The Floyds made a decision to leave Georgia early in 1911, about the time of Charley’s seventh birthday. It can be said that itchy feet got the best of them. They wanted a change of place, a chance to start over. The South had been rising again for over four decades, but the resurrection was much too slow for Walter. Half-century-old wounds from the war with the Yankees and others from Reconstruction remained raw. Sometimes it seemed to Walter as if the revival of the Southern economy was stuck in a hopeless bottleneck like a rebel yell caught in the throat of a dead soldier. Although northwest Georgia had been their family’s home for generations, Walter and Mamie concluded that there was more opportunity waiting for them and their children beyond the hill country they loved. They looked to the West.
Walter first thought about moving to Texas, where there was plenty of room for cattle and cotton, but, for whatever reason, that notion did not last. He talked to other farmers and got their opinions and he listened to old pals from his railroad days who had traveled around the country. Finally, he settled on Oklahoma, a relatively new state with an abundance of farm and ranch land and thousands of acres of cotton fields. Oklahoma had long attracted Georgians ever since the infamous Trail of Tears. Then, in 1889, tens of thousands of eager claim stakers, including many from Georgia, poured into land that had once been given to the Indians when the federal government opened the unassigned lands to white settlement. Following that great land rush, farmers continued to trickle out of the South and strike out for the land where their grandfathers had long before driven the Indians they displaced.
Despite the promise of fertile land, Walter chiefly picked Oklahoma because several Floyd family members and friends, including his folks, Charles and Mary Floyd and his younger brothers and sisters, had already made the move.
Mamie’s parents, Elmer and Emma Echols, had also moved to Oklahoma. They had left Bartow County back in 1904, the year Charley was born. They first settled at Hanson, a small railroad town near the Arkansas River in what was then known as Indian Territory. The Echols subsequently quit cotton farming and moved farther southwest to McCurtain, Oklahoma, where Elmer died and was buried in 1910, three years after Oklahoma gained statehood. His widow remained in McCurtain and her sons worked in the nearby coal mines. Even though Mamie’s daddy was gone and her people had moved to another county, Walter’s parents, as well as other fellow Georgians, lived at Hanson. There were enough close kin in the small communities scattered in the nearby Cookson Hills to make Walter Floyd and his family feel welcome.
Once they decided to leave, the Floyds sold off their home and livestock. The boys had a final romp in the dense Georgia woods filled with deer, turkey, and the ghosts of old soldiers. Mamie could not resist pulling up weeds sprouting around her beloved roses—roses the color of fire and lightning when they bloomed in the yard all summer and long into fall. She and her girls toured the stores of Adairsville one last time. At the old homestead, Walter took long pulls from a jug of seasoned mash before he ran his hounds down the dark trails and lanes until their thick tongues hung out as long as leather strops.
Then they packed up their things and said their goodbyes to neighbors. Walter, Mamie, and their three daughters and three sons dressed in their Sunday best. They took their few belongings and a basket of food, boarded a northbound train at the Adairsville station, and left Georgia behind in a cloud of vermilion dust. Charley and the other children were as excited as colts. All the way to Oklahoma, they dined on fried chicken and canned fruit. They pressed their faces against the cold windows to watch the passing landscape. They wondered about the new country that awaited them. It was difficult to sleep as the train bounced across the mid-South and the conductor stalked the aisle and sang out the destinations. The trip seemed especially long for Mamie, who was unable to get much rest because she was fearful of losing one of her children on the train. Her worries were for naught. Everyone arrived safely.
When they finally stepped from the train in Hanson, the Floyds were met at the railroad siding by family and friends, who put them up until Walter could find a house and some land to sharecrop. As soon as they pulled off their neckties and good britches and changed into bibbed overalls, the Floyd boys dashed off to see what kind of place they were now going to call home. Bradley and Charley, with little E.W. behind, ran as fast as they could up the dirt roads. They crossed the steel tracks, and raced up a mountain covered with timber and a strawberry patch. They could see for miles in any direction. They liked what they saw.
Situated in Sequoyah County in extreme mideastern Oklahoma not far from the Arkansas border, Hanson was flanked by two small mountains on the south and east. Between the mountains ran Wolf Creek, a tributary of Big Skin Bayou, and Little Sallisaw Creek, on the west side. Old-timers said the town of Hanson took its name from a railroad official and got its start back in 1888, when a store and post office had been opened on the Robert Sutton farm located about one mile to the east. Two years later, the store and post office were moved to be near the tracks of the Iron Mountain Railroad. A new town site was established and the village began to grow. Hanson served as the headquarters for railroad crews and many people came there to live and work. A large public well was dug for a fresh water supply. There was a depot, bunkhouse, section house, and a water tank for the steam engines. Across the track was a long loading platform to ship the bales of cotton to eastern markets, and there was a stockyard with pens and a loading chute for the cattle being sent north to Kansas City slaughterhouses.
