THE GRANDMOTHER STORIES

I am a woman. My name is Susanne Renaud Chastain. In my home of Bourges, Francais in 1572, the Catholics pillaged our homes. We fled to Charost, we Huguenots, but they persecuted us there. My husband Pierre, a good man and a surgeon, took our five children and myself across the Jura Mountains to Switzerland. It was a long journey, cold and difficult and dangerous, but in Vevey we felt free to practice our beliefs. Pierre, however, felt we would be even freer in the new colonies across the Atlantic. We went first to Wallone in Holland where we stayed among other Huguenots while my daughter Susanna was born. Then we moved on to London, England in 1699 for a short time to await the sailing of our ship to America. The good English ship Mary and Anne embarked from Gravesend on April 10, 1700, and set us on the American shore at the mouth of the James River on the 23 of July, 1700. The first year was very hard. We were given land that the English governors had taken away from the Monacan Indians. Colonel Byrd gave us Indian meal to carry us through that first awful winter. I would not live through it, but my children went on to father many.

I am a woman. My name is Isobel Wilson Moore. As a young girl in 1746 I stood on the shore of South Carolina and watched a tall ship named Nancy disembark several strong, young men from my home of County Antrim, Ireland. One of them was William, the Irish lad who would steal my heart. We settled at Cannon Creek on headright land of 150 acres and raised five children. They would have many children, and their generations many, until there were Moores all over America.

I am a woman. My name is Catherine Sively Fine. My father and my husband’s father came to America from Holland. William fought in the War of 1812, and the government gave him bounty land out in the west in a wild place called Arkansas. I am happy in my beautiful Tennessee log cabin on the banks of the river at Pigeon Forge, but it is 1825 and William is eager to be off to the new land. The younger children and I will go with him, but my heart is breaking to leave my two married daughters behind. A year passes, and we have a cabin built as nice as the one in Tennessee. The crops are in and the boys are big enough to help William harvest. I must be off while the weather is warm. It is a long mule ride back to Pigeon Forge. William is not happy, but I must see my girls once more while I live. They may be mothers themselves now. I made the journey alone, and came back alone. I lived to be an old, old woman, secure in the knowledge that my many grandchildren would live after me.

I am a woman. My name is Aradonia Harston Miller Maxwell, but my family and friends call me “Donie.” In 1896 I shot my husband. Only the sheriff knows what I caught him doing, and he let me go free. I went on to marry another man with whom I raised my lovely daughters and the other children we had together.

I am a woman. My name is Sophia Kathleen Chastain Smith. I was a lovely young woman in 1902 when I spied the handsomest cowboy I ever saw astride a gray horse. He wore a leather vest and a dark Stetson hat, but he didn’t carry a gun around his waist. I liked that. He asked me out, and my pa said it would be fine. He knew Mr. Sumner, the owner of the Rocking Chair Ranch. My cowboy, George, was the foreman of that ranch, and Mr. Sumner assured my father George was a fine, sober young man with a good future. On the day of our outing George came to pick me up in a rubber-tired buggy, the first one ever in that county. He passed it off as one he borrowed from his brother, but I found out he bought it just to impress me. Eventually we were married, and he took me to the ranch with him. I often rode with the cowboys, but of course I rode sidesaddle. One day George gave me an old yellow horse to ride. A cow would drift past us, and the horse would take out at a sprightly trot. It took all my skill to hang on. I later found out that Old Yeller could not bear to let a cow pass him, and it was George’s idea of having fun with me. Once George was quarantined with a herd at the railhead at Lawton, because of the Texas tick fever. He left one of the boys in charge of the herd, and came back to north Texas to get me. It would be a long quarantine of six months, so he wanted me with him. We stayed in a half-soddy, half-dugout on land that Mr. Sumner leased from Quanah Parker, the great Comanche chief, to graze the cattle on. I had to tack cloth over the entire ceiling to keep dirt from sifting down onto the bed and the table with dishes. Didn’t matter about the floor, it was dirt anyway. After a couple of years on the ranch and being married, we had a little girl. George decided it was time for us to settle down. He bought a farm in what was then Texas, but the US Supreme Court later decided we were on the wrong branch of the Red River, so we became part of Oklahoma. The first year we were there, a tornado came and blew away our house and barn and almost every thing else. All that was left was our baby, two horses, and us. My wedding ring was even blown off my finger. My hair was full of mud and sticks and straw. The neighbor ladies tried to comb it out, but we had to cut it short like a boy’s. I cried, because it was so long I could sit on it before the tornado. We were thankful though, as 164 people in that sparsely settled region died because of the tornado. The first thing we rebuilt was a dugout cellar. We lived in that until George got a one-room house rebuilt. Next spring George was plowing before planting and he saw something glint in the sunlight from the sod the horses were plowing up. It was my wedding ring. We eventually had six more babies. Every time we had a baby, George added a room to that house.