Part 5: The Pioneer Women
Thomas and Martha Catlege had two children when they gave up everything they owned in order to make the land run in 1891. A century is a long time, but it’s still difficult for me to imagine, when reading his accounts, that they settled Oklahoma only about 100 years ago — Catlege speaks extensively about the hardships they faced not only in clearing the land, but also in terms of isolation. At the time, there were no roads in Oklahoma, no neighbors, very few towns, very little commerce. Not to mention a lack of modern amenities such as electricity, telecommunication and easy access to medical care. Below, Catlege explains the hardships facing the women who settled Oklahoma, who shared not just manual labor responsibilities, but also full responsibility for the children of the family. Above, Old Grandma with my grandmother and my father, circa 1960.
During the summer of 1892 I built a log house with a side room to it which was our home for several years. Month by month and year by year my wife and I toiled, constructing buildings as needed, fencing and clearing more land. We knew there was only one way to establish a home in the new country and that was by hard work. The younger generation will never know the hardships and sacrifices the early pioneers endured to establish homes in the new country. It seems that there was a scarcity of everything except hardships and hard work. But we endured the hardships without know they were hardships, and few complained. With the passing of the years saw more land cleared, better houses built, roads constructed and our lot improved in other ways. We visioned better days ahead and struggled hard to make those dreams come true.
Speaking of hardships, I think a special tribute should be paid to the pioneer wife and mother who came with her husband and family and did more than her share in changing the wilderness into a land of homes. It is true the husband and father had his share of trials and tribulations in subduing the forests, breaking the land, meeting debts, fighting floods, and droughts, insects and sickness, and trying to provide his family with the better things of life, few of which he himself had known. But no historian can ever pay adequate tribute to those heroic women who came here in the early days and endured all the hardships their men folk did and then some.
After more than a half century I can still see those brave women huddled with their lonesome brood in a little log cabin in the wilderness, a full half mile or more from the nearest sign of life or human habitation. There was no daily mail, no telephone by which she might converse with a neighbor, no cloth for making garments to replace the rapidly disappearing ones on the children. What a deep feeling of homesickness must have enveloped these women as they toiled from day to day trying to provide the bare necessities for their families, knowing there was no returning over the long road to distant states where loved ones were left behind. What pangs of loneliness and despair they must have suffered as they gave birth to their young, buried their dead, and looked and longed for a better day. I can see them during the long hours of darkness while loved ones lingered on the precipice between life and death, with the nearest neighbor a mile away and the securing of a physician next to impossible. What loving care was shown and sacrifices made as the mother sat up far into the winter night sewing and knitting that her family might be comfortably clothed. Yet these women played and laughed with their children and cheered their little spirits while their own were sinking; rocked them to sleep and then placed them in their crude beds, then lay awake most of the night listening to the howling winds and planning for better things. It was then, rather than the exception, for the women to take their little ones to the field, place them on a pallet in the shade of a tree at the end of the rows while she chopped or pocked cotton or did other field work. Others may salute the heroes of war, but I take off my hat to those stout-hearted women who worked side by side with their husbands in transforming this county into what it is today.
To be continued…
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