By the 1890s, Hanson developed into an active trading center, an entrepôt, with several general merchandise and clothing stores, and drugstores, as well as a two-story hotel, several churches, a schoolhouse, blacksmith shops, a gristmill, and two cotton gins. During this period, Hanson surpassed Sallisaw, the nearby county seat, in population and importance. The town even managed to survive the depression of 1893, when the price of cotton plummeted from twelve to seven cents per pound and some of the stores had to close their doors. The economy gradually improved, however, and when cotton-picking season arrived each autumn, more people came to the area to work the fields. Hanson’s gins ran twenty-four hours a day. Trains loaded with bales of cotton departed every few days.
Besides cotton, the town also relied on the booming cattle industry. Ben Garvin, a prominent cattle rancher in Sequoyah County, sold beef to the railroad company so it could feed its crews. The son of a full-blooded Cherokee mother and a father who had been killed by bushwhackers, Garvin grazed a large herd of cattle, with his brand on their hips and jaws, from the Boston Mountains of Arkansas west to the Illinois River and all through the bottomlands of the broad Arkansas River. In some of the meadows, the bluestem grass reached the tops of the stirrups of the horsemen who rode out from the line shacks to guard the herds. Noted ranchers like Frank Faulkner and Jake Wright also ran substantial cattle operations in the area. These men and others held periodic roundups that became major events for the town.
Before the cattle were shipped off to the slaughterhouses of Missouri, the citizens of Hanson got little sleep. Long lines of cattle cars arrived in town around 3:00 A.M. Sunday in order to be ready for the train to make Kansas City in time for the Monday-morning market. The combination of cowboys’ curses, screeching train wheels, and the bellowing of stubborn steers could arouse the dead. So could the stench of manure. By dawn, almost every citizen in town as well as quite a few sharecroppers and farmers from out in the sticks turned up to watch them load. It was better than a hanging, a Fourth of July picnic, and a revival service rolled into one.
Disaster struck the town in 1899 when a fire swept through Hanson and destroyed all but one of the businesses. Some merchants rebuilt; others moved to Sallisaw, since the Kansas City Southern Railroad officials had selected the county seat over Hanson as the site of its rail junction with the Missouri Pacific Railroad. In 1910, just a year before the Floyds arrived, another fire roared through the business district and burned nearly all of the mended structures. This time, Hanson never really recovered.
Before he and the family left Georgia, relatives wrote Walter and told him about the fire that had left much of the town in ashes. Still, when he first arrived in Oklahoma and saw Hanson’s charred foundations and vacant buildings, he thought that just maybe he had made a mistake. He was not nearly as taken with the place as his curious sons. Looking for a fresh start, Walter had stumbled into a town that appeared as if it had just hosted Sherman and his Yankee raiders. Rather than panicking, Walter took stock of the prospects. In only a few days, he realized there was much more to Sequoyah County than the town of Hanson.
The history of the county was tied to early Indian cultures, and the name Sequoyah, which meant “shut in” or “shut away,” honored the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, who had settled in the area in the late 1820s. Throughout the county were communities and small towns, each with stores, churches, schools, and cotton gins to serve the farmers. The Floyd youngsters soon learned to recite a litany of new town and schoolhouse settlement names. There was Badger Lee, Bethel Chapel, Blunt, Box, Dwight Mission, Evening Shade, Gans, Gore, Maple, Marble City, Miller Ridge, Muldrow, Nicut, Paw Paw, Price’s Chapel, Roland, Shiloh, Short, Sloan’s Chapel, Vian, and many more. The county seat of Sallisaw, at one time a trading post and camping site was situated in a picturesque valley through which flowed a tributary of the Arkansas River—Sallisaw Creek, the stream that gave the town its name. The word Sallisaw came from early fur trappers, a corruption of the French word salaison, or “salt provisions.” To the south of Sallisaw lay Wild Horse Mountain, and to the north was Brushy Mountain and the Cherokee and Cookson Hills. The Cooksons, along with the Boston Mountains, formed the southern part of the Ozark Plateau, while to the south of the Cooksons, the San Bois and Ouachita mountains were formed by a series of curving ridges known as the Kiamichi and Winding Stair mountains. There was no shortage of wood or water, and the soil of the surrounding countryside appeared to be fertile enough for settlers to scratch out a living.
