Indian Pioner Papers - F.M. Tolbert

Submitted by Brenda Choate  bcchoate@yahoo.com


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                    Garvin County Indian Pioneer Papers
                                      
                                                                    
                              F.M. Tolbert



Interview #8292

Field Worker: Maurice R. Anderson

Date: August 16, 1937

Name: Mr. F.M. Tolbert

Residence: Pauls Valley, Oklahoma

Date of Birth: 1855

Place of Birth: Ohio

Father: P.G. Tolbert, born in Ohio

Mother: Louisa Smith, born in Ohio





I was born in 1855 in Ohio.  I came from Ohio to old Oklahoma 

with my family in a wagon.  I  took a homestead in Canadian 

county just after the run in 1889.  We lived in a tent the 

first winter and in the spring after I got my corn and rye planted, 

I cut cottonwood logs and hauled them to the sawmill and had them 

sawed into lumber and I built a house on my homestead.



That year corn did not make a good crop and by the fall of 1890 

there were several homesteaders who had settled in this community 

and several of us got together and built a sod school house and 

that winter we held a three months school.



There was a small town where I bought groceries named Frisco.  

At that time there were around two hundred people living at Frisco 

but after the railroad was built it missed Frisco by about four 

miles and a town was started named Yukon and the stores and the 

people moved from Frisco to Yukon.



We did not buy much in those days; we tried to raise our own products.   

Homesteaders would settle here and sometimes not stay but a few months; 

they would trade their one hundred and sixty acres of land for a 

span of mules or anything they could get.



There was a cattle trail that went through Canadian County.  I do not 

remember where it crossed the Canadian River but it crossed the Cimarron 

River south of Dodge City.  There were not many cattle driven over this 

trail after I moved there but there had been lots driven over it in the 

early days for this trail was beaten down in places two feet deep.  I 

have helped take a few small herds of cattle over this trail to Dodge 

City, Kansas; this trail was called the Santa Fe Trail.



Our only transportation in that day and time were horse-drawn buggies 

and wagons.



Our clothes were mostly overalls, hickory shirts and ten gallon hats.



When I came to old Oklahoma, there was lots of wild game, not many deer 

but the prairie was covered with prairie chicken, and there were plenty 

of fish in all the creeks around where I lived.



I now live on South Cherry Street in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma.