old me about. There was big houses
and buildings of brick setting on the high land above the river when I
first see it, not like she know it when the Perrymans come here years
ago.

She heard the Indians talk about the old fort (1824), the one that rot
down long before the Civil War. And she seen it herself when she go
with the Master for trading with the stores. She said it was made by
Matthew Arbuckle and his soldiers, and she talk about Companys B, C,
D, K, and the Seventh Infantry who was there and made the Osage
Indians stop fighting the Creeks and Cherokees. She talk of it, but
that old place all gone when I first see the Fort.

Then I hear about how after the Arbuckle soldiers leave the old log
fort, the Cherokee Indians take over the land and start up the town of
Keetoowah. The folks who move in there make the place so wild and
rascally the Cherokees give up trying to make a good town and it
kinder blow away.

My husband was Tom Banks, but the boy I got ain't my own son, but I
found him on my doorstep when he's about three weeks old and raise him
like he is my own blood. He went to school at the manual training
school at Tullahassee and the education he got get him a teacher job
at Taft (Okla), where he is now.

Oklahoma Writers' Project
Ex-Slaves

10-19-38
520 Words

NANCY ROGERS BEAN
Age about 82
Hulbert, Okla.

I'm getting old and it's easy to forget most of the happenings of
slave days; anyway I was too little to know much about them, for my
mammy told me I was born about six years before the War. My folks was
on their way to Fort Gibson, and on the trip I was born at Boggy
Depot, down in southern Oklahoma.

There was a lot of us children; I got their names somewheres here.
Yes, there was George, Sarah, Emma, Stella, Sylvia, Lucinda, Rose,
Dan, Pamp, Jeff, Austin, Jessie, Isaac and Andrew; we all lived in a
one-room log cabin on Master Rogers' place not far from the old
military road near Choteau. Mammy was raised around the Cherokee town
of Tahlequah.

I got my name from the Rogers', but I was loaned around to their
relatives most of the time. I helped around the house for Bill
McCracken, then I was with Cornelius and Carline Wright, and when I
was freed my Mistress was a Mrs. O'Neal, wife of a officer at Fort
Gibson. She treated me the best of all and gave me the first doll I
ever had. It was a rag doll with charcoal eyes and red thread worked
in for the mouth. She allowed me one h