My Life and An Era

The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin

John Hope Franklin, John Whittington Franklin, John Hope Franklin, John Whittington Franklin

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780807167267
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"My father's life represented many layers of the human experience—freedman and Native American, farmer and rancher, rural educator and urban professional."—John Hope Franklin
Buck Colbert Franklin (1879–1960) led an extraordinary life; from his youth in what was then the Indian Territory to his practice of law in twentieth-century Tulsa, he was an observant witness to the changes in politics, law, daily existence, and race relations that transformed the wide-open Southwest. Fascinating in its depiction of an intelligent young man's coming of age in the days of the Land Rush and the closing of the frontier, My Life and an Era is equally important for its reporting of the triracial culture of early Oklahoma.
Recalling his boyhood spent in the Chickasaw Nation, Franklin suggests that blacks fared better in Oklahoma in the days of the Indians than they did later with the white population. In addition to his insights about the social milieu, he offers youthful reminiscences of mustangs and mountain lions, of farming and ranch life, that might appear in a Western novel.
After returning from college in Nashville and Atlanta, Franklin married a college classmate, studied law by mail, passed the bar, and struggled to build a practice in Springer and Ardmore in the first years of Oklahoma statehood. Eventually a successful attorney in Tulsa, he was an eyewitness to a number of important events in the Southwest, including the Tulsa race riot of 1921, which left more than 100 dead. His account clearly shows the growing racial tensions as more and more people moved into the state in the period leading up to World War II.
Rounded out by an older man's reflections on race, religion, culture, and law, My Life and an Era presents a true, firsthand account of a unique yet defining place and time in the nation's history, as told by an eloquent and impassioned writer.

1

DAYS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

I was born on the sixth day of May, 1879, near Homer, a small country village in what was then Pickens County, Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory.¹ I was the seventh of ten children born to David and Milley Franklin. Dad was born in Tennessee not far from Gallatin, and Mother was born in Mississippi, not far from Biloxi. I was christened “Buck” in honor of my grandfather Buck, who died long before I was born. As a slave, he was the property of a full-blood Chickasaw Indian family, the Birneys, and he must have been above the average slave in intelligence and business, for he purchased himself, his wife, and their ten children long before the Civil War.²

My mother was of one-fourth Choctaw Indian blood, the other three-quarters being Negro; but she never knew the meaning of slavery in her early childhood days; for she was born in the home of her Indian kin; she ate, slept, played and attended their tribal school and church and spoke their language. She and Dad were married in 1856 near Biloxi and moved to Pauls Valley, in what is now Garvin County, Oklahoma, where their two oldest children, Walter and Andrew, were born. After that, they moved near Homer, in what is now Carter County, Oklahoma, where the rest of their children were born. There were principally two things that caused Dad to move from Pauls Valley. Since he was what is known as a Chickasaw freed-man and his wife a Choctaw, and as the lands of the two tribes were then held in common, he could hold, use, and occupy as much of it as he desired, provided he did not attempt to occupy or use any that was occupied or used by any other Indian or freedman of the two tribes. The second reason was that his oldest and youngest brothers, Alexander and Bailey, and a sister, Matilda, had already moved to this settlement.

It is strange how a decision can so often change the whole course of one’s life and the destiny of one’s children as well as unborn generations.

Had he remained at Pauls Valley, the best he could have ever hoped to be was a janitor or some other menial worker. Whereas, as we shall soon see, the change brought him into the great open spaces, where there were vast uninhabited areas where the virgin grasses grew profusely and luxuriantly. Here, amid these untamed surroundings, where there was plenty of elbow room, Dad’s spirit was lifted high above the valleys and low places, upon a tower, as it were, from which he could view distant vistas and horizons unfolding and widening like the rippling waves of a pebble cast into the still waters of the lake. Here, he found breathing easier and the intake of the rarified atmosphere drove the cobwebs from his mind, and there rushed into the vacuum new aspirations and inspirations, seizing and engulfing his entire being and transforming him into a new creature. Before, he had felt limited and circumscribed; but now, for the first time in his life, he had a clearer and broader outlook. He told me about this new birth. He said that after he left Pauls Valley and saw the progress being made by his brothers and sister and listened to them talk about the new life in the new West, about the tremendous possibilities for getting ahead, a new surge came upon him and he believed he could outstrip them.

Since the days of Grandpa Buck, the Franklin family had been a clannish lot whether they lived far from or near each other, and Dad’s brothers and sister insisted on helping him get started. They sold him, on credit, workhorses, milch cows, brood sows, and opened an account for him at the Tom Grant general store at Fort Arbuckle. He was able, on his own, to get some credit and other things he needed from the Freeman general store at Pauls Valley, and within two years, he was able to square his accounts with his creditors, including his brothers and sister, by working day and night. This remarkable feat redoubled his confidence in himself. He had become a shrewd trader, and by the end of 1863 he had accumulated many hundred head of livestock and other personal properties. He had under cultivation over two hundred acres of land, under fence almost a section of pasture land with a sizable spread, and one of the best young orchards in the entire Chickasaw Nation. It seemed that everything he had touched turned into money and chattels.

It was in the midst of his almost miraculous rise to success and prosperity that Dad became restless and morose and neglectful, and he grew more so as the days came and went. His sister and younger brother did not understand and became deeply concerned. Mother had guessed the trouble after hearing bits of a conversation between Uncle ‘Zander and him, and when he informed her of what was ailing him, she frankly told him she had guessed it.

At the time, the Civil War was at fever heat and casualties were daily mounting on both sides. Uncle ‘Zander, who had always had an uncanny influence over Dad and who had seen service in the Second Seminole War, had persuaded him to enter the conflict on the side of freedom. ‘Zander had fought by the side of Osceola and painted glowing pictures of his risks and daring, even of the time when he narrowly escaped the massacre at the hands of General Zachary Taylor, later president of the United States. He convinced Dad that he and his brothers and sister would look after his family and property and see that it grew and nothing would be lost or destroyed. They both, like their father, hated slavery and oppression, and Dad became convinced that it was his solemn duty to do his bit for the cause of freedom. Among other things that his older brother had said to him: “Slavery is hell’s twin monster, and it’s both wicked and immoral.”

Most of the Indians and all the freedmen hated Andrew Jackson for the war, although he was dead; they believed he had stirred the hatred between the races, and the Five Civilized Tribes and their former slaves blamed Jackson for their treatment and the wars against them, including their banishment and removal from their old homes to the Territory. Years later, my uncle repeated, I am quite sure, the same things he had said to Dad when he influenced him to enlist. Dad was inducted into the army on the 17th day of March, 1864, and assigned to “B I Indian Home Guards as a private, as a detachment of U.S. volunteers.”³

During the time Dad spent in the army, Uncle ‘Zander and Uncle Bailey and Aunt Matilda, true to their promise, looked after his business with the same fidelity and earnestness as if it were theirs. Uncle ‘Zander galloped the six miles from his home to ours daily, supervising the work while Uncle Bailey, whose home was just two miles away, looked after the details. And the business, every phase of it, grew and prospered.

An examination of Dad’s war record discloses a wide discrepancy between it and the record as told by him and his family and contemporaries. Some parts of this war record I know are wrong. It says that he was a runaway slave when he enlisted. He was not a slave, as I have pointed out. Uncle ‘Zander might have had him say that in the belief that he could enlist easier in “Bleeding Kansas.” He was a Chickasaw freedman and never lived in the Choctaw Nation as the record claims. The Burney (the correct spelling of the name is Birney) family that once owned my grandfather Buck came to the Territory under the general removal treaty with the Chickasaws in the early 1830s, and they settled near the Texas northern border, around or in the town of Burneyville, across the Red River from Gainesville, Texas, on the Oklahoma side. None of my family lived in the Territory then. My Uncle Alexander was between 1835 and 1837 engaged in fighting the Second Seminole War. It is over a hundred miles by the Santa Fe railway from Pauls Valley to Burneyville, and it is more than two hundred miles from Burneyville to Topeka, Kansas, where all of Dad’s war records were originally kept. The war record places Dad’s age at twenty-five when he enlisted in 1864; but he was born in 1820.

So we have government records v. traditions, or folk facts. In this instance, I prefer to believe the latter, for two reasons. First, Dad was unable to read and did not know how or why the records were compiled as they were—one thing is clear, it seems to me: he wanted to enlist and that was possibly the thing he had uppermost in his mind. And second, the bits of information he gave me from time to time about his participation in the struggle indicate that after his enlistment, he went to Tennessee and saw his first engagement near Knoxville and finally joined up with Sherman and marched with the army to the sea.⁴ Don’t ask me how he did it, I don’t know. He told me the color of the soil around Knoxville, and I saw it myself for the first time in 1899. I know I used to read to him about the siege of Atlanta and the march, and he disputed many things the history book contained and said “that happened this way or that,” and what he said and the argument he made seemed like common sense to me. I’m not puzzled about how he got to Tennessee; for, in those days, there were many freedmen who made the trip back to their old home and thought nothing about it. They had good horses and thought nothing of such a journey, and it was the most natural thing for him to want to fight on the soil of his birth.

I knew nothing of the discrepancy between his war record and the things he had told me until a few years ago. I went to Pauls Valley to see his old lawyer, O. W. Patchell, but he had died and so had his wife. He had a young son living, but the son knew nothing of the things I wanted to know and could find none of his father’s records. I was sure Patchell had assisted Dad’s Washington attorney in working up his pension request, and looking about, I found that his oldest kin and relatives, who might have been able to explain this discrepancy, had passed.

By the time I was of sufficient age to pay attention to things, Dad was the owner of two spreads, one at home and the other about six miles northwest of home.⁵ He was easily the best known cattleman in the Nation, with the possible exceptions of Cal and Ike Suggs and Jack Brown, and by far the most popular and most highly respected. He was an active paid-up member of the Texas Cattle Raisers Association and attended all of its annual meetings. He was well acquainted with most of the cattlemen in southern Kansas, especially in and around Dodge City, Abilene, and Caldwell, from which points he often shipped cattle before the Santa Fe went into operation through the Chickasaw Nation. He had early commenced the improvement of his livestock—cattle, horses, jackasses, jennets, and hogs in the main—and he therefore raised and sold them to better advantage and for better prices than the average stockman. In the improvement of his livestock, especially horses and cattle, he owed much to his brother ‘Zander, who had made a specialty of dealing in fine breeds of horses and cattle before the close of the war, and from whom he got his start of fine breeds.

In the matter of swine, there was an exception, as I recall. Dad had an old, blue brood sow. She was different from the rest of the hogs. She and her offspring had as little to do with the other swine as possible. I don’t remember how Dad came by her. The first time I remember having seen her was after the first light snow. Then she came home with her own drove of different sizes, all of them shy of human beings. You see, Old Blue, as she was called, had a way of spending the winter months at home. As soon as spring weather commenced to arrive, she would leave with a boar of her brood for the creek bottoms and woods where she would subsist upon acorns, farrow her young, and return home after the snow had fallen. Dad always kept her offspring of the former season at home. He tried to detain Old Blue, but he was unable to build a fence to hold her. There was an instinct in her that warred against confinement. The wide open spaces beckoned her and she was obedient unto the call of the wild. Not so with her former broods. After the winter had passed and they had feasted upon corn, they were content to remain at home.

There was another peculiar phenomenon at the home spread. Dad had a dun mare named Fannie. She was a pet, a natural-born pacer and as beautiful an animal as I ever saw. And the many foals she delivered were all natural-born pacers and of her color, although their sires were all of different colors.

Looking back across the years, I recall two personal experiences that stand out in my memory as vividly as if they happened yesterday. The first occurred in May, 1884, just a few days after my fifth birthday. It was in the late afternoon when Dad had just ridden in from Fort Arbuckle. He tethered Old Button to the hitching rail and went into the house. I was playing alone in the barnyard, teasing old Tom, our peacock, as he strutted around me with dragging, flaming plumes, in barbaric pride and vanity. As I looked toward the hitching rail and saw Dad’s horse hitched to it, a strange and compelling something seized me. I loosed the horse’s bridle reins, led him to a stump behind an outhouse, climbed up into the saddle by way of the stirrup, and rode away into the sunset.

As I rode away toward the west, I recalled a broad, expanded prairie, by which I had ridden many times behind Mother as she took me to the Oil Springs schoolhouse. It was called the “Sam Williams Prairie” because he lived upon one edge of it. The prairie was as level as the floor of our house, except that here and there it tilted, and was almost treeless, except on the northeast corner, where there was a grove of oaks. The edge of this prairie extended to the foothills of the Arbuckle Mountains. To the south lay the Oil Spring Flat, carpeted with mosquito grass.

I guided Old Button into the grove of trees to the side as I was approaching, and stopped. In the spring, summer, and fall seasons, this prairie was a gathering and camping place for cattle from many herds. They came late in the evening, when the sun was not so hot, and grazed upon the tall and tender grass and bedded down after their fill. Often the bulls of the different herds challenged and fought each other for the mastery of the herds. Earlier that evening, wild turkeys had flown from the bottoms out near the prairie into the sumac groves to feed upon the red berries. Subsequently, I would see them there in droves that could not be counted. I have watched them as they flew up to return to their roosting places and witnessed how their wings completely hid the sun from view and darkened the earth beneath over an extended space.

