Field Worker:  John F. Daugherty 

Date:  January 4, 1938
Interview # 9583
Address: Sulphur, OK
Born: September 28, 1880
Place of Birth: Leon, Panola County, Chickasaw Nation
Father: H.D. Moore, born in Kentucky
Mother: Rhoda Poe, born in Kentucky

My father was H. D. Moore, born February 11, 1835, in Kentucky.  My mother was Rhoda Poe Moore, born July 15, 1942, in Kentucky.  Father was a Confederate soldier in the Civil War from the beginning of the War till it's close, after which he farmed and ranched.  There were thirteen children in our family.  My parents came to Leon, Indian Territory, Panola County,  in the Chickasaw Nation, on the Red River in 1879.  I saw the light of day there the following year on September 28.  In 1884 we moved to a ranch near Drake, in the Chickasaw Nation, south of Sulphur.

Mother spun cotton and wove cloth for our clothes.  She dyed the cloth with sumac bark for copperas color and polk for dark brown or black.

There  were so many children in our family that Father could not afford to send us all to school at the same time, so we took turns at being educated.  The school was a tuition school.  We paid $1.00 a month for each child who attended.  For thirteen children, this sum amounted to too much for a poor man to pay, so part of us went to the summer term of school and part of us went tot he fall term.  Thus we each received about two months schooling each year.

Father had his wheat ground at Ardmore.  He took a wagon load each trip and brought back flour, shorts and seconds.  It took him three days to make the trip, if he waited for his grinding.  It took a day to get the grinding done.  Father usually traded his wheat for flour and shorts and returned home the second day.

Everybody was neighborly in those days.  If a man was sick and unable to gather his crop, his neighbors came on a set date and gathered it for him.  When hog killing time came, the whole neighborhood turned out to help.  One day they killed a certain man's hogs.  The next day they all went to another house for the same purpose, and so on, until everybody had butchered his hogs. 

Those were the happiest days of my life.  I wish they could be lived again. 

I married M. F. Paslay in Tecumseh in 1898.  We moved to Sulphur in 1900 and have lived here continuously since.

We are the parents of eight children.  My husband is constable for the town of Sulphur.

Transcribed by Brenda Choate and Dennis Muncrief, March, 2001

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