Wayne Pounds, Prof. Emeritus
Aoyama Gakuin Univ., Tokyo
I. Graduating to the Sinners’ Pew
I’d stand it as long as I could, then I’d tell Mama I had to go to the toilet. On my way back from the cubby-hole jakes to where Mama sat with the saints toward the front of the church, I’d sit down in the next-to-the last row or the last one, knowing she wouldn’t disturb the service by coming back to get me. I was cautious and calculating, starting with say five minutes, stretching it after a few weeks to ten, and so on until by the age of ten or eleven I had established my place on the row furthest back, the sinners’ bench. I found the climate there more congenial to my soul. I didn’t dare bring a book to read, but at least in the back I could draw pictures. It was friendlier back there too. My companions were Zelda Alsip's brothers Bob and Elwood Saulsberry and occasionally her husband Jesse Alsip and sometimes even a passing pilgrim they’d sobered up enough to look respectable. Who else may have sat back there, I don’t recall, but Bob and Elwood I remember well. I liked them. They had big rough hands and red faces and wore clean faded overalls. They were convivial men and, by my lights, able conversationalists. They never asked me about school. They never asked me about anything, but they made it clear that I was welcome to listen. They told stories about pickup trucks, horses, mules, dogs, and hard times (a.k.a. rural poverty). They were my kind of talkers. I grappled them to my soul.
I am repeating myself here, for I told this story before more than ten years ago in “Confessions of a Childhood Churchgoer” I wrote:
The physical contact that I craved was with my mother. I think that as a small child, and perhaps especially because I was the youngest, I tended to cling to her, but this was not encouraged, and as I grew older it was actively frowned upon as something I was now "too big" for. In church, sitting beside her, as old as six or seven, I would pretend to be sleepy so I could put my head on her lap, but this too was eventually disallowed as something I was too grown-up for. I soon moved to the back pew, where the known sinners sat, red-faced men in overalls who carried a funny smell that years later I recognized as whisky. After church, these were the ones I would talk to. They would joke with me, and I felt that they liked me. The two I remember best, the brothers Bob and Elwood Saulsberry, died of alcoholism, or so my mother told me. That made sense. They did have a curious odor about them--I was just too young to know what it was.
But I am digressing. My subject is not myself but Bob and Elwood. Both of them had been born in Kentucky, Bob came bawling into the world in 1896, and Elwood ten years later. The town was called Fallsburg, in Lawrence County, a political entity established by land parcels donated by adjoining counties along the Ohio River in eastern Kentucky, at the merger of the Levisa and Tug Forks into the Big Sandy River, which forms part of the state's border with West Virginia.
There are two points of contact, neither of them by blood, between myself and these two tipplers born before the turn of the century. One might be Appalachia, which is a very long mountain range that runs along the east coast of North American from Canada to Georgia and Alabama. I can make quick work of myself by saying that I have a split personality. My father’s grandparents came from Illinois, land of Lincoln, while my mother’s granddad came from Alabama, land of slavery. Abraham Lincoln himself was from Kentucky, a burg called Hodgenville in the county of LaRue, a county that should be better known as one without whiskey. Yes, gentle reader, it’s dry.
A second point is that, like Bob and Elwood, my paternal grandmother came from Kentucky as a young girl, and by some quirk of fate’s clock both my clan and the Saulsberry clan arrived in Chandler Oklahoma in the year 1912. A more intimate contact came with the sinners’ pew in the back row of the Bible Missionary Church, where we abutted in the decade of roughly 1952-1963, beginning when I was just over six years old and they were in their sixties.
Florescent sign on the front of the Bible Missionary Church
The great Scots-Irish migration from the British Isles began in the eighteenth century. Shelf after shelf of books have written about their contribution to American culture, producing Presidents from Andrew Jackson to Ronald Reagan. I have leafed through this literature enough to know when to keep my mouth shut. In what follows will focus on two matters that concern Lincoln County, Oklahoma, the place of my own origins. First what might be called the great migration of 1910-1920, and then the close alliance between forms of evangelical religion and the consumption of whiskey.
The first is the less controversial.
II. East Kentucky Comes to Lincoln County
Someone needs to write a chapter on the great migration from central and eastern Kentucky into Oklahoma during the period from 1890 to 1910. The Kentuckian Samuel Wilson, in the second volume of his 1928 History of Kentucky, provides an overview, although he doesn’t mention Oklahoma until the end:
In 1850, Missouri had 69,694 native Kentuckians living there. Indiana showed 68,651. Illinois had embraced 49,588 Kentuckians. Ohio gained 13,829 of our people and 12,609 had moved south to Tennessee. Iowa received fewer; 8,994 and Arkansas showed 7,428 Kentucky born people. Texas already had 5,478 Kentuckians and far-off California 4,690. This gives us an indication of the direction of the major migrations in 1850 – Illinois, Indiana and Missouri. . . .
By 1860, the largest migration was to Missouri; they had picked up nearly 30,000 more of our people. Texas had picked up from 5,478 to 14,545. Arkansas was slowly gaining Kentuckians in their midst and Kansas showed 6,556 native born Kentuckians. . . . California, in 1860, showed only 7,029 Kentuckians; Iowa had 13,204. . . .
By 1880 many Kentuckians were on the move. Texas and Kansas gained the most people; about 26,000 are shown on the census and approximately the same amount to Texas. 15,000 had gone to Ohio and to Tennessee (each). Indiana, Illinois and Missouri had past their peaks of Kentuckians. Other areas gaining population from Kentucky included the Indian Territory and Oklahoma. . . .
After 1900, within ten years, migration to Oklahoma grew stronger – the 1910 census shows 50,000 native-born Kentuckians there.
Apart from Wilson’s work, there are period newspapers which report on the immigration. A useful source is the Lincoln County Oklahoma History, which prints an essay by Don Sporleder on the history of Davenport (seven miles east of Chandler) based on the newspaper reportage. Sporleder relates that in January of 1903 the Kentucky, Oklahoma, Indian Territory Company was incorporated in Lexington KY with the ambition of developing a town in Oklahoma or Indian Territory to be divided into one-acre lots for old and retired ministers. Advance scouts into the promised land were favorably impressed by the crossing of the Frisco and Santa Fe Railroads at Davenport, and soon the folks were arriving. The migration of the elderly ministers quickly turned into a movement of home-seekers, and they came for the next ten years. It was not long before Davenport acquired the nickname Kentucky Town.
Came then the Kentuckians. First the ministers and after them the deluge. In the latter part of the flood came the Stidhams, poor farmers from Wolfe County, who were my forebears. And in the same year came the Saulsberrys, including Bob and Elwood, also poor farmers but from Bourbon County, a political entity which had already proved itself rich in whisky and religion. The great tradition of whiskey production in Kentucky is too well known to warrant comment here, but its religious contribution may be worth a couple of sentences.
Scholars of American religion recognize that the current ruling Religious Right had its origins in the Cane Ridge Revival of 1801-- Harold Bloom’s masterful American Religion comes first to mind--but typicallyfail to recognize that Cane Ridge itself is located in Bourbon County. Bloom of course knows Cane Ridge, for surely it is on his mind when he states “the USA is religion-mad country. It has been inflamed in this regard for about two centuries now” (37).The county was established in 1785 from a portion of Fayette County, Virginia, and named after the French House of Bourbon, in gratitude for the assistance of Louis XVI of France during the American War of Independence. Bourbon County, Virginia, originally comprised 34 of Kentucky's 120 current counties, including the current Bourbon County. This larger area later became known as Old Bourbon. Bourbon became part of the new state of Kentucky when it was admitted to the Union in 1792. Whiskey was an early product of the area, and as it was made mostly from corn, it had a distinctive flavor. and its home-brewed, untaxed varieties were simply called corn while the later bottled-and-bonded varieties went on to become world famous.
III. Evangelical Religion and Whiskey
My remarks above about Kentucky and whiskey are standard standard reference-book fodder, available from the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1910 to Wikipedia in the present. When I touch on the topic of religion and whiskey, however, the potato gets heated very quickly. It’s like trying to write in the present day about the politics of gender or ethnicity, it soon gets too hot to handle. My great-grandmother Stidham, born in Kentucky, had a memorable reply to the question of her origins: she would say “Dutch, hog, and Negro.” Consequently, I’ll limit myself to a few truisms. Readers who don’t accept their validity may skip to the next section.
A simple and obvious pattern of Scots-Irish life to anyone who grew up in it is that the women go to church, and the men go out drinking--then they both come home and fight about it. The woman has the moral high ground, because both sexes accept the truth of the Bible as taught in the evangelical churches, be they Baptist or something more holy-roller (the man, after all, was raised by a woman), but he may be content with the low ground for many years because he has more fun. That situation, a stand-off of equal and opposite forces, can endure many years, but in the end the woman is going to win because whiskey can be a killer, and consumed in sufficient quantity over a long enough period of years, can reduce the man to helpless alcoholism, at which point--or so the story is told again and again by the gospel preachers--the woman or the preacher or a ministering angel steps in, and the man is converted and becomes a teetotaler. Either that or he dies. From the point of view of the sermon maker, the moral is the same: give it up or it will kill you; “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging” (Proverbs 20:21).
The greatest exemplar of the whiskey-religion symbiosis was probably the Mississippi Delta bluesman Son House, whom I will skip over lightly because he was black, but his music came out of the same slave-holding southern society that produced the Kentuckians I am focusing on. House was both a bluesman in a period when blues were considered the devil’s music, and a preacher. His career took him back and forth between the pulpit and the juke-joint, demonstrating to later generations that blues and gospel were the same musical form. Only the content of the lyrics changed with the audience. One of his best lyrics was “Preachin’ the Blues.”
Yes, I’m gonna get me religion
I’m gonna join the Baptist Church . . .
You know I wanna be a Baptist preacher
Just so I won’t have to work.
There can be no objection to speaking of the slave-holding south as common background to both Son House and the Saulsberry family, because the blues musicians played for both black audiences and white, and many of the groups used both white and black musicians.
Returning now to my subjects Bob and Elwood, there can be little doubt that they were consumers of corn, because for half a century that was all there was available in Lincoln County. In 1907, when Oklahoma entered the Union, its constitution prohibited the production and sale of alcohol, thereby creating a natural market for home-brewed and bootleg whiskey. The law mandating prohibition was not repealed until the administration of Governor Henry Bellman about 1956. In the meantime as Will Rogers famously remarked, Oklahomans continued to vote "dry as long as they could stagger to the polls." No one went thirsty around communities like Pleasant Ridge, where over by Sweet Home for generations the Africa-American Caldwell family produced highly-regarded corn liquor.
IV. John Saulsberry and His Sons Bob and Elwood
In Biblical fashion, it behooves me to speak first of Bob and Elwood’s father John, who brought his clan to Chandler Oklahoma about the year 1912, the same year that saw my Kentucky great-grandfather William Floyd Stidham and his clan arrive from Wolfe County Kentucky. I adapted a song by John Prine to tell about one episode from that journey, a verse I might well have made the epigraph for this whole present essay..
Grandma came out west by train,
all the way from ol' Kentuck;
They missed the train they were supposed to be on
when Uncle Henry got off and got drunk;
But that train derailed and fell in the river
and most of those people died;
Just goes to show a little whiskey's OK
as long as God is on your side.
My great-granddad Stidham was known to occasionally take a drink but he was far more renowned for his hatefulness and stinginess, and he probably had some money hidden away. At any rate, the family came by train and spent their first night in the St. Cloud Hotel, where the fourteen-year-old daughter Roxie cried when she saw all the red water running down the street. No such night in a hotel is recorded for the John Saulsberry clan.
In November of 1915 the Chandler newspaper shows both John and his oldest son Bob working for the “poor farm,” or the county farm, as it was also called. After ten years of negotiation and committee work, in 1904 Lincoln County, bought the Kirtley quarter a mile and a half northeast of Chandler in the NW quarter of section 33, 15N-4E, for $3700. Bob must have labored more than his dad, since he was paid $15.60, while John was paid only $1.00. This is the only payment recorded in the Chandler paper, and suggests their work on the poor farm was temporary.
It is significant that the 1880, 1900, and 1910 Kentucky censuses show John owning his own farm. Its sale must have financed the trip to Oklahoma, leaving the family in difficult straits. The 1910 census showed him with ten people counted as his dependents. In 1920 he is renting a farm in Otoe Township, with ten dependents including the twenty-four year old Bob. In this same year my own grandfather Tom Pounds, born 1891 in Missouri, orphaned in Oklahoma at the age of fourteen, was living with his wife and three children in neighboring McKinley Township. Tom farmed all his life in Lincoln County but never owned an acre of it. In the 1930 census, the two families would both be living in Otoe Township, the Saulsberrys near Pleasant Ridge (which had a church and cemetery) and the Poundses near Oak Grove (which had no cemetery, only a schoolhouse that was also the church). The society column in the Chandler newspaper usually did not carry an Oak Grove section, only one for Pleasant Ridge, thus the doings of the two families were reported in the same column.
Overall, John lived a long and productive life, dying near Pleasant Ridge in 1936 at the age of 73. What, you may well ask, about his wife Emma Blankenship? The 1910 census asks a very intelligent question about motherhood, requiring the number of children the woman has born and the number still alive. Emma Blankenship recorded eleven children born and ten of them still alive. (Her last child, Rachel, would not be born until 1911.) In a period of high child mortality, this is an extraordinary achievement. In the nearby farm community of Clematis (south of Davenport--“East Chandler” as the Chandler promotors named it) which has a lowland topography dissimilar to that of Pleasant Ridge, a study I did twenty years ago focused on the period 1898 to 1904 found that half of the children born did not reach the age of ten.
Of Emma and John’s eleven children, the first two were girls (Jennie May and Millie), while the first son was Bob, born in Kentucky in 1896. As the oldest son, John had to be a hard worker to set an example for the younger sons, and we have already seen him laboring on the County Farm in for a short period in 1915.
The most significant events for Bob in his early manhood were military service and marriage. He served with the 58th Army Service Corps in France from October 1918 until his arrival at Newport News VA in July of the next year. His return to Pleasant Ridge is mentioned in the social column for July 1919. He must have married Hazel Holdcraft of Pleasant Ridge sometime in the next year, for the birth of their son Robert John Saulsberry took place in August 1921.
Hazel Holdcraft’s family were Pleasant Ridge people, though they had came not from Kentucky but from Indiana. They were living in Pleasant Ridge by the 1920
The Holdcraft family, location uncertain, 1890s
census. One striking photo remains from an earlier settlement. If one had to guess on the basis of the straight logs that form the cabin wall, one might place this undated photo in Indiana, where fine straight trees were more readily available that in Lincoln County, located in the Cross Timbers of blackjack and post-oak. The two adults standing are Hazel’s parents, Hugh Ray Holdcraft and Eliza Jane (Davis). The older man is the husband’s father, Jeremiah Hugh Holdcraft, a Civil War soldier born in Indiana in 1837 and dying in Chandler, 1917. The child might be Mabel, born 1896, making it a photo of three generations. Hazel lived to be 93, dying in Chandler in 1995.
As a school and a church house, Pleasant Ridge has its own history, some of which is recounted in the big Lincoln County Oklahoma History. Two facts are of particular note. The land for the school/church had originally belonged to Bob and Hazel Saulsberry, who donated it. And at one point the misbehaved students “ran one teacher off and the school was nicknamed ”Heathen Ridge.”
After consolidation with Chandler schools, the building was still the community center for pie suppers, Sunday school, and musical evenings with local talent doing the entertaining. The land reverted back to the original owners, Mr. and Mrs. Bob Saulsberry. (312)
e the final move in 1912. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, news
Returning now to Bob Saulsberry’s life, the newspapers have little to report, and his obituary adds but one fact to our general knowledge--the stutter step that brought him to Lincoln County first in 1906. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, reporters besieged him for information about his obscure origins in Kentucky. To which he replied memorably by quoting a line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Church Yard,” referring to “The short and simple annals of the poor.” That could be an appropriate line to leave with Bob Saulsberry as well. The engraver of his gravestone, however, gets the last word: “World War I Veteran.” Bob and Hazel’s son Robert John Saulsberry served in World War II, achieving the rank of sergeant. His military marker reads, “faithful to god and his country.”
The grave marker of Bob’s younger brother Elwood is smaller, has no inscription, and does not carry his wife’s name. These details together suggest that he cast a smaller shadow than Bob, but it’s not uncommon for the older brother to cast the longer shadow. Elwood, like Bob, was born in Lawrence County Kentucky but his birth was ten years after Bob’s. He probably arrived in Lincoln County with the rest of the family in 1912.
We can track bits and pieces of his life through the Pleasant Ridge social column in the Chandler papers. The first item, however, will occasion a detour, for it mentions a brother who died in California in 1937. The Chandler News Publicist for July 1925 states no more than that Elwood spent Saturday night with his brother Tom, but this brother has a tale of his own.
Born in 1904, Tom was Elwood’s next older brother and the first true Okie we find before we take up the boys’ sister Millie, whose eventful life will be given separate treatment below. Tom’s death occurred in Tulare County, California. His obituary in the Chandler News-Publicist for 11 November 1937 reads:
Saulsberry was employed on a Tipton, Calif., ranch at the time of his death and was smothered to death October 25 at a Tipton gin. Saulsberry evidently fell asleep in the cotton seed store house when the seed piled upon him by the conveyor during the night suffocated him.
That’s a sad end in all truth, but it serves to connect his experience in the cotton fields of Lincoln County with the fields of Tulare. His funeral in California required a major excursion for his Oklahoma family: “His widowed mother, Mary E. Saulsberry, his two brothers, Robert and Elwood, his two sisters Mrs. Garnet Grannell and Mrs. Ollie Ward and his brother-in-law, Jess Alsip, motored to California to attend the funeral services.”
Tom had married Bertha Cassady, and they had a son Franklin Leon Sausberry born in 1926 who was a soldier in World War II.
Returning to Bob’s younger brother Elwood, he was nicknamed “Red” for the color of his hair. The Pleasant Ridge social column picks him up in 1928 with the local school clean up. There was a picnic lunch (described in detail) followed by hard work, leveling the ground and putting things “in spic and span shape.” Those thanked included Henry Stidham, Mr. and Mrs. Holdcraft, Elwood Saulsberry, and a host of others.
Born in 1906, Elwood was too young for WWI, but we have a 1941 record of his physical examination for the army. He was classified 3A, meaning “a registrant deferred by reason of extreme hardship to dependents.” At this distance in time, it is hard for us to know, but the record suggests that the parents were dependent on the laobr of their two remaining sons.
In November 1948, in Van Buren Arkansas, Elwood married Flossie Bernice Waddell, who was born in 1903 in Coldwater, Kansas, the seat of Comanche County, on the Oklahoma border above Woods County. By any common population standard, Comanche was hardly a county, in 2020 it had a population of a mere 1,689 souls, down from a record high of 4,412 in 1940. The 1950 census shows Elwood in Comanche County with Bernice and her daughter Juanita. A state census for 1953 shows the three of them still together. Juanita is 15.
Coldwater did not live up to the promise of its name, for in the next decade, troubles begin to arise from Elwood’s drinking. In March of 1954 the paper reported him involved in a serious car wreck, and he was fined for failure to yield. In September of the next year he was “charged with driving while intoxicated and operating a vehicle without a state driver license.” The next day the Chandler News Publicist, had this to saay: “Elwood Saulsberry, 29, of Chandler was involved in an accident Friday afternoon 1/10th mile east of Chandler when his automobile hit the rear of a dump truck parked on the highway. Highway Patrolman Leon Jones, investigating officer, reported that Saulsberry's car lay down 78 feet of skid marks before striking the truck. A flagman had been placed 100 feet to the rear of the truck to warn oncoming traffic.”
My sister Geraldine, who retained good relations with the Bible Missionary Church long after my departure to university in 1963, once wrote me an email in which she called Elwood “An alcoholic who in later life was converted and delivered from alcohol.” She gave no date, and that’s all she said. I can’t help recalling W. C. Fields famous remark, however: “It’s easy to stop drinking. I’ve done it a hundred times.”
The newspaper tells us that Elwood was admitted to Stroud hospital July 1, 1982, dismissed July 8th, and died July 31st. His flat grave marker in Chandler’s Oak Part is undecorated. As Hawthorne writes of Young Goodman Brown, “they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.” Perhaps that is the case. Perhaps not. We don’t know, but photographs show the area around his gravestone as bare.
V. Millie the Migrant Mother
Mildred Saulsberry, born in Kentucky in 1892, was the second eldest of the seven Saulsberry daughters. Her sister Jennie May seems to have preceded her by exactly ten months, if the data is to be believed. Although girls in this period were expected to be sedate, Mille was as headstrong as a horse that’s never been broken to the bridle. She went her own way, and if you didn’t like it you could get out of the road. For the contemporary reader, this headstrong quality makes her the most contemporary of the seven sisters.
It was no easy road that Millie chose. A girl or young woman in the early 1900s had but two paths in life to choose between. If she was studious, she might hope to be a school teacher or a nurse. The other path was marriage and the bearing of children. Millie’s mother had borne eleven in all.
We would feel blessed if we had a photo of young Millie--or Millie at any age, for that matter--but there is none. Indeed, of the seven Saulsberry daughters, the only early picture is of Ida Belle at the time of her1926 marriage to Otto Keith Brown:
Ida Belle (Saulsberry) and Keith Brown, wedding photo?, 1926
Let us begin this survey of Millie’s life with her census records and those of her first husband Beach Boxley. The first census for Millie is from 1900 when she is eight and still a child. It shows that both of 1900 shows both her parents could read and write. Here are the records for the next five decades.
