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Indian Pioneer Papers - Index

Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma
Date:  April 26, 1938
Name: Richard F. Colbert
Post Office: Ada, Oklahoma
Residence Address: Homer, 3 miles N.E. of Ada
Date of Birth: September 23, 1895
Place of Birth:
Father: George Colbert
Place of Birth: Colbert Station
Mother: Sukey Courtney
Place of Birth: Near Old Lebanon
Field Worker: Eugene V. Murray
Interview #

Richard F. Colbert was born September 23, 1895, near the present location of Colbert School, two miles north of Ada. The land on which Colbert School is situated and the place where Mr. Colbert was born are both part of the lands which comprise part of the several allotments to the members of the Colbert family. This school was named for Mr. George Colbert, father of Richard F. Colbert. Richard Colbert, being the younger generation of Chickasaws, does not remember very much about Territorial times. He is a graduate of Murray Agricultural College, Tishomingo, and also of the A & M College at Still water. Mr. George Colbert, father of Richard, was born in 1853 near Colbert Station, on the Red River. He received his education in Tennessee. He, like the Colbert family in general, was very prominent in Chickasaw tribal affairs. He was for several years a member of the Chickasaw Legislature and was also County Clerk of Pontotoc County. He is believed to have been at one time Attorney General of the Chickasaw Nation. As a Baptist minister he was well known through the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. Mr. Colbert died of bronchial trouble in 1911.

Mrs. Sukey Courtney Colbert, mother of Richard Colbert, was born in 1870 near Lebanon, Chickasaw Nation. She was until her death in 1905, very active in church work and was as well known and loved as was her husband, Mr. George Colbert. Both Mr. And Mrs. Colbert were pure-blood Chickasaws.

Mr. Richard Colbert began his schooling at Sulphur Springs "neighborhood school" a few miles south of Ada. He also attended school at Sulphur, and Harley Institute at Tishomingo and the Lebanon Orphan School, at Lebanon. These schools have long since passed out of existence. According to Mr. Colbert, the old family home north of Ada was considerably above the average Indian Territory home in improvements and facilities. It was also a very good farm and the family raised great quantities of wheat, corn and oats. The boys did most of the farm work as Mr. Colbert, because of his official duties and church work, did not have much time to engage in it himself. After threshing the wheat and corn it was necessary to haul it to Byrd’s Mill, some nineteen miles south, for grinding. The trip there and back required three or four days, depending on how long they had to wait for their turn at milling after arriving as Byrd’s, which being about the only mill in that part of the country at the time, was always very busy. The time spent in waiting at the mill was always very pleasant as the creek and the surrounding woods were shady and cool, very inviting to the loungers, fishermen and squirrel hunters. Many pleasant hours could also be spent in visiting and gossiping with friends and relatives and travelers at the mill. Byrd’s mill is now the property of the city of Ada and is the source of the city’s water supply. 

The family supplies were hauled in from Lehigh, forty-five miles to the southeast, in the Choctaw Nation. The trip to this place was made only twice each year as it took one week to go there and back again.

The country around Mr. Colbert’s home was very thinly settled, was heavily wooded and contained much small game and some deer and wild turkeys and the principal recreation of the boys when not working or going to school was hunting and fishing. One night Richard, who was then nine years old, two of his brothers and some cousins, decided to go possum hunting in the timber northeast of the Colbert home. The boys asked Mr. Colbert for the loan of his gun but he, thinking they were too young to be allowed to have a gun, refused to let them have it. The boys were not to be outdone however and decided to take some axes and go anyway, which they did, taking their four ‘possum-dogs with them. By midnight they were six or seven miles away, in the Muddy Boggy bottoms and being good hunters had killed six possums with the help of the dogs. About one o’clock the dogs picked up another trail and started following it up. 

After an hour the animal was treed and the boys had caught up with the dogs. They found the dogs barking madly at the base of a tall pecan tree and looking up into the tree top tried to determine what kind of an animal it was. But, as the night had turned very dark they could only see a black form in the tree. They had about decided to cut the tree down to get the animal when on of the boys, a brother of Richard, suggested that, as the tree was a large one and would require a lot of work in falling, that they go to the home of a white man who lived nearby, borrow his gun and shoot the animal out of the tree and save time and work too. This they decided to do and after selecting a spokesman for the group and coaching him in his ‘speech’ set out for the white man’s house. Most full blood Indian children at that time were very backward and bashful in the presence of white people-especially if they were strangers, even though the most of them could speak English very well, and being more accustomed to speaking the Chickasaw language than they were English they disliked to use English in the presence of whites. 

This was the reason the boys selected a speaker to represent the group. Arriving at the white man’s house the speaker called the man by name two or three times. The man finally came out on the porch and asked them what it was they wanted at this time of the night. The boy speaker, after being nudged a few times by his friends, walked into the yard removed his hat and, pointing over his shoulder to the woods from whence they had come, said: “Indian boy, I, fox 1: yonder see did, loan it you it gun.” The man, after laughing loud and long at the “speech”, said: "Sure, you can have my gun.” The boys took the gun, a muzzle-loading, double-barreled shotgun, and ran as fast as they could back to the tree where they had left the dogs and the ‘animal.’ The gun was far taller than any of the boys and was very heavy. The largest of the boys took it, sat down on the ground behind a dogwood bush and rested the barrel in a fork of the bush and took aim at the animal in the tree. After squinting down the barrel a long time the boy finally pulled the trigger and rolled over backwards, from fright as well as from the recoil of the gun itself. The ‘fox’ remained in the tree for some minutes before falling out-badly wounded. On striking the earth the dogs, of course, pounced upon it and got it badly “chewed up” before it was dispatched by a blow on the head with an axe. It was a giant bob-cat, though the boys all thought it was a tiger. The ‘speaker’ for this group of Indians Nimrods is now a very well known farmer south of Sulphur, who speaks English like a professor and has almost completely forgotten how to speak the Chickasaw language.

Another interesting boyhood experience which Mr. Colbert remembers is the time he and some other boys “put on a circus” at Harley Institute where they were attending school. This school was maintained by the Chickasaw Government as a school for boys only. Colbert’s roommate, who was somewhat older than Colbert, had at one time been with a ‘real’ circus in the east. This boy conceived the circus idea himself and solicited Colbert’s help in putting it over. They went out in the woods along the creeks and caught several snakes including rattlesnakes and cotton-mouthed water-moccasins, turtles, lizards, rabbits, possums, skunks and other small animals, also some spiders and a few birds with which to stock the menagerie. A trapeze act was organized, with Colbert’s roommate as the principal actor, there were also Roman chariot races, with dogs acting as horses, wild west scenes depicting the massacre of General Custer and his troops on the Little Big Horn River in Montana by the Dakotas, tumbling acts, clowns, fortune telling, a Pashofa Dance and other acts. The circus was held in an opening in the woods about one-half mile from the school. The whole school turned out to attend, even the teachers and some people from Tishomingo. The thing was a real success and a good time was had by everyone except the snake charmer, who was bitten by a rattlesnake, and the tight-rope walker, Colbert’s room mate who fell and almost broke his neck.

All the Colbert family, seven or eight persons in all, took their allotments in the neighborhood of the family home north of Ada, allotting some two thousand acres in all. Mr. Colbert is well known to the older residents of Ada, who have watched him grow from boyhood to middle-age. He is also very well known in legal circles, having acted as legal council and official Indian interpreter in many cases involving Indiana.

Submitted to OKGenWeb by Pat Cates Gee, August 2001.