In the Untamed Woods

This morning, I came across an account I’d almost forgotten about. It’s written by my grandmother’s uncle and came by way of the Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma. What degree of an uncle would he be to me? I haven’t the slightest, but his grandfather would have been my third great-grandfather.  I found this account of early day Oklahoma when it was still Indian Territory to be fascinating, even after I’d read it many times a few years ago. Uncle Dow described a land that no one would recognize now; it was untamed, mostly unsettled, and beautiful. Uncle Dow’s grandparents made the trip from Georgia to this new, unsettled country by wagon. This is the story they told him and the story that he wrote later. This was how it was when the nineteenth century was young, Uncle Dow’s words according to his grandparents.

The open Indian Country was absolutely alive with wild animals and game of all sorts and the underbrush and grass and vines almost covered the dim, winding trails. Wolves were very dangerous at night, coming quite near the campers. They often saw panthers slipping up near them. The wild pigeons would come over in great swarms and in such great numbers that they would cover the skies and many times the daylight was shut off by these flocks of wild pigeons and the sky was as dark as an evening at sunset.

Finally, my grandfather (Uncle Dow’s grandfather) decided to settle on a certain area and they began to chop out and clear up the land for cultivation and they had to fight with wild fowls and “varmints” to keep them from eating up their crops. The squirrels would run up and down the corn rows, and the dead trees in the new ground afforded roosts for squirrels to outrun their pursuers and they would just run up and down rail fences to keep from being caught by hand and wild coons did the same things, and wild turkey gobblers would come into the yard to fight the home fowls.

Uncle Dow went on to tell of his grandparents’ many adventures and how more people gradually came and hewed farms out of the wilderness, built a store, grew their own food, and settled their part of Indian Territory. It’s fascinating reading and a glimpse into a time that is far removed from the here and now.