Interview #8292
Field Worker: Maurice R. Anderson
Date: August 16, 1937
Name: Mr. F.M. Tolbert
Residence: Pauls Valley, Oklahoma
Date of Birth: 1855
Place of Birth: Ohio
Father: P.G. Tolbert, born in Ohio
Mother: Louisa Smith, born in Ohio
I was born in 1855 in Ohio. I came from Ohio to old Oklahoma with my
family in a wagon. I took a homestead in Canadian county just after the run in
1889. We lived in a tent the first winter and in the spring after I got my corn and
rye planted, I cut cottonwood logs and hauled them to the sawmill and had them sawed into
lumber and I built a house on my homestead.
That year corn did not make a good crop and by the fall of 1890 there were
several homesteaders who had settled in this community and several of us got together and
built a sod school house and that winter we held a three months school.
There was a small town where I bought groceries named Frisco. At
that time there were around two hundred people living at Frisco but after the railroad was
built it missed Frisco by about four miles and a town was started named Yukon and the
stores and the people moved from Frisco to Yukon.
We did not buy much in those days; we tried to raise our own products.
Homesteaders would settle here and sometimes not stay but a few months; they would
trade their one hundred and sixty acres of land for a span of mules or anything they could
get.
There was a cattle trail that went through Canadian County. I do not
remember where it crossed the Canadian River but it crossed the Cimarron River south of
Dodge City. There were not many cattle driven over this trail after I moved there
but there had been lots driven over it in the early days for this trail was beaten down in
places two feet deep. I have helped take a few small herds of cattle over this trail
to Dodge City, Kansas; this trail was called the Santa Fe Trail.
Our only transportation in that day and time were horse-drawn buggies and
wagons.
Our clothes were mostly overalls, hickory shirts and ten gallon hats.
When I came to old Oklahoma, there was lots of wild game, not many deer
but the prairie was covered with prairie chicken, and there were plenty of fish in all the
creeks around where I lived.
I now live on South Cherry Street in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma.
