Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma
Date: November 11, 1937
Name: Thomas Ross Self
Post Office: Hugo, Oklahoma
Date of Birth: May 20, 1906
Place of Birth: Eight miles west and north of Hugo
Father: Thomas S. Self
Place of Birth: Selfs, Texas
Information on father: White man
Mother: Annie Usray Self
Place of birth: Roebuck Lake, in Choctaw County, Indian Territory
Information on mother: About 1/2 Choctaw
Field Worker: Hazel B. Green
Interview: #12248
LDS microfilm #6016946 vol. 81 page 538
An Interview With Thomas Ross Self
District Court Clerk, Hugo, Oklahoma
A Story of the Original Doaksville.
There Was One At The Mouth Of Doaksville Creek.
Up until a couple of years ago, "Tommy" Self was night operator at the Hugo Super Service Filling Station at the corner of North A and Jackson Streets in Hugo.
One night a stranger drove up and asked for any information that was available concerning a Doaksville at the mouth of a little creek on the "north bank of the Red River."
The stranger said that his name was MORRISON or some such name and that his ancestors had come from England, bringing with them papers proving heirship of properties in England. One member of the family, it seemed had a yen for wandering. He went up into Canada and joined some fur traders who were planning a trip to trade with the Indians along the Mississippi River and anywhere along Red River that Indians could be found. They loaded their boats with trading goods, salt, ammunition, axes, etc., and started down the Mississippi and just kept going until they came to the Red River, when this fellow with his trusted old negro slave decided to explore up Red River.
They kept going up Red River making a sort of map as they went and counting the streams of water as they came to them, or rather numbering those streams that emptied into Red River. They came to a settlement on the north bank of Red River and landed, built a cabin, and began trading with the Indians. And while this young Englishman was there he wrote relatives in South Carolina that he and his trusty slaves were at Doaksville, on the north bank of Red River in the Indian Territory, and that he had the family papers in an iron box with him.
He ran out of supplies and went back north to get another supply of trading goods, leaving the slave with the papers at Doaksville. On the return journey he joined some more traders and at Saint Louis, they killed and robbed him. He never returned to South Carolina or Doaksville. I don't know how the family got the news of his death but they did. And now, in 1935, more than a hundred years later, here comes a relative seeking that Doaksville and possibly the grave of the old negro slave, and hoping that the old negro had kept the papers with him and had probably had them buried with him, or that there might have been someone who remembered the old negro, and had heard him talk of having lived at the original Doaksville.
That was the last that Tommy Self ever heard of the man but it set him trying to find out if there really was a Doaksville at the mouth of Doaksville Creek, on the north bank of Red River.
Submitted to OKGenWeb by
Jami Self Hamilton <Jamialane@aol.com>
07-2000
Also see http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~jami