1910: residing in KY; age 18; not in school; can read but not write.
1920: Otoe Twp; attended school, can read and write
1930; Ardmore; married; not attending school; can’t read or write; no children.
1940; Bowie TX; completed 6th grade, can read and write
1950: no census. She’d wed Bryan Manson in 1949 and they lived in Fairfax.
On October 19, 1924, Millie married Beach Boxley in Wellston, and the certificate survives. We infer that she was 32 and the document declares that he was 21, born in Missouri in 1903 and residing in Wellston.
1920 Laborer, unable to read or write
1930 never attended school, can’t read or write: occupation: sells artificial flowers
1940 resides Bowie TX; completed 6th grade
1950 married to Opal Boxley, he’s yard man for for the Park Dept.
The joker in this deck is the 1930 census for both Millie and Boxley. It states that Mollie can’t read or write, though she could in 1920 and will be able to again in 1940. It states that Boxley can’t read or write, though in 1940 he will have completed the 6th grade. I can only infer that in 1930 both Millie and Boxley were having a bad day when the enumerator came to the door. Either they were drunk or hungover, and he dismissed the pair of them as bums; or they were non-responsive and he gave them failing grades. (Yes, the correct pronoun is “he.” Up until 1960, census enumerators were always men.)
There are areas of Millie’s life that remain unknown or obscure, but in the years for which we have good records she appears as a cross between the picaresque heroine and the hapless okie. First, we have no clear idea why she waited until the advanced age of thirty-two to marry. Country women of her time and place typically married soon after their menses, at fifteen or sixteen. Shakespeare’s Juliet was fourteen. My Grandmother Roxie (Stidham) Pounds, also born in Kentucky, was fifteen.
It is difficult to believe that a young woman of Millie’s feistiness and willfulness didn’t begin her sex life until marriage. It is much more likely that she and Boxley were having sex and babies before they married, but Boxley couldn’t legally marry until he was twenty-one. Our main problem here is that for the years between the ages of fifteen and her marriage at thirty-two, we must depend on the Pleasant Ridge social column which never, never talked about sex or even hinted at it unless it looked like a young couple was about to be married. Here is an example, not quite at random, from 1922:
Carrier On Route One Gets Aid
Mr. Brown is an employee of the local post office and is very popular with the patrons whom he serves. . . . The post office employees have suspicioned Mr. Brown for some time, on account of his being extremely careful in fulfilling his duties as carrier of the mails on his route, according to rumors circulated in the office and especially did they become alarmed when Mr. Brown asked for a leave of absence.
The reader may well think that (as Ezra Pound joked about James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake) that nothing could possibly be worth all “the circumambient peripherization” short of a new cure for the clap. But no, sanity and order are immediately restored when I insert the phrases I have omitted. At the beginning:
Otto Brown, popular carrier on route one out of Chandler, was united in marriage last Thursday evening at the home of Rev. J. G. Cansler to Miss Ida Saulsberry, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Saulsberry, who reside west of Chandler.
And at the ellipsis in the middle:
Miss Ida Saulsberry is one of our popular young ladies and will make a splendid helpmate for Mr. Brown [see photo of the newly weds above].
The general reader is supposed to smile at this broad joke and applaud the sentiment at the end: “Nevertheless, this happy couple have the best wishes of the entire community for happy and prosperous married life.” Which above is my long and paraphrastic way of saying that the Pleasant Ridge social column was not going to tell any truths about how bored Millie Saulsberry must have been or even drop a direct hint.
After Millie’s marriage in 1924, she disappears from the Pleasant Ridge social column, and we are forced back to the census for details of her life. The 1930 census, however, as we have already seen is not reliable except for her place of residence. She and Beach were renting a house in a poor neighborhood of Ardmore. In 1935 they are in Tecumseh with only a City Directory to note them.
It seems probably that between their marriage in Wellston and their residence in Ardmore, Millie and Beach had children, but if so the children died. Thereby hangs a tail, albeit a sorrowful one and uncertain.
My knowledge of the uncertain events begins with two letters from Millie’s nephew David Alsip, who has been among my best friends since we were misbehaved boys in church at the age of five. (I am now corresponding with his younger brother Danny, who is helping me reconstruct the lives of his aunts and uncles.) Here is the first of two letters from David in the slightly edited form in which I have preserved both.
Millie and Beach had a son named John Boxley, who lived with my Aunt Bob
and Hazel Saulsberry, [and with] Tom and Garnet Granell in Casper,Wyoming. He joined the Army and retired , and still lives in Manning, S.Carolina. He told
me and Danny in 1990 at my Aunt Garnet’s Funeral in Casper, that Beach was
mean to him and he left home after Millie and Beach Divorced. I think she
moved to Ralston or Pawnee Oklahoma. I remember going there with mom and Dad and going Fishing. She had a man but I cant recall his name. It might have
been Davenport was the last name. My dad said Millie and Beach travelled
around like a bunch of Gypsy’s. John is still alive, I talked to him about 12 Years ago and he still lived in S. Carolina.
Comments: Yes, they had a son named Johnie, born in 1933 in Tecumseh, Oklahoma. Garnet is Millie’s younger sister, born in Kentucky in 1908, and who married Tom Grannell (1901-1971). Johnie is still alive, and even as I write this in late June 2024 Danny Alsip is hoping to have a phone conversation with him soon. David, for his part, talked to Johnie a few days after writing me the letter above. The Beaches’ gypsy lifestyle will emerge further below.
Here is the second letter from David Alsip, bearing the same June 2014 date but clearly written some time after the first.
