Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma
Date: May 20, 1937
Name: Mary Kennedy
Post Office: Sulphur, Oklahoma
Residence Address:
Date of Birth: July 28, 1869
Place of Birth: near Heavener, Indian Territory, Choctaw
Nation
Father: Robert Benton
Place of Birth: Mississippi
Information on father: Merchant-Trader
Mother: Jane McCurtain Benton
Place of birth: Indian Territory
Information on mother: niece of Green
McCurtain
Field Worker:
John F. Daughtery
Interview: 4099
Life of a Full Blood Choctaw
Indian Woman
My parents were Robert
Benton, who was born in Mississippi in 1840, end Jane McCurtain
Benton, born December 25, 1841, in the Choctaw Nation, near
Heavener, Indian Territory. They both belonged to the Choctaw
tribe. Father was a merchant and trader. He had a general
merchandise store in Heavener, from which we
had a fairly good living: He was a Confederate soldier during
the Civil War. He reared fifty-two Indian orphan children. There
were only two children in our family, my brother dying when an
infant.
I was born July 28,
1869, in the Choctaw Nation, near Heavener. The house in which I
was born was built
of hewed cedar logs. There was plenty of rock in that section of
the Territory, so father built a rock chimney. The house was a
story and a half. There were two windows downstairs and one
window upstairs. It had a hewed puncheon floor. We used water
from a well and spring. I went to school near Heavener in a
small log house. We had only three months in a term, and I did
not go many of these. Edmund Curtain came to visit us and he
made the remark that girls didn't need to go to school much--If
they could write their names that was all they needed to know.
Mother decided he was right, and so she kept me at home after
that.
We cooked on the
fireplace in the winter, and outdoors in the summer. We had very
few matches and we always kept an old log afire with which to
start our fires., However, father always carried a flint rock in
his pocket.
One year while I was a
very small child there was a terrible drought in this
country. There was not a grain of corn raised, and not much
cotton. People were about to starve. They came in droves to
father for food. He could not see them starve, so he went to see
the Chickasaw governor. He told father to go to Fort Smith and
lay in a good supply of food for those starving Indians, and the
government would pay him. So Father took a wagon and went to
Fort Smith and brought back a good supply of food. He took care
of those people until another crop was made.
Father raised sheep and
we sheared them and spun thread with which we made into cloth
for our clothes. We also carded the wool for quilts. We dyed our
cloth with home made dyes. We boiled bois 'arc bark for yellow,
indigo weeds for blue, and black haw roots for purple.
The first ink I
remember was made of pokeberry juice.
I was married April 12,
1891, to Mr. Kennedy, by Noah Holston, County Judge of Sugar
Loaf County, in the Choctaw Nation. We lived near Wilburton on a
ranch. We went in ox wagons to Fort Smith to haul freight. I
allotted land near Wilburton in 1803. The land that I wanted was
segregated by the government as coal land. It was near Heavener.
We moved to Sulphur, in
Murray County, in 1903, for my husband's health end we have
lived here continuously since. My mother is buried at Sulphur
and my father is buried near Howe.
|