Territory to settle in Washita County. In Part IV, Dustin
Ward describes the towns closest to their farm, Cloud
Chief and Gotebo. Edna goes on to marry Walter Ward,
from a neighboring farm, and both end up working the
land together at Oak Creek Farm.
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Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
only recounts the long-ago days of old towns, but also the hardships
Oklahoma farmers faced amid the land speculation, weather, and
foreclosures by banks.
Until 1902, the closest town to the Stubblefields and Wards
was Cloud Chief, approximately eight miles north. Cloud Chief
was established in the Run of 1892 and was named for a
prominent Cheyenne Indian chief. It was the closest place for
the Stubblefields and Wards to buy sugar, flour, coffee or
anything else they needed. For a few years (until Cordell got
the railroad) Cloud Chief was the county seat of Washita
County.
To give an idea of what Cloud Chief was like back then, here is
an excerpt from an address given to the Oklahoma State
Historical Society by Edward Everett Dale, noted Oklahoma
educator and historian of the West: (I attended many a class in
Dale Hall, a building named after him on the OU campus.)
“My first visit to Cloud Chief must have been in the summer of
1898. More settlers were coming in, schools were springing up
rapidly and my brother was to conduct a county normal
institute at Cloud Chief for four weeks, which it was my
privilege to attend.
It was a very small town at this time, quite remote from any
railroad. There were a few stores, two hotels, the Iron and the
Central and two saloons known as the Elk Saloon and the Two
Brothers. The courthouse, which stood in the middle of the
central square, was a long, low wooden building consisting of
a single room. Desks were placed along the walls, each with a
chair and a sign designating it as the "office" of the county
clerk, sheriff, school superintendent, and so on. Only the
county treasurer's desk was separated from the rest of the
room by a low railing and had an iron safe beside it. In the
middle of the room were placed rows of chairs separated from
the desks of the county officers by a wide aisle. Here district
court was held, the judge sitting at a table just in front of the
first row of chairs.
Two young men teachers attending the county institute cooked
their meals over a campfire in the rear of the building and slept
each night on pallet beds on the courthouse floor. They had a
wide variety of choice since they could sleep in the office of the
county clerk, superintendent, sheriff, or any other county
officer, or in the district court room. All were enclosed by the
same four walls. Travelers also often stopped their covered
wagons back of the courthouse and slept inside on the floor,
particularly in cold or rainy weather. With no locks on the
doors it was in the true sense a "public building."
A short distance from the courthouse stood the jail, a low
wooden structure in which the county had recently installed
two steel cells of which the citizens of the town were
inordinately proud. Formerly the jail had consisted of only a
single room with a big cottonwood log inside to serve as a seat
for men confined there. Ordinary prisoners were merely put
inside and the door locked. More desperate offenders were put
inside, chained to the cottonwood log and the door locked.
The town's water supply came from a public well in the central
square fitted with a pump and trough. The water was clear but
so strongly impregnated with "gyp" that most of the supply for
household use was hauled from springs two or three miles
away or, in the case of some families, taken from a cistern.
Most of the some forty teachers attending the summer
institute boarded with families in town at a weekly rate of two
dollars. In some cases, however, there were no beds available
for men so they slept on blankets spread on the prairie grass.
The small ranchmen who had hoped and planned for an
indefinite period of free range soon realized the extent of their
error. Someone crossing the western part of the country on
horseback from north to south in 1899 saw almost no
settlement for many miles. In fact there was virtually none
from the Canadian to the valley of the Washita, which was the
better part of a day's ride. Some five or six years later there
was a family living on practically every hundred and sixty acre
homestead.”
author's great-grandparents. Cool
car!
Dustin Ward.
Gotebo wasn’t established until 1901 when the
Kiowa/Comanche lands were opened for settlement. These
lands were the first to be allocated through lottery instead of
land run. (The land runs resulted in too many disputed
claims.) Gotebo was first named Harrison, after former
President Benjamin Harrison. In 1904 the name was changed
to honor Kiowa Indian Chief Gotebo, who lived in the area of
Rainy Mountain. The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad
ran through town and was the closest railroad to the Oak
Creek Farm.