Once he was able to saddle a borrowed roan horse and ride out across the country, Walter quickly saw the promise the growing fields held. He scooped up a handful of the earth and smelled the future in the soil. Within a short time, Walter leased some acreage and went to work as a tenant farmer. He acquired horses, milk cows, and some poultry. The Floyds raised cotton, corn, hay, and sorghum grain. Mamie became a pillar of the Hanson Baptist Church. She canned vegetables and made jelly and jam from the wild fruit that grew along the fence lines. She and her girls kept the family’s frame house tidy. All the Floyd children also helped work the land just as they had learned to do back in Georgia.
In little time, the Floyds made many new friends. There were kinfolk galore in the area, as well as other northwest Georgia families. They had surnames such as Wofford, Amos, White, Gilbert, McEver, Randolph, Trotter, Dysart, Pannel, and Maulden. Some of them had known Walter and Mamie and their children back in Bartow County. A few were kissing cousins. There were also plenty of folks from Arkansas and Alabama and other places—the Lessleys, Watsons, Farmers, Hawkins, Matlocks, Fullbrights, Hensleys, Walkers, and Caseys. Like the Floyds, they had made the move by train, or else in wagons pulled by teams. Still more were old Indian families who had lived on their land allotments near town for a long time before the others even thought of coming. They included the Faulkners, Garvins, Lattimores, Fleetwoods, Millers, Riders, Choates, Twists, Seabolts, Baldridges, Ganns, Burrows, McQueens, and many more.
For several years before the new schoolhouse was built, the Indian settlers had sent their children to the Cherokee National School located near the railroad station. Some of the students rode in from surrounding farms on horses or jennies. Later the school was opened to white children, whose parents paid a subscription fee of five cents per day. The school ground was also used for picnics and as the site for Cherokee Green Corn Stomp Dances. Barbecued beef and freshly squeezed lemonade left no one hungry or thirsty on these occasions. Sometimes the feasts lasted three days, and at night, the Indians in their costumes—with bells on their ankles—would dance around the camp fires to the steady beat of drums. By the time the Floyds came to the county, most everyone attended classes in a two-room frame schoolhouse built at the foot of Hanson Mountain just after statehood in 1907. The older Floyd children, along with other youngsters, went to the new school and squirmed on the hard wooden seats. For holiday programs or special events, the folding partition that separated the two rooms was taken down so parents could sit like cigar store Indians and watch their nervous children sing or recite poetry and memory work.
The Floyd children instantly adjusted to their new surroundings. Oklahoma seemed to be an untamed country of cowboys and Indians. It was an exciting place for Charley, his brothers, and his sisters. They enjoyed the town band concerts, picnics on Sallisaw Creek, hayrides, and especially Saturday afternoons in the summer when they cheered themselves hoarse as Hanson’s baseball team was matched against one of the other communities. They played hide-and-seek amongst the old gravestones in the nearby Fleetwood Cemetery. And, just a year after they arrived in Oklahoma, the family welcomed yet a new member to the fold.
The children were happy to have someone else who could eventually help with the endless chores. Unlike the others, this Floyd came after four years, breaking the more frequent cycle that Walter and Mamie had maintained for years. The baby was born June 25, 1912, the same day the Democratic convention commenced in Baltimore. A week later, the convention delegates gave Woodrow Wilson, a son of the South, the nod to run for President. The Floyd baby was a girl, however, so Walter and Mamie could not name their child for their candidate. Instead, they named her Mary Delta. She was a true Oklahoma baby, and became in time the consummate little sister for Charley and the rest of the brood. With four girls and three boys in the Floyd household, Walter knew he would never be caught shorthanded when the cotton harvest came due.
That same year, in 1912, disaster struck the family when Mamie’s younger brother Forest was killed in a coal-mine explosion at McCurtain, along with seventy-seven other miners. He was only twenty-nine. After Forest was buried next to his father, Emma Echols, Mamie’s mother, moved back to Hanson to live with her daughter’s family. She stayed with the Walter Floyds until her death in 1916, when her body was taken back to McCurtain for burial alongside her husband and son.
During this busy summer of 1912, with the arrival of the baby girl and Mamie’s mother, Walter took the entire family by surprise. After a revival sponsored by the Hanson Baptist Church, Walter—not nearly as active a Christian as his devoted wife—was moved by the spirit. Following the services, Walter, and some others who had similarly been stirred, marched to