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If at the age of seventy-nine if have the suddenly mild and pleasing revelation that in the whole world right now I am the only person who knows the story of my first meeting with Cleburne Pound in 1986 in Seminole on a Sunday afternoon, and I realize that out of just such a non-memory as this is history discovered, made, made up, invented--let the reader complete the list for it is a long one that describes all the processes involved in the writing of history. The art of telling the past, however, didn’t begin as writing but with storytelling as famously embodied in the figure of Herodotus, much taken to ask these days for his failure to write modern uptodate history, tested and proved with scientific rigor, but dear reader let me announce at the outset that I hereby renounce all those high sounding terms used to describe the historians task and instead take you back to a hut on the side of a dirt road where the first tories were told around the fireside.
Leroy and Maud Pound
Many genealogists, whatever their pretenses to the contrary, have worked in precisely this homely homemade manner that, whatever they may say to the contrary, is their truest beginning, where the old potter sat beside his wheel, turning it with his foot to shape the clay, singing as he worked, and, to come down to the present, where people have names and work in places that are readily locatable on our maps, whether mental or printed. For me, for reasons which I am about to explain, the genealogist who did the best work in this line was Cleburne Pound, deceased. Born in Arkansas in 1911, he practiced the craft of family history the old-fashioned way, driving from county courthouse to county courthouse, and exhausting the records wherever he stopped. He died before the arrival of the big databases like Ancestry, but his work has been copied and quoted by many researchers and you can still find it online.
The parents of Cleborne Pound were Leroy Pound and Maud Bullock, both of Alma in Crawford County, in far western Arkansas, at the edge of the Ozark Mountains. According to his census, the father was a public school teacher and farmer, while for his wife Manda/Maud the census of her day would have never given her occupation as anything but “keeping house” no matter what important activities she may have carried on outside the home. The family had ten children, four boys and six girls born between 1904 and 1926. There were very likely other children who died in infancy but these would have never been recorded in a census and even their graves have long since vanished along with their names..
Born in 1911, Cleburne was the fourth child and grew up in Arkansas and Texas, beginning his recorded career as a school teacher in November 1929, when he led students to the American Royal Livestock show at Kansas City, as is recorded in the Southwestern American Times Record for that date. The same newspaper reports him, now in Alma, rewarding a student for exceptionally good work on the farm, and the in December 1923 he is teaching in the Parker School at Fort Smith, Arkansas. His next position, in 1929, is no longer in his native Arkansas but in the neighboring state of Oklahoma, where he will spend most of his career., and teaching in Tulsa.
In 1931 he is teaching in Ada, which we may suppose to have been the town of his Alma Mater, East Central State Teachers College, where he becomes involved in radio broadcasting in alliance with the Ada Evening News and, no doubt, also with the Bohannon school in Holdenville in Hughes county. Then in 1934, after marrying Chlorine Howell in Coalgate, Oklahoma, the census to show him as an adult is the 1940 when at the age of twenty-eight he had finished four years of college, renting the family home and living with two small children in Jacobs, Hughes County. The census does not give the name of the school with which he was affiliated. The 1950 census adds nothing of interest to this snapshot and with that blank we may now skip to the point where the author of this essay meets Cleburne and their friendship begins.
The Indian part of the family background is simple enough and can be readily stated. Richard Kenner Pounds, Reuben's grandson, was was the son of Newman Pounds, his father Reuben Pounds being part Indian, if family tradition can be trusted, and Reuben's mother was full Indian blood. Cleburne Pound’s great grandfather was Richard Kenner Pounds of Crawford County Missouri. He was a farmer, blacksmith, woodworker and ordained minister of the gospel in the Primitive Baptist Church in which he was ordained in 1885.
In the intervening years before we reach the stories known to me personally by and about Cleburne, we have to at least glance at his growth and progress as a man. Born in Alma, Crawford County, Arkansas, in 1920, he and his family had passed through Texas before arriving in Lafayette, Crawford County, Arkansas in 1930, were they continued to reside through the next census, though their stay there was marked by the milestone of Cleburne’s marriage to Chlorine Howell of Seminole in1934.