Because it had the railroad, Gotebo began to grow as Cloud
Chief began to decline. In its heyday, around 1920 or so, it had
two cotton gins, two banks, a dry goods store, post office,
variety store and a place to eat. It also had the Weiss
Drugstore, run by probably the only Jewish man in the area.
When it was torn down sometime around 1975 my uncle Jack
somehow acquired the original tin ceiling tiles and put them on
the ceiling of the old smokehouse on the farm. They are there
to this day.
Indians in the Area
About a mile east of Cloud Chief is a creek with a strange
name - “Two Baby Creek.” I’d always wondered how it got its
name, and in reading a history of Cloud Chief I came across
the reason. One of the famous Indians in the Cloud Chief area
was huge Arapaho named Two Baby. He got his name
because when he was born he was large enough for two
babies. He was popular with the settlers because he was
good-natured and loved to make people laugh. He lived in a
teepee alongside the creek that is named after him.
Another notable Indian was the Kiowa Chief Gotebo, who was
alive while my dad was growing up (died in 1927). Dad doesn’t
remember ever seeing him, though he said he saw many
Indians in town sitting on blankets and Chief Gotebo could
have been one of them. I asked dad if the Indians dressed as
whites or as Indians back then. He said about half and half,
but they always had braids. He said the government built the
Indians living around Rainy Mountain some frame houses, but
the Indians preferred to sleep in their teepees in winter and
their brush arbors in summer. They used the government
houses as barns or outhouses.
There is a story about Chief Gotebo’s bravery. There was a
bad flood on Rainy Mountain Creek in 1903, and a family’s
home was washed away and all drowned except for two little
boys who were able to cling to a tree. Gotebo heard them
yelling for help and swam out and brought each to safety.
In Herk’s tape Grandmother talks about a flood in “the Kiowa”
where her family was almost stranded. I wonder if it could
have been the 1903 flood mentioned above. Grandmother
says,
“Now after we were here several years we started to go back
down to the Kiowa and fish, just in wagons, you know, and an
old Indian down there at Rainy Mountain Creek said “Maybe so
heap waters, we better go back.” Well, we never paid any
attention to him and we went down there and it rained till we
didn’t get back. That’s when I was just a kid. Didn’t get back
until they started out, some of them, to looking for us. It had
rained, and there was just a lot of water down there in the
Kiowa, and it was flat you know.”
Then, of course, there was Big Tree. I told part of his story
earlier in this book, how he was a great Kiowa warrior and
was involved in the Warren Wagon Train Massacre and was
sentenced to hang along with Satanta. And I said that
Grandmother referred to him in Herk’s tape. Here is what she
said. “Big Tree . . . I’d seen him. I never tried to talk to him any,
but he lived right down on the Washita. I thought if I ever got
close to him he’d just take my head off. I’d read a history of
the Indian and white war, you know, and old Big Tree was in a
lot [of those battles.] I remember that he was telling some
men down at the mill – there was a mill down on the Washita
River - that the most regrettable thing he ever done was pitch
a baby up in the air and he caught it on his knife and killed it. It’
s nearly too bad to tell.”
My dad told me stories of Big Tree, too. He said all the kids
had heard stories about him and were afraid of him. They
would try to get past his place as fast as they could whenever
they went to Mountain View.
But there was no need for them to fear Big Tree any more
because he became peaceful in his old age. He converted to
Christianity and became a deacon and Sunday school teacher
in the Rainy Mountain Kiowa Baptist Church southwest of
Mountain View. He died at his home in 1929 and was buried in
the Rainy Mountain Cemetery close to Chief Gotebo, who died
two years earlier. I stopped there and found their graves.
Walter married. Photo courtesy Dustin
Ward.
My Grandmother met my Granddad when she was 12 years old, at Hagy school. He would walk to school from his house in the
grove southwest of the farm and take a shortcut across J.P.’s property to get to school. This is how Grandmother describes it
on my tape:
“My mother was combing my hair getting me ready for school. School was right down the hill there in that draw, you know. She
was combing my hair and your Granddad come steppin’ across the prairie out there – it wasn’t broke up, it was still grass, you
know – and he was steppin’ out I don’t know how far at one step. He was hurrying to get to school. And I said, “Mama, there’s
one of the Ward boys. He’s mine if I never get him.” And she stopped and told me to get my mind on my books. But it wasn’t
long ‘til I was fourteen. I was, I guess, about twelve then, between eleven or twelve. It wasn’t long after we come to this country.
