A standard history of Oklahoma; an authentic narrative of its development from the date of the first European exploration down to the present time, including accounts of the Indian tribes, both civilized and wild, of the cattle range, of the land openings and the achievements of the most recent period, Vol. IV, Part 55

Author: Thoburn, Joseph B. (Joseph Bradfield), 1866-1941
Publication date: 1916
Publisher: Chicago, New York, The American Historical Society
Number of Pages: 656

USA > Oklahoma > A standard history of Oklahoma; an authentic narrative of its development from the date of the first European exploration down to the present time, including accounts of the Indian tribes, both civilized and wild, of the cattle range, of the land openings and the achievements of the most recent period, Vol. IV > Part 55

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"It was the admonition and prayer of my muother that made me accomplish what I did," says Mr. McKin-

ney. "I was determined when I went to Roanoke to fight my Indian blood to the last ditch if it interfered with my progress. My mother died in a few months, but her prayer always was with me. I never came back to the Indian country during those five years. On the contrary I employed a private tutor at the end of each term and spent each summer studying the course that came the succeeding year. I made good grades. I avoided bad company. I remained without college fra- ternities and gave society the least attention possible."

The tenacity of purpose of Mr. Mckinney was put to test once during his five years at Roanoke, and by no less a person than Dr. Allen Wright, the man who suggested the name of Oklahoma for the territory and who, as a pioneer missionary, accomplished more than any other Indian for the welfare of his people. Doctor Wright visited Roanoke. "William," he said, the day before his departure for Indian Territory, "I'm going home to- morrow and if you want to go I've got $65 for you as expense money." "I don't want to go," replied Me- Kinney. "I came here to stay until I finish and I'm going to stay."' Next day Doctor Wright renewed the suggestion. "You may give me the $65 if you like,'' said the young student, "and I'll use it in paying ex- penses here. I'm not going home." "You've got the right stuff in you, " laughed Doctor Wright. "I didn't want you to go home. I was only giving you a test, and you've stood it. Take the money and remain here."

During his early years as a minister Rev. Mr. McKin- ney covered three counties of the Choctaw Nation. Later he had as charges Atoka, Coalgate, Mahew, Durant, Caddo, Antlers, Stringtown and Boggy Depot. Still later the scope of his work was enlarged to cover the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. The Civil war had prac- tically demoralized the organization accomplished by the missionaries before the war, and his duties were largely reconstructive and reorganizing. There were few church edifices; nearly all meetings were held under brush arbors or trees. The meeting period was supposed to begin at 7:30 p. m. on Friday and last until Sunday evening, but the Indians were slow in recovering from laxity of attendance entailed by the war. "To overcome this,"' says Mr. MeKinney, "I had to set an example. For sev- eral months when I reached an appointment at a stated time on Friday evening I found no one there on the camp ground. I staked my horse and lay on the grass all night without supper. I went without breakfast or din- ner on Saturday and on Saturday afternoon the Indians slowly gathered. When I told them of my long and lonesome fast and my prayers they were sorry and prom- ised thereafter to come to service on Friday evening. I never had to repeat this at any appointment. For thirty years our Christian work made good progress. Our two-day meetings in late years have been interfered with by the Indians adopting the customs of the white people. For instance, they remain away from church on Saturday and go to town or attend baseball games. Most of our services now are limited to those of the Sabbath, although occasionally we have meetings that last sev- eral days and Indians come long distances and live in camp houses during the time. I have only two appoint- ments now, one at Eagletown and one at Goodwater."'

Not only in the religious field has Mr. Mckinney ac- complished a great work. For twenty years he has beeu official interpreter for the Choctaw Legislature, serving under the administrations of Governors Thompson Mc- Kinney, who was his brother, Benjamin F. Smallwood, Wilson N. Jones, Jefferson Gardner, Green MeCurtain and Gilbert Dukes. Bills were written in English and one of his duties was to interpret them for fullblood members of the Legislature who could not speak Eng- lish. Another of his duties was to interpret speeches

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made in the Legislature, English to Choctaw and Choctaw to English.

By the request of many of his own people he appeared before Judge Jefferson Gardner, Supreme Judge of the Supreme Court of the Choctaw Nation, and applied for the license to practice law in the courts of the Choctaw 'Nation and was admitted in 1892; and afterward he was admitted to the bar in the United States Court in the Central District of the Indian Territory in 1906; and in 1908 he was admitted to the bar of MeCurtain County of the State of Oklahoma.

Another characteristic about him is that he has always had perfect confidence of the full blood of his own people; this state of things was fully proved when the Government was enrolling the new-born children of "Snake Indians." These Indians were bitterly opposed to take their allotments of land and refused to have anything to do with the requirement of the Government, and commissioner to the five civilized tribes and its field clerks utterly failed to enroll the new-born children of these "Snake Indians." W. H. Mckinney was ap- pointed as special officer to go among these Indians, and he went and enrolled all delinquent children and now these "Snake Indians"' know that they have a friend on whom they can depend, and who has all the time advised them as though they were his own children.

His character and his training made him more than a mere servant of the Legislature. He felt it his duty to criticize proposed legislation if he believed it would be inimical to the best interests of the Choctaw people and never hesitated to advise fullblood members of his opinion. His disinterestedness and sincerity thus gave him a great influence. Such activity caused him more than once to be hailed before the powers and repri- manded. He was threatened with discharge, but he always answered that the performance of a duty he be- lieved he owed his people was more sacred than a politi- cal appointment. It was his activity that defeated the approval by the Department of the Interior of a bill passed by the Choctaw Legislature creating a commission of three, of which the governor was to be ex-official mem- ber, to superintend the payment of nearly $100,000,000 to the Choctaws. This amount was the estimated value of all tribal property that was to be sold by the commis- sion. The commission, under the bill, was to receive 10 per cent of all money distributed, or nearly $10,000,000. Mr. Mckinney discovered evidences of bribery, and did all in his power to forestall the passage of the bill, and failing in this he wrote letters to the Indian agent at Muskogee and the secretary of the interior that caused the bill never to leave the Muskogee office on its way to Washington.

GEORGE A. HARBAUGH. That the sterling and popular citizen whose name introduces this paragraph is dis- tinctively one of the representative and influential busi- ness men of the thriving little City of Alva, county seat of Woods County, needs no further voucher than the statement that he is here president of the Central State Bank and also of the Alva Roller Mills, which represent two of the most important business enterprises in Woods County.

Mr. Harbaugh was born on the homestead farm of his father in Washington County, Iowa, and the date of his nativity, August 27, 1870, shows that his parents were numbered among the pioneers of that section of the Hawkeye State. He is a son of Eli and Catherine (Engle) Harbaugh, both natives of Ohio, where the former was born in 1825 and the latter in 1827; both were reared and educated in the old Buckeye State and there their marriage was solemnized in the year 1848. The parents of Mr. Harbaugh were early settlers in

Washington County, Iowa, where they established their home in 1850, when that section was on the very frontier of civilization, and where the death of the devoted wife and mother occurred in 1872. In his native state Eli Harbaugh learned in his youth the trade of cabinet- maker, and after his removal to Iowa, within about two years after his marriage, he there found demand for his services as a skilled artisan at his trade, the while he was giving close attention to the reclamation of his frontier farm. In 1884 he removed to Barber County, Kansas, where he purchased a farm and here he con- tinued his residence until his death, in 1907, at the venerable age of eighty-two years.

George A. Harbaugh acquired his rudimentary educa- tion in the schools of his native county and was a lad of about fourteen years at the time of the family removal to Barber County, Kansas, where he was reared to adult age on the homestead farm and continued his studies in the public schools. He was associated with his father in the work and management of the home farm until 1893, when he became one of the many ambitious young men who participated in the "run" into the newly opened Cherokee Strip or Outlet of Okla- homa Territory. He entered claim to a tract of Govern- ment land seven miles distant from the present City of Alva aud thus gained the distinction of becoming one of the pioneer settlers of Woods County. He vigorously instituted the improvement of his embryonic farm, to which he eventually perfected his title and upon which he continued his residence five years, in the meanwhile acquiring an entire section of adjacent land and develop- ing one of the extensive stock ranches of the county. He thus aided materially in the initial stages of civic and industrial progress in Woods County, and his energy and circumspection enabled him to achieve definite success and prosperity through his association with the agricul- tural and live stock industries in the county to which he has continued to pay unswerving loyalty.

In 1898 Mr. Harbaugh removed from his ranch to Alva, where he engaged in the live stock and grain busi- ness and became one of the leading representatives of this line of enterprise in this section of the territory. He was a staunch supporter of movements advanced to obtain statehood for the territory and in the meanwhile gained precedence as a steadfast and influential business man and public spirited citizen. In 1906, the year prior to the admission of Oklahoma to the Union, Mr. Harbaugh purchased the controlling interest in the Alva Rolling Mills, of which, as president of the company, he has since maintained the active management. In 1914 this corporation purchased and shipped 3,500,000 bushels of wheat, the enormous shipments having been handled from its chain of thirty elevators, at eligible points in Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas. The Alva Roller Mills are essentially modern in equipment and facilities, the products find a wide demand and are known for superior- ity, and the business, as conjoined with the extensive grain trade controlled by the operating company, repre- sents one of the most important industrial enterprises of Northern Oklahoma.

In 1913 Mr. Harbaugh became associated with Henry E. Noble and others in the organization of the Central State Bank of Alva, of which he has since been president and of which Mr. Noble is cashier, individual mention of the latter executive being made on other pages of this volume.

In politics Mr. Harbaugh is aligned as a staunch supporter of the cause of the democratic party, but he is essentially a business man and has manifested no pre- dilection for the honors or emoluments of political office. He is still the owner of one of the large and valuable

William Higgins

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landed estates in Woods County and is one of the sub- stantial capitalists of the state to which he came as a young man of worthy and ambitious purpose. He is affiliated with Alva Lodge, No. 1184, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and it may consistently be said that in his home county his circle of friends is limited only by that of his acquaintances.

At Alva, on the 1st of November, 1899, was solemnized the marriage of Mr. Harbaugh to Miss Mary Devin, who was born at Princeton, Gibson County, Indiana, in which state were also born her parents, Alexander N. and Melissa Devin. Mr. and Mrs. Harbaugh have three children, whose names and respective dates of birth are here noted: Paul A., September 7, 1901; Melissa Kathryn, October 8, 1905; and Helen E., February 2, 1912.

WILLIAM B. DOUTHITT. By the exercise of an ability which seems to be native in the Douthitt family and a persistent energy coupled with fair methods, William B. Douthitt has succeeded in making a reputation and successful position for himself in the real estate business in Oklahoma, and for the past five years has had his home and offices in Duncan. In recent years an im- portant feature of his business has been the handling of oil leases.

William B. Douthitt was born in Russellville, Ar- kansas, January 12, 1874, a son of W. A. and Belle (Bowden) Douthitt. The Douthitts came from Ireland to America before the Revolutionary war and settled in South Carolina, from which colony the name has spread to many different sections of the United States. Mr. Douthitt's maternal grandfather, J. W. Bowden, was the pioneer settler in Arkansas, having come from Vir- ginia. He owned a large tract of land, and though espousing the cause of the republican party in a strictly democratic state he was elected a member of the Legis- lature. He was killed at Russellville by bushwhackers during the Civil war. W. A. Douthitt was born in Mis- souri in 1847, and is now a business man at Muskogee, Oklahoma, having lived in this state for many years. He moved from Missouri to Russellville, was a farmer there, and in 1892 located at Shawnee, Oklahoma, where he continued farming and stockraising, and since locating at Muskogee in 1913 has been a merchant. He is a republican, a member and deacon of the Methodist Epis- copal Church, South, and affiliates with the Masonic Fraternity. His wife, Belle Bowden, was born in Ar- kansas at Russellville in 1856, grew up and married there, and died at Shawnee, Oklahoma, in 1912. Their children were: J. T., who is a stock man near Guymon, Oklahoma; Lizzie, who lives at Duncan, widow of the late J. W. Paul, a real estate man; Lulu, who lives in Muskogee, married T. J. Stephens, now deceased, who was a school teacher; G. F. is associated with his father in the merchandise business at Muskogee; H. B., also in business with his father and brother at Muskogee; Jennie, wife of Hoyt Davis, a farmer at Shawnee; and May, wife of Ray Toney, of California.

William B. Douthitt attended public school in Russell- ville, Arkansas, and finished his education at Shawnee. The first twenty-four years of his life was spent on his father's farm and this experience as a practical farmer has been valuable to him in his business of real estate. In 1898 he engaged in the real estate business at Shaw- nee, but in 1901 became one of the pioneers who located at Lawton at the opening of that section of Oklahoma, and lived there until April, 1902. From 1902 to 1910 he continued in his regular business at Marlow, Okla- homa, and since 1910 has been at Duncan. He does a general real estate business, handles farm lands and

loans, and his operations cover Stephens, Jefferson, Car- ter and Garvin Counties. He is the individual owner of about a thousand acres of land in these counties. He has handled a number of oil leases, and is the president of the Safety First Oil and Gas Company.

Mr. Douthitt is a republican, a member of the Meth- odist Episcopal Church, South, and affiliates with Mistle- toe Lodge No. 17 of the Knights of Pythias and with Duncan Camp No. 515 of the Woodmen of the World.

In 1905 at Sterling, Oklahoma, Mr. Douthitt married Miss Jessie M. Utter, whose father J. F. Utter is a pas- senger conductor living at Sweetwater, Texas. To their marriage was born a son, William J., on June 4, 1909.

WILLIAM HIGGINS, of Bartlesville, has been a witness of and participant in much that is vital in the history of this great section of the Middle West for fully sixty years. He and his family were in Kansas during the fratricidal struggle which made that a free state. Wil- liam Higgins cast his first vote for Abraham Lincoln in 1864, while with the Union army at Fort Gibson, Indian Territory. He is a former secretary of State of Kansas, and for fifty years has been closely acquainted with Oklahoma citizenship and tribal affairs. He first came to Oklahoma in May, 1899, in the service of the Indian department with the Dawes Commission as appraiser of Indian lands for allotment. At the beginning of the oil excitement he resigned and in 1903 went to Bartles- ville and has been a prominent resident of that city since 1904.

In Norristown, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, William Higgins was born April 2, 1842, a son of Patrick and Elizabeth Jane (Flanagan) Higgins. His parents were solid and substantial people, endowed with a large amount of common sense, had good ideals and aims and endeavored to put them into practice, and were both of the Catholic faith. Patrick Higgins was born in the City of Sligo and his wife in Belfast, Ireland. The former lived to be eighty-nine and the latter to seventy- seven years of age. Patrick Higgins was an Irish school- master and mechanic. He was a free state democrat, but when he settled in Missouri in 1848 found that such democrats were not popular. In 1854 he moved to Kansas and gave his aid and influence in making that a free state.

First in Missouri and then in Kansas Territory Wil- liam Higgins spent his early years beginning with his first conscious recollection. What schooling he had came from his parents, and public schools, from a Catholic academy and from printing shops, which have always been recognized as a great university training school. However, his character has been molded and shaped by hard experience in the frontier life of the West. He has been in and has seen every territory west of Mis- souri, Iowa and Arkansas come into statehood.

As a boy during the terrible border warfare between the Missouri and Kansas people of the '50s, he endured the hardship of frontier life and of drought fanatical strife. He himself shared in some of the experiences of those days, witnessed the destruction of homes and lives, and all the brutal savagery and passions of the civil warfare, which beginning in Kansas, in time enveloped the entire nation. Nowhere was the Civil war fought with greater fury and hatred and with less regard for the honorable rules of warfare than in the border district. William Higgins is one of the few men still living who wit- nessed the battle of Osawatomie on August 30, 1856, between the border ruffians under Colonel Reid of Inde- pendence, Missouri, who had 300 men under his com- mand, and John Brown, who had about forty of his followers. Mr. Higgins says this was not a battle, but

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a very tame affair, between two parties of outlaws, neither of which showed a keen desire to fight. Brown did his best to get away, while Reid and his men thought Brown had from 800 to 1,000 sharpshooters in the timber and marched into Osawatomie, a village of less than 600 people, sacked the town and burned the homes, leaving women and children without shelter or food.

After witnessing this battle Mr. Higgins, then a boy of fourteen, went to Leavenworth on September 11, 1856, and in the same month he became a teamster and drove a team for the Government to a supply train from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Kearney. In 1857 he went into Salt Lake City, Utah, with Col. Sidney Johnson's army, and continued to follow the plains life up to August, 1860.

He then returned to the home of his parents at Paola, Kansas, expecting to go back to Utalı to engage in busi- ness. The Civil war prospects caused a change in his plans, he resumed work at the case in a printing office. Some years earlier he had gained his first knowledge of printing, and his work as a newspaper man is one of the most important features of his career.

On April 7, 1861, at Paola, Kansas, he enlisted in the Union army for three years. He was the first one to offer his services in Miami County, Kansas. He was mustered out of the service at Fort Leavenworth October 19, 1865. He has in his possession an honorable dis- charge as a private veteran of the Civil war and his record as a soldier was clean. His service was in the Western Department, composed of Missouri, Kansas, Indian Territory, Arkansas, Colorado, and Nebraska. This department was more a guerrilla war zone than one in which honorable war methods prevailed. In the entire department only eighteen honorable battles were fought between the regular army forces of the Union and Confederate sides; though there were Indian mas- sacres and outlaw guerrilla warfare by Quantrill, Ander- son and other outlaws.

After the war Mr. Higgins started the Miami Free Press at Paola, but sold it in 1867, and then established the Le Roy Pioneer in Coffey County, Kansas. That paper he sold in 1868, and going to Coffeyville in Mont- gomery County was associated with ex-Senator E. G. Ross on his paper. In 1870 the plant was destroyed, and he then established at Columbus, Kansas, a republican paper which he conducted until 1878. While his work in the newspaper field and otherwise did not bring to Mr. Hig- gins great wealth, he has prospered, and his influence has always been exerted on the side of improvement. All the papers he started are still alive excepting the Miami Free Press.

In 1876 Mr. Higgins became connected with the claim and law department of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, and in 1880 when that road passed out of the hands of receivers he went with the claim and law de- partment of the Santa Fe Company. He has held but two public offices, has never asked for nor sought an official position, has never asked a man to vote for him, and he says that it has been his best pleasure to play the political game for principle and good government and capable citizenship rather than to hold an office.

However, in the State of Kansas the name of William Higgins has long been well known in state and local affairs. In 1888 and again in 1901 he was nominated and elected to the office of secretary of state on the republican ticket. He inade a creditable record during his administration in both terms. This was the only elective office for which Mr. Higgins was ever a candi- date before the voters, In earlier years he had been honored by the Legislature and governors of Kansas. He was appointed to state positions, and since coming

to Oklahoma has served as clerk of United States Court at Bartlesville, and President Roosevelt appointed him postmaster of that city. The democratic governor of Oklahoma appointed him a member of the Gettysburg Commission as the representative of the Grand Army of the Republic. He has been elected department com- mander of the Grand Army of the Republic, Department of Oklahoma, and has been a member of that order for more than thirty-seven years.

The one organization to which Mr. Higgins has been chiefly devoted throughout his life has been the repub- lican party. He is an old fashioned conservative type of republican. He believes in high tariff, strong state and National Government, and has had little sympathy with many of the theoretical reforms which have held the stage of public attention during recent years, particularly those designed to control aud regulate business affairs. Mr. Higgins says that he became a member of the re- publican party organization and has kept his dues paid up ever since and before he cast his first vote for Mr. Lincoln in 1864 in November while with the army in Indian Territory.

As to churches he believes in the good of such organiza- tions, though he is not a regular attendant. He was reared a Catholic. He also believes in schools and all forces for education. He has tried to guide his life in accordance with the divine laws and in Oklahoma as elsewhere he has endeavored to support those laws made by men, but which he finds have not been enforced by public officials in compliance with the full meaning of the obligation of an oath of office.

On January 20, 1863, during the Civil war time, Mr. Higgins married Miss Julia A. Gallaway at Paola, Kansas. The two daughters of that marriage are still living. At Parsons, Kansas, on November 30, 1879, Mr. Higgins married Laura Virginia Knisley. To this union also were two children born, Helen W. and Theo C. The daughter Helen died four years ago, and the son is now living with his parents, unmarried. The daughters by the first wife were Cora Jane and Alice Agnes Higgins. Cora Jane married in 1884 Henry Mudd of Adrian, Missouri, a farmer, and they now live in California. Alice Agnes was married in 1887 to Lincoln Etyner, and they now live on a farm in Ogle County, Illinois. Helen W. Higgins, who died at Long Beach, California, in 1911, married Franklin T. Metzler, a wholesale mer- chant of Colorado Springs, Colorado.

JASON GILES MCCOMBS, prominent lawyer, ex-judge of the County Court of Sequoyah County, and a lead- ing and influential citizen of Sallisaw, is a native Mis- sissippian, born in Tate County, October 15, 1863, a son of William F. and Margaret Caroline (Jackson) Mc- Combs. the former a native of North Carolina and the latter of Alabama. The McCombs are of Scotch-Irish lineage and in America are descendants of three brothers who came from Scotland at an early date, one going to the North and the other two drifting to the South, where one of the latter located in North Carolina and the other in Texas. The father of Jason G. McCombs was reared in North Carolina and Mississippi and was living in the latter state at the time of his enlistment in the Con- federate army for service during the war between the states, in which he met a soldier's death on the battle- field of the second engagement at Corinth. Mrs. Mc- Combs later married Larkin W. Echols, who was a planter and resident of the vicinity of Huntsville, Alabama, in which city Judge MeCombs was reared in the home of Mr. Echols' mother.

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Author: Thoburn, Joseph B. (Joseph Bradfield), 1866-1941 Publication date: 1916 Publisher: Chicago, New York, The American Historical Society Number of Pages: 656

Author: Thoburn, Joseph B. (Joseph Bradfield), 1866-1941
Publication date: 1916
Publisher: Chicago, New York, The American Historical Society
Number of Pages: 656