Generation One

The Homesteaders

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Theodore and Etta Hubbard

Theodore Hubbard was born in March 1864 in Tennessee. That is all the census will tell me about where. He was raised by an uncle (see my brick walls) and came west to Kansas as a young man, about 1885, where he worked as a hired hand on the wheat farms of Sumner County. There he met Etta Bumgardner, whose people had come from Missouri, and they were married in 1889. Their first child, Ralph, was born in Kansas the next year.

The Run

On Saturday, September 16, 1893, the government opened the Cherokee Outlet, which everyone called the Cherokee Strip, to settlement. It was a land run: at noon, a signal was fired along the line, and everyone who had lined up at the border raced in to stake a claim. They say there were a hundred thousand people that day for perhaps forty thousand claims.

Theodore stood in line for most of two days at a registration booth in the heat and dust to get the certificate that let him make the Run. Then he lined up on the Kansas border on a borrowed horse, with a stake, a hatchet and a canteen. Etta and the baby stayed behind. He told my father he never rode so hard in his life, before or after. By early afternoon he had driven his stake on a quarter section, 160 acres, southwest of the new town of Enid, in what became Garfield County, and he filed his claim at the land office in Enid a few days later.

The Cherokee Strip had belonged to the Cherokee Nation before the government bought it. I did not think much about that when I was a girl. I think about it more now.

The Dugout, the Soddy and the House

That first fall Theodore dug a room into the bank of a dry creek and roofed it with poles and sod, and in October Etta came down from Kansas in a wagon with Ralph, a milk cow, a crate of chickens, her mother's rocking chair and her Bible. My aunt Miriam was born in that dugout in 1894, the first Hubbard born in Oklahoma Territory. Etta said the snakes came in to get warm and she kept a hoe by the bed.

The next year they built a sod house, and in 1899 a real frame house of lumber hauled from Enid. The homestead law said they had to live on the land five years and improve it before it was theirs. Theodore's homestead case file, which I sent away for from the National Archives, has his sworn statement and two neighbors' saying he had built a sod house sixteen by twenty-four feet, dug a well, put up a stable and broken sixty acres to wheat. Reading my grandfather's own signature on that paper, almost a hundred years later, I had to sit down for a minute.

The Family

• Ralph (1890-1962), the oldest, who took over the farm.
• Miriam (1894-1979), who married and moved to Enid and wrote everybody letters for sixty years.
• Henry (1898-1918), who was drafted in 1918 and died of the influenza that October at an Army camp in Texas, before he ever went overseas. He was twenty.
• Walter (1905-1971), my father. See Generation Two.
• Julia (1908-1990), the baby, my favorite aunt, who kept every letter and every photograph and gave them all to me.

Oklahoma became a state on November 16, 1907. Grandma Etta liked to say they went to bed in a territory and woke up in a state, and nothing looked any different in the morning.

Theodore died in 1931, the year after I was born, so I don't remember him. The farm went to Ralph. Grandma Etta lived on with Ralph's family until she died in 1944. They are buried side by side in the township cemetery, and Henry is next to them.

Nathan and Hortense Pearson

Nathan Pearson, my mother's father, was born about 1868 in Arkansas. Hortense Phillips was born in 1874 in Missouri. I don't know yet how or where they met, but by 1900 they were married and farming in Arkansas. The 1900 census asked every married woman how many children she had borne and how many were living. Hortense's answer was two, and none. She never spoke of them to anyone that I know of.

In 1901 they came over into Oklahoma Territory in a covered wagon behind two mules and settled in Caddo County, where they rented cotton land. They never did own a farm of their own. Their children were born there:

• Catherine (1904-1983), who stayed in Oklahoma all her life.
• Lila (1908-1988), my mother.
• Paul (1911-1944), who was killed in France in the summer of 1944. My youngest brother John got Paul for his middle name, and Uncle Paul carried the birth announcement in his wallet.

Grandpa Nathan led the singing at their little Baptist church for thirty years and could hit a note dead center without a pitch pipe. Grandma Hortense quilted. I have her Double Wedding Ring quilt on my own bed, and it is the most beautiful thing I own.

Nathan died in 1935, in the worst of the dust years. In 1941 Grandma Hortense rode the bus to California to live with us, and she died in Stockton in 1952. She is the only one of my grandparents buried in California.

Sources for this generation

• Federal census, 1880 (Kansas and Arkansas), 1900, 1910 and 1920 (Oklahoma).
• Theodore Hubbard's homestead case file, National Archives.
• Etta Hubbard's Bible, now in my keeping.
• Headstones in the township cemetery, copied by my cousin.
• Letters from my aunts Miriam and Julia, 1950s to 1980s.
• Hortense Pearson's obituary in the Stockton paper, 1952.