James R. Carselowey interviewed Bettie Perdue Woodall in Welch, Oklahoma, on September 20, 1937. She talked about the “old Indian days” and the Trail of Tears.

My name is Elizabeth Perdue Woodall, but I have always been called “Bettie.” I was born near Westville, Indian Territory, December 6, 1851. My father’s name was James Perdue, a half-breed Cherokee Indian. My mother, Dollie Thornton Perdue, was a white woman. Both were born in Georgia. They were married in 1838, and came immediately with the eastern emigrants over the Trail of Tears to their new home west of the Mississippi, settling in Going-snake District, in the new Cherokee Nation….

Some histories say that on the Trail of Tears all the women and children were allowed to ride; but my mother told me that not a single woman rode unless she was sick and not able to walk. My mother walked every step of the way over here.

The government furnished green coffee in the grain for the Indians along the route. Many of them had never seen coffee and did not know how to make it. Some of them put the coffee in a pot with meat and were trying to cook it like beans when my mother came along and some Indian woman said, “Ask her, She white woman.” My mother said she just had to laugh the way they were trying to cook that coffee. She took some of the green coffee, roasted it in a pan over their fire, put the parched grains in a cloth and pounded it up, and made them a pot of coffee. They all liked it and said she was a smart white woman.

She also showed them how to cook their rice. It seems they all thought everything had to be cooked with meat, but in this way the young white woman became very popular and much loved by her newly made friends.

My mother told me about many of the hardships and privations she and the rest of the women suffered while on their way from Georgia. Some of them were almost unbelievable, yet I know they are true, for my mother would have had no motive in telling it if it had not been so.

On one occasion she told of an officer in charge of one of the wagons who killed a little baby because it cried all the time. It was only four days old and the mother was forced to walk and carry it, and because it cried all of the time and the young mother could not quiet it, the officer took it away from her and dashed its little head against a tree and killed it.

After my mother’s quarrel with the officer in charge of our wagon, my father made arrangements with some of the other officers in front to move to another wagon. He was afraid the officer might kill her to keep her from telling on him.

My parents settled near the present site of Westville and my father taught school and farmed. They were married quite a while before I was born and I was their only child. There was a peculiarity about my father and mother. He was an Indian, but was blue eyed and had brown hair; while my mother, who was white, had piercing black eyes and black hair.¹

ENDNOTES

¹ Bettie Perdue Woodall, Interview 7551, vol. 100, Welch, Okla., Sept. 20, 1937, 66–68, Indian Pioneer Papers, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Okla.