Just how long I sat in the saddle or how or when I dismounted, I don’t know. The first thing I remember afterward was that I was sprawled upon the ground, canopied by tall blades of grass and a huge hairy face against mine. The face was that of old Dash, my Newfoundland shepherd dog, that had been my almost inseparable companion since birth. Dad had purchased him when he was a pup from a friend in Caldwell, Kansas, when I was a baby. He was so large that I could ride him; but he allowed no one else to do it. He must have seen me leave home and followed me at a distance. Dash was an unusually smart dog. My mother’s cousin, Pleasant Shoals, had taken great pains to train him for me from the time he was a mere pup. He could send him around the fence to see if any cattle were in the field, or to Homer to get the mail or to other neighbors in the community to carry messages, and so forth.

I had been afraid lying there on the ground before Dash came, but now being reassured, I soon fell asleep again. Next I heard a voice calling me; first it seemed at a great distance, and then it drew nearer and nearer. Then I felt Dad’s breath against my face and he was next lifting me to my feet. He was saying, “Wake up son, my God! I’m so glad we have found you safe and sound. Let’s go home. Your mother is up and waiting for you.” Rubbing my eyes, I was fully awake now. He went and fetched Old Button grazing nearby and shouted to some other hunters not far away. He placed me on his horse behind him and led Old Button. Someone fired a shot or two, signals to other seekers that I had been found. Near home I saw a light burning in Mother’s room window. She kissed and disrobed me without a word; but I could see that look in her eyes, and I knew that there was more to come. She never whipped one of her children when she was angry or under a great strain. She always took her time and lectured to us while she applied the lash.

The other experience occurred in July of the same year. In those days it was the custom of the Baptist churches throughout the Nation to conduct joint revivals, or camp meetings, after crops had been laid by. They would move from settlement to settlement, holding their meetings from ten days to two weeks in each community where there was a church. That meant that they covered an area of sixty miles or more. They went on horseback, buggies, and covered wagons, each with enough to set up light housekeeping, and each resembled a tented village. On this occasion, this moving church was encamped at the Salem Baptist Church upon the same spot where it stands today. (On November 21, 1955, my brother Andrew died of a heart attack in this very church as he was rising from a prayer he had just said.)

Then, the country was wild and untamed. The deer were more numerous then than the rabbit is today, and the wild turkeys and prairie chickens abounded everywhere, and the panther and mountain lion skulked in every forest and creek bottom ready to pounce upon man and beast. Wild Horse Creek was truly “wild,” and dangerous to cross. Its waters ran swift, deep, and muddy. The grass grew tall and luscious, and wild grapes and plums and berries of all sorts were plenteous. Only cow trails and dim roads pointed the way, except for the fact that the government road, called the Doadesville-Fort Arbuckle-Fort Sill Trail, ran nearby. Now, State Highway No. 7 and farm-to-market roads belt and thread the environs.

It was late one evening, after different preachers had been preaching all day, and some of the womenfolk were preparing evening meals, with the men butchering a yearling or hog or lamb, while to the east in the bottom bordering on the banks of Wild Horse Creek, desperadoes and murderers with prices on their heads engaged in selling whiskey and gambling. Among them there existed bitter hatred, jealousies, and feuds. Particularly was this true about Dick Glass and his friend Henry Farrow and their enemy Mose Clay.

Dad and Mother took my brothers David and Fisher and myself with them to church that evening and stopped our wagon behind one owned by Jim Williams. I was left in the wagon to look after my brothers, my juniors, while Dad unhitched the team from his wagon and hobbled them on the grass, and Mother retired to the church. Soon after that Mose Clay rode up, dismounted and tethered his horse behind the wagon of his half brother, Jim Williams.

It was after nightfall, but the moon was full and shining as bright as day, and peering through our covered wagon I could see everything that was taking place in front and to my side. Mose took some corn from his brother’s wagon and fed his horse in the feed box and disappeared for a short time. A man, whom I did not know, removed Mose’s horse from the feed box and placed another horse there. Soon Mose returned to the wagon, and seeing a horse had been substituted for his at the box, inquired with an oath who had done it. The man, whom I was soon to learn was Henry Farrow, said, “I did it, you s.o.b., and if you do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Editors’ Preface
• Buck Colbert Franklin: An Appreciation John Hope Franklin
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Days of Early Childhood
• 2. Life on the Ranch
• 3. Dawes Academy
• 4. Roger Williams University
• 5. Atlanta Baptist College
• 6. Frustration and Indecision
• 7. Ardmore
• 8. Rentiesville: A Period of Crusading
• 9. Tulsa, 1921: Bloody Racial Conflict
• 10. 1929: The Beginning of Panic
• 11. A Promise Fulfilled
• 12. Climbing the Ladder of the Law
• 13. Others in My Life
• 14. The World Today and My Beliefs
• 15. Loose Ends—Conclusion
• Index