Thomas Catlege sums up his experiences as a pioneer and talks about how the world has changed in the 50 years since he settled in Oklahoma.

My wife and I are particularly proud of our family; we have taught them to work, to be self-reliant and honest and to make their own way in the world. We have long realized that the most valuable thing we could do for our children was to develop in them a strong and sturdy character. Besides our six children we now have 39 grandchildren and 28 great-grandchildren. Our fondest hope is that they will all be strong, resolute men and women and be a blessing to all who know them. We always keep and open house and it is our proudest moment when some of them come to visit us.

I have always helped my children so long as they were trying to help themselves. Long ago, when our children first began to marry off, I made it a rule to give each of the sons a team of mules when he became twenty-one and to each of the girls I gave a milk cow and two or three other cattle. We have raised three sons and three daughter, all grown and married, and I have fulfilled this promise to each and every one of them.

With the passing of the years has come better times. I early gave up the raising of so much cotton and at one time marketed several hundred bushel of apple a season. Later we stressed the raising of livestock. For some years we milked from ten to 30 head of cows and for seventeen years without missing a week, I shipped cream to one creamery in Shawnee. Of late years, since help has been so hard to obtain, I have raised beef cattle. I now have a herd of 36 white faced.

One thing I am particularly thankful for is the excellent health my wife and I have enjoyed. I never had a doctor with myself until about three years ago. That is, I think, quite a record for a man 87 years old. I attribute my long life and good health to the fact that I have always worked hard and enjoyed it. I have tried to be content with what I had, and not let problems I could not solve get the best of me. My wife and I have tried to keep abreast of the times and enjoy the conveniences we could afford. I early bought a car and still can drive one anywhere I care to. We have electric lights and butane gas in our farm home. While we have nothing elaborate, it is a far cry from the simpler, primitive life of those bygone years of half a century ago.

While I am proud that we have progressed in a way I feel, too, that many good things have passed with the old days, The old days and ways are but a memory, yet sometimes I look back to them with a wistful tenderness not untinged with regret. It was a good life despite it’s hardships and disappointments that came to every settler struggling for the upbuilding of a new country. But these served only to strengthen the fibre of a people and to make the generation who grew up under such conditions one of strong, resolute men and women who were prepared to give to the community and to the nation services in ever-increasing measure.

The pioneer days are gone and with them the old pioneers. As I look around I find that my wife and I are the only couple living in this section who made the run fifty-three years ago. Most of the others are dead, others have moved away. I still remember those noble old characters we lived among, and I seldom pass the sites of their old homes without thinking of them. What a surprise would greet them if they could step back into life and view the changes that have taken place. The trail over which the covered wagons of the pioneer settlers rolled into the country has broadened into a paved highway over which we can now travel as far in an hour as the old pioneers could go in two days. The former village is a modern little city; consolidated schools in the rural districts, city high schools, colleges and beautiful churches have grown up to add to the cultural resources of a prosperous people. New homes have been built which are in sharp contrast to the little log cabin on the claim. Oil has been discovered, and tall derricks pierce the sky-line where giant trees once stood, and where the coyote howled and the whippoorwill once called the air is rent day and night with the sound of heavy machinery drawing liquid gold from the ground. It is my rare privilege to say, “All of which I saw, and part of which I was.”

At the time of the opening and for several years afterwards there was not a railroad in the county. Outside the small villages, Lexington, in Cleveland County, and Purcell, in the Chickasaw country, were the nearest trading centers for those who lived in the southern part of the country. On account of the long distances and poor roads, few trips were made to these towns. Wagons and horseback were the only means of transportation, and the trip usually required two days. Families made about one trip a year to these towns, and that in the fall of the year to buy their winter supplies; the night was usually spent in the wagon yard of which every town had one or more.

It was not long after the opening until cotton gins were erected at different points, but we had to take our cotton to Lexington or Purcell to sell it. I have hauled many a load of cotton seed to the oil mill at Tecumseh also, a distance of more than twenty miles. In the early days while I was clearing out my land I hauled wood by ox team to Lexington and Purcell and sold it for from $1 to $1.50 a load. I would start at four o’clock in the morning and would be late in the night getting back home if I did not stay over night in town. Today that seems a pitiable sum to work two or three days for, but commodities were cheap then and that was the best we could do. Of course we could not afford any luxuries, only the bare necessities.

Many of the settlers who came here during the run or soon afterwards became discouraged and drifted on, but through floods and droughts and other misfortunes those of stamina stayed, some from hope, some too dogged to give up, some because they had no means with which to go, or could see no prospect elsewhere. It was a case of necessity that they got by on their meagre incomes; they knew how to depend on themselves, and they carried on with all the tenacity they had, all for the sake of a home — the castle of their hopes, the shire of their unconquerable spirits.

I might mention here that in the grazing in the early days my wife would saddle her horse and drive our cattle each morning to Greenhead prairie, two miles away, leaving our small children to take care of themselves while she was away.

When we first settled in Pottawatomie County our post office was Moral, three miles to the northeast. A Mr. Walker was the postmaster. The building was a little double log cabin with a hallway between. The family live in one room and kept a store and the post office in the other. Later old Moral was moved one-half mile east where it grew into one of the largest villages in the south part of the county before the coming of the railroads, having a population of about 100 in 1902.

Soon after settlers had built homes and began to improve their claims they began to think about the cultural side of life, and it was not long until schools and churches were established, In the summer of 1893 we organized a school district and built a school house. As there was very little tax money then, and the practice of voting bonds had not yet come into vogue, the district borrowed money from W.C. Paine to buy the material for the school house. Most of the work in erecting the building was donated by the patrons. Timbers for the sills and sleepers were cut in the forest nearby and ‘snaked” to the building site with ox teams. The lumber was hauled from Lexington, eighteen miles away. As was the custom in those days the school house was used for church services and all community activities.

To be continued…

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…

Having eaten dinner and Mr. Caddis and son has started on their return home, my wife looked out over our claim and said, “We have a place and I am proud of it, but how are we going to make a go of it here in this wilderness?” I said, “I can show you better than I can tell you,” and I picked up my ax and started cutting logs.. There was lots of good timber on the place and I was young and strong and a good hand with an ax, and by night I had enough logs cut and in place to make a bin as high as my head for my corn, besides I had floored with with puncheons. That night I unloaded my corn into it. The next day I cut poles and built a lot for my cattle. A few days later I had completed a log cabin which we used for a kitchen while we continued to live in the tent that winter.

I realized that if I cleared out enough land to make a crop on I would have to work day and night burning brush to make a light to chop by. Practically the entire place was covered with heavy timber which had to be cleared, but by planting time I had eight or nine acres cleared. The land was new and fertile and the first crop we made on our place, in 1892, we made two bales of cotton and all the corn we needed for another year.

For the benefit of the younger generation I shall give a description of this country as it appeared at the opening. Except for a few scattered cabins of the Indians and inter-married whites, with their small clearings, the country was in the same primeval state as it had been from time immemorial. Much of the country was covered with heavy timber with a occasional prairie glade of a few acres. Along the creeks were thickets of underbrush and tall trees of pecan, walnut, elm, cottonwood, and several kinds of oak. On the hillsides postoak, blackjack and hickory were the principle trees which grew in profusion. Grass grew from two to three feet high all over the prairies and woods, Wild fruits, such as strawberries, plums, grapes, blackberries, and dewberries grew in abundance. Acorns, pecans, walnuts, and hickory nuts were plentiful. The timbered regions, outside the creek bottoms, were generally free of underbrush, due to the burning of the younger growth with the grass in the fall and winter, and a wagon could be driven almost anywhere through the woods. Very few of the Pottawatomie Indians who had been given allotments were living on their land, and in consequence, it remained unfenced and on which ranged vast herds of horses and cattle. The settlers considered these unfenced lands as common grazing grounds. Wild game abounded, such as deer, turkeys, prairie chickens, while the woods and fields were alive with quail.

The early settlers got much of their food by killing the game and gathering the wild fruits and nuts. It was several years before orchards and vineyards came into bearing and these wild fruits were a God-send to the meagre larders of the settlers.

There were many springs over the country and the presence of a good spring often determined the location of a settler’s cabin, as these springs for several years were the source of water supply.

To be continued…

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.

For as far back into my childhood as I can remember there hung a painting in the living room of my grandparents’ home in Lexington, Okla., an arts-and-crafts monstrocity that depicted in primary color detail a cowboy walking along a dirt road. His head hung low, and along his path were shacks and picket fences and a curve in the dirt that led to a large shop, presumably either a post office or general store. The painting was a persistent fixture in my memory, so much so that I can even recall exactly where it hung for almost 20 years (alongside various other relics of folk art including faux-rusted tin Coca-Cola signs and the black-and-white photo seen here) but I never thought much about it until I found it hanging in the music room of my father’s house, entirely out of place. It was then that I learned the story of Trousdale, Oklahoma ghost town and birthplace of my grandfather.

