Willis and Lizzie (Sipe) Youngblood; Minnie (Youngblood) Sloan, age 87

This is the story of their daughter, Minnie, born a month after he died, as composed from a tape recording made by her daughter, Jean (Sloan) Hardwick, one week after Minnie's 90^th birthday. It gives an insight to the some of the hardships and harsh realities of pioneer life faced in early Oklahoma Indian Territory.

(While not quoted verbatim, this was written as first person singular to effectively tell the story ~ dq).

I was born in 1892 in Alpena, Arkansas. My father died before I was born and my mother and I lived with my grandparents, Riley and Mollie Sipe. My mother worked out, so my grandparents took care of me until I was about two years old. Then I went to live with my aunt and uncle, Francis Youngblood.

I lived with my uncle and aunt until I was five, when my folks left Arkansas to homestead in Oklahoma. They talked like they were raising good crops out there and the folks decided to just pack up their belongings in a covered wagon and move. (My grandmother (Youngblood?) lived with my aunt and uncle, too, and she took me over to my mother's so I could go to Oklahoma with them. It was about two miles, I think, and we had to cross a stream of water. I can remember walking a foot log across the water to get to my mother's. We left Arkansas in two wagons. My mother had just given birth to a baby boy, and my step-daddy had two children when they married, so there were six of us in one wagon. My (Sipe) grandparents were in the other and they had a big family ~ about 8 or 10 of them. I don't know how long it took us to get there, but it was several days.

That was when Oklahoma was a new country and just opened up. It was Indian Territory, then, and there wasn't many towns or houses ~ no railroads; so we had to live in tents or brush arbors, or anything we could fix up. We settled in the neighborhood of Perkins. There wasn't a town there, yet, but they were going to build one and that's what they called the place. They finally put up a post office and, I think, another building ~ maybe a store, but we had to go quite a ways to trade. We couldn't just go to the store, like you do, here; we had to drive maybe all day to get where you could buy groceries. They'd take a day for it and maybe some of the neighbors would go, all in the same wagon.

We got an old house ~ I don't remember how many rooms it was, but it was on the bank of a creek called Deep Fork. The creek ran right in front of the door and sometimes it would overflow ~ get out of the bank and flood the farm land for miles around. It was common for a storm to come through in the summers. My folks were afraid of storms, but and we had a cellar, or dugout they called them, and when we saw a bad cloud come up, we'd go to the cellar. I was kinda afraid the water would come up and get in the cellar, because it was between the house and the creek, but we made it.

We stayed in Perkins until we moved to another place ~ I forget what they called it, but it wasn't a town at that time, either. When the railroad came, a town was built, it was called Carney. We lived in a tent in Carney and they worked on the railroad. The railroad ran from Tulsa, I think, to Guthrie, or maybe Oklahoma City ~ I don't remember which. I think it was Carney where I first went to school ~ that's the first place I can remember going. They didn't have no schools when we first went out there. I don't remember how old I was, but I just got to the fourth grade. We didn't go to school, much ~ we had to pick cotton when that was going on. The only time we got to go to school was when it would come a snow or rain, and it would be too wet to pick. If it snowed, we'd usually put on out coats and gloves and wrap our feet up in tow sacks to get out and snap bolls. It would be too cold to pick the cotton and we'd just pick the bolls off and take them in the house, where they were piled in a corner of the kitchen. Then, of a night, maybe some of the neighbors would come in and we'd pick the cotton out of the bolls. The kids all had to pick their shoes full, before they could go to bed.

Mama had a garden with a fence that run kinda crossways across the path to it and we had to carry water from the creek. The fence was just one strand of new barbed wire, stretched across the path. I was going after a bucket of water and was looking at the garden, with my head turned kinda sideways, and somehow struck that wire just right. It cut my face from my eye, clear down on my throat. I went back to the house and mama washed it and kinda bound it up. We kept it wrapped 'til it had healed up. Another time, she had a garden that we had to cross a branch-like to get to. The stream ran across a big flat rock and moss was growing on it. Mama was working in the garden and I had started over there, walking on the rock to cross the stream. I stepped in that slick green stuff and fell and split my head, right above my eye. It kinda connected to where I'd just healed from getting cut it on the barbed wire. My grandma used to tell me I wouldn't make a very good criminal, because I had too many scars and someone would recognize me! (Chuckling)

When we were living on the place where I cut my face, we ran out of groceries and we didn't have no money to buy anything ~ didn't have any flour, no coffee or nary anything to eat. The landlord gave us a pan of cracklins she'd rendered the lard out of, to make soap with, but we didn't have any groceries and we ate that for meat. Mama went to the field and got the corn that had began to get too hard for roasting ears ~ some of the hardest she could find, that was out of milk. She took and ripped open a half gallon bucket, then took a hammer and nail and drilled it full of holes. Where the nail went thru, it kinda split the tin, you know, and made sharp edges around the hole. She took and bent it and nailed it on a board and made a grater. She grated the hard corn to make cornbread and she'd put some of them cracklins in the cornbread and made shortnin' bread out of it ~it was good. Then, she take some kaffir corn and she made hominy out of it. I don't remember, exactly, how she did it, but I don't think she used lye ~ just cooked it 'til it got tender, like beans. We raised a lot of okra and had lots of okra seed, so she'd take the seed and parch them in a pan in the oven, then put them in the coffee pot to made coffee. That's all we had to eat for a few days, until we got some money and went with some fellers to the store and got a sack of flour. Mama was a good hand to rig stuff up ~ just used her imagination and fixed stuff for us to eat. I guess we'd starve to death if we had to
do that now, but back then, we didn't seem to know any different ~ we just done it and didn't think anything about it.

