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Indian Pioneer Papers - Index

Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma
Date: November 18, 1937
Name: Mr. Floyd Cooper
Post Office: Maysville, Oklahoma
Residence Address:
Date of Birth: April 8, 1865
Place of Birth: Illinois
Father: J.  C. Cooper,
Information on Father: born in Kentucky
Mother: Mille Floyd
Information on Mother: born in Tennessee
Field Worker: Maurice R. Anderson
Interview #9296

I was born in 1865 in Illinois.  I came to the Indian Territory in 1884 with my brother.  We rented a four hundred acre farm in Kickapoo Flats, now known as Neil Switch, about five miles west of Maysville.  That year we put the four hundred acres in corn.  That was about the only kind of crop that was raised at that time and if you did not have as much as three or four hundred acres in cultivation you were not counted as much of a farmer.

There was no cotton grown in this part of the country then and what few people were living here were along near the river.  In the river bottom the grass was waist high and there were not very many trees

There was a store called Beef Creek, now Maysville, and a store at Whitebead and one at Pauls Valley.

Whitebead was the leading trading post at that time but most of the farmers and ranch owners did their trading in Texas.  People didn't have to buy things then like they do now as they raised nearly everything they used.

Our nearest grist mill was on the river just east of Pauls Valley and was owned by a Chickasaw Indian named Zack GARDNER.

James RENNIE was the leading merchant at Whitebead and the three MAYS brothers owned the largest ranch with two ranch houses and also owned the Beef Creek store and the stage line that came from Caddo to Fort Sill which had for one of its stops the Beef Creek store.   This stage line was more of a United States mail stage than anything else.   There were four horses worked to it and we called it the mail hack.  It was very seldom we ever saw a passenger on it.

The only market we had for our corn then was the big cattlemen from Kansas.  They would have beef pens on the river and every fall they would feed out thousands after thousands of head of cattle at those beef pens.  That was the reason the store there was named Beef Creek.

After the Santa Fe Railroad was built from Texas to Kansas in 1887, I quit the farm and went to work as brakeman on the Santa Fe Railroad from Purcell to Arkansas City.  I worked for this company until 1893, when I came back to Beef Creek store and bought a corn sheller and shelled corn for the cattlemen up and down the Washita River.

There were several ranchers who raised their own cattle and fed them out along the river; Joe WILSON, Bob LOVE, and a man named STORY.   I operated this corn sheller until 1900.  At this time there was lots of wheat and oats being raised so I bought a thresher and began threshing for the farmers and I still own my thresher and make the harvest each year.

In 1906, I owned an elevator at Maysville and in six days I bought and piled at the elevator twenty-five thousand bushels of corn.  There were five other corn buyers in Maysville and I think each one of those buyers bought as much corn in those six days as I did.  This will show about how much corn was raised in those days.

In 1908 the Washita River got out of its banks and destroyed several thousand acres of crops between Maysville and Pauls Valley and besides this there were a number of homes washed away.

The grist mill and sawmill owned by Mr. HIGGINBOTTOM on the river north of Maysville was washed away.

I have made Maysville my home since 1902.

Submitted to OKGenWeb by Brenda Choate <bcchoate@yahoo.com> November 2000.