Mrs. Ella Coody (or Coodey) Robinson was interviewed by Ella Robinson (likely her daughter) in Muskogee, Oklahoma, on May 6, 1938. She talked extensively about the Civil War and her life as a Cherokee woman during Reconstruction and beyond.

I was born April 28, 1847, at the home of my parents, “Frozen Rock,” four miles east of the present site of Muskogee, on the Arkansas River. My father was William Shorey Coody, and my mother was Elizabeth Fields Coody, both Cherokees. Her father was Richard Fields, a prominent man in the Cherokee Nation. My father was a native of Tennessee, born across the line between Alabama and Tennessee. Mother was born near Gunter’s Landing in Alabama.

Such were the prosperous, peaceful conditions of the Cherokees when the war clouds began to gather in 1860 and broke with all their fury in 1861. The Cherokees, with the other tribes attempted to remain neutral and not take any part in the conflict, as they had no part in the trouble in Congress. A convention was called and the Five Tribes decided to keep out of the conflict and abide the result of the war whichever side was victorious. But when the Southern states began to secede, things began to take on a war-like aspect in the Territory and confusion began. Pressure was brought to bear from Texas and Arkansas, asking that they join forces with them. Raiding parties from Kansas preceded the regular army, driving off stock and pilfering. Those were known as “Kansas Jay Hawkers.” For self protection alone, the Indians had to take steps to defend themselves. When it became apparent that the Cherokees had to take action, a regiment was recruited under General Stand Watie. My stepfather (Mr. Vann) was made captain. My brother, Will, seventeen years old, enlisted. Real fighting began in 1862. Our men went to the army and we children were left at home with mother.

Some years prior to that Mr. Vann had gotten a man from Kentucky to come out and he had been Mr. Vann’s overseer and cared for the race horses. He was not drafted into the army, so Mr. Allen stayed with us.

The Northern Army set up headquarters in the little village of Webbers Falls [in what is now Oklahoma], and things were at high tension. Mr. John Drew raised a company of full-bloods and was appointed their captain. General Watie’s troops were sent to the aid of Missouri troops and were in the disastrous battle of Pea Ridge [in northwestern Arkansas]. When things began to be so uncertain and dangerous my parents wanted to place me in the Catholic Convent at Fort Smith [Arkansas] for safety they thought, as well as school advantages, as the Cherokee schools had been forced to close. Two cousins, Emma Vore, Emma Drew and myself all were taken to Ft. Smith, but owing to over-crowded conditions, only one girl was taken—Emma Drew, daughter of John Drew. Afterward I went to Van Buren [Arkansas] and attended school at the academy. I saw the Confederate troops march through the town on their way to the northern part of the country; they went through in perfect order and looked fine. It took four hours for them to pass through. They participated in the battle of Pea Ridge and came back a terrible looking crowd, bringing their wounded with them. Schools were dismissed and every church, school and store was thrown open to care for the wounded and dying. I went once to see the wounded but didn’t go again as I felt sure they took a man out to bury him that wasn’t quite dead.

I stayed one year in Van Buren when that school, too, was forced to close. I came home and found things in terrible confusion. The battle of Honey Springs was the biggest battle fought near us. Just at dawn the cannons began to roar and kept up until dark. We could hear them, and each one struck terror to our hearts, for our men folks were in the midst of it. I remember how frightened Mrs. Perry Brewer was when she came to our house after nothing had been heard from the men. She was Mr. Vann’s sister, and when she became panic stricken, she always came to my mother, who at all times tried to keep her balance. On that particular morning she had ridden from her home some ten miles up the river to our house, and wanted mother to go with her to try to hear from the men. Mother put her off by saying, “If we don’t hear today, we’ll go tomorrow,” when Aunt Dee said, “Lizzie, the buzzards will have them eaten up by that time.”

Mother’s father, Mr. Richard Fields, was taken prisoner at Prairie Grove, Arkansas, with another Cherokee named Reece. They were taken to Union prison in Illinois, where they were held for some months, with no prospects of being exchanged for Northern soldiers held in the South. Grandfather was sick and one day when the commanding officer came through the prison, grandfather said, “Do you know General Sacket [Union general Delos B. Sackett]?” The officer said, “What do you want to know that for?” Grandfather replied, “Nothing, only he is my son-in-law and I wondered where he was now.” In a day or so both he and Reese were discharged. They made their way through the line and got into the Southern Army where they rested and were given assistance in getting home. When they walked up to the house barefooted and in rags, no one knew them.

