Part 1: My full name is Thomas Overton Catlege
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.
Thomas Catlege was my Pawpaw’s grandfather, making him my father’s great-grandfather, and his daughter Esther was my great-grandmother, also known as “Old Grandma,” who died in 1989 at 101 years old.
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.
PrefaceHaving 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
My full name is Thomas Overton Catlege, and I was born in Polk County, Arkansas, March 29, 1857, so that I will be 87 years old within a few days. I do not know when my first ancestors came to America, but as far back as I know anything they were of old Southern stock, my parents having emigrated from Mississippi to Arkansas a few years before I was born.
When I was fourteen months old my father died, and four months later my mother passed away. My married sister, Mary Jane Pruitt, then took me to raise, and not long after the death of my parents my sister and her husband moved back to the home community in Mississippi where we lived until I was 12 years of age when we again pulled up stakes and went west, this time to Texas, settling in Montague County, then on the fringe of western settlement. Some farming was done there at that time and a little farther west the expansive Texas prairies were devoted almost exclusively to cattle raising, large ranches being sometimes 20 miles across.
Our new home in Texas was near the old Chisholm cattle trail, just south of the Red River crossing where it crossed from Texas into the Indian Territory. I have seen thousands of head of cattle driven up the trail on their way to railroad checkpoints in Kansas, as there were no railroads that far west in Texas at that time. The cattle would be started on the trail in the spring as soon as grass was big enough to sustain them and grazed through the Indian Territory to points on the Santa Fe railroad in Kansas, from where they were shipped to the eastern markets. It must be remembered that at the time there were no white settlements in what afterwards became known as Oklahoma, and both Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory were then spoken of as the Indian country. Though the cattle would often leave their winter range in Texas in poor condition, they would arrive at the Kansas shipping points two or three months later fat enough for market.
Some of these immense herds would number several thousand head, mostly longhorns, and would take several hours to pass a given point. Where the grass was good the herd was driven leisurely along, giving them time to graze. The old trail ran north through Montague County, and crossed Red River at the western edge of the Chickasaw nation just below where the little town of Ryan is now.
When I was seventeen years old I thought I was old enough to make my own way in the world, so left the home of my sister and brother-in-law. I worked for wages on farms and ranches a while and in 1884 made a crop with a boyhood friend, John Richardson, who had married a few years before. We made a good crop that year and on Christmas day, 1884, I was married to Martha Ponder. If we both live until next Christmas we will have been married sixty years. That is a long time for a woman to live with one man, but personally I have never seen the woman or women I preferred to that little girl I married in Texas so long ago.
The next year my wife and I rented a place adjoining the Richardsons and it happened that we continued to live as neighbors to this good family for the next forty years, they having moved to the Chickasaw country with us and to Pottawatomie County the same year we came.
I suppose it is the Irish in me that makes me love the soil, and since boyhood I have wanted to own a home of my own. I thought that opportunity had come in 1889, so I made a down payment of five hundred dollars on a farm, going in debt for the balance. My wife and I went to work in high hopes of some day getting that farm paid out, but fate played a trick on us. That year, our chief money crop, cotton, was almost a complete failure in Montague County, and we lost the place with all we had paid on it.
In April 1889, the Unassigned Lands in Oklahoma were opened to white settlement and there was a strong agitation for the opening of some of the Indian reservations. Having lost my farm, but still being land-hungry, I began to think of getting a home in the Indian country, and in July, 1890, moved with my family to old McGee, in the Chickasaw country, near where the present Stratford now is. Here we made a crop in 1891. By this time we had two children, Esther, a daughter, born in Montague county, Texas, and Oscar, a son born in McGee.
In the summer of that year it became certain that the Pottawatomie country, across the Canadian to the north, would be opened to white settlement, and I decided to secure a home there if possible. After finishing my crop in August I rode over to Johnsonville to try to get information as to when the new country would be opened. There I was told that it would be opened September 22nd, and was advised not to enter the country before then as I could be classified as a “sooner” and would not be allowed to file on a claim. Johnsonville was a little village of perhaps two stores and a blacksmith shop, located near the river a couple of miles north of the present Byars.
As the opening day was not far off I returned home, bought a tent and moved my family [to] Johnsonville where we waited three weeks for the run. While at Johnsonville I made the acquaintance of a Mr. Norris who had lived in the section for a number of years and who was familiar with the Pottawatomie country. He agreed to pilot me into the new country on the opening day and help me select a good claim. Soon after we arrived at Johnsonville others began to come in camping there and along the river awaiting to enter the promised land.
To be continued…
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