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Indian Pioneer Papers - Index

Indian Pioneer History Project of Oklahoma
Date:
Name: Virgil Sherrill
Address: Kiowa, Oklahoma
Field Worker: Charline M Culbertson
Interview #:7775

I was born at Lynn, in the Chickasaw Nation, in the year 1886.  My parents were Mr. And Mrs. J. F. Sherrill.

We were living on Jess Moore's farm in a little log house when I was born.  We then moved two miles from this place to the Billie Arch farm for a while then returned to the Moore farm and farmed on a little place about one half mile from the first house where we had lived.

We had a nice fruit orchard.  We got out water from a near by spring.

We were located about three quarters of a mile from Lynn where there was one General Merchandise store operated by Hightower; the postmaster was Bob Green and there was a blacksmith shop operated by Babe Rushing.  There were also two country doctors in the settlement, Dr. Jackman and Dr. Logan.

Mr. Hightower sold out his stock of goods to a man from Texas named Roberts and moved to  Durant.

There was no lumber closer then Durant which was just a small town at this time.  There was a sawmill at Durant that cut cottonwood.  We got our lumber at this mill and used it to build our little box house and a little log house.  We had the first pine house in that district.  The lumber was brought from Denison, Texas.  This pine house had two rooms and a side room. This is where my mother died when I was just past six years old.

I had started to school the year before.  I went to school about one half mile from our place down by the Washita River.  The school was in the middle of a corn field.  Our teacher was Colonel Hickman, who was seventy-five years old.  All the school equipment we had were cottonwood slabs to sit on and boxes for desks.  The teacher had a cane bottomed chair.  Our book was the blue back speller and each of us had a slate.  All ages and grades used the same book and we studied it until it wore out.  We carved our slate pencils from the soap stone from what we called the Soap Stone Mountains.  It was at this place that Father married again.

Father and Uncle Tom Richardson put in an old type cotton gin.  Cotton seed was blown out on the ground and anyone who wanted it could have it.  No one would pay money for cotton seed.  Father later bought the Munger gin system that was run by steam.  He bought it from a firm in Dallas.

One evening after Father had closed the gin for the season, we were at a church meeting and saw the light of a fire and soon discovered it to be the gin.  When I was back there six or seven years ago the old boiler was still there on the lot.

You could hardly raise corn because of the prairie chickens; they would strip the grains of corn out of the ears in the fields.

We killed lots of turkey, quail and deer.  Father killed loads of deer and quail and took them into Denison, Texas and sold them.  Quail would come in big coveys.  We used to drive them into nets.  One time when I was about nine years old, I helped to drive a covey of forty quail into a net just as you would drive cattle.  We sold these quail at Denison.

The way we often times killed our prairie chickens was by placing corn in a long trough; the prairie chickens would all crowd into the trough and with one shot we could kill the long string of them.

We took our wheat and corn to Bryd's  Mill where we h ad it ground.  We took our cotton and hogs to market at Denison.

We then moved back to Lynn on the Thompson place where we built rail fences and where we stayed for three years.  I remember that some Indians cut up the first wire fence that was put up in the vicinity.  They cut it all up one night because they did not want the land fenced up.

We sold our cotton for ten cents a pound; one year we made sixty one bales of cotton and picked it all ourselves.  Dad hauled it to Ardmore and sold it there.

When we lived at the Hightower place at Lynn the United States surveyors camped on our place while they were surveying the land around Lynn.

Father made the run in the Cherokee Strip but was not lucky.

During these days we had wagon peddlers.  Some people never went to town so they would buy their clothes and all their supplies from these peddlers.

Everyone carried a gun every place he or she went.  When we took the cotton to Market each man always had his gun lying beside him.

Submitted to OKGenWeb by Rusty Stroup <m2759@chickasaw.com>