Bio of Slaton, James A. - Grady County, Oklahoma

Transcribed by:  Gene Phillips  <okarchives@comcast.net>   18 Jun 2006
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                             USGENWEB NOTICE
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JAMES A. SLATON, of Rush Springs, is one of the pioneers and active 
cattlemen and farmers of this locality, having passed the last seventeen 
years in what is now Oklahoma and the last dozen years around the place of 
his present abode. In the territory now covered by Grady and Stephens 
counties he has been an especially active spirit. The old settlers well 
remember him as a hardy hand on the ranch of Bourland and Colbert, well 
known cattle men of a score of years ago, and some time afterward as an 
ambitious young farmer and stockman establishing himself in the community 
on the headwaters of Rush Creek. Acquiring a right by marriage, in 1898, 
he finally located his allotments on the waters of that stream, ten miles 
east of the town, where he still occupies a farm of five hundred acres of 
some of the best valley land in that section of the state. The historic 
order of the family migrations had been from Georgia and Alabama to Texas, 
and it was in the central part of the Lone Star state that James A. Slaton 
was brought up, spending most of his time ranging over its great plains on 
the back of a pony. It was to this section that his parents, with their 
family, had come from northern Alabama, in 1870.

Mr. Slaton is a native of Macon, Georgia, born on the 8th of December, 
1861, son of W. T. and Georgia (Flournoy) Slaton. His father was liberally 
educated, taught school in Georgia when a young man, and served in the 
Civil war as commissary sergeant in a regiment of Confederate troops. He 
was not a man of strong constitution, and died in Cooke county, Texas, in 
1889, at the age of fifty-two years. His father (James A. Slaton) who had 
accompanied him in his migrations to Alabama and Texas, passed away in 
Ellis county, Texas, in the early seventies at an advanced age. The 
mother, who was of Scotch-Irish extraction, passed away on Wild Horse 
creek, in 1895, at the age of fifty-eight years, being the mother of James 
A., of this notice, and William, the latter residing in Oklahoma City. As 
stated in 1870, when the former was nine years of age the family had 
entered the Lone Star state, coming by boat from Alabama to Galveston, 
thence to Corsicana in Navarro county and therein, as well as in Ellis, 
Tarrant and Cooke counties, the parents passed the remainder of their 
active lives. In 1891, two years after his father's death, James A. Slaton 
commenced his busy and useful life in Stephens and Grady counties, with, 
the results already noted. On September 28, 1898, he was united in 
.marriage to Mrs. Mary J. McDonald, widow of A. M. McDonald and daughter 
of Mrs. Margaret Moncrief, a member of the Choctaw tribe and a quarter-
blood of her race. Mrs. Moncrief was born in Alabama in 1821, and is one 
of the very few left of her tribe who were brought into what is now 
Oklahoma in 1842. Mr. and Mrs. James A. Slaton have become the parents of 
two sons, Cornelius McDonald, of Tubencary, New Mexico, and Muir McDonald 
Slaton, a schoolboy living at home. The family stand high in the community 
and Mr. Slaton, besides being a cattle man of large and expanding 
interests, is president of the First National Bank of Rush Springs, of 
which he was one of the organizers in 1906.
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