Another source of annoyance with which we had to contend was the “Pin Indians,” a band of full-bloods who were not slave owners, nor did they belong to either army, although they were Union sympathizers. Their main object was stealing—taking milk cows and pilfering homes. A band of women also would go to a house in day time, go through the house and take what they wanted. One day a group of them came to our home. Mother talked to the one who seemed to be the leader and told her that she was Richard Fields’ daughter and he had been such a good friend to the full-bloods. They went away but one little woman took the new water bucket from the back porch as she went. White men came down from the North ostensibly to preach to the Negroes, but instead of preaching, they were inciting them to all kinds of meanness and deviltry. The Negroes tried to be faithful to their owners and at the same time were bewildered by what was being told them by these men. The women stayed at home and tried to keep things together and care for their families but it was a terrible ordeal for they never knew what a day would bring forth…. Everything was being done by the agitators from the Northern army to get the Negroes to desert their owners and take refuge in the Union headquarters in the village; many did but most of ours stayed on. One white man in particular sneaked about among the Negroes, telling them they would be taken care of at the Union headquarters. He had been warned to leave the neighborhood but stayed on. One morning he was found dead on Mr. I. G. Vore’s place. Mr. Vore had been away since the beginning of the war. He was stationed at Fort Washita in charge of the Creek Commissary, so they couldn’t accuse him of having done it. They laid it on Mr. Vann and his brother, David, who were many miles away. They used that as an excuse and proceeded to burn our house. In April of 1863, Kansas troops commanded by Colonel [William A.] Phillips had moved into the Territory and burned and robbed as they went. A report came that morning that my brother, Will, had been taken prisoner and was being held at Union headquarters. Mother had gone down there that morning to see about it and I was left alone with the little children, when a detachment of Negro soldiers from Colonel Phillips’ division swooped down and took possession of the house. The big insolent negro men went through the house, taking everything they wanted and destroying the things they couldn’t take; they ripped open the feather beds and let the feathers blow away. The men would try to put on my mother’s dresses and would tear them to pieces; they took all the groceries and food in the house and left us nothing. The little children were so frightened that they clung to me in terror but didn’t say a word. I was no less frightened myself. Our overseer, Mr. Allen, was away too, that morning having gone to see if he could get some news of the men in the army. When mother returned she was panic-stricken but there was no place to go or anything to do. Late that same evening another detachment of Union soldiers came with Colonel Phillips himself in charge and set fire to the house and burned it to the ground. They went through and kindled a fire in every room. Mother pleaded with him to allow her to remove a few prized pieces of furniture, (her bed was one.) He refused and said, “Madam, it’s entirely too fine.” Mother replied, “Well, it’s mine and paid for.” They went through the house with an axe and broke every mirror and marble slab on the furniture. Mr. Allen was there and in the confusion managed to get two or three mattresses, a few quilts and one or two pieces of furniture out. One was a little table of my mother’s which I still have. The negroes had gone crazy and were no help. There happened to be one or two vacant negro cabins on the place and the bedding was taken to them and that is where we slept, or rather stayed, for no one slept except the babies. That night all the negroes ran away, taking all the best horses, including Mr. Vann’s race horses.

The Negro men who took the horses made their way to Kansas, and the women went to Union headquarters at Webber’s Falls. The next morning Mr. Allen went out to Colonel Brewer’s headquarters and reported the trouble and secured some food. Late that evening he came back and mother prepared supper, the first meal we had had since breakfast the day before. Mr. Vann got word about what had happened and came home. There was a vacant house of two or three rooms on the Vore place and we moved up there. Some of our neighbors who had not been burned out gave us a few things but in a few days Union troops set fire to the little village, and burned the whole place out. During the thirty-six hours we were without food the little children who were accustomed to three good meals a day did not ask once for anything to eat. We stayed there until August when everyone left and made their way across the line into Texas. We did not have very much to move after having been robbed and burned out. All the best horses had been stolen by the Negroes and Kansas Jay Hawkers so we had only light teams left. Rumors were everywhere that young girls were in danger and one day an authentic report came that some had been insulted by the Union soldiers. My mother and the mothers of several girls became alarmed and at midnight got us out of bed and started us with some companions to Colonel Perry Brewer’s headquarters, eight miles out on Dirdy Creek. I had only thin shoes and when I got there about daylight the soles were worn through. Mr. Brewer (Uncle Perry as we called him) took us in and gave us protection for several days. He then sent us with a guard down on Canadian River where his wife (Aunt Dee) and children were. We stayed there until my family started South. Mother came by and took me on with her and I never went back to Webber’s Falls.

We traveled slowly as it was hot and Mother was not well. There had been no fighting in the lower part of the Territory, but almost all of the Choctaws and Chickasaws had already left their homes and gone to Texas. We could find vacant cabins to camp in and would stop to rest and cook. We found plenty of late vegetables, turnips, pumpkins, sweet potatoes and late corn in the gardens. What we missed so much was sugar, coffee, white flour, milk and butter. I learned to drink coffee from a tin cup without sugar or cream. I could take a quilt and lie down by a tree and sleep all night. Occasionally the boys found somebody’s hog and killed it and divided it among the families traveling together.

There was no regular company traveling together. Some would stop to rest and some would hurry on, but we were never alone. I had a pony that I rode almost all the way, preferring that to riding in the wagons. We finally reached San Bois Creek in the Choctaw Nation where we stopped because my little half brother, Charles, was taken sick with fever. He died after ten days illness and we buried him there. My brother, Will, had been killed by Union soldiers before we left home, and this was a double grief to our family. Mr. Vann had gotten leave from the army to take his family south, and after the death of his little son couldn’t bear the thought of leaving us to go on alone. We stayed at San Bois some six weeks to give mother a chance to recover from her grief and loss. The weather had begun to turn cold and Mr. Vann wanted to go on and find a place to spend the winter. While we were on the way and food was such a problem, the Confederate troops captured a wagon train of supplies from the Union Army. I think it was somewhere near Honey Springs that they did that. Our faithful friend, Mr. Allen, was still looking out for us and managed to get a good supply of groceries, including sugar, coffee, rice and flour and tea; also some dry goods of which we were badly in need. I remember I got a pair of shoes which were the same kind but one was a size larger than the other. However, I wore them and was glad to get them.

When the Southern states seceded and a confederacy of states was formed, they issued their own currency and that was put in general use. It ran from ten cent pieces called “shin plasters” to one hundred dollar bills. It was all paper money. After the defeat of the Southern Army the currency depreciated until it was worth only a few cents on the dollar. I remember paying $120.00 for goods to make one dress; finally it was worth nothing at all.

Mr. Vann applied to his brother-in-law, Major I. G. Vore, for a conveyance to take us on, and he sent an ambulance from his headquarters and a driver.

The first night we stayed at Carriage Point, where the town of Durant [Oklahoma] now is. A public home there was run by the Rider family. The next day we traveled on and went to where Major Vore’s family was living, he having sent them with the Negro slaves down there in the spring. We stayed there several days while Mr. Vann looked for a home. He found a two-room cabin some four miles from Bloomfield Academy and rented it, and we stayed there a year and in November after we got there in October, my youngest brother was born; they named him Charles for the little boy who had so recently died. A number of our neighbors from Webbers Falls, who had gone on ahead of us, were living in that vicinity….

Good crops had been raised in that section of the country and we had plenty to eat in the way of vegetables. We were able to get sugar and flour but no tea or coffee, only a little occasionally from the Army. People tried every substitute for coffee, even roasted sweet potato peelings and parched wheat. As all commerce was disrupted, it was hard to get things at the stores. Freight was being captured all the time and it was impossible for those in business to secure goods. There was plenty of wheat raised in Texas and we soon learned to make our hats of wheat straw and they were both comfortable and pretty. We made shoes, something like tennis shoes now worn, of pieces of canvas and leather from the men’s boot tops, using the leather for the soles. They were all right for summer wear. Those who had saved their household goods by going south at the beginning of the war had their looms and wove cloth for themselves and others. We had indigo and copperas and plenty of alum for setting the colors. We boiled oak bark for different shades of brown and made a pretty purple dye of sumac.

Even the dark tragedies of war didn’t quite kill the spirit of the young folks. There were parties, dinners and balls. I remember riding horseback to go to a dance twenty miles distant, fording a river, dancing all night and riding home the next morning. Getting party dresses was the problem. One girl took her mother’s lace curtains, dyed them and made a beautiful party dress that was the envy of all of us. A friend of Mother’s gave me a very full skirt of some soft white material. I took a width out of the skirt and made a waist and wore that one season. The women had gatherings they called “hankings” where everyone would take some wool and go to the home of a friend who had a loom and spin the wool on the spinning wheel. Then the hostess would weave the goods and the cloth was divided among the guests. A fine dinner was served in the middle of the day. The young girls who were not there came early in the afternoon and made preparations for a dance at night. There were several good violinists among the Indians and the music was good. We danced the polka, schottische, waltz and Virginia reel. An old white man of the name McCanaless, who had taught violin at Webber’s Falls, went south with the Cherokees and was there at all the parties.

We stayed in the same locality for more than a year, then moved across Red River to a little village called Preston. There I met Lieutenant Joe Robinson and we were married in the spring of 1866. We went to live at the Chickasaw Academy where my father-in-law had had charge of the school since 1850. The school was closed at the beginning of the war and was not in operation while we lived there. The Reverend J. C. Robinson (Joe’s father) and his wife were left in charge of the school during the time it was closed. We occupied three large rooms on the ground floor that were a part of the original building erected [in] 1848. A large three-story brick building was attached. My father-in-law had been there for so long and had become such a good friend to the Indians on the western reservations that they regarded him as their best friend and advisor. They would come there in companies, riding their little spotted ponies and carrying their little tepees. They always camped down on the creek, and the first they wanted of Mr. Robinson was a beef to kill. He always had one to give them. Then the men in the party, including one or two chiefs, would come up to the house for a conference. These were Comanche and Kiowa Indians. Before Mr. Robinson was sent to the school, these same tribes had been in the habit of making raids into the Chickasaw Nation and driving off cattle and horses. With the help of the United States Agent he had been able to stop that.

My mother and her family moved from Preston, Texas, where we had been living, to the Academy the first year I lived there…. While I lived at the Chickasaw Academy, my oldest child, Cornelia Ann, was born. When she was two years old Joe and I came back to the Cherokee Nation. I boarded that winter with my aunt, Mrs. Louisa Kerr, in Fort Gibson [in what is now Oklahoma] and my second child was born, a son.

My husband had left college in Virginia (Emory and Henry) to enlist in the Army and had no training for any work or profession. He rented a farm about six or eight miles from Fort Gibson on the west side of Grand River and farmed that year. We had a double log house to live in and I cooked on the fireplace in the kitchen. It had only a dirt floor and often when the hired boy went in to make the fire in the morning a big black snake would be curled up in the corner. The farm lay between the mountains on the west and the river on the east. It was a very rich, productive strip of land and we raised fine crops, but snakes were our greatest menace. One warm morning I put my baby outside on a blanket near the kitchen door to play around a large box while I prepared breakfast. I heard him laughing and the dog that always stayed near him growling. I went to the door and within a few feet of the baby was a rattlesnake ready to strike. I grabbed the baby and screamed for the men at the barn. The snake measured 6½ feet with 27 rattles, which indicated that it was 27 years old.

The old settlers told marvelous tales about snakes in the mountain caves. One was that one had lived there as long as they had and no one had been able to kill it. One day as the men were going from the field at noon they saw a huge thing across the road that they took to be a dead log. The horses became alarmed and stopped. When the thing began to crawl[,] all the weapon they had was an ax and one man stuck it into the back of the snake’s head, and the men all declared it traveled some distance with the ax in its head. When they finally succeeded in killing it, they told that it was twelve feet long and as large as a twelve-inch tree.

I was glad to leave that place; an Indian boy, Bill Mott, stayed with us and looked after the baby and me when my husband was away. We moved into Fort Gibson from there and Mr. Robinson operated a string of freight wagons from Fort Gibson to Saint Jo, Missouri, the nearest railroad point. His father had retired from active work in the Methodist Church and was living at Paris, Texas. We made numerous trips overland to visit him. We traveled in a carriage with two horses; it was rather slow traveling with two babies, my oldest little girl had died, and we had our third child, a little girl born at Fort Gibson. We would start at noon and drive to Honey Springs (near the town of Checotah) and stay all night at a public house kept by Mrs. Hagerty, a sister of Colonel McIntosh. About the third day we would get to Boggy Depot and spend the night with Mrs. G. B. Hester, the Hesters being long time friends of ours. Every trip we made my father-in-law would urge us to come down there to live. Joe wanted to move to be near his father as he was getting old. I was reluctant to go as I felt that I belonged in the Cherokee Nation and I wanted to stay near my mother. Business opportunities were good in Texas at that time so I finally gave my consent to move.

We lived in the house with Mr. Robinson for a time and my husband was engaged in the lumber business. He bought the lumber standing, had the trees felled and taken to the mills. That section of Texas was malarial and I had such poor health that my husband was forced to let me come back to the Cherokee Nation to my mother’s. She and Mr. Vann had moved to “Spring Place,” his mother’s old home, ten miles east of the present site of Muskogee. In the settlement of the Vann Estate he had gotten the home. The same trees I had played under and the same fruit trees from which I had gathered fruit as a little child were still there for my own children to enjoy. I never returned to Texas, as my husband died. With the exception of the four years I spent in Texas, I have spent the entire 91 years of my life in the Cherokee Nation.¹

ENDNOTES

¹ Ella Coody Robinson, Interview 13833, vol. 77, Muskogee, Okla., May 6, 1938, 94–127, Indian Pioneer Papers, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Okla.