An Oklahoma Homestead and Oil Booms
by Helen Erwin Campbell
In 1911 Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band was stirring American music lovers; Madam Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry; the first practical automobile self-starter was developed; and Dad and Mom homesteaded in Oklahoma on land about ten miles from Grandpa Hayworth’s farm in Cleveland in Pawnee County. According to Mom’s recollection, they lived in a little one-room shack with Goldie, three and Flossie, one.
Dad remembered that he had a team of big mules, and one of the crops he grew was watermelon. He broke the sod, dropping seeds as he plowed. Evidently conditions were right, as he produced a bumper crop that year. He would often bring one to the house, split it open, and set Goldie on the ground with her legs circling the melon. With spoon in hand, she would be busy, quiet and happy for thirty minutes or more.
There were lots of snakes in the area, and Dad had undoubtedly tried to warn her about them, but at three Goldie was unafraid of most everything. One day Dad heard her laughing and calling out, “Come here Daddy, I got him!” He went to investigate. There was Goldie with her foot firmly planted on the head of a squirming snake. “I got him Daddy!” She looked up proudly at her father. He grabbed her, killed the snake, and undoubtedly sternly pointed out that she was not to hunt snakes in the future.
Dad never proved-up on the claim. As Mom explained, times were hard, and they decided to abandon it. Perhaps also, my father’s tendency to not wanting to be “tied down” had something to do with it. All of his life he tended to scratch his “itchy-foot” when he perceived that there was an opportunity “just over the hill or down the road a-piece.”
In later years Dad and Grandpa Hayworth were not always on the friendliest terms. Perhaps Grandpa Hayworth was disappointed when his son-in-law chose not to stick it out on the claim. Dad did not react well to criticism, and Grandpa’s verbal disapproval would not have been received well at all. Clifford remembered that there was always a strain between the two.
After my parents left the claim they moved to Fargo, Oklahoma where Dad ran a dray – somewhat like a modern-day motorized delivery service – delivering freight from the train depot to local merchants. Since they lived only a short distance from town Mom would often push Flossie in her go-cart and, with Goldie, walk to the main-street stores. One day, when she went outside to get Goldie to dress for the planned outing, Goldie was nowhere in sight. Mom put Flossie in her cart and began looking. In just a few minutes she spotted Goldie. She was walking down the street towards home in her stocking feet, carrying her shoes. When questioned where she had been she just shrugged her little shoulders and replied, “Just around.”
Another day Mom was in a store shopping when she again missed Goldie. After several anxious minutes Mom found her out back playing with a little red wagon which had caught her eye in the store. Dad later bought the wagon for her. She frequently just wandered off, seemingly just because of her curiosity about the big world out there. Mom would often look out and see Flossie but not Goldie. When asked where her sister went Flossie would point, and Mom would know in which direction to search.
As well as liking to wander, Goldie seemed to have trouble sitting still. Often, while in church, she would wiggle loose from the restraining hands of Mom and Dad and walk up the aisle to be with the preacher. Dad, more than once, had to spend the time during the church service outside with her. On the other hand, Dad, not being overly devout anyway, could spend the time chewing and spitting.
In 1912 Woodrow Wilson was elected president; moving picture shows were becoming popular; the F.W. Woolworth Company was founded; the first successful parachute jump was made; the S.S. Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, and Mom & Dad had a son. The family was in Wakita, Grant County, Oklahoma when Clifford was born on Jun 29. After mother and child were doing well Dad and the doctor went out on the back porch to have a chew, whereupon Dad asked what he owed him. The doctor, eyeing the two halves of a hog carcass that Dad had butchered that morning said, “Well, I could sure use some fresh meat.” Dad took a half down, cut it in half. So, Clifford’s delivery was paid in full with the hind-quarter of fresh pork.
Part of the time in Wakita Dad worked for the railroad. He had his own team and skip-loader, moving earth and preparing railroad bed for new tracks. He was paid $2.29 for he and his team. When that job was finished he rejoined his father’s crew of teamsters.
In 1913 the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution brought the country income tax; Henry Ford invented and started using the modern assembly line in his plants; “fashionable people” were dancing the foxtrot, and a loaf of bread cost 20 cents.
Oil had been discovered in Oklahoma and Kansas a few years earlier with relatively little fanfare. But the oil boom years really started in 1895, when Henry Foster of Kansas acquired a blanket lease that covered the entire Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma. Oil recovery started slow initially due to inadequate development capital and poor transportation, but most of all because of reduced demand as more discoveries in the Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas areas were made. However, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, demand for petroleum products gradually increased as Henry Ford and others began producing automobiles that the “common man” could afford. And, as the need for fuel and lubricants grew, “boom towns” popped up wherever a new crude oil discovery was announced.
It was in this time and setting that Grandpa Mike and his sons found that they could make big money working in the oilfields. They owned horses, mules and wagons that were necessary to haul the heavy equipment, and they had the expertise to handle the teams. Grandpa Erwin had handled horses and mules his entire life, and he had taught his sons well.
