Throughout this book are documents from the Indian Pioneer Papers. This project, sponsored by the federal government in the 1930s, recorded the oral histories of hundreds of elderly Indians in many tribes in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Historical Society and the Department of History at the University of Oklahoma secured a WPA Writers’ Project grant for the interview program. Over one hundred writers conducted over eleven thousand interviews of early settlers, many of them Indians. When compiled, the Indian Pioneer Papers consisted of 112 volumes. Like the WPA slave narratives, this archive on Indians is an invaluable source for hearing the voices of ordinary people long silent in the historical record.

Rebecca Neugin recorded her personal recollections of the Trail of Tears in an interview with Grant Foreman in 1932. Almost a hundred years old at the time, she had been only three or four on the journey. She died near Hulbert, Oklahoma, during the same year she was interviewed. One of the vivid incidents she recalled was of her pet duck she would not leave behind. She held it so hard that she squeezed the life out of it. For ninety years afterward, she grieved its death. The Cherokees had to leave it on the roadside.

Neugin was born Wa-ki. She had nine siblings. Her first husband was John Smith, a full-blooded Cherokee, with whom she had two children. Her second husband was Bark (or Bock) Neugin. She had several children by him.

When the soldiers came to our house my father wanted to fight, but my mother told him that the soldiers would kill him if he did and we surrendered without a fight. They drove us out of our house to join other prisoners in a stockade. After they took us away my mother begged them to let her go back and get some bedding. So they let her go back and she brought what bedding and a few cooking utensils she could carry and had to leave behind all of our other household possessions. My father had a wagon pulled by two spans of oxen to haul us in. Eight of my brothers and sisters and two or three widow women and children rode with us. My brother Dick, who was a good deal older than I was, walked along with a long whip which he popped over the backs of the oxen and drove them all the way. My father and mother walked all the way also. The people got so tired of eating salt pork on the journey that my father would walk through the woods as we traveled, hunting for turkeys and deer which he brought into camp to feed us. Camp was usually made at some place where water was to be had and when we stopped and prepared to cook our food other emigrants who had been driven from their homes without opportunity to secure cooking utensils came to our camp to use our pots and kettles. There was much sickness among the emigrants and a great many little children died of whooping cough.¹

ENDNOTES

¹ Rebecca Neugin, Interview, 1932, Indian Pioneer Papers, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Okla. See references to Neugin in Grant Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), 242, 302 n. 18.