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Indian Pioneer Papers - Index

Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma
Date: December 1, 1937
Name: John L. Crotzer
Post Office: Wyandotte, Oklahoma
Date of Birth: Pennsylvania
Place of Birth:
Father:
Place of Birth:
Information on father:
Mother:
Place of birth:
Information on mother:
Field Worker: Nannie Lee Burns
Interview #12300

Interview with Mark C. Crotzer
Wyandotte Squawman

My father was John L. Crotzer, a native of Pennsylvania. My mother was Margaret Crotzer, also a native of Pennyslvania and was born near Harrisburg. They were married in Pennsylvania and came when young to Indiana.

I was born April 27, 1851, twenty-two miles north of Terra Haute, Indiana.

My father, who was a generally useful man and much of a mechanic, came west with the McCune Wollen Company. He worked on the first bridge across the Raccoon River in the new home and did all of the weatherboarding and shingling on it.

BOYHOOD DAYS

When small, I attended school at Armysburg, near home. Mother died when I was quite young and after that I did not get along so well at home and hearing the stories of the war made up my mind that I would go to Texas. When I was nine years old I made my first attempt to run away from home. I got eight miles west of Terra Haute and spent the winter here with a farmer but then my father found me and I was returned home.

I did not have the advantages that the boys have today. I was born in a log house and as Father was a mechanic, he expected me to learn under him but I was left-handed and I could no do things as he did and he would get angry at me for not doing things like he did them and try as hard as I could I could not learn from him. A left-handed neighbor here a Wyandotte has taught me how to do many things; among them, how to bind grain and to tie the knot in the twine.

I ran away several times and once I cam down the canal and worked as a "cooper," that is I picked up things and helped for my passage. I was fourteen at this time. I saw the first soldiers volunteer for the Civil War in Terra Haute and would have liked to go with them but was too young.

THE MOVE

In 1868, when I was seventeen, my father sold out in Indiana and came west to Missouri with his family. He had married again. He secured work on the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad that was being built at that time.

LIFE IN THE RAILROAD CAMPS

I also got a job driving a cart and hauling dirt rock from the places where you could not plough.

We lived through the winter in tents and worked in snow half shoe-top deep. I received $20.00 per month and my board for my work and we were paid once a month.

In this railroad camp you found every type of character. Since then I have met some of the men who worked there; one has since been a United States Marshal here in Oklahoma and another came to my home as a churn (sic) agent. It was while I was working that I saw my first man hung and another was shot. He was working on the other side of the camp from me.

The man who was hung was arrested in the railroad camp for stealing horses and they left a man to guard him and he stole the guard's gun and shot the guard and got away and they found him and he was hung to a tree without a trial.

The other incident that I have referred to, I have sometimes heard called the "Battle of the Bloody Cut" and it happened between Seneca, Missouri, and Wyandotte.

A man was working on the other side of the cut from me when the Vigilance Committee rode up and told me to step back.

They commenced shooting and the man was shot thirty times. At that time he was not dead and I hauled him to the jail in Neosha, Missouri, and here he died but I think he would have recovered if he had had the right care. We never knew his real name. Many of the fo[l]ks were called names that was not theirs and we never knew names of others.

This happened on what was called the 'Cap Williams Place. It is eight or nine miles east of Wyandotte. I can still go to the place. I was there not long ago. It was hard to find as the roads have been changed and shortened and some of the hills have been cut and all this has changed the appearance of the place.

When we reached the state line at Seneca, Missouri, there was a distance of about twelve miles across the Seneca, Wyandot and Shawnee country where the railroad did not have a right of way so we had to stop and move out. We came west to Grand River and began to build west towards Vinita across the Cherokee Nation through land on which the railroad had already secured permission to build.

From the banks of Grand River we built towards Vinita and worked until the railroad could purchase from the three tribes; the Senecas, the Shawnees and the Wyandottes a strip of one hundred feet wide extending from the State line to Grand River.

They purchased one hundred feet but they took possession and used a strip one hundred fifty feet wide. My wife, who was a Wyandotte received $170.00 as her share of the payment for the railroad right-of-way.

I worked with the gang in building the railroad from State line to Grand River and after this stretch was completed we were moved ahead to a place west of Vinita which was the end of the completed road.

From there our crew was shipped to Fort Smith and I went along still wanting to go to Texas, my boyhood dream, but soon after I reached Fort Smith, I changed my mind and returned to the vicinity of what is now Wyandotte though then there was no town here and only a switch east of the present town called the Shawnee Switch. We were a year building the road from the State Line to the Grand River. I worked nearly three years on the construction of the road.

MARRIAGE

February 14, 1875, I was married to Catherine BLAND, a Wyandotte. My wife was the daughter of John Bland and Eliza ARMSTRONG Bland; the latter was born in Ohio and came with the Wyandottes to eastern Kansas.

My wife's father, with his family in two wagons and accompanied by her uncle and family with their two wagons and a neighbor, came to the Indian country in November 1872, and settled three miles south and one east of Ottawa. He rented a room for his family until he could build a log house. My wife was born in 1866.

She grew up near Wyandotte and attended the Mission School there. We had a big wedding; the folks wanted to see us married, so I gave her aunts the money to buy the things to eat excepting the lard and flour for a big dinner. I hired a Baptist minister living six miles east of Seneca to marry us and then as he did not know the road or trial I had to send a man to bring him down and take him home and I had to pay the minister $5.00.

There were about sixty guest at the ceremony and they stood up with us and half of them stayed for dinner and of all those who stayed for dinner, I am the only one living now.

BUILDING THE NEW HOME

With the help of friends, I cut the logs for a house and when they were dressed we had a log raising, that is, the neighbors came to help me lay the logs and to finish the house. We had dinner the first day and then a fire that some hunters on the river had let get away from them came our way so we had to stop and fight fire, so it took a second day t finish the house and we had two dinners, one each day. That night it was finished, we gave a dance.

Then the wife and I went to Seneca, Missouri, in a wagon and bought a few things and among them a stove to cook on. For a bed, we took two benches and put poles across them and made our bed on this frame.

I did not build a fireplace until years later.

In those days everybody went to Seneca every Saturday. On one of the trips home I lost a part of my harness and did not know it until I began to unharness the horses. Our bottom fields were very productive and with the payments that the Wyandottes received occasionally, they soon had comfortable homes though some of their houses were not very large.

We soon had a town laid out and the folks began to build houses there and to start stores; first, we had a grist and sawmill; later, a flourmill and the Mission School on the hill north of town. We had a post office called Grand River post office where the railroad crossed the river. All the conveniences with good neighbors made our lives in those days when we were surrounded with our growing families very pleasant. We had eight children, five girls and three boys.

LATER LIFE

I decided that I wanted to work in the mines so we moved to Galena, Kansas, but it did not take us long to decide to return to our old home and this time we returned to my present home on the hill west of the Seneca Boarding School where my son Homer and his wife live with me. I have left only the homestead of thirty-three and a third acres and a native three room, story and a half house.

Submitted by Sherry Smith-Stanford <conure@advancenet.net> 03-2000.