Field Worker:  John F. Daugherty 

Date:  June 19, 1937
Interview # 4514
Address: Sulphur, OK
Born: August 12, 1861
Place of Birth: Near Mountain Grove, Missouri
Father: John S. Stephens, born in Kentucky, Farmer
Mother: Mary Stephens, born in Missouri

My parents were John S. Stephens, born in Kentucky and Mary Stephens, born in Missouri.   There were four children in our family.  I was born August 12, 1861, near Mountain Grove, Missouri.

I came to Indian Territory in 1886 when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad grade was being built.  I was corral boss.  Sullivan and Sergeson were the contractors.  I had charge of sixty mules.  My duties were to feed and water the mules three times a day, patch the harness and hire skinners.

There were ten wagons and six mules ate at each wagon bed.  The harness racks were made of poles and were behind the mules.  Each skinner hung the harness of his team on these racks.  The grade was put up with plows and slips and a wheel grader was used on the heavy work.  There were about forty-five men employed.  I received $45.00 per month and my board.  The skinners got $25.00 per month and board and the day hands got $1.75 a day and paid board.  We had a camp cook who prepared our meals.   There were several tents in camp; kitchen tent, dining tent, commissary tent and sleeping tents.  Our beds were piles of hay with blankets spread over them and we made pillows out of our trousers.  We drank water out of creeks and ponds, using oatmeal in it to purify it.

I met and later was married to Marietta LeVaster in 1889.  She helped cook for the engineers who laid out the town of Marietta and one of the engineers named the town in her honor.  We couldn't be married legally in the Territory as we went to Gainesville, Texas and were married.

I farmed near Marietta for several years after we were married. We lived in a log house with a puncheon floor, a side room and a porch across the front.  I dug a well and put up a rail fence around the house and we thought we had a fine house.  We had a set of home made chairs made of hickory and painted green.  We had a table made of a box, a bed made of poles and fastened to the wall, covered with a straw bed and a cotton mattress.  We used iron handled knives and forks and tin spoons.  My wife had as cooking utensils, a tin stewer, a tin dishpan and a skillet and lid.  Also an old iron dinner pot and our water bucket was a cedar one.

We moved to the Choctaw Nation near Tuskahoma about 1895 and I was a logger for a sawmill there.  The logs were loaded onto skids and pulled by the team onto the wagon.  The logs were handled with canthooks.  After the logs were loaded they were tied down with chains and hauled to the sawmill to be sawed into lumber.  Each log was measured and I was paid by the foot for the number of board feet the logs would cut.  Our house was furnished by the mill free of charge.

One day as I was hauling a load of logs to the mill my mules suddenly stopped and would go no farther.  I wondered what they were frightened about so I got off the logs to investigate.  I found the spot where someone had shot a bear.  My mules would never cross that spot again and I had to make a new trail.

I moved to Tishomingo County in 1900.  Part of it later became Murray County and I have lived here continuously since.

Transcribed by Brenda Choate and Dennis Muncrief, November 2000.

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