Posts Tagged by Oklahoma

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. (more…)

Oklahoma Land Rush — public domain photo via Wikipedia

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

In November, I finished gathering my crop and on the ninth of that month went to the land office and filed on my claim. Mr, Griffin in the meantime had told the claim seekers that my land had been taken. I hired a neighbor, a Mr. Caddis, and his son with two wagons to move us to our new home. My wife and Mr. Caddis’ son drove his teams while Mr. Caddis drove my oxen to my wagon loaded with corn. I walked and drove our cattle which numbered seventeen head. We started early in the morning of November 20th and after driving hard, arrived on our claim by 11 o’clock of the second day. We put up the tent and set the cook stove outside under the trees, and by the time we got the wagons unloaded my wife had dinner ready to serve. (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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)