Wayne, I just got off the phone with John Boxley and asked about the Baby Girl,
and I was shocked to hear that Millie and Beach had 6 Boys and 1 Girl
including Johnie who was the youngest and they all DIED after 1 or 2 Years Old. Johnie said they didn't know how to raise Kids and my Grandparents John and
Mary Saulsberry took him away from Millie and Beac. [Johnie] told me he
stayed with us [and with] My Aunt and Uncle Tom Granell who moved to Winfield, Kansas, then to Casper,Wyoming. [Johnie] said he tried to make amends with Beach but it was too late. I never knew the story about the 7 Kids who Died, it was kept a secret I guess. Helluva story. I am trying to let that Soak in. So the 1 Girl Buried at McCorkle would have to be known as Baby Boxley? Too bad my Mom and Aunt Rachel are not around to ask.
Comments: Now the reader can see why I referred to this letter as sorrowful one and uncertain. The tale of sorrow needs no comment, but the uncertainty does.
Though I would never doubt anything that David told me, in this case he is not old enough to know at first hand. He knows only what Johnie Boxley told him, and long experience quickly suggests to me that Johnie may be repeating a family legend. Since family stories are like the fisherman’s tale of the one that got away, they grow in the telling. Finally, we don’t know how many children were lost. [We are waiting on Danny’s phone call to hear how many deaths Johnie would report today.] Six out of seven, however, is a staggering toll.
Having thought about this puzzle for ten years, I now suggest that the cause of the infant deaths that David reports was malnutrition resulting from poverty. The mother suffering from malnutrition doesn’t have enough milk to nourish the baby, who sickens and dies. Such deaths are a commonplace of the literature, especially John Steinbeck's The Harvest Gypsies of 1937. This booklet is a compilation of Steinbeck's preliminary journalistic essay preparatory to The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, which popularized the term Okie.
The problem of childbirth among the immigrants is among the most terrible. There is no prenatal care of the mothers whatever, and no possibility of such care. They must work in the fields until they are physically unable or, if they do not work, the care of the other children and of the camp will not allow the prospective mothers any rest.
In actual birth the presence of a doctor is a rare exception. Sometimes in the squatters’ camps a neighbor woman will help at the birth. There will be no sanitary precautions nor hygienic arrangements. The child will be born on newspapers in the dirty bed. In case of a bad presentation requiring surgery or forceps, the mother is practically condemned to death. Once born, the eyes of the baby are not treated, the endless medical attention lavished on middle-class babies is completely absent.
The mother, usually suffering from malnutrition, is not able to produce breast milk. Sometimes the baby is nourished on canned milk until it can eat fried dough and cornmeal. This being the case, the infant mortality is very great.
That being the case, the infant usually dies within a year. Here we have laid out before us in simple prose, the probable cause of Millie’s six dead babies--six or whatever the number is that were given home burials wherever her migrations took her.
The girl buried at McCorkle requires a double note. First, mention of McCorkle Cemetery refers to the cleanup and repair of the cemetery that took place in 2013-2014. I was fortunate enough to find that the McCorkle daughter who had inherited the old homestead had given the cemetery land to the City of Chandler. This made the City legally responsible for its maintenance, and with Brent LaGere’s backing the City Manager kindly took over the job, sent a crew out to cut away the undergrowth and brush, and put up a new fence to keep the cattle out.
Second, at the time we were repairing McCorkle cemetery, David Alsip wrote me the story above about the deaths of the Boxley infants. As a result, we decided to create a an FAG memorial for at least one child that we believed had died while the Boxley’s live near McCorkle Cemetery. I hasten to add, however, that with ten years’ retrospect I no longer see reason to believe that Millie and Beach Boxley lived near McCorkle. That means I should change the name of the child’s burial place to Unknown. The memorial, which retells the stories from David, can be seen here: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/121240398/infant-boxley.
Which brings us back to the saga of Millie’s peregrinations beginning in 1925, which was the first year of her marriage to Boxley and saw the birth of her only child to survive infancy. We get a fine, realistic glimpse of Millie and Boxley’ life together when the two of them are caught in in The Redwood Gazette of Redwood Falls, Minnesota for Thursday, August 19, 1937:,,
The article continues:
It seems that Mr. Boxley who is a transient harvest hand became intoxicated at Alivia Monday and threatened to beat up his wife. So she took her son and started hiking down the highway to Redwood Falls. Her story is that her husband drove up, took the boy and left her stranded on the road.
She came to Redwood Falls and Tom Arnett Jr., police officer, took her to station KNHD. A broadcast for Mr. Boxley was made. Then she was advised to go back to authorities at Olivia.
Sheriff Henry Heaney of Renville county says she arrived there Tuesday morning. He doesn’t know just what he is going to do about it.
The phrase “somewhere in Oklahoma” is eloquent of the Buxleys’ lack of social significance in Minnesota. The journalist has not even bothered to learn the name of the town, the assumption being that Oklahoma is a state full of transient agricultural workers among whom there is no distinction. He has not called them “okies,” because John Steinbeck’s novel would not be published yet for two years, but we recognize the social stereotype: feckless, landless, irresponsible--drunk before noon. At this point in his life, Steinbeck was calling these people “Harvest Gypsies.”
1st edition of pamphlet, 1936
Steinbeck’s pamphlet of the same title was a series of feature-stories written on commission for The San Francisco News about the lives of migrant workers in California's Central Valley. The cover design showing the woman and child is modeled on a photograph taken by the Great Depression photographer Dorothea Lange working for the Farm Security Administration in the years 1935 and following.