The next morning Avants and I rode over to the Pete Greemore spring, about a mile to the northeast, where we found a number of settlers who had come to get water. Among the men was Tom Griffin, a white man who had married a Pottawatomie woman and who had been alloted land on the north side of Salt Creek, a mile north of the spring. In conversation with Griffin I told him I would give him that saddle horse I was riding if he would locate me on a claim with some good bottom land. He replied that he could and we rode over and looked at a tract of 120 acres adjoining his. This suited me and I told Griffin I would take it and for him to inform others that the land had been taken. This 120 is in section 26, 7n, 2e, and I also staked my claims to a forty in the adjoining section n the east, making 160 acres in all.

Avants and I then started to Oklahoma City to file on the land. We made it to the Big Jim crossing on Little River that night where we camped, using our saddle blankets for beds and saddles for pillows. The country then abounded in wild game and we could hear the wild animals around us that night in Little River Bottom.

We started early the next morning through the woods and across the prairies and ate breakfast in Moore, probably twelve miles from where we camped on Little River. Arriving at the land office in Oklahoma City we were informed that the filing fee was $14.50. We only had $14.00 between us. Therefore there was only one thing to do; I must go back home and pick some cotton before I could file. I returned to Johnsonville, got my family and pulled up my tent and went home to gather my crop.

To be continued…

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.

The lands claimed in April 1889 were referred to as the Unassigned Lands, areas ceded to the government by the Creek and Seminole tribes following the Civil War, since these tribes had supported and fought with the Confederacy. At the time this area was pure wilderness, unsettled by whites or other Indian tribes. In all, it amounted to roughly five thousand square miles. An estimated 50,000 people, a number of whom, like Walter Catlege, had never had the opportunity to own land before, made the first run.

No doubt hearing of the success of the first run, Walter Catlege decided to try his luck in the second opening, which took place in September of 1891.

The day of the opening, September 22, 1891, arrived, and how well do I remember it! I mounted my good saddle horse and my wife and children accompanied me to the river from where we were to make the start when the signal was given. Fully five thousand people were lined up at that point on the Chickasaw side to make the run. Some were in wagons with all their worldly belongings, ready to establish a home in the wilderness as soon as a suitable plot of vacant land could be found; others were in carts and on horseback, the latter having a decided advantage in getting the best land first. Sam Paul, a Chickasaw citizen, and of the family for which Pauls Valley was named, had charge of the run at this particular point.

Just before the signal was given for the run to start I began to look for Mr. Norris who had agreed to pilot me, but he could nowhere be found. I never knew what became of him, but I suppose he struck a better bargain with someone else and gave me the slip. However, I went back to my wife and told her of my predicament, but, I will have us a home anyway when I come back. Her brother, Will Avants, was making the run with me.

Promptly at high noon, Sam Paul, who was riding up and down in front of the line of intended settlers, fired the signal shot and the race was on. Wagons and carts, footmen and horsemen raced pell-mell across the sandbars, through the waters of the river and out on the Pottawatomie side where they scattered hither and yon in the mad scramble for homes. Many accidents occurred, some serious, in the mad rush. Will Avants and I came up on a man who had been run over. We offered to help him but he urged us to go on and stake our claims, saying we could not do him much good.

We put spurs to our horses, we were both riding good ones, and ran on probably three or four miles when we stopped and looked at a piece of land which suited us. This track was located a mile or so west of where the town of Wanette was built some twelve years later. While we were looking over this land and [sic] Indian came up and informed us we could not file on this particular tract as it was an Indian allotment. We asked about the choice claims and he told us up on Salt Creek, about five miles further north was the best land, “But,” he said, “don’t get too near the creek, as most of the land along the creek is alloted land. Get branch bottom land near the creek valley and you will be safe in getting the land subject to fillings.” We followed the Indian’s instructions and ran on to the north. We had gone probably five miles when we came to a tract which I thought might be as good as I could find, as the settlers were now fast staking their claims, and I told Will here I believed I would take my chance. We dismounted and stayed on the tract that night. This tract was southwest 1/4 of section 34 in township 7 north, range 2 east, three miles west and a mile south of the present Trousdale. It was all upland with no creek or branch bottom and was not what I wanted, but I decided to file on it if I could not do any better.