And when I was about fourteen I’d walk with him down to that little school. And I’d had a date with him. Well, when I was
eighteen-and-a-half and he was twenty-three we got married.”
They got married on December 11, 1905 in a buggy in front of “Granddad Eskew’s house” near Lake Valley. Granddad Eskew
was one of the original pioneers in the area. He wasn’t related – everyone just called him “Granddad Eskew.” He had a two-
story house, which wasn’t that common back then, and it was considered one of the nicest houses in the area.
About the same time, J.P. and Alice moved to Cloud Chief where J.P. got started in the cattle business. J.P. leased some Indian
land and a school section and ran cattle all up and down the Washita River. Grandmother said at one time he had over 200 head.
He also would help supply stores in Cloud Chief by making wagon freighting trips to El Reno. Those trips took around ten days out
and back.
So Granddad and Grandmother had the Oak Creek Farm to themselves then. It wasn’t long, though, before J.P. asked W.D. to go
into the cattle business with him. So Grandmother and Granddad moved into a little house on a hill outside Cloud Chief, close to J.
P. and Alice. Granddad tried running cattle with J.P., but it didn’t last long. They didn’t get along too well in business together. (In
Uncle Herk’s tape you can hear Leta saying in the background it was because they were “two hard-headed men.”) So
Grandmother and Granddad moved back to Oak Creek. By this time they had their first two daughters, Leta Grace (Lete) and
Edith Mae (Goob), both born in Cloud Chief. (Birth dates, etc. are listed in family chart at the end of this book. Also, I’ve heard it
said that only Leta was born in Cloud Chief. But Grandmother says unmistakably in both Herk’s and my tapes that both Leta and
Goob were born there.)
The next nine children were born at home on the Oak Creek farm. The first was another daughter, Emma Clorina (Punnie). Then
Grandmother started in with the boys. First was Glenn Price (Son, Red, my dad), then Claude Francis (Jack). The house had only
one bedroom. That obviously wouldn’t do with such a large family, so Granddad built two rooms on the north side of the house.
Then the other boys came along: Jesse Ray (Tink), Leo Dyer (Boake), Walter Dean (Dude), Hershel Lloyd (Herk), Stanley Joe
(Stan), and Donald Wayne (Pug).
Doctor William W. Miller of Gotebo delivered all the Ward children born on the Oak Creek farm. When Grandmother felt her time
coming, W.D. would ring Doc Miller on their old hand-cranked telephone. The doc would ride his buggy out, deliver a baby, and
charge W.D. $20.
In the interim, J.P. was prospering in the cattle business and was able to acquire enough land to deed a 160-acre farm over to
each of his three children. He deeded the Oak Creek farm to Grandmother and Granddad, and Hershel and Belle were deeded
farms closer to Cloud Chief.
This made W.D. the first Ward to actually own a farm, rather than tenant farm for someone else. My dad told me that W.D.’s
brothers would tease him that he had “married a farm.” I’m sure that rankled Granddad and hurt his pride. He soon acquired
some land, on his own, in Beaver County (in the Oklahoma Panhandle) and planned to move his family up there. But for some
reason he changed his mind, and I’ve heard it suggested that Grandmother was a big part of the reason. I think she liked it right
where she was and saw no point in pulling up stakes to settle in “No Man’s Land,” as the Panhandle was called in those days.
So W.D. started making improvements to the Oak Creek farm, by himself at first and with the help of his daughters and sons as
they grew old enough. He put up fences. He terraced the land. He broke the soil and planted cotton. He built the chicken and
brooder houses, the smokehouse and hog sheds.
At one point he was able to purchase 160 acres across the road to the north, but times turned bad. There was the Dust Bowl
and the Great Depression. Gotebo’s two banks went bankrupt. Dad said his dad lost everything in his savings account – $17.
Granddad also lost his 160-acres across the road because he couldn’t make the payments. My dad told me it’s the only time he
ever saw his dad with tears in his eyes.