women worked around the owner's
house, but each Negro family looked after a part of the fields and
worked the crops like they belonged to us.

When I first heard talk about the War the slaves were allowed to go
and see one another sometimes and often they were sent on errands
several miles with a wagon or on a horse, but pretty soon we were all
kept at home, and nobody was allowed to come around and talk to us.
But we heard what was going on.

The McIntosh men got nearly everybody to side with them about the War,
but we Negroes got word somehow that the Cherokees over back of Ft.
Gibson was not going to be in the War, and that there were some Union
people over there who would help slaves to get away, but we children
didn't know anything about what we heard our parents whispering about,
and they would stop if they heard us listening. Most of the Creeks who
lived in our part of the country, between the Arkansas and the
Verdigris, and some even south of the Arkansas, belonged to the Lower
Creeks and sided with the South, but down below us along the Canadian
River they were Upper Creeks and there was a good deal of talk about
them going with the North. Some of the Negroes tried to get away and
go down to them, but I don't know of any from our neighborhood that
went to them.

Some Upper Creeks came up into the Choska bottoms talking around among
the folks there about siding with the North. They were talking, they
said, for old man Gouge, who was a big man among the Upper Creeks. His
Indian name was Opoeth-le-ya-hola, and he got away into Kansas with a
big bunch of Creeks and Seminoles during the War.

Before that time, I remember one night my uncle William brought
another Negro man to our cabin and talked a long time with my pappy,
but pretty soon some of the Perryman Negroes told them that Mr. Mose
was coming down and they went off into the woods to talk. But Mr. Mose
didn't come down. When pappy came back Mammy cried quite a while, and
we children could hear them arguing late at night. Then my uncle
Hector slipped over to our cabin several times and talked to pappy,
and mammy began to fix up grub, but she didn't give us children but a
little bit of it, and told us to stay around with her at the cabin and
not go playing with the other children.

Then early one morning, about daylight, old Mr. Mose came down to the
cabin in his buggy, waving a shot gun and hollering at the top of his
voice. I never saw a man so mad in