Dad owned his own team and wagon and followed the oil booms individually at times, but he would also work with his father and brothers as well. Goldie recalled a trip they made in a covered wagon, probably going from Kansas to Oklahoma, to join up with Dad’s parents and some of his brothers. They carried all of their possessions in that wagon. It was their home when they travelled and when they arrived at their destination a tent was set up to live in, and Dad used the wagon for his work.
Goldie recalled one such trip when Clifford was still a baby. He had been crying for milk, but they didn’t have any and they were still several hours from their destination. About this time Dad spotted some milk cows in a pasture next to the road. He stopped, grabbed pail, climbed through the fence and quickly milked one of them. He came back with enough milk for all of his children.
Another time, as Dad was moving his family where there was supposedly work, Mom complained that there was almost no food left, and that she didn’t know what to fix for supper. As the story was told years later, it was just about that time when they came upon a flock of chickens that had strayed out of a farmer’s yard and onto the roadway, scratching and pecking for possible edible tidbits. Dad slowed the wagon. “Here, Hazel,” he said, “Take the reins, and let them poke a bit.” He added, “How’d you like a nice fat hen for supper.?”
While Mom handled the team, Dad fashioned a hook on a rake handle and hooked an unsuspecting hen by the head and plopped her over into the wagon, and with a quick hand over her beak to silence any squawks of alarm. He then wrung her neck and handed her to Mom. They had their dinner.
At one point they were travelling through the Osage Indian Reservation. Though the Indians were friendly, Dad and Mom would have preferred being further from them when night came, but they had no choice. It was getting late, so they camped in a clump of trees a short distance from a bend in the road. They couldn’t see very far, but they couldn’t easily be seen either.
Dad claimed that the team he was driving could smell Indians, and they were especially restless that night, all night. Dad wasn’t afraid of physical danger for his family, but it was not unusual for Indians to sneak into a camp at night and steal horses. Without their team they would have been stranded. While his family slept in the wagon, Dad spent the entire night on the ground under the wagon with his rifle cradled in his arms. At daybreak he said to Mom: “Come on Hazel, let’s get going.” Mom fixed a quick breakfast, and they broke camp, wasting no time in getting underway.
Just around the bend in the road they were startled to see an Indian encampment not more than a mile from where they had spent a restless night. According to Dad’s story-telling years later, he drove right on past them, not slackening the pace of the team. Mom and the children watched the camp with wide eyes, but the Indians paid little attention to them. Nevertheless, Mom (according to Dad) was much relieved when they were well past the Indian camp, and Dad was anxious to get on down the road to the next oilfield teamstering job.
1914 Mom was born in Longton, Kansas, and her mother Melissa died when she was only nine. When her father went back to Oklahoma homestead after her death, he left his middle child, my mother with his sister Ellen Stilwell, and took his older daughter and his young son with him. Thus, her father had little impact on her life after that; she considered her Uncle tom and Aunt Ellen her parents after that.
Aunt Ellen, though domineering and demanding – and who was often not very secretive about favoring her own child – did nevertheless teach my mother how to cook and keep house; to make a garden and look after chickens. All skills that young ladies in a pioneering age needed to know, and which would be very valuable in the years ahead when it was necessary for her family “get by,” and “get ahead.”
Mom, in turn, passed these same homemaking skills along to her daughters. Goldie, particularly, was an apt pupil and a real help to mother. When she was about six and Clifford was an infant, Mom heard him screaming. She hurried in from her garden and found Goldie trying to change a diaper (way, way, before disposable ones), only to discover that Goldie had stuck him with a safety pin.
Dad always had quite a repertoire of stories, and one of those was about a cyclone (now we call them tornados). It seems after the storm had passed over one small neighborhood house was completely missing, along with the owner and his wife. Everyone was concerned, and a search was started. They were found a short time later. According to Dad the cyclone had picked up their shack, along with its occupants, and deposited it a mole or so away, smack-dab in the middle of the road. Supposedly, when they were discovered the man was sitting on his front stop making his pipe and his wife was inside cooking breakfast.
Dad would laugh at his own story and repeat the punch line:
“There he was sittin’ on the stoop, smokin’ his pipe, and his old lady was inside cookin’ breakfast!” Then he would slap his leg and laugh again.
Sometimes Dad’s stories needed to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.
1915 Dad and Mom were still living in Longton when Michael Raymond was born on September 4. He weighed a hefty thirteen pounds. Mom said years later that he was born under primitive conditions. Actually, for the entire time that Dad followed the oilfield work the family lived in primitive conditions, but I suppose, in Mom’s mind, 1915 was especially bad. In fact, all of her eight children were born at home, under conditions that most Americans would today call primitive. None of the family houses, until 1942, had running water or indoor bathrooms.
The new baby was nicknamed “Bub,” and was known by that until he grew up. As an adult he chose to be called his middle-given name of Raymond. No one seems to know why. Dad was disappointed, and always grumbled that it was wife Alma’s choice rather than his. After all, Dad had chosen Michael as a first name, honoring Grandpa Erwin. While “Bub” was still an infant the family moved to Drumright, Oklahoma. Mom said years later – when she responded in a letter to my request for family background information – “We were in Drumright when Bub was a baby, and from there we went to Augusta (Kansas).”