Frank C. Wright


Wright, Frank C. 

Field Worker:  John F. Daugherty 

Date:  September 16, 1937
Interview # 8529
Address: Mill Creek, OK
Born: March 1, 1858
Place of Birth: Missouri
Father: Chester C. Wright, born in Kentucky, Farmer
Mother: Lizzie Burchett, born in Ohio


My father was Chester C. Wright, born in 1820 in Connecticut.  He was a farmer.

Mother was Lizzie Burchett Wright, born in Ohio in 1825.  Father died in the Northern Army in 1825 (error here? must be 1865?).  There were sixteen children in our family.

I was born March 1, 1858, in Missouri and came to the Indian Territory in 1881 from Kirksville, Missouri.  I settled on Oil Creek near Old Mill Creek.  I farmed under Scott Hawkins and Eastman James, full blood Chickasaws.  I paid my permits to Galloway Frazier.

This was just an open range for cattle when we first came here.  In 1883 or 1884 I decided to go to Arkansas City and work for the railroad company.  In February I took my family and went.  I didn't pass a house from the South Canadian River near Purcell to the Kansas line.  I took enough feed for my team in the wagon and we camped each night wherever we happened to be.

I forded the rivers and sometimes they would be running bank full, but we would plunge in and swim the team across.  Our things in the wagon all got wet once and we had to stop and dry them.  We camped near the present site of Guthrie and the panthers screamed hideously all night.  We had two small children and my wife was so afraid that they might be stolen away by these screaming beasts that she pinned each child to her clothes, one on each side of her, when we retired for the night.

We returned to our home in the Territory after a years absence and have been here since.

In those days our guns were laws.  When there was any kind of a dispute it was usually settled by gun shots.  The United States Marshals were the only peace officers we had and they were usually far away at the moment they were most needed, so each fellow kept a gun for his own protection.

We almost had a feud around Mill Creek in the 80's.  Cubby Cutch, an Indian, died, leaving a wife and some children as well as some cattle.  Jess Brown married the widow of Cutch.  Jess was a white man and when he began gathering the Cutch cattle from the range, it made the Indians very angry.  One cold, rainy night, some of the Indians went to Brown's home, yelled at him, and as he opened the door, they shot him and his step-daughter who was sitting in front of the fireplace.  Feelings ran high over this and some of the citizens decided to exterminate the bunch of Indians who had committed such a dreadful crime.  Those who didn't have guns went to Ardmore and purchased them.  There were about five hundred boxes of cartridges sold in a very few days.  But some of the saner citizens with-drew from the situation and it finally subsided without any lives being lost.

One day a man from Duncan came to my house and asked if I knew any Indian girls.   He was a white man and wanted to marry an Indian girl, so he wouldn't have to pay the permit on a large herd of cattle.  I told him I knew several.  He asked if I wouldn't take him to see one.  I started to take him to the home of one who was not a full blood.  I told him he would have to court her like a white girl.  He replied, "I haven't time for that.  I want one who will marry me at once".   So I took him to the home of a full blood Chickasaw girl.

Indian girls were very shy.  When a stranger came, they ran.  I saw these two girls run to the woods to hide as we drive up.  I left this white man in the hut to talk to the grandmother while I went in search of the girls.  They spoke and understood some English.  When I told them that this man wanted an Indian wife, they came back to the house to met him.

He chose the older of the two and asked her if she would marry him.  She consented and they went to Tishomingo and were married that evening.  He paid $50.00 for his license and they were married according to the Chickasaw law.  The next night the neighbors had a big dance for them and the next day they departed for their home at Duncan.

He bought the girl anything she wanted and was as good to her as he could be, but she couldn't be happy away from her own people.  She would stay with him a month, then come back to Mill Creek and stay a month or so.  This continued until she finally left him and came home to stay.  Indians are very devoted to their own people and it is very difficult for them to break their home ties.

My wife was called in cases of illness many times.  There was no doctor at that time and they came from far and near to get her to help care for loved ones who were ill.   She was at the home of a full blood Indian one night, and his oldest daughter was at the point of death.  He asked if she would live and my wife told him no.   This full blood walked out under the trees, took a drink of whiskey, got on his horse and rode around the house many times, yelling and whooping, supposedly to frighten away the death spirit.  He rode away and was gone for a long time and when he returned, Elvira was dying.  Again he rode around the house many times and yelled, and once more he rode away.  When he returned the second time his daughter had passed away.  He was heart broken but very drunk.  He rode away and slept in the woods for several hours.

When the Indians buried their dead, each one passed around the grave and threw a small clod of dirt on the coffin before the grave was filled.

A white man and an Indian boy stole a carload of cattle from an Indian.  They kept the cattle on the range for a while and one day they started to Dougherty to ship them.   A neighbor slipped around to the home of Felix Penner and told him what was taking place.  He got on his horse and hurried to Dougherty and telephoned to Ardmore for the officers.  They were awaiting the arrival of the cattle and thieves and when they got to Dougherty, the thieves were arrested.  The Indian was very angry and told Scott Hawkins, a Chickasaw, who was also in Dougherty, that if he lived to get out of the Federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, he would kill him.  Sometime after t his they were digging a grave at the penitentiary and the white man and Indian who had stolen the cattle were helping.  They grabbed the guard's gun and keys and escaped.  The white man came and got his wife and family in the night and they were never heard of again.

One day Scott Hawkins came to my house and said, "Mebbe so dead Indian in road.   I found him.  Come help bury him."  I went along with him.   Several of us dug a grave by the side of the road and buried him.  Scott cut a sixshooter on a tree near his grave.  This dead Indian was the escaped convict who had stolen the cattle and nobody ever found out who shot him.

One bright night when the moon was shining, someone rode up to my door and called me.   I didn't have an enemy in the world that I knew about and when I stepped out, I heard a gun begin to click.  I jumped behind a tree and finally made my way back into the house.  When I got my gun, I found it was empty and there was no ammunition in the house.  I went back outside empty handed to find out what it was all about.   This time my friend was on the ground, trying to shoot me.  I noticed he had long whiskers so I made a grab for them with one hand and got hold of the gun with the other.  To my surprise, the whiskers came off.  I pulled his hat off and found it to be a drunk whiskey peddler whom I knew very well.  I took him in the house and put him to bed.  Later, when I told him what he had done, he was very sorry about it.   He didn't know what he was doing.

I worked with my team on the Santa Fe Railroad grade in 1885 and 1886 at $3.50 per day, between Berwyn and Dougherty.

I helped to build the first telephone line from Dougherty to Nebo and put up the second dwelling in Mill Creek.  I had a gin here.  It was a two stand gin with a progress press.  I could bale about forty bales every twenty-four hours.  One year I baled six hundred and fifty bales of cotton.

Mill Creek was the largest cow town in the Chickasaw Nation after the Frisco Railroad was built in the early 1900's.  There were one hundred pens, some of them holding two carloads of cattle.  We had to pump water from Mill Creek for the cattle to drink and during the heaviest shipping season, early in the Fall, the pumps were going day and night.

There was a large tank in the pens and a large tank in the middle of town.  Cattle were drinking at these constantly.

My son bought a double headed calf from a ranch near Mill Creek.  It had one horn on the right side, three eyes and two mouths, but ate only with one.  The heads were joined by a loop attached to each throat.  She was a white-face and weighed eight hundred pounds at the age of two years.  He sold her for $1500.00, after travelling and exhibiting her for awhile.

I married Dovie Potes, August 10, 1881, in Missouri.  We are the parents of seven children.


Transcribed by Brenda Choate and Dennis Muncrief, July 2001.

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