Indian Tale

This story from Frances Jean Nowlin Brubaker, Class of 1952:

My grandparents bought land in what was known as “Big Pasture” down on Red River and moved to Cotton County about 1906.

Mary Catherine Gann Nowlin was born in Brown County, Texas on April 3, 1860. She departed this life July 8, 1959 in Cotton County, Oklahoma. She married James Calvin Nowlin in 1876. He was born in Alabama on October 15, 1850, and died October 14, 1922 in Cotton County, Oklahoma. Our Dad, Rufus Eugene Nowlin, was next to the youngest in this family of five children who lived to be grown. He had three older sisters: Margaret, Ruth and Nancy and a younger sister was Audrey.

MY grandmother opened my imagination with stories of her life and childhood. The following is an event that took place during my grandmother’s first year of school.

The setting was rural Texas in 1866. Buffalo herds roamed the plains of Texas and wild Indians raided and killed settlers coming to the area. These would have been Comanche and Apache Indian tribes. Men from this part of Texas did not have to serve in the Civil War for they were needed at home to protect their families.

This was a one room school situated near a stream. Probably located in as central an area as they could manage for the children who were to attend. My grandmother and her older brother walked several miles to school. This particular day my grandmother’s brother was sick and her mother wouldn’t let her walk this distance alone to school.

Some child in the classroom spotted two horse back riders in the distance. Soon the entire classroom was aware of the approaching riders. It was apparent these riders were headed for the school. The classroom was a stir! The children were restless and pointing. In vain, the teacher was trying to maintain order until she saw these two horsemen were Indians. Quickly she went to the little window at the back of the room and frantically began helping the children out with instructions for them to hide in the brush down by the stream. When these two Indian men came through the door the teacher and two children, a boy and a girl, stood petrified with fear at the back of the room. The young teacher put her hand to her chest and begged them not to kill her. As soon as the first arrow pierced her body she became enraged, and began be meaning these two Indians. She would not flinch nor fall, but continued to rage verbally at them until they killed her. Possibly she may have wanted to divert their attention from those children who had escaped hoping to give them time to hide.

This brutal scene took place in the presence of the children who did not have time to escape. The Indians motioned for these two children to go outside with them. They then patted their horses for them to get on their horses. –A TEACHER KILLED AND A BOY AND A GIRL STOLEN BY THE INDIANS--.

When they found the teacher lying on the floor of the little school room she was full of arrows. They did not try to remove them, but cut the arrows off to bury her.

The children who escaped stayed hid out until late evening. News as to what had happened began to trickle through the area. The tragic event ended school for that year.

Several years later some settlers traveling through the country bought this white boy from the Indians for a sack of flour. The Indians said he was a bad boy. The boy would show people scars on his lets below his knees where the Indians stuck feathers beneath the skin and set the feathers on fire. The Indians did this because he tried to run away.

Evidently, this account is recorded. In the summer of 1966, while visiting my parents in southern Oklahoma I came across an article in the Wichita Falls, Texas newspaper written by Jack Kemp. The title was “Just a Hundred Years Ago”. The article told how children collected pennies to buy a headstone for their teacher who had been killed by the Indians.

I tried to tell the story as near as I could to the way my grandmother told us.

Frances Jean Nowlin Brubaker, Class of 1952.