grandma is 100 years old?”

My dad always called her Old Grandma, and Pawpaw called her “Mama,” but her given name was Esther. She was named after a character in the Bible, which I discovered one day while flipping through the giant gilt-edged book my parents got when they married. I liked the name Esther. I’d never heard it before.

I only have one memory of her — a very specific memory — of her sitting at the table during Thanksgiving dinner at my grandparents’, wearing a calico dress and her thin white hair pulled back in a bun. She was in a wheelchair, a blanket on her lap, and my Pawpaw was feeding her mashed potatoes with a spoon.

I was only seven or eight at the time. Later in the same evening she threw up the food she’d eaten, and I pretended not to watch out of the corner of my eye while my Pawpaw cleaned her dress with an old towel. In the car on the way back to my mom’s house, my dad said something I would never forget. “Old Grandma is old. Did you know she was in the Land Run?” (more…)

The account below was transcribed by a man named Edwin E. Stephens, who in 1944 was a friend of my family’s and also a reporter for a newspaper in Shawnee, Okla. Stephens appears to have been an amateur genealogist, as my family’s story is not the only one he wrote.

This project was inspired in part by Maud Newton and her Friday Ancestry posts, as well as series on Swapatorium. In all cases, I have done my best to stay true to the original documents I was given, including all spelling and punctuation.

Preface

Having known Mr. Catlege since my childhood, but not having seen him for many years, I have often wanted to interview him so I could write up his experiences of the early days for the Pottawatomie County Historical Society. This opportunity came early in March of this year when he came to our home in Shawnee and spent the night with us.

When I mentioned the subject of writing down his experiences so that those who came after us may know of the trials and triumphs of the early pioneers I found him eager to talk of the old days. I found, too, that his memory was extraordinarily clear for a man of his age, he being able to recall incidents of more than fifty years ago with the minutest detail.

Thinking it would be more readable and interesting, I have written the account in the first person, just as he told it to me.

— Edwin E. Stephens
May 29, 1944

(more…)

Oklahoma wasn’t settled in one fell swoop. The first land run, the most famous and largest one, occurred on April 22, 1889, and included lands in central Oklahoma — what would now be Oklahoma City and surrounding counties, even as far north as Stillwater. This is the date on which Oklahomans celebrate the holiday known as Land Run Day. (more…)

My daddy, taken in the late 1950s.

The first claim chosen by Walter Catlege was just west of a part of Oklahoma that would later be known as Trousdale. In the 1944 telling of his story, Catlege mentions the town, but if you were to look on a map of Oklahoma today you wouldn’t find it. The town that was named after the sheriff of Pottawatomie County is now considered one of Oklahoma’s more than 100 ghost towns. (more…)