Neil R. Johnson - The Chickasaw Rancher

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Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.

Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publishers Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE CHICKASAW RANCHER

BY

NEIL R. JOHNSON

MONTFORD JOHNSON

From an oil portrait by Ralph Shead

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER

There are several reasons or excuses for writing The Chickasaw Rancher. Most people have a false idea that the civilization of Oklahoma did not begin until the opening of Oklahoma for settlement by the Run in 1889. The truth of the matter is that Montford T. Johnson, The Chickasaw Rancher, with his family and friends, brought civilization to this particular section of Oklahoma in 1868, just twenty-one years before the opening. He moved into the northern part of the Chickasaw Nation with the wild prairie Indian tribes as neighbors. He lived peacefully with them until after the opening of Oklahoma.

The white settlers, who observed and heard of his fine well-bred livestock, his farming, his fine race horses, and his plantation type of home and way of living, were attracted to the country and wanted to share it.

Montfords son, Edward B. Johnson, who lived and experienced and saw the beginning and the changes that took place in the Chickasaw Nation, shortly before his death wrote the Memoirs of Montford T. Johnson.

Edward B. Johnsons wife, Mollie, after reading the Memoirs of Montford T. Johnson, wrote of her early day experiences as a wife of a Chickasaw rancher.

Several years after the death of Edward B. Johnson, I was asked by an Oklahoma University student if I knew anything about the Early Day Ranching in the Chickasaw Nation. It was then I decided to write The Chickasaw Rancher so that future generations might know the facts.

I wrote this from the viewpoint of the Chickasaw Indian and endeavored to show what effect the changing conditions had on the life of the Indian, who was given these lands.

I am extremely grateful that the Memoirs of Montford T. Johnson were written, which gave me an outline of the events that took place. I also am thankful for the information furnished by many of the early settlers, who knew, worked for, and admired Montford T. Johnson. I was also helped by records found in the State Historical Society at Oklahoma City, in the Phillips Collection in the library of the University of Oklahoma and the library at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

I trust that my children and theirs may read and learn how Montford T. Johnson, the Chickasaw Rancher, lived and civilized this part of Oklahoma.

NEIL R. JOHNSON

The American West continues to captivate the popular fancy, and while this enduring public interest puzzles many social critics, actually an explanation is not too difficult to come by. The West was a savage, dangerous land, and the challenge it hurled to the men who would conquer it was deadly certain and exacting. Survival, ever a clear and constant question, required endurance and initiative, resourcefulness, and above allcourage. The very uncertainties of existence induced an admirably reckless daring. The West was an outlet for individualism, a land of strong personalities. And the region produced a coarse nobility, esteemed by contemporaries, and understandably admired in a nauseously secure, tamed age. Devotees of the West are well acquainted with the likes of Charles Goodnight, John Clay, Richard King, and Ab Blocker. The Chickasaw Rancher introduces to the world a worthy confederate for these range aristocratsMontford Johnson.

The epic of the Chickasaw rancher is based on the memoirs of Montford Johnson and his son Edward. Neil Johnson, grandson of Montford and son of Edward, has fused these parental recollections into a candid, instructive, and exciting narrative.

The Chickasaw Rancher is a multi-dimensional story, for besides its primary focusthat of supplying a detailed view of ranching in the Chickasaw Nationit provides a description of life among the Five Civilized Tribes before, during, and after removal to the Indian Territory. The catalyst which provoked these five nationsthe Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminolesto remarkable advances in the Anglo civilization was the mixed-blood family formed from the liaisons of intermarried white traders, missionaries, and frontiersmen. Just as the Ridge, Hicks, Lowry, and Ross lines, initiated among the Cherokees even before American Independence, were producing leaders to sustain this tribes high level economic and political life down to the Government-enforced dissolution of tribal existence around 1900, a similar development was taking place among the other four nations. The Grayson, McIntosh, McGillivray, and Porter mixed-blood families were pre-eminent in Creek affairs, as were the Brown and Davis lines among the Seminoles, and the Folsoms, Le-Flores, McCurtains, and Pitchlynns for the Choctaws.

Outstanding mixed-blood families developed in the Chickasaw Nation too, and none was more esteemed than the issue of Charles N. Johnson. English-born Johnson came to the United States at the age of nineteen, and after a brief stint as an itinerant actor, he became a trader in the Chickasaw Nation. By his marriage to a Chickasaw girl, Rebekah Courtney, Johnson became a citizen of the tribe and accompanied the Chickasaws west over their Trail of Tears to a new home in the Indian Territory. Beginning in 1837 and for nearly twenty years the Chickasaws lived with their linguistic brethren, the Choctaws. The independent Chickasaws grew dissatisfied with this arrangement, and finally in 1855, after years of complaint, were permitted to separate from the Choctaws and were assigned a national domain of their own, its boundaries as finally established extending west from the Choctaw line to the ninety-eighth meridian, bounded on the north by the Canadian, on the south by Red River.

Several important developments took place in the Johnson family before the Chickasaws received their new home west of the Choctaws. In 1843, Montford Johnson, the future Chickasaw rancher, was born, shortly his mother died, and Charley Johnson returned to the East, leaving his two children, Adelaide and Montford, with Indian relatives.

Montford grew to young manhood in the shadow of Fort Arbuckle, and from his recollections we are furnished a glimpse of pioneer life on the western rim of the Chickasaw Nation, where, as on other American frontiers, social status was based more on courage honor, dependability, and hospitality, and less on considerations of birth and wealth. Further, The Chickasaw Rancher contains an intimate account of the hardships and heartaches, the successes and failures of the hardy settlers who tamed this howling wilderness. This is timely since up until now, except for scant references found in such impersonal sources as the annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, little has been known of the region and its people.