My Grandpa Sipe and his family lived nearby, so I had several aunts and uncles, who were not much older than me, to play with. We played games like black man, a ball game where you ran from base to base; drop the handkerchief, and games like that. One game we played was Needle's Eye. It was kinda like London Bridge, two of us would hold their hands up and the others would pass thru ~ that was the needle's eye. You sang, "Needle's eye, the best apply; the one I love so truly. Many a beau have I let go, because I wanted you". Then, you dropped your arms and caught someone in the needle's eye.

One of the neighbors that I went to school with was Marion Sloan. His daddy built a house there in Carney when we were living in a tent and I would go over there and get scrap blocks of wood, left over from his building, to play with. Marion's mother had died when he was still real young. I played with his brothers and sisters, Willis, Minie, Orville, Virgil and Maude. We'd all get out and climb trees and sometimes I'd get out on a branch and sing, "Hey, boys, you'll never get to heaven if you ride old Jack". That was when I was about 10, I guess; just a kid.

When I was 11, my mother wrote to my Uncle Francis and told them I could come back and live with them, if they'd come get me. So, he came and got me and I went back with him. We got off the train about two miles, I guess, from where he lived and then we had to walk on in. They didn't have cars in them days and he didn't have any stock of any kind, so the only way we could get to where he lived was to just walk. (Here, the story jumps back to when she was in Oklahoma, and nothing is mentioned about how long she stayed with her uncle, or how she got back to her mother's. The sequence of events incicate she was only gone a year or so - dq).

(The following is in response to daughter Jean's question of when she started dating "Daddy"):
His brother's wife gave birth to a baby and he came and got me to go down there and cook for them while she was in bed. I guess that's when we got to liking one another and when I went home, he began to come and keep company with me. He'd ride a horse, or sometimes come in a buggy, and we'd go to church together. Or we'd go over to my grandpa's, whose sons were about the same age as Marion, and we'd all play together ~ or they'd come over to our house to play. But mama wouldn't let us go off anyplace, unless it was over to grandpa's. One Sunday, he was going to take me for a buggy ride a little ways out in the country. All the boys ~ grandpa's boys and my brothers, took out after us and followed the buggy. They couldn't all get on it, so those that couldn't just walked. My folks were pretty strict with me, tho, and church was about the only place we went.

When we was married, he was share-cropping with his brother and we stayed there at their house, but when we moved out to ourselves, we moved into an old house that was ~ well, it was falling over. It leant quite a bit and we skit it up with some logs on the sides where it was leaning to keep it from falling over. That was the first place we went to start keepin' house in. Marion had a horse when we married, or maybe a team, I don't remember. He had a cotton crop on a place different than where we all lived and he tended it. We hardly ever
furnished a farm, ourselves, we share cropped mostly. They furnished the team and tools to make a crop with and you'd get half of what you raised. We canned stuff and dried some corn and beans. We'd string the beans on a string and hang them in the summer cellar to dry. Mama always dried corn and beans and canned tomatoes. We raised lots of tomatoes and canned them.

I can remember, after I was married, Marion would go to work on the railroad and he'd take a little lunch with him. Then, I'd get out and hunt wild greens and have them cooked for supper. Sometimes we'd run a little grocery bill, maybe, for bread or coffee, or something like that. Maybe we'd have ten dollars, or so, but we couldn't go in debt. We only got paid once a month when he worked on the railroad. You could buy, then, for little or nothing and we could live on ten dollars a month, by hunting greens for supper.

Melvin was born about 10-11 months after we got married. We lived in an old house and was farming, and Grandpa lived about a mile, mile and a half, maybe, from where we did. I remember, I bought a little old baby buggy and put him in it when he was little and rolled him down to grandpa's. My uncle, George, came from Arkansas to visit ~ him and Lucy. Lucy was about five years old and I gave her my big doll I'd made from trading out groceries. Trade out $10 worth of groceries and you'd get a china doll head ~ didn't have a body; it was just a head that had holes in the shoulders to fasten it onto a body. I had made a big doll out of it and Lucy took it back to Arkansas with her.

We went to Guthrie, or maybe it was Oklahoma City, to where his sister lived. He was going to work on the railroad, I think, and all we had was what canned stuff we had. We had a long wooden box and packed it full of fruit and I used some of my clothes to wrap the fruit in. Then, when we left Oklahoma City, he sold the box of fruit and my clothes, so when we got back down there, I didn't have anything much to wear. We never had much, anyway. We went to Kansas and he worked on a railroad up there for awhile, then came back to Agra, Oklahoma. That was later, when we had three children. Melvin, Gladys and Burl ~ I think Burl was a baby, then. In Agra, we rented a house for a dollar a room ~ a five room house for $5 a month. It was a pretty nice house ~ much nicer than we'd ever lived in.

