The Roosevelt family (detail) no date
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The woman on the right is a ringer for my mother at that age; she also looks a great deal like Bob Dylan, which explains some of the confusion of my youth, I expect.
My mother's people were, before they came out to California, from Oklahoma by way of Kansas and Texas. Scots-Irish, Scots, Irish, French, etc.
The original linkage that started this is something like bloggy > Dumbo Arts Center (esp. Kathe Burkhart) > Virgil Marti (which eventually sort of recursively led to James Wagner) > OKGenWeb, whose url has the string "marti" included in it because the sitemaster, whose name is Marti, is ill, and the person running it in her stead did so to honor her.
We wish her well, and take this opportunity to express our deepest gratitude to all the contributors who've made the OKGen site the treasure it is.
All the images except where otherwise noted are from there.
John N Williams courting Parrilla Montgomery
on the Ferry at Webbers Falls
Muskogee county, Oklahoma 1918
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Sarah Ballard Dryden, center, probably at the wedding
of Kitty Ballard and John B. Vincent (detail) April 8, 1901
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Another Vincent family photograph:
late 1890's at the Bent Creek homestead of Nicholas B. Vincent
(or, perhaps, the adjacent homestead of his son, Hiram J. Vincent)
(detail)
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Those are sod houses.
An image from the U.S. National Archives and records Administration:
Teacher and children in front of sod schoolhouse
Woods Co., Okla. Terr., ca. 1895
Something of the tenor of their daily lives shows in the posture and expression of the children, though at least part of that must come from the seriousness of being photographed, and the strangeness of having to sit still and stare at a man who's doing basically nothing but hiding behind a small box on legs.
How young the teacher is, with the bell in her hand.
Not all the sod houses were squalid and dark. I've lived in rougher rooms than this one.
These images are from the Library of Congress but they don't have pages of their own.
Sod was the turf under the prairie grasses that covered what's called the Great Plains in the US. It turns out that the grasses, and the buffalo that lived on them, and to an extent the indigenes, had an inter-relationship that worked to everyone's advantage, once they got accustomed to it. The disruption of that ecological harmony was a primary cause of the Dust Bowl, another significant part of Oklahoma history.
The country was young, and like all young things, a little naive.
And even then, there were images of mystery, if you knew where and how to look.
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There's a lot of hard work visible in this picture, and a lot more right behind it:
Jordan Log Cabin and the Charlie Jordan Family
"This was Charlie & Ellen's first home in St. Louis, Oklahoma after their marriage. The log cabin belonged to Charlie's father. It was the William Thomas Jordan old home place. Taken around late 1912 or early 1913. Vera looks to be about a year old."
These folks were no strangers to hard work, either:
The William Duckworth Family
Okmulgee County, OK 1913 (detail)
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Here's a bunch a fellas down at the axe-handle factory.
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It's easy to read into a photograph, that's one of the reasons this kind of immersion is so easy for me to get lost in, but at the same time there's an unprovable contact with what's there, at least I believe there is.
I'm thinking a lot about decency these days, how rare it's getting, how small a thing it is, but how much impact it has when it comes your way. I like to think something shows through from these families that's decent, not in the way the word's come to mean prim and puritanical, but straightforward, what it's always meant - upright and relatively virtuous.
"A Hearty Welcome To All"
Samuel Thomas "Tom" McGuire family
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There were at least as many characters per capita in Oklahoma a hundred years ago as there are today, probably a few more.
Polly Belle Barnes
with an unknown friend from her school days
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Unknown Man, Hartshorne, Indian Territory
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Jesse Jerome Stewart and Maggie Mae Duncan,
married August 10, 1907 in Eufaula, Oklahoma, Indian Territory. They lived on High Early Mountain.They had 13 children.
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When things got a little too individual and threatened to get out of hand, or did, there were always groups like the Anti-HorseThief Association to step in and do what had to be done.
Bill Fossett was a lawman in the Territory who rode some with the AHTA. Fossett wasn't exactly a Pinkerton but he did do some security work for the railroad interests. Later on in life he was appointed U.S. Marshall by Teddy Roosevelt, which brings us almost full circle here.
Jesse James had way too much familiarity from the Pinkertons. In a botched phosphor-bombing of his family home, when they thought he was inside though he wasn't, his mother's arm was blown off. His mother was not an outlaw. His step-father, a fairly crippled man and not at all young, was hung from a tree and seriously abused in an attempt to get him to divulge Jesse's whereabouts. Jesse James was and is a folk hero for the same reasons Robin Hood was and is a folk hero, and the Pinkertons are reviled by many for the same reasons the Sheriff of Nottingham is reviled.
Susan M. Dodd wrote a fine book about Jesse James called "Mamaw". Which brings us even closer to full circle, now.
Except for some obligatory gratuitous chicken imagery, that is.
Woman feeding chickens
And this from LoC, which is what I imagine a terraformed Mars might be like.
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