A sequences of small towns exchanged for larger schools will leads us through villages like Bilby and Jacobs in Hughes County, but when I at last visited him from my parents’ house in Chandler, he was living in Seminole, an petroleum rich area whose black gushers over the years had made the name Oklahoma synonymous with oil.
A genealogist’s life moves in zig and zags like an inebriated photographer’s, but he follows the gossamer of narrative, an Ariadne’s thread, that leads him through the labyrinth within whose depths the minotaur waits. We pick up the web in a letter dated 31 May 1949. in which he is following the early and very faint traces of a boy named George Pounds and living near Tupelo Mississippi but who in later life, when Cleburne gets to know him, will be Sheriff of Tubucksy County.
George Walker Pound, Sheriff of Tubucksy County
George Pound was living near Okolona when his father David
David Pound was killed by bushwhackers as he sat at the supper table in his
home at the outset of the Civil War. Dave had three sons; William Taylor, George, and Thomas, and iIt was Taylor and George who went from Mississippi to Texas and later came to Oklahoma, where they both died, though their widows were still living. I once met Mrs, Caroline Pound, widow of George Walker Pounds, writes Cleburne, and she gave me all the information she could regarding her husband's people. A Chickasaw Indian past ninety years of age, she was a well respected person of good education.
David Walker Pound was born in Obion County Tennessee in 1823. His wife was Mary Ann Jones, and their known children William Taylor, Sally, Thomas, and Alice Pound. The author of the present essay now speaks. It was the construction of a Find-a-Grave memorial for William Taylor memorial to his brother Taylor that had at last made me understand the blood link between myself and the George Pound family. A few days before I'd come across some of Cleburne's old work. He regularly published his research but in obscure genealogical journals increasingly impossible to find. His admirers in the present digitalized day have excavated much of this work and put it online. When you've gone through the databases and find your hunger for stories unsatisfied, then you look for a historian like Cleburne. History has roots and branches, Ezra Pound said. It is a tree.
In one old essay in Cleburne’s that I found online, a researcher quoted from a letter
Cleburne had written to a family acquaintance in which he told the story of the killing of
George's father. What he wrote was: "David Pound was killed by bushwhackers as he sat at
the supper table in his home." Cleburne could only have gotten the story from looking up
George's wife, Carrie Messick Pound, who outlived her husband by forty years. He must have driven to the village of Kiowa in Pittsburg County to visit Carrie Messick Pound, for in the 1940s when Cleburne collected the story she was the only living person who could have known it. In the 1949 letter I am citing here Cleburne states: "I have met Mrs. Caroline Pound, widow of George Pounds, and she gave me all the information she could regarding her husband's people. She is past 90 years of age, and is a [Choctaw] Indian. She is well-respected and has a good education." Cleburne could have also mentioned that Caroline Pound's mother was Sophia Colbert, of the Colbert family famous for political leadership in Indian Territory.
Good Friends Have a Gun Fight
The following vignette is one that I, Wayne Pounds, copied from The Chronicles of Oklahoma as I found it on the dusty back shelves of the Oklahoma Historical Society about 1990. It’s entitled “Good Friends”:
George Pound was U.S. Marshall And the Sheriff of Tobucksy County, Moshulatubbee District, Choctaw Nation, the only white sheriff around. His wife was Choctaw, they lived sixteen miles on east of Kiowa, what was called Pound’s Valley, where the Fort Smith road loops like a hog's gut through the loblolly pines.
One day George drove a load of razorbacks to town. Now them Thompson brothers run the live stock sale, and that day Henry was drinkin. He went to see the hogs and they was poor. He said, "No man brings hogs like that to town but a half-breed bastard." George said, "Henry, don't talk like that." Henry walked across the street, then quick wheeled and started firin.
