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Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma
Name: Sheegog, Dick
Date:  June 2, 1937
Address: Sulphur, OK
Born: 1872
Place of Birth: Pilot Point, Texas
Father: Edward Sheegog, born in Unknown
Mother: Elizabeth Manass, born in Unknown 
Field Worker:  John F. Daugherty 
Interview #

My parents were Edward Sheegog and Elizabeth Manass. (Dates and places of births unknown). There were three children in our family.  Father was a stockman.

Four years before I was born, the Comanche Indians captured my mother, two cousins, father, a baby sister and her Negro nurse, west of Gainesville, Texas.  They tied Mother to one of their ponies and took the others in a wagon.  Toward night, they came to Mother and said, "Papoose gone," and pointed toward the sky.   Mother knew they had killed her child.  They killed the rest of them before reaching Gainesville.  They turned her loose at Gainesville during the night, leaving her a small mule to ride and a moccasin of pecans to eat.

I was born at Pilot Point, Texas, in 1872.  In 1891, I received a letter from Bob Freeman, who was an old friend and in the mercantile business in Davis in the Chickasaw Nation, asking me to come there and work for him.  So I came.  I worked for twenty-five dollars per month and my board.  In those days people had very little money but there were no crop failures so many of our customers came in the spring and bought their summer's supply of groceries and dry goods, giving a mortgage on their crop.   We would not see them again until Fall, after the crops were harvested and sold.   They would come in and pay what they owed and buy their winter's supply.

Once or twice a year was as often as they went to town.  There were no banks.   Everybody carried their money or hid it about their premises.  We shipped money in from Gainesville and kept in in a safe at the store.  We never thought of being robbed.  Such crimes were almost unheard of in those days.

We had only a frame building and an ordinary lock on the doors, which anybody could have opened had they so desired.  There were many cattle and horse thieves and outlaws but they didn't rob people of their money.

This was an open range country when I came here.  The first pasture which I remember being fence was between Sulphur and Davis in 1900.  It was owned by Mose Chigley, a fullblood Chickasaw.  I used to go on hunting trips with him and Wyatt, his brother.  There were usually a large number of us and we went down on Blue River in the eastern part of the Chickasaw Nation.  We had a chuck wagon and we made the trip in covered wagons.  We would be gone for a week or two and have a great time fishing and hunting.  We killed deer, turkeys, prairie chickens and lots of snakes.   We also hunted in the Kiamchi Mountains in the southeastern part of the Indian Territory in the Choctaw Nation.

Platt National Park was originally a cow ranch.  Colonel Froman had a ranch house built of pickets, southwest of the old Gum Springs.  There was a store run by Mullenbrook on the banks of the creek and a small dairy owned by Cunningham near the Antelope Spring.  People, both Indians and whites, came for miles to camp near these springs and drink the water.  Small stores began to appear.  Cold drink stands were put in and the town of Sulphur began in the park on the south side of Sulphur Creek.

When the United States Government segregated these eight hundred acres for the purpose of establishing a national park, the town of Sulphur had to move, and they began building on the east and west sides of Rock Creek.  There was much jealousy and wrangling between the two sided.  The county courthouse was on the west side and the east siders decided they must have it.  So they insisted that it be moved.  The west side wasn't in favor at all.  Finally a cyclone tore down their building and the court house was moved to the east side, but only for a short time, as the west siders got busy and soon had another building under construction.  This is the building which is there at the present time.  Finally they decided there would be no more hard feeling and they "buried the hatchet" in concrete on the bridge which joined the two sides across Rock Creek.

I married Mary Polk in 1895. We are the parents of one boy, who is a park ranger in Platt National Park.

Submitted to OKGenWeb by Brenda Choate,  September 2003.