Indian Pioner Papers -   Floyd Cooper                           



Submitted by Brenda Choate   bcchoate@yahoo.com

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                    Garvin County Indian Pioneer Papers
                                      
                             Floyd Cooper



Interview #9296

Field Worker: Maurice R. Anderson

Date: November 18, 1937

Name: Mr. Floyd Cooper

Residence: Maysville, Oklahoma

Date of Birth: April 8, 1865

Place of Birth: Illinois

Father: J.  C. Cooper, born in Kentucky

Mother: Mille Floyd, born in Tennessee





I was born in 1865 in Illinois.  I came to the Indian Territory 

in 1884 with my brother.  We rented a four hundred acre farm in 

Kickapoo Flats, now known as Neil Switch, about five miles west 

of Maysville.  That year we put the four hundred acres in corn.  

That was about the only kind of crop that was raised at that time 

and if you did not have as much as three or four hundred acres in 

cultivation you were not counted as much of a farmer.



There was no cotton grown in this part of the country then and what 

few people were living here were along near the river.  In the river 

bottom the grass was waist high and there were not very many trees

There was a store called Beef Creek, now Maysville, and a store at 

Whitebead and one at Pauls Valley.



Whitebead was the leading trading post at that time but most of the 

farmers and ranch owners did their trading in Texas.  People didn't 

have to buy things then like they do now as they raised nearly 

everything they used.



Our nearest grist mill was on the river just east of Pauls Valley 

and was owned by a Chickasaw Indian named Zack Gardner.



James Rennie was the leading merchant at Whitebead and the three 

Mays brothers owned the largest ranch with two ranch houses and 

also owned the Beef Creek store and the stage line that came from 

Caddo to Fort Sill which had for one of its stops the Beef Creek store.   

This stage line was ore of a United States mail stage than anything else.   

There were four horses worked to it and we called it the mail hack.  

It was very seldom we ever saw a passenger on it.



The only market we had for our corn then was the big cattlemen from Kansas.  

They would have beef pens on the river and every fall they would feed out 

thousands after thousands of head of cattle at those beef pens.  That was 

the reason the store there was named Beef Creek.



After the Santa Fe Railroad was built from Texas to Kansas in 1887, I quit 

the farm and went to work as brakeman on the Santa Fe Railroad from Purcell 

to Arkansas City.  I worked for this company until 1893, when I came back to 

Beef Creek store and bought a corn sheller and shelled corn for the cattlemen 

up and down the Washita River.



There were several ranchers who raised their own cattle and fed them out 

along the river; Joe Wilson, Bob Love, and a man named Story.   I operated 

this corn sheller until 1900.  At this time there was lots of wheat and oats 

being raised so I bought a thresher and began threshing for the farmers and 

I still own my thresher and make the harvest each year.



In 1906, I owned an elevator at Maysville and in six days I bought and piled 

at the elevator twenty-five thousand bushels of corn.  There were five other 

corn buyers in Maysville and I think eac one of those buyers bought as much 

corn in those six days as I did.  This will show about how much corn was raised 

in those days.



In 1908 the Washita River got out of its banks and destroyed several thousand 

acres of crops between Maysville and Pauls Valley and besides this there 

were a number of homes washed away.



The grist mill and sawmill owned by Mr. Higginbottom on the river north 

of Maysville was washed away.



I have made Maysville my home since 1902.