Interview with Annie Lee Mathies
        Wister, Oklahoma.

Mrs. Annie Lee Mathies, nee Carnall, was born in Warrenton, Virginia, on November 18, 1863, and was the daughter Thomas D. and Catherine E. Carnell, nee Howison.

Through the death of her father, which occurred in 1865, and death of her mother which occurred in 1872, she and an elder sister, Ella Howison, were left to the care of an aunt, Elizabeth Carnell, with whom the sisters came to Arkansas in 1872  where they made their home  with an uncle, Wharton Carnall on Mazzard Prairie, near Fort Smith.

Through the efforts of their aunt, Elizabeth and their uncle, Wharton Carnall, the  sisters enjoyed the best of scholastic advantages; the older sister, Ella Howison, attaining her Ph.D. degree at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, after five years of study at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Arkansas where she earned the degree of M. A. era here she had served as teacher of English.

The younger sister, Annie Lee, was sent to a private school In Prince William County, Virginia, and after the completion of her studies at that school,  returned to the home of her uncle near Fort Smith, Arkansas.

On January 1, 1684, she was  united in marriage to C. C, Mathies, who through a  former marriage had established his right of  citizenship in the Indian Territory, and established a home near what now the village of Monroe in Leflore County. The couple lived et that home for twenty-seven years and then moved to a point near Wister, where Mrs. Mathies still lives, Mr. Mathies having died in 1915.

Mrs. Mathies related of her husband that he frequently aided his friends, end especially his Indian friends, when in doing so he had no hope or desire for fee or reward. On one occasion when crops generally had failed and the plight of his Indian neighbors  was such that they badly needed corn for bread, Mr. Mathies refused to sell corn to those who were in a position to pay for it, in order that he could supply those that had neither corn nor money. Be it said to the great credit of the Indians the last penny which they owed Mr. Mathies for corn bought when in their extremities, was paid in full. She recalls that one old Indian some years after he had been supplied corn by Mr. Mathies came to their home and proffered a silver dollar in payment. Mr. Mathies had forgotten all about the transaction. The Indian had not.

Mrs. Mathies sheds an amusing sidelight on some of the problems which the various enrolling committees were called upon to solve. In one instance two dark-skinned women who, ordinarily dressed in conventional manner, appeared before the enrolling committee wearing the cheapest and longest gingham dresses; their ill-concealed dyed hair and eyebrows stressed with red bandana tied over their heads in the usual Indian manner, and with little else in the way of corroborating evidence upon which to base their right to enrollment as Choctaw citizens.

Mr. Mathies home was on segregated land, so he took his allotment near Wynnewood; but the absence from their view of the enchanting Poteau, Sugar Loaf an Cavanal Mountain to which they had become accustomed, caused the family to dispose of their prairie home and to return to a point near Wister where the grandeur of these mountains can be viewed from the front porch.

Mrs. Mathies has ever preferred farm life, close to nature, to the more glamorous life of the drawing room which her education and inherent refinement has so well fitted her to adorn.