Amanda Kimball

Field Worker:  John F. Daugherty 

Date:  June 26, 1937
Interview # 4639
Address: Davis, OK
Born: July 20, 1850
Place of Birth: Tishomingo, I.T. 
Father: Jesse Nail, born in Mississippi
Mother: Mary Ann Carter, born in Indian Territory

My father was Jesse Nail.  He belonged to Joal Nail of Nails Crossing on Blue River.   He came from Mississippi with the Nails.  My mother was Mary Ann Carter and belonged to Lizzie Carter.  I do not know the date of birth of either of my parents.

Father farmed a ten acre patch after he was freed.  There were six children in our family.  I was born July 20, 1850, three miles east of Tishomingo in Tishomingo County, Chickasaw Nation, in a lay hut, with a dirt floor and no windows.  The house had a cat chimney and the roof was covered with clapboards fastened down with weight poles and bois d' arc pins.  We drank water out of a creek.  We dug holes in the creek bed and sank barrels.  These would fill with water and we used it.

There was lots of game here in those days.  The turkeys came and sat on our rail fence each evening.  When corn was scarce we ate turkey for bread and venison for meat.  We always had plenty of meat, beef, wild hog, venison, turkey and prairie chicken, but we often had to do without bread.  We had very little flour.  It was five dollars a barrel and we couldn't buy much of it.  Our bead was usually corn bread, and most of the time we beat the corn into meal from which this bread was made.   We liked Blue Bread.  This was made of the ashes of burned bean hulls mixed with meal.  This was seasoned and cooked in a pot until almost done.  Then it was dipped up and rolled in corn shucks and put into a pot of boiling water to boil until done.  We roasted corn until it was brown, pounded it on the mortar block, put sugar on it and cooked it.  This was our cereal.  We made ash cakes.  These were baked in the skillet and ashes sprinkled over the top.  We liked the flavor of these wood ashes.  The ashes would brush off, the flavor remained.

We had many berries and grapes which we dried in the sun.  We were especially fond of grape doodles in the winter.  These were made of the dried grapes.  We boiled them until they were tender and sweetened them.  Then we put dough in the pot with them and boiled them together until they were done.  The sugar in those days was yellow and waxy.  We knew nothing about white sugar.

We cooked with a skillet and lid and a large dinner pot.  I was grown before I saw a cook stove.  We had spoons made of cow horns and our forks were notched cow horns.   The men took these spoons and cut notches in the end.  This made a sort of fork which we could stick in the meat.  We had no tables, chairs nor cabinets.   We spread a buffalo hide on the ground and all sat around on this when we ate our meals. 

Our beds were made of poles fastened to the corner of the hose and roped with strings of leather cut from cowhide.  A buffalo hide was placed on first.  Then a feather bed.

We had no newspapers.  And we told the days of the week by cutting notches on a stick and the time of day by the location of the sun, moon and stars.

There were many panthers in those days and we were more afraid of them than any animal.   One night a panther came to our house, jumped up on the roof and began tearing the boards off.  Mother began to scream and my uncle came from his  shooting as he came.  This frightened the panther and he left there but we were all frightened almost to death. 

There were many bears in these Arbuckle Mountains, too.  It was very hard to raise our Tom Fuller patches to maturity.  Bears liked corn when it was young and tender.   I have seen them many a time in corn fields, gathering corn for their cubs.   They walked upright and carried the corn in their arms, just like a man.  If they happened to drop an ear, they threw down the whole armful, and returned to the field for another load.

We didn't have many store bought clothes.  They were too expensive.  They sold for five dollars a pattern which was ten yards.  This was just after the close of the Civil War, in 1865.  We wove our own cloth from thread which we had spun.   We got bark from Walnut trees and extracted the ooze by boiling it.    Then we put copperas in this to make it stay in the cloth better.    This was our dye and it made the cloth brown or black. 

We had no patterns to make our dresses by.  We measured the cloth as long as we wanted it, which was always to the ground.  Then we folded this over on the cloth and cut if off with  made scissors or shears.  We cut a hole for the head to go through, and opened it down the front, sewed up the sides by hand and hemmed it by hand.   We used  made needles which were made out of horns. 

We had no pins, nor buttons on our clothes but fastened our dresses with thorns, gathered from bushes.  I wore hoops and bustles and very long riding skirts.   These reached the ground as I sat on my pony, and had buck shot in the hems to hold them down.  They would fly in the wind as I rode. 

My hats were made of straw which I gathered and plaited.  I spliced these plaits together and started tacking them in the center which was the top of the hat.  They went around and around this center until I had the hat as large as I wanted it. 

I wove red ribbons and red handkerchiefs around my neck.  My bonnets were slat bonnets, with white ash slats.  We had long, wide strings to tie them on with, and the bottoms of the bonnets came well down over our shoulders. 

These were always starched stiff with starch which we made from white corn.     We cut the corn from the ear, covered it with water and let it stand until the starch was soaked out.  Then we strained it and got our starch. 

We wore split leather shoes with brass toes in the winter and went barefoot in the summer.  One pair of shoes a year was all we had.  These were half soled with wooden pegs when they needed repairing.  I remember a neighbor girl having a pair of flat heeled shoes which laced on the sides, made of suede or velvet.  How I envied her!  Those were the first dress up shoes I had ever seen.

We made our candles.  We had tin moulds into which we poured hot tallow.  We put a string in the center of this and when it became firm we removed the candles from the moulds.

We smoked summate leaves in cane and cob pipes.  We made clay pipes, also.   We got red clay and shaped it into a pipe bowl then we stuck a piece of cane it it and laid it in the sun to harden.

We went once a year to the Salt Lake, east of Double Springs in the Choctaw Nation, near Tuscaloosa, and brought back a year's supply of salt in large chucks.

After I was married, (can't remember the year) my husband killed deer and traded the hams in Dension, Texas, for groceries.

Many a time we ate rice for bread and if we ran out of coffee we parched corn and made coffee.  We killed game with a set trigger rifle and cap and ball gun.

Our farming was done with oxen and bull tongue plows.  We sowed cotton seed by hand, and hoed it with eye hoes.

My husband hauled rock from the Arbuckle Mountains to Wynnewood with an ox team for a week and received three bushels of corn as payment.

There were no roads at that time, and he dragged rocks out of a trail across the Arbuckle Mountains so we could go to Ardmore.  This was known as the Kimball Trail and has since become Highway 77.

There were many common-law marriages.  Many couples who had lived together many years had to marry when the Arkansas Law was extended over the Territory about 1898.

We used to have a horror of raids by the Comanches.  People would live in squads, when one of those raids was in progress.  They seldom bothered people unless they caught a white man out alone.  Then they took his scalp.  I can remember when they stole a child and its mother near Woodville.  The soldiers from Fort Washita went after them and the Indians killed both mother and child.  They stole horses and cattle and white children.  If the child wasn't large enough to eat they killed it.   They liked to capture these white children to rear as their own.

My husband had the first saddle in this part of the Territory.  He bought it at Fort Smith and it was of black leather with a large flat horn, as large as a saucer.   People came for miles to look at that saddle.

I have lived continuously since 1887 in this same old log house here in the Arbuckle Mountains, near Sorghum Flat, four miles south of Davis.

My mother is buried at Tishomingo.

Transcribed by Brenda Choate & Dennis Muncrief, February, 2001