While in Galena Papa bought us a pony saddler and bridle for us to ride. It disappeared one night and we never did find out who took it, but some people left out in the night so we figured they took it.

Papa and Scott Needham came back to Oklahoma with a wagon and team. A couple weeks later in January of 1902, Mama, my brother and I came on the train. I had to sell my chickens and I was sure broken hearted. But a little boy Clyde Davis had given me a baby chicken and I put it in a basket with my cat and brought it on the train. People on the train thought it odd that the cat didn’t eat the chicken. She was just about a week old when he gave her to me end I carried her wrapped in a handkerchief. Named her Clydie and it tuned out that she was a hen. We got off the train at Chickasa. Papa rented a little one place in the north part of it but we only stayed two weeks. Scott Needham came with his team and moved us out on the farm he had gotten before, in February they began putting up the grade for the railroad. Papa got lumber at a sawmill that had moved in east of where Cement is built. He built us a one-room house with a wagon sheet for a door. Shunks railroad camp was just across the road from our place. We could buy some food there but one time Papa walked the 20 miles from Chickasha with a sack of flour on his back We didn’t have coal oil (kerosene) for light so my brother and I would work all afternoon getting dry brush which Mama would put on stove hearth and read to us by the light. She read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin"," Swiss Family Robinson” and others I loved to read.

Papa got a job making bridge timber and post tor the railroad so he cut a lot of timber. Mama and us kids would take his lunch at noon and peel the bark off the posts in the afternoon. Something happened to our cat not long after we got there so we always thought the dogs in the railroad camp killed it. Scott Needham had a place not far north of us. He bought some chickens, then decided to leave, I bought a hen with 8 chickens from him and my brother bought one with 5 chickens, When our shoes wore out, Mother made us some out of old pants and quilted them.

Aunt Sallie had gone with a boy in Joplin. When he went back to Indiana, Aunt Sally came down to Oklahoma to file on land, His name was George Lucas. In February of 1902 he came to Oklahoma and met her at Oklahoma City where they were married on February 14 and came down to Grandpa's. Grandpa took us to Chickasha and bought us shoes and we were very proud of them.

Uncle George built a one-room house on Aunt Sallie's place, just west of Old Maid Hill in the Kechi Hills. He went to Chickasha and bought a team of unbroken horses, Grandpa had a mule called Jumbo. Uncle George would hitch one of the wild horses up with Jumbo to plow. I would ride the mule and guide them while he held the low and broke out the land north of the hill. I would ride the mule with a jug on each end of a strap across the mule’s back and carry water from the Vaughn railroad campsite just east of town. There was Jim Vaughn, 17, that would make me so mad calling me his sweetheart. That fall they built a school house a mile north of us called the Shunk School. All the girls had a crush on Allen Melton who helped build it. That first summer a family named Layton moved just north of us. They had 2 girls and a boy big enough to play with.

An old Negro Jim had out on a Miss Wooten’s place to help her. One day he came from Chickasha with a bunch of dogs. The people wanted him to keep the dogs for them until the tax man had come and gone. He had one he said had just joined the bunch and didn’t belong to anyone. He