Tom Green County, TX - Bios:  Mrs. Eleanor Ervin

TX BIOS:  Mrs. Eleanor Ervin
   Selected and converted.American Memory, Library of Congress.
   
   Washington, 1994.
   
   Preceding element provides place and date of transcription only.
   
   This transcription intended to be 99.95% accurate.
   
   For more information about this text and this American Memory
   collection, refer to accompanying matter.
   
   U.S. Work Projects Administration, Federal Writers' Project (Folklore
   Project, Life Histories, 1936-39); Manuscript Division, Library of
   Congress.Copyright status not determined.
   
   00011
   
   Range-lore
   
   Nellie B. Cox
   
   San Angelo, Texas.
   
   Page one
   
   RANGE-LORE
   
   Mrs. Eleanor Ervin who came to [San Angelo?] in 1886, is 96 years old
   and until about two years ago was (as she expressed) sprier than most
   girls now.
   
   She says: "I was born in Missouri and when I was about six years old,
   my father brought us to Limestone County, Texas. Yes, that was a long
   time ago. I can't remember it much except that there were Indians
   everywhere. My mother stayed scared all the time. My father was
   friendly with some Indians and they would bring us children beads and
   trinkets of all kinds and also fresh meat.
   
     NOTE: C.12 - 2/11/41 - Texas
     
   00022One time 500 Indians passed our house after they had burned a
   small settlement and killed the settlers. We had been warned and hid
   out. Mother was worse scared after that so father moved us to
   Mississippi. I married my first husband there. I got word that he was
   sick at a commissary during the Civil War, so I took my oldest boy and
   started to him. A neighbor took us in a wagon. It was so muddy we
   bogged down and then had to ferry across a river." (Here the daughter,
   herself an old woman, interrupted to remind her mother of something).
   "Now, daughter, you don't remember like I do. You weren't there. I
   can't remember the name of the river. It wasn't the Mississippi River.
   I got to my husband anyhow and he got well, but he didn't live many
   years.
   
   "After Mr. Ervin and I had been married a few years we moved by wagons
   to Uvalde, Texas. Indians were there, too, but about all they did was
   to steal horses on moonlight nights. My husband and son would take the
   other children and spend the night in the corn patch. The Indians
   could have found us, but they never did. We sold our goats and other
   stuff to Nub Pulliam's brother-in-law. My husband knew Mr. Pulliam far
   back. He (Mr. Ervin) attended the wedding of Mr. Pulliam and his first
   wife- Mary Holmes, I think was the girl's name. 00033"After selling
   out, we came to the Concho Country, first to Ben Ficklin and later to
   San Angelo. We have lived at Knickerbocker, Sonora and other places
   around in this country.
   
   "Tom Ketchum was a good boy. He got off with bad company. I knew all
   the boys. I heard Sam say that all he wanted was a horse branded
   S.L.S. I don't know why. Tom always did things for poor people, gave
   them what he could. Yes, he might have been a kind of Robin Hood. I
   knew a girl in this country who joined up with a gang of desperadoes.
   When she was growing up she was pert and different to most girls of
   that time, but she learned to shoot, first with one hand and then with
   the other hand. She helped her bunch in robberies and was finally
   caught, convicted and sent to the "Pen". She was real smart.
   
   "I remember when Will Carber was killed and another man caught at
   Sonora who were thought to be trying to rob a bank. That wasn't so
   many years ago.
   
   "If my memory wasn't so bad I could tell a great deal more."
   0004Range-lore
   
   BIBLIOGRAPHY
   
   Mrs. Eleanor Ervin, 216 [E?]. 11th Street, San Angelo, Texas,
   interviewed January [5?], 1938.

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