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Chronicles of Oklahoma
had a droopy jaw and a long stringy mustach and watery eyes,
and chewed tobacco constantly. He had a strong antipathy for
work of any kind, John would come over and visit every day and
spin tall tales of his prowess as a coon hunter back in Arkansas..
I often wondered how he ever got up enough energy to come to
Oklahoma.
My neighbors on the west and northwest were Jim, Dave, and
Frank Sharp. Each one had large families. Harve Reynolds, my
neighbor on the north had a growing family. On the northeast
was Mr. Norton, whose family consisted of a grown daughter, Daisy,
and a son named Paul, a youth about fourteen. Paul was one of
my best friends. He was a bright intelligent youth, he often spent
the night with me. He said I made the best biscuits he ever ate,
and I sure was flattered. Mr. Norton was an elderly gentleman, a
widower and was in poor health. There were several neighborly
young bachelors in the community but they were mostly located on
Skeleton Creek. They were Hugh Williams, Bill Shultz, Will Wall,
and Jerry Hatfield who could play the fiddle. There was also a
lady homesteader, Miss Alice Dawson, "Oklahoma Alice," who came
in with the rush and filed on the Skeleton.
She had been given a great deal of publicity by eastern news-
paper reporters covering the rush of settlers to Oklahoma, and had
given her the sobriquet of "Oklahoma Alice." They pictured her
on a horse, her hair flying in the breeze going at full speed in com-
pany with other home seekers on horseback, in the mad rush for
land. It was quite thrilling. The truth was she came in on the
first train and was met by her uncle, Jim Patterson, a United States
Marshal who drove her to her claim on the Skeleton. She was con-
tested, and after a long drawn out trial, she won the case. She in-
formed me afterward that the expense of lawyers and witness fees
cost her more than the claim was worth.
About the first improving I did was to dig a well. In this
undertaking, I enlisted the services of my friend, John Kirk. He
claimed to be an expert on digging and walling up wells and
locating water. He claimed to be a water witch, using a forked
willow switch which he grasped in his hands while he walked around,
and when he struck a stream of water the switch would turn down.
John located the well near my cabin just where I wanted it. My
cabin was in a little valley on the bank of Wolf creek and it was a
safe bet that you could have struck water anywhere around there.
John did the digging. Lilburn Graham and I windlassed out the
dirt. At twenty feet we struck a nice flow of soft water. We
walled up the well with rock, built a wood curb over it, rigged up a
pulley and rope with an oak bucket at each end, and my well was
completed. John proved he was both a well expert and an expert
on coon hunting. My next improvement was a stable to shelter my
two horses. This was a log shed built in the side of a bank and
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