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E. D. Hicks, visited the World's Fair at St. Louis in 1882 where for the first time he became interested in the telephone. February 1, 1934 he retired after forty-eight years' service as manager of the telephone in Tahlequah and the surrounding district. During this half a century vast changes have occurred: the Cherokee Na- tion is merely a name and a memory; the old Agency Building at .Muskogee is now one of the buildings of the Veterans' Hospital; the Creek Indian settlement of Muskogee is the third largest city in the state of Oklahoma; a Federal highway connects Tahlequah and .Muskogee, so that a courier could make the trip now in less than an hour; the ferry has been replaced by a modern bridge; the army post has long since been abandoned ; Gibson Station is mere- ly a location; the mails come in not three times a week but three times a day; every section has ready access to the telegraph; and a telephone is in practically every home in the state of Oklahoma. Who can tell which of these changes may be due in whole or in part to the imagination, ingenuity, and determination of this sixteen-year-old Cherokee lad. Few stories of romance and ad- venture are more interesting than the story of the life of Mr. E. D. Hicks. He was born in Fort Gibson in 1866, lost his mother while he was yet an infant, made his home for a few years with his grandparents, lived a few years with his father and step- mother, and at the age of six came to live with an aunt in Tahle- quah. The aunt, the late Mrs. Jane Hicks Stapler (Mrs. John W. Stapler), taught the Cherokee boy to speak English and educated him in the public schools of the Cherokee Nation until he had completed the work offered in the grade schools. He was then sent by his father, Daniel Ross Hicks, to the University of Ar- kansas, where he remained until his father's death in 1883. That same year Hicks went to live with an uncle, Major D. W. Lipe, on a ranch near Claremore, where he had charge of the commissary. With a friend or two Hicks decided to attend the fair at St. Louis. With about twenty-five dollars, some of which he had earned and some of which was given to him by his uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Stapler, he left Vinita for St. Louis. So far as the Cherokee lad was concerned the outstanding exhibit at the fair was the telephone. He studied it, trying to understand the intri- eate workings of the unusual piece of machinery which enabled people to talk over wires to each other although they might be separated by several miles.