Them days, you still could pack a shootin iron, but it couldn't be carried hid. George jerked his Winchester off the saddle, and jumped behind the gate post of the stable. The lead was ringin from the post's iron hinges an inch from his head. He shot at Henry but missed him cause his face was full of splinters.
George took his glasses off and used his shirt to wipe them clear. He mopped his face, and put the glasses on. Then he shot Henry. The slug took him right above the brass stud on his levis. That stopped the fight. We took Henry to the doc, thought sure he'd die, his guts danglin blue loops in the dust.
When George came back to town next month ole Henry was gettin better. Now George he paid the doctor bills and other odds and ends of Henry bein down. They had a shot of whiskey, and after that they was good friends.
The next vignette I found is about Anderson Lewis:
Anderson Lewis was a Choctaw man, and he was the police. Unlike some tribes the Choctaw did not have the Light Horsemen. Bob and Henry Thompson were both drinkin and raisin hell one day on Main Street. Lewis rode up to them and advised them to go home, as they were drunk and riled. Lewis was still sittin on his horse his hands holding the reins when Henry started firin. Bob fired too from the other side. Five times, all told, they shot him, though that's not how they told it around town. They said Lewis pulled his Colt first. Gut shot, groin shot, neck shot, then twice in the heart, Anderson Lewis was dead before he hit the ground.
I return now to George Walker Pound, Sheriff of Tobucksy County, Choctaw Nation.
The Bushwhackers
The boy received his calling to a career pursuing criminals early, when bushwhackers entered the family's home and killed his father with a shotgun blast. The family had been sitting down to eat their supper of cornbread and milk. This was Pontotoc County, part of the old Chickasaw homelands in northern Mississippi, in the year 1863. George was thirteen.
"Bushwhackers" means regulators, the riffraff who stayed home to plunder and kill in the name of patriotic zeal. What had the father David Walker Pound done to draw the regulators' attention to himself? He was an outsider, born in Obion County in the northwest corner of Tennessee. He didn’t own slaves, nor had his father before him. He was sitting at home instead of off fighting. Eating supper, which would mean eating with his family: his wife, two daughters, and three sons aged ten to thirteen. Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before three teenage sons? And yet, the story that follows is not a vengeance story.
I first encountered the name George Pound about 1995 when I was working in the archives of the Oklahoma Historical Society, going through the index to the typescript volumes of a 1937 WPA series called Oklahoma and Indian Territory, Indian and Pioneer Historical Collection. Like similar work by the writers of the WPA’s Federal Writer’s Project--the most familiar being the splendid collections of slave narratives--this 116-volume series was an attempt to record the lives of the "other America" in the Great Depression, a rural America invisible to the urban privileged who still had jobs and money, an America composed of the poor, of agricultural workers, of the unnumbered minorities, black, brown, and red.
Part of what stopped me was the shared surname, but I wouldn't have lingered as I did just for that. To my understanding at that time, the lack of a final -s on his surname suggested that George Pound and I came from unrelated lines. What held me and made me copy pages of the typescript was the laconic realism of the story of a white man (as I wrongly believed) who had been a marshal in Tobucksy County in the Choctaw Nation. I kept these notes for twenty-five years until just recently I happened across the Find-a-Grave online memorial for George's son Thomas, and I saw the blood link, distant but clear. Despite my mental reservations, even in 1995 I may have unconsciously felt a distant kinship. Also it may be that, reared as I had been on a diet of western movies and novels by Zane Gray and Louis L'Amour, I simply identified with the mild-mannered sheriff. Since the kinship line can be of no interest to the reader, I will say but one more word about it--a word about genealogical research.