To be continued…

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

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…

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?”

At Red Oak Elementary, Land Run Day was practically a holiday.

Every year on the morning of April 22, all the students and teachers in the school would line up on the soccer field we shared with the YMCA, and at the sound of the whistle, we were off, bagged lunches in hand, to stake our miniature claims.

The younger kids had learned about Boomers and Sooners, prairie houses and pioneers, and got to choose between Indian costumes with construction paper feather headdresses, or Cowboy costumes with boots, hat and spurs. The older kids built miniature covered wagons out of Radio Flyers, and used wooden stakes and lengths of twine to section off their “plots.” The teachers manned land registration stations, and once lunch was over, games would commence on the field — wagon races, gold prospecting, prizes for the best outfits. Pistols and arrows, even toys, were specifically forbidden by the school, but some kids snuck them in anyway.

I remember sitting on an old blanket in the grassy field next to my school. I was wearing a dress my mom had made, blue with silver thread and silver rick-rack, like the Native American girls who performed at the cultural center. I sat, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and watched as the other kids dragged their covered wagons around and ran from square to square, laughing and playing. And for some reason this memory is always connected to my memory of Old Grandma, blanket across her lap, and my father whispering her life story in my ear.

Old Grandma, circa 1970s, with my aunt Suzanne

I never appreciated Oklahoma until I left. As a teenager, I found it stifling, though my friends and I joked that we were the only 16-year-olds in the country who paid less than a dollar for gasoline, and who could attend late-night parties in abandoned pastures without curfew or concern. As a young adult, I dreamed of other places, of living a life better and more exciting than my parents. It was only after college, after I moved away, that my visits home revealed to me an Oklahoma I’d never known. The dilapidated motels along every highway were actually shining examples of mid-century architecture, and the Stockyards downtown were the last remaining icon of Oklahoma’s pioneer days, where you could get a 10-ounce steak for under $20 and a home-brewed beer on the side. I often asked myself, “Does everyone feel this way about the place they came from, or is it being thousands of miles away that makes me sentimental?”

My family has plenty of stories. Who knows how many are true. They were real Okies, like the Steinbeck novels, leaving the dust bowl for California and returning generations later. My favorite involves Bonnie and Clyde, who sought refuge one night at a farm house belonging to a distant relative of ours. The next morning the couple was gone, but they left a bundle of money on the table to express their gratitude, and it was only then that the relative realized who they were. Another tale involves the spelling of our German last name — now Anglacized after my great-great-grandfather killed a man and fled the law.

True or not, these stories fascinated me as a child, which is why at Thanksgiving two years ago, when I was handed a booklet of eight densely-typed pages, stapled in one corner and photocopied to distortion, I was immediately engrossed. The pages, originally dated May 29, 1944, provide a first-hand, first-person account of my paternal family’s journey into Oklahoma by way of the 1891 Land Run. It was the story of how my Old Grandma, Esther Hoofard, three years old at the time, made the journey with her family into the territory that later became the nation’s 46th state.

November 16, 2007, marks Oklahoma’s Statehood Centennial. I had been trying to think of ways to participate in the celebration from so far away, and was considering writing about the land run story when a strange coincidence occurred. Just a few months after I received the first narrative, I was sent a second first-person account in the form of an email from my maternal grandmother, which included nearly 30 pages detailing the life story of a relative on that side, his family’s involvement in the Civil War, and ultimately, their settlement in Oklahoma.

Reading through both stories, with a hundred years of hindsight at my disposal, I sometimes feel a sense of sadness at the way history unraveled. I’m often torn between pride in the pioneer spirit Oklahoma is so famous for and shame in the knowledge that my beloved homeland was taken and “reassigned” from the people who rightfully owned it so that my own relatives could make use of it instead. But that’s the beauty of history — it is neither made nor lived in hindsight. And if ever there was a good reason to keep a journal, it’s accounts like these. An average person’s story — the physical hardships and financial struggles, as well as the successes — give us a glimpse into what life was like for the many Okies 100 years ago. Here’s a hint — it wasn’t all gunfights and cowboy ballads.

Over the next several weeks, to mark the celebration of Oklahoma’s 100th birthday, I will be posting excerpts from both biographies, in the hopes that not only my family’s story can be preserved, but also that the story of everyday Oklahomans, the one few people hear, can be shared. To read Part 1 of the Centennial Project, start here.