I believe we was getting about fifty cents a day, chopping cotton, but we chopped from daylight to dark. You didn't work just 10 hours, you worked as long as you could see. But, we could get 50 pounds of flour for fifty cents and coffee was ten cents a pound. I remember when you could get a loaf of bread for a nickel and you could buy candy ~ get a big, long stick for a penny. We didn't buy many groceries, so I don't remember what they was worth.

We didn't have very many dishes. We used to get crackers in a wooden box and I nailed up a cracker box in the corner of the room for a cupboard. I put what dishes I had in there, but we didn't have any knives, forks or spoons. (chuckling): I don't remember, but I guess we must have ate with our hands! But the house we was renting had a skittle hole up in the roof, like most houses did, and one day, I got up in the skittle hole to see what was up there. I found an old pasteboard box, sorta like a shoebox, and it had a lot of old knives and
forks and spoons in it that the land owner had discarded. They'd got new things to eat with, I guess, and they just boxed them up and put them in the attic. I got them down and washed them up and we thought we was pretty well off ~ we had knives and forks and spoons to eat with! That's the way I raised seven children.

I never did have no furniture 'til we came to California. I did have an ice box. When we lived in Stilwater, I went to work at the laundry and I bought an ice box ~ that was the first of anything we had to keep things cold. I remember one time, I had a box put up on the side of the house and I put a cloth over the front of it. I'd soak the cloth with water, and I'd put my milk and stuff in the box to keep it cool. We used to set a tub in the bedroom and fill it with water. Then, we'd set our milk in the water and set water on top of the milk. I'd spread
something over it and set the edges down in the water and the cloth would soak up the water. Seemed like the water and milk stayed just a cool in there!

I can remember when I used to live with my aunt and uncle, they built an ash hopper out of boards and filled it with ashes they emptied from the fireplace. When the hopper was full, we carried water from the spring, about a half mile away, and they poured it on top of the ashes. It would soak thru and run down the slanted bottom of the hopper into a bucket. We used this lye to make soap. During the year, they burnt green wood, so it didn't make hard soap, like concentrated lye, it made soft soap. It was put in a keg and when we went to wash, you'd put your hand down in the keg and dip out the soap and smear it on the clothes, then rub them on a board. (Jean): "I remember you taking the laundry down to the creek and standing in the water to wash it on the rocks, before we moved out here to California". I don't remember, but when you brought up water from most of the wells out there, it was so red and sandy, you had
to put it in a tub or kettle and let it set overnight. It would kind settle, then you could dip the water off the top and put it in a copper boiler we kept. We boiled the clothes, then hung them on the fence to dry.

We carried the milk and butter to the spring house. They built a little house about six or seven feet square, out of rocks, I think, and it was used by the whole community. Down in the pasture from where we lived, there was a cave. There was a hole, about as big around as this room, and about six or eight feet deep ~ then a cave, that went back about a half mile. Water seeped thru the walls from the river, near there, and made a stream that ran thru the cave. Of a morning, fog would come out of the cave and it looked like a brush pile burning.
This stream ran thru the spring house. We had to go down in it on a rope, or ladder, and people would come out from town
and pay him to go down in it.

We made just about everything we had to use for furniture. We had an old iron bedstead and I made a (mattress) tick and filled it with straw. There was a straw stack, from where people would thresh their oats and things, and we'd get the straw to put in the ticks. We didn't have any springs, or anything, just slats, and we'd put the bed tick on them. For the kids, I built a trundle bed. It was just a frame, with slats across it, and I put a bed tick on it. It was on rollers, so it could be rolled under the other bed in the daytime, out of the way. We only had one room and a kitchen.

I remember several times, even, when we lived on that place before we came out here ~ there was one time we didn't have anything to eat except peanuts. We'd raised a lot of peanuts that year, so we roasted peanuts to eat. We just had to eat anything we could get ahold of. Mighta had terrible times, sometimes ~ anyway, we lived!

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As bad as this might sound, it was typical of most families living in this part of the country at that time. Just a few years later, the dust storms came, followed by the Great Depression, adding to their miseries. Unable to grow crops or find jobs, people were literally starving, and thus began the desperate migration to California, where you could make as much as twenty cents a day hoeing cotton. Minnie and her husband joined this migration in 1935, followed by their oldest son and his family in 1937. They settled in Madera, in the rich
agricultural San Joaquin Valley, where they spent their remaining years. Times were better, but the lessons learned of earlier days instilled in them an appreciation and thankfullness for even the simplest of luxuries. (dq)

Photographs from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.


Black Sunday April 14, 1935. The dust storm that turned day into night. Many believed the world was coming to an end.


"Dust Storm Near Beaver, Oklahoma." (July 14, 1935)


Farm Security Administration: farmers whose topsoil blew away joined the sod caravans of "Okies" on Route 66 to California.

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