Cleburn the Family Historian
The story of the bushwhackers' killing David Walker Pound can be found in a 1949 letter written by Cleburne Pound. He was a genealogist of the old school, a teacher who spent his summer's driving from courthouse to courthouse across the South from Virginia to Arkansas. If he knew his ancestors had lived in a county, he would stay there--a day, two days, three days--until he had located every record that referred to them. He was gray, patient, scholarly, meticulous--the ideal genealogist. He was also a gentleman, as I learned from personal experience. When I first became interested in family history, I wrote to Cleburne, who wrote back inviting me to drive down from Chandler to Seminole to visit him. At that time recently widowed, he had just retired as a principal in the Seminole school system and was living alone. For the better part of a long Sunday afternoon, he shared his work with me, demonstrating that flame of concentrated curiosity which is the heart of the true historian, and affecting me with the warmth. He gave me a 15-page typescript dressed in a judicial black robe of thick paper and probably his own composition, called The Name and Family of Pound, and as I left he went with me downtown so I could copy a 1941 essay on my own northern branch of the family.
When I say that the Find-a-Grave memorial to George’s brother Taylor had at last made me understand the blood link between myself and George, it was because a few days before I'd come across some of Cleburne's old work. Cleburne published his researches, but in obscure genealogical journals no longer possible to find. His admirers in the present digitalized day have excavated his work and put it online. When you've gone through the databases and find your hunger for stories unsatisfied, then you look for a historian like Cleburne. Family history is a tree. It has roots and branches.
In Cleburne's old genealogy, which I found online, a researcher quoted from a letter Cleburne had written to a family acquaintance in which he told the story of the killing of George's father. What he wrote was: "David Pound was killed by bushwhackers as he sat at the supper table in his home." Cleburne could only have gotten the story from looking up George's wife, Carrie Messick Pound, who outlived her husband by forty years. He drove to
Carrie Messick Pound
the village of Kiowa in Pittsburg County to visit her. In the 1940s when Cleburne collected the story, she was the only living person who could have known it. It had to have been Carrie who told Cleburne that the killing took place at suppertime. In the 1949 letter Cleburne states: "I have met Mrs. Caroline Pound, widow of George Pounds, and she gave me all the information she could regarding her husband's people. She is past 90 years of age, and is a [Choctaw] Indian. She is well-respected and has a good education." Cleburne should have mentioned that Caroline Pound’s mother was Sophia Colbert, of the Colbert family famous for political leadership in Indian Territory.
George Pounds, the Youngest Confederate Soldier
Born in Pontotoc County, northern Mississippi, in 1850, our subject' like to use all three parts of his full name George Walker Pound, and when he died in 1917 in Pittsburg County, in what had been Indian Territory, they were placed on his tomb stone. (See photo at the end of this essay.) Walker, which was George’s father’s name also, is a name everyone in the South knows--it's common and sometimes it carries the weight of historical figures. It's a name to reckon with. His two brothers were the eldest, William Taylor Pound, known as Taylor, and Thomas Pound, the youngest. Taylor is remembered, if at all, for having burned down Paris Texas in 1877. No record exists for Thomas after 1860, leading to the conclusion that he may have died young--and to such speculation as this.
I said this was no tale of vengeance, yet these three young men were bound by an iron code of honor that required them to avenge their father’s murder. They would have started in pursuit of the killers when the learned of the killing--in the middle of the War, when Taylor was 15, George 13, and Tom 7. Tom was too young to fight, but he could hold the horses. He certainly wouldn’t have stayed home. The answer to who-went-where should be in the 1870 census, but it’s not. Only George figures in the census, and he’s in a boarding house in Sunflower County, Mississippi, famous for Parchman Farm. One of his father’s killers could have been serving time there, in which case he would be out in the work gangs and exposed to the young men’s bullets. The other two brothers could have been in the same boarding house, but if so Taylor as the oldest may have been wary of census takers and kept his head down. George was more naïve and let himself be counted. And Tom--it’s pointless to even guess. He died in these years, for he’s not in the 1870 census and never shows up later. It’s a dark story, which no light penetrates, for the avengers would never have told. We too must leave it shrouded in decent darkness. The shears of Fate cut the tent ropes of his life, and the broker Hope sold him for nothing.
