Bird Ashton

Field Worker:  John F. Daugherty 

Date:  June 2, 1937
Interview # 4266
Address: Sulphur, OK
Born: 1868
Place of Birth: Georgetown, Texas 
Father: Andrew Ashton, born in Georgia, Stockman
Mother: Annie Meadowbrook, born in Georgia

My parents were Andrew Ashton and Annie Meadowbrook Ashton, both born in Georgia. (Dates Unknown). There were twelve children in our family. Father was a stockman.

I was born in 1868 in Georgetown, Texas.

I came to the Indian Territory in 1889 and settled at Harmonville in the Chickasaw Nation now called Pooleville. I came on a horse, crossing the Red River at Delaware Bend. We lived in a double log house with shutter windows, oak floors and a fireplace made of rock. We drank spring water. There was plenty of game and wild hogs, both mule fasted and two-hoofed. We sold hogs for three cents per pound in 1894. We
raised corn, cotton and oats, selling the corn for eight and ten cents per bushel and the cotton for four cents per pound. The oats we fed to our horses.

I went into the cattle business a short time after coming here and have followed that ever since. I have a ranch which I have lived on since 1895.

Every fall we rounded up our cattle for shipping purposes. In the Spring we had a general roundup. There were no pasture fences and the cattle wandered far in the winter. Each spring fifteen or twenty of us started out with 4 mounts each and our chuck wagon to bring in the wandering cattle and brand them. One spring we rounded up about four thousand head of cattle.

There were no telephones, and our only mode of travel was on horses or in covered wagons. The first telephone line running from Sulphur to Davis was on the top wire of a barb wire fence. We had to go to Davis for our mail.

West of my ranch which is northwest of Sulphur, there are eighteen or twenty graves,  where soldiers are buried. It is said that an army camped there during the Civil War and centipedes got in their coffee and this number died and were buried here. When I came here there were the remains of their old rock ovens and the timber was scarred where they had used the trees for target practice.  (Ed. note:  The soldiers were from Ft. Arbuckle and died of cholera, occurred in the 1850's, before the War)

I was married in 1894 under the Chickasaw Law to Mrs. Greenwood, a widow.

Transcribed by Brenda Choate and Dennis Muncrief, November, 2000.