Dorothea Lange, “Drought Refugees,” 1936 (Wikipedia)
Above is Lange’s original photograph called “Drought Refugees.” Twenty-two of Lange's photographs produced for the Farm Security Administration were included in John Steinbeck's The Harvest Gypsies when it was first published in 1936 in The San Francisco News. Historians say that “Migrant Mother” (below) became the most reproduced photograph in the world.
Dorothea Lang, “Migrant Mother”
The fame of “Migrant Mother” was of no help to Minnie Boxley, nor was the recognition provided by the Modern Museum of Art’s first retrospective solo exhibition of the works of a female photographer in 1965, shortly after Lange’s death. The only recognition for Millie came from a follow-up article in the The Redwood Gazette dated two weeks after the first one.
The article continues:
Her husband, a transient harvest hand, deserted her two weeks ago at Olivia, taking their four-year-old son with him. she asked KNHD to broadcast for him and as a result of the call, Mankato police picked him up.
Then authorities here were unable to locate Mrs. Boxley. It developed that she was in Olivia but officers there said they did not know of her whereabouts.
She returned to KNHD Wednesday after her husband and child had left Mankato for parts unknown. She decided to go back to her parents’ home in Oklahoma and try to locate her husband from there. It is reported that he told Mankato police that he did not want her with him anymore.
She is anxious to gain custody of the child as she accuses her husband of beating him mercilessly at times. Mrs. Boxley can neither read nor write and has the appearance of a woman of 60, although she claims to be under 30 years of age. [In fact, she was 45.]
She left Redwood Falls with $3. “Will that take me to Oklahoma on the bus?” she asked. Informed that it wouldn’t she asked what states she must go through to reach her home and started out, looking utterly helpless.
Millie clearly belongs to the great mass of migratory workers, impoverished farm people displaced by the drought conditions in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and nearby states. These are people whose lives have been explored by a series of literary classics now the basis for the study of American social conditions during the Great Depression. The great classic in this field is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), but Steinbeck had an important predecessor.
In the case of Oklahoma, the classic exposé comes much early, when Harrah Oklahoma was visited in 1907 by Oscar Ameringer, a German-born socialist organizer and editor of radical labor newspapers who came to the United States in 1885 at the age of fifteen. His father, a cabinet maker, sent young Oscar to join his brother in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he tried his hand as a furniture maker and musician. He joined the Knights of Labor in 1886 and the American Federation of Musicians in 1903, but soon found his way into the newspaper industry working for union newspapers in Columbus, Ohio, and other large cities.
In the spring of 1907, the year of our statehood, Ameringer started his first tour of Oklahoma, moving from one socialist encampment to another and relying on the hospitality of local farmers. (The quotations below are from his 1940 autobiography If You Don’t Weaken.) His initial speaking engagement was in Harrah, about twenty-five miles east of Oklahoma City, "a hamlet of some two hundred souls . . . This indescribable aggregation of moisture, steam, dirt, rags, unshaven men, slatternly women and fretting children were farmers . . . . I had come upon another America!”
[These people] were worse fed, worse clothed, worse housed, more illiterate than the Chicago packing house whops and bohunks Upton Sinclair described in his The Jungle, and whom I had seen with my own eyes while doing my bit in one of their strikes. The Oklahoma farmers' living standard was so far below that of the sweatshop workers of the new York east side before the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and International Ladies' Garment Workers Unions had mopped up that human cesspool, that comparisons could not be thought of. (232-33)
We can only be grateful for this kind of description, unmatched for realistic detail in the journalism of the period. To find its equivalent, the reader would have to read James Agee and Walker Evans’ great Depression-era report on sharecroppers in Alabama in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
Shocked by the depth of poverty he encountered, Ameringer asked himself who these people were. Not immigrants, he said:
They were Scotch, Irish, Scotch-Irish and English with only a few exceptions. They were more American than any present-day New England town.They were Washington’s ragged, starving, shivering army at Valley Forge, pushed ever westward by beneficiaries of the Revolution. Pushed out of Tidewater Virginia, out of the Piedmont and the valleys of the central Atlantic states, into the hills and mountains of the South Central states, “they had followed on the heels of the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, like the stragglers of routed armies. Always hoping that somewhere in their America there would be a piece of dirt for them.
The statement is too broad to be good history but perhaps it may stand as poetry, which has its own kind of truth. By the third day, the depth of poverty Ameringer was seeing had acquired greater detail:
I found toothless old women with sucking infants on their withered breasts. I found a hospitable old hostess, around thirty or less, her hands covered with rags and eczema, offering me a biscuit with those hands, apologizing that the biscuits were not as good as she used to make because with the sore hand she no longer could knead the dough as it ought to be. I saw youngsters emaciated by hookworms, malnutrition, and pellagra, who had lost their second teeth before they were twenty years old. I saw tottering old male wrecks with the infants of their fourteen-year-old wives on their laps. I saw a white man begging a Choctaw squaw man who owned the only remaining spring in that neighborhood to let him have credit for a few buckets of water for his thirsty family. I saw humanity as its lowest possible level of degradation and decay. I saw smug, well dressed, overly well fed hypocrites march to church on Sabbath day, Bibles under their arms, praying for God's kingdom on earth while fattening like latter-day cannibals on the share croppers. I saw wind-jamming, hot-air- spouting politicians geysering Jeffersonian platitudes about equal rights to all and special privileges to none . . .without even knowing, much less caring, that they were addressing as wretched a set of abject slaves as ever walked the face of the earth, anywhere or at any time. (232)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Ameringer notes on the next page, “has shocked tender-skinned sisters and sensitive brethren who wouldn't lift a finger to wipe the foul blot off the face of America. They have called the book vile, vulgar, and indecent. . . . it is as vile, vulgar and indecent as the condition of the people whom Steinbeck saw and I saw years before him” (233).
Dorothea Lange also saw those people, and it is the present writer’s hope that her portrait “Migrant Mother” will serve if not as an image of Millie Boxley as an image of a woman in a similar situation. At any rate, we have no other photo of Millie.
If I were a plain storyteller, I would have ended the present tale with the 1937 article above that shows Millie highwaying it home with $3 in her pocket and “looking utterly helpless. Or I would have stopped with the larger canvas painted by Oscar Ameringer. But I am not a simple teller of tales. I’m a historian, and I have an obligation to keep following Millie until my sources are exhausted.
Epilogue
We will close this overly long essay with two weddings and a funeral. In 1942 at Atoka, Oklahoma, Millie divorced Beach Boxley. He had not been a good husband. He couldn’t hold a steady job, he drank too much, encouraging her to do the same, and he had periods of mental instability which surely helped destabilize his wife.
A man drunk in public does not call down law enforcement the way a drunk woman does. We have only one report on Boxley himself, but it may be significant that it comes from 1942, the year of the divorce. A newspaper article from Walters, Oklahoma reports:
Beach Boxley was charged with being intoxicated in a public place by
a complaint filed Friday by Henry Sisk, deputy sheriff. Boxley admitted the charge, and was ordered to pay a fine of $10 and costs.
In 1947 Boxley married again, this time to Opal Mae Davis of Comanche, Oklahoma, and they had a son named Jimmy Dale Boxley, who died in Comanche in 2021. Beach Boxley himself died in Cotton County in 1997 at the age of 94.
In Stillwater in July of 1946, Millie was arrested and held in jail for “loitering,” a loaded term which was the newspapers’ usual euphemism for prostitution, a term their pious readership didn’t like to see in print.
Finally, an article that suggests Millie may have enjoyed disturbing proper authority comes to us from Council Grove, Kansas, dated June 1947.
An elderly woman [Millie was fifty-five] was picked up here yesterday by Undersheriff Elliot Smith after [a citizen] had complained “that she was begging and that she didn’t seem to be “all there.” [She] produced more than $60 in cash from her person on repeated questioning by the officer. She . . . told Smith that she had been en route to the harvest fields in the Dakotas but had changed her mind.
On learning that she had a son and a sister at Winfield, Smith released her to go there--but she didn’t get away without asking him to help her out. Although she was advised to use some of her money for travel to Winfield, it is understood that she elected to make the journey by hitchhiking.
Continuing to meet impoverishment and failure, it is not surprising that Millie married again. First to Jesse Anderson in Oklahoma City in March of 1949. This was a step up for Millie since Jesse came from a respectable business family around Edmond, but the marriage lasted only nine months. Probably until she found out that he was already married.
In November of 1949 Millie married Bryan Manson, her third husband. Bryan was from Pulaski County, Arkansas, born there in 1907, not in Little Rock but in a suburb called Big Rock. We have only two censuses for Bryan Manson, one says that his education stopped with the sixth grade, and neither lists his occupation. Millie received two obituaries when she died in 1961, one headed “Mrs. Manson” and the other “Mrs. Bryan Manson, and Manson is the name carved on her stone. The two obituaries both state that she had lived in Fairfax “most of the time” since her marriage. The Fairfax Chief obit states that her age was 69 years, two months, and 14 days. Mr. Manson outlived her by ten years, and is buried beside her in Fairfax Cemetery.
R.I.P.
VI. Sources
Print
Vital records come from Ancestry.com. Most of my data about individuals comes from the Pleasant Ridge social column in the Chandler newspapers and from other old newspapers available online from newspapers.com.
Ameringer, Oscar. If You Don’t Weaken. With a Foreword by Carl Sandburg. NewYork: Henry Holt and Co, 1940.
Bloom, Harold. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Lincoln County Oklahoma History. Compiled and edited by Lincoln County Historical Society. Claremore OK: Country Lane Press, 1988.
Pounds, Wayne. The Ghost Roads of Fallis Oklahoma and Other Trails. Monee IL: Kindle Books, 2023.
_____. The Lonesome Death of Billie Grayson: Killings in Early-Day Lincoln County Oklahoma. 2nd edition. Columbia SC: Kindle [Create Space], 2018.
_____. North of Deep Fork: An Oklahoma Farm Family in Hard Times. Create Space, 2011.
_____. Wyatt Earp in Yamanashi: Outlaw Stories. Middletown DE: Kindle Books, 24 March 2019.
Steinbeck, John. The Harvest Gypsies. Introduction by Charles Wollenberg. Notes by Takahiko Sugiyama. Tokyo: Kenkusha, 1992.
Webb, Jim. Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. New York: Broadway Books [Random House], 2004.
Wilson, Samuel M. History of Kentucky. Volume II. From 1803 to 1828. Chicago-Louisville: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1928.
Digital
Alsip, David. Personal email from 2014 concerning Millie and Beach Boxley and their missing children. Accessed June 2024.
“Ichi-go ichi-e.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichi-go_ichi-e. Consulted June 2924.
Pounds, Wayne. “Clematis: The Rise & Fall of the Oklahoma Socialist Party.” https://uenowayne.blogspot.com/2019/04/clematis-rise-fall-of-oklahoma.html. Consulted June 2024.
“Prohibition.” Oklahoma Historical Society. Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=PR018. Consulted June 2024.
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