The speculation above may be right in its storyline but it’s wrong in its facts. This is borne out by an 1897 article from The Confederate Veteran, a magazine out of Nashville which began publishing in 1893. It became the official organ of the United Confederate Veterans and by 1900 had a readership of over 20,000 before fading away in 1932. The article honors George Pounds as
the youngest living ex-Confederate soldier, or rather the youngest regularly enrolled sworn-in soldier who was in the Confederate army at the time of the surrender. His name is George W. Pound, and he was enrolled at Okalona, Miss., in March 186[3] in Company ___, Capt. Tom Gill commanding, and surrendered at Gainesville Ala., on the 8th of May 1865. He was forty-seven years old on the 8th of February 1897, hence was only thirteen years and one month old when he enlisted, and fifteen years and three months when he was paroled. Pound was transferred and attached to the Eighteenth Mississippi Cavalry, and served in the Oxford raid. He then [was] attached to the Third Kentucky Cavalry, then to the Second Tennessee Cavalry (Company B), and was in the battles of Athens, Ala., Suphur Trestle, Pulaski, and Columbia, Tenn., and Martin's Factory, Ala. The Second Tennessee Cavalry will remember the little "kid" who rode the little mule across the Tennessee River in the Middle Tennessee raid.
What this tribute means is that the story we began with about the boys seeing their father murdered at the supper table was fiction, at least as concerns the older two. George had already joined the Confederate Army, and if he had gone then his older brother Taylor would have been gone too.
Arrival in Indian Territory
Taylor and George both came to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, probably together, and their presence is well attested, for they were counted as Chickasaw Indians, enrolled "by blood" (their mother had been part Chickasaw), and the Dawes Commission had spawned a whole bureaucracy of population control. It was part of an elaborate apparatus whose ultimate effect, if not its aim, would be to chop the great open hunting ranges of the original Indian land grants into 160 acre farms called allotments. These and the huge areas of “surplus” land could then be acquired by unscrupulous whites. (The story is eloquently told in book after book by Angie Debo.) Land-fraud--that's the way the west was won in eastern Oklahoma.
The Dawes-derived Chickasaw rolls show George Pound in the Chickasaw Nation in 1897, but he must have arrived two decades before. By 1875 he was married to Nancy Caroline "Carrie" Messick, who was born in 1855 in Kiamichi, Choctaw Nation (present-day Pushmataha County), which means that he was in the Choctaw Nation by 1875.
The Commission's recommendations had been enacted into law as the Dawes Act in 1887. According to the Dawes rules, a person who was, for instance, half Choctaw and half Chickasaw had to choose one nation and register simply as a member of that nation, forcing individuals to lose part of their inheritance and heritage. In violation of earlier treaties, the Dawes Commission registered tribal members in official rolls, and forced individual land allotments upon the Tribe's members allowing the "surplus" land to be ceded for white settlement. Many of the allotments were given under "guardianship" to third parties while the owners were underage. During the oil boom of the early 20th century, the guardianships became very lucrative; there was widespread abuse and financial exploitation of Choctaw individuals. Charles Haskell, the future governor of Oklahoma, amassed a fortune this way, as did other bankers and Indian agents, including some in my own natal Lincoln County.
The reason why George and his wife chose to settle near Kiowa is not clear. Nor is his career as a U. S. Marshal clearly defined. He was a Marshal under Isaac Parker, known aptly as the Hanging Judge, appointed to the Western District of Arkansas, headquarters in Fort Smith, in 1875. Pound’s name occurs in Marshal posse roles in the hundreds of stories circulating about pre-statehood Oklahoma outlaws, but the only documents that bear his name are writs and subpoenas served by him. The end of his career came in 1898, as the narrative below relates.
In the 1900 census, though George is Chickasaw by blood (probably a quarter), he appears as a Choctaw by marriage, and he and his wife are living in the Choctaw Nation, which is where the story I found in the Oklahoma and Indian Territory, Indian and Pioneer Historical Collection takes place--in the Moshulatubbee District east of Kiowa. At that time Kiowa was a village on the Texas Road, which ran from Denison Texas north to Kansas, crossing the Red River at Colbert, named for the ferryman Benjamin Colbert, a relative of George’s wife Carrie. Today Kiowa is in Pittsburg County, best known as the home McAlester State Penitentiary and its execution facilities.The Pound family, however, lived not by the prison (not established until after statehood) but east of Kiowa in an area first known as Peaceful Valley and then as Pounds Valley.
Pounds Valley
That’s how the narrator whose work I have remembered all these years entitles his story--“Pounds Valley.” His name is L. F. Baker. Born in Kentucky in 1884 and arriving as a boy in Indian Territory, Baker’s laconic recollections cover twenty pages. The material is homely, centered on farming and cattle ranching, with stories about church, cattle-driving, and the author's first paying job in the coal mines around Pittsburg. The story of George Pound comes apropos of nothing, following a story called "Church and Sunday Recreation." There’s continuity in the succeeding story, however, "The Result of Drinking," which features the cold-blooded murder of a "Choctaw Indian police" by two drunken brothers named Bob and Henry Thompson, one of whom features in “Pounds Valley.” Both stories reveal the brothers’ dislike of Indians and people of mixed blood like George Pound. That they also, as it will turn out, are themselves part Indian just adds to our sense of understated brutality.
Here is the story, copied from the original typescript.
Pounds Valley
George Pound was a United States Marshal who lived sixteen miles east of Kiowa. That was known as the Pound Valley and was on the Stringtown, Fort Smith route. George Pound resigned or quit being a U. S. Marshal thirty-nine years ago, 1898. (He was my father's brother, G.K.)
George brought a load of wild hogs to Kiowa to sell. Henry and Bob Thompson owned the meat market. That day, Henry was drunk. He came out to look at the hogs and they were poor. He said, "Nobody wouldn't bring hogs like that into town but a halfbreed bastard." George told him that he shouldn't talk like that.
Henry left the wagon and went across the street, turned and started shooting at George. Everyone carried a gun in those days but they had to be carried where they could be seen. It was against the law to carry a concealed gun. George Pound had hidden his horse into town and someone else brought the wagon.
George ran to where his horse was, jerked his Winchester off of the saddle, and jumped behind a gate post that was in front of the livery stable. The bullets were hitting the iron hinges on that post right at George's head. He shot at Thompson but missed him, for his face was full of splinters. He took his glasses off, wiped his face and glasses, put them back on and shot Thompson in the abdomen. That stopped the fight.
Thompson was taken to the doctor and it was thought he would surely die for part of his intestines had come out.
George came back to town a week or two later and Thompson was getting well. George paid all the doctor bills and other expenses of Thompson's being laid up and they were good friends after that. When George came to town you would see them together on the streets.
When I made a poem out of this story, I cut out a bit of deadwood and colored the details: "He shot Henry right above the brass buckle on his levis," I wrote, which was probably true, and I wrote that Henry's "guts were dangling blue loops in the dust," which was also probably true, though neither were what L. F. Baker said. I also supplied the phrase “you half-breed bastard,” making George’s reply notable for its mildness. But the story didn’t need my editorial touches. When George gets splinters in his eyes and stops to wipe his face and glasses so that he can see clearly to shoot, the scene glows with a homely realism that we don’t get in western film until the recent post-westerns of directors like Clint Eastwood in The Unforgiven and Quentin Tarantino in The Hateful Eight.
The Thompson Brothers
This companion story confirms the picture of the sort of men the Thompsons were, and the reader needs to know, for in sentimental fiction the bad guys are usually more interesting than the good guys. The second sentence of the story gives the gist: "Bob and Henry Thompson were both drinking and raising trouble on the streets. Anderson Lewis went to them and advised them to get off of the streets as they were drunk. Henry started fighting him while he was on his horse. Bob shot him five times. Anderson pulled his gun and fired it three times, but didn't hit anyone. He fell off his horse dead."
These are the Thompsons we remember. No palaver, no foreplay, they just start shooting and they aim to kill. In the murder of Anderson Lewis, one of Bob’s bullets went through the victim and into Mrs. Sheer’s café across the street, drilling a hole in two cans of sardines. Later, when Bob enters the café to eat, he has to step across the laid-out corpse of Lewis. Mrs. Sheer is sitting there crying because Lewis, a good man, thirty-two years old with a wife and two small children, has been killed. Bob asks her what is the matter, “You want me to pay for the sardines?”
Such was Bob Thompson and his brother Henry was of like temperament, and such was the mild-mannered, bespectacled George Pound, Sheriff of Tobucksy County in the Choctaw Nation. No sentimentality mars Baker’s portraits of these men.
As to Pounds Valley, it’s a name I’ve never found on any map, but up through the early 1920s it was not infrequent in the local newspapers. As of this writing (May 2016), I have a correspondent who lives there and is a descendant of George’s brother Taylor. At eighty-six, she is sparing with words, but just this morning she wrote to say, “Pounds Valley is much the same as when I was a little girl. We usually see a wolf around the school house, fox, wild turkey, and once my brother and I saw a mountain lion (cougar) run up the side of Indian Trail Mountain, not too many years ago. It’s like time stands still here, and the people are very clannish and unfriendly.”
The boy George Walker Pound received his calling to a career pursuing criminals early, when bushwhackers entered the family's home and killed his father with a shotgun blast. The family had been sitting down to eat their supper of cornbread and milk. This was Pontotoc County, part of the old Chickasaw homelands in northern Mississippi, in the year 1863. George was thirteen.
"Bushwhackers" means regulators, the riffraff who stayed home to plunder and kill in the name of patriotic zeal. What had the father David Walker Pound done to draw the regulators' attention to himself? He was an outsider, born in Obion County in the northwest corner of Tennessee. He didn’t own slaves, nor had his father before him. He was sitting at home instead of off fighting. Eating supper, which would mean eating with his family: his wife, two daughters, and three sons aged ten to thirteen. Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before three teenage sons? And yet, the story that follows is not a vengeance story.
The Power of a Surname
I first encountered the name George Pound about 1995 when I was working in the archives of the Oklahoma Historical Society, going through the index to the typescript volumes of a 1937 WPA series called Oklahoma and Indian Territory, Indian and Pioneer Historical Collection. Like similar work by the writers of the WPA’s Federal Writer’s Project--the most familiar being the splendid collections of slave narratives--this 116-volume series was an attempt to record the lives of the "other America" in the Great Depression, a rural America invisible to the urban privileged who still had jobs and money, an America composed of the poor, of agricultural workers, of the unnumbered minorities, black, brown, and red.
Part of what stopped me was the shared surname, but I wouldn't have lingered as I did just for that. To my understanding at that time, the lack of a final -s on his surname suggested that George Pound and I came from unrelated lines. What held me and made me copy pages of the typescript was the laconic realism of the story of a white man (as I wrongly believed) who had been a marshal in Tobucksy County in the Choctaw Nation. I kept these notes for twenty-five years until just recently I happened across the Find-a-Grave online memorial for George's son Thomas, and I saw the blood link, distant but clear. Despite my mental reservations, even in 1995 I may have unconsciously felt a distant kinship. Also it may be that, reared as I had been on a diet of western movies and novels by Zane Gray and Louis L'Amour, I simply identified with the mild-mannered sheriff. Since the kinship line can be of no interest to the reader, I will say but one more word about it--a word about genealogical research.
The story of the bushwhackers' killing David Walker Pound can be found in a 1949 letter written by Cleburne. He was a genealogist of the old school, a teacher who spent his summer's driving from courthouse to courthouse across the South from Virginia to Arkansas. If he knew his ancestors had lived in a county, he would stay there--a day, two days, three days--until he had located every record that referred to them. He was gray, patient, scholarly, meticulous--the ideal genealogist. He was also a gentleman, as I learned from personal experience. When I first became interested in family history, I wrote to Cleburne, who wrote back inviting me to drive down from Chandler to Seminole to visit him. At that time recently widowed, he had just retired as a principal in the Seminole school system and was living alone. For the better part of a long Sunday afternoon, he shared his work with me, demonstrating that flame of concentrated curiosity which is the heart of the true historian, and affecting me with the warmth. He gave me a 15-page typescript dressed in a judicial black robe of thick paper and probably his own composition, called The Name and Family of Pound, and as I left he went with me downtown so I could copy a 1941 essay on my own northern branch of the family.
The Power of Find-a-Grave
When I say that the Find-a-Grave memorial to George’s brother Taylor had at last made me understand the blood link between myself and George, it was because a few days before I'd come across some of Cleburne's old work. Cleburne published his researches, but in obscure genealogical journals no longer possible to find. His admirers in the present digitalized day have excavated his work and put it online. When you've gone through the databases and find your hunger for stories unsatisfied, then you look for a historian like Cleburne. Family history is a tree. It has roots and branches.
In Cleburne's old genealogy, which I found online, a researcher quoted from a letter Cleburne had written to a family acquaintance in which he told the story of the killing of George's father. What he wrote was: "David Pound was killed by bushwhackers as he sat at the supper table in his home." Cleburne could only have gotten the story from looking up George's wife, Carrie Messick Pound, who outlived her husband by forty years. He drove
to the village of Kiowa in Pittsburg County to visit her. In the 1940s when Cleburne collected the story, she was the only living person who could have known it. It had to have been Carrie who told Cleburne that the killing took place at suppertime. In the 1949 letter Cleburne states, "I have met Mrs. Caroline Pound, widow of George Pounds, and she gave me all the information she could regarding her husband's people. She is past 90 years of age, and is a [Choctaw] Indian. She is well-respected and has a good education." Cleburne should have mentioned that Caroline Pound’s mother was Sophia Colbert, of the Colbert family famous for political leadership in Indian Territory.
As an educator teaching the lower grades, Cleburne’s work schedule was perfectly set up for his research in genealogy, giving him about a quarter of each year free to drive around in the southeastern states where his family had lived and there visit the courthouse, if it had survived the nineteenth century fires that destroyed almost all of them, and there delight his soul with the kind of records which Ancestry.com delivers its users today under the rubrics of vital (birth, marriage death), military, and immigration.
Conclusion
Funeral services for Seminole resident Cleburne Greene Pound, 88, were held Monday at Spaulding Community Center. Freeman Whitlock officiated at the services, and burial followed at Holdenville Cemetery. Pound died Saturday, Feb. 5, 2000 at Seminole Estates Nursing Home. He was born Nov. 23, 1911 in Hector, Ark. to Leroy and Maud (Bullock) Pound. A graduate of John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Ark., and East Central, he received his Master’s degree from OU. Pound began teaching in Bohannon, in 1933, and later at Hulsey, Prairie View, Bilby and Atwood. He also served as Superintendent of Spaulding Schools from July of 1943 to 1959. Pound later served as Newcastle Elementary Principal from 1959-67, and principal of Roosevelt and Central from 1967-71. He left Seminole to teach at Crook Oak for a while, then became Elementary Principal at Earlsboro in 1973 until his retirement, around 1976. A Jehovah’s Witness by faith, he was married to Chlorine Howell on March 17, 1934 in Coalgate. She preceded him in death May 26, 1989.
Pound was also preceded in death by his parents, four brothers, John L. Pound, Julian Haynes Pound, James Irwin Pound and Wilburn C. Pound, and one daughter, Mary Ann McConnell. Survivors include one son, Richard Pound, Stephenville, Texas; two daughters, Norma Jean Whitlock, Prague and Martha Rhodes, north of Seminole; two brothers, Glen S. Pound, La Jolla, Calif., and Bob Pound, Little Rock, Ark.; three sisters, Audra Ramsey, Holdenville, Nell Johnson, Mineola, Texas and Helen Simons, Colorado Springs, Colo.; seven grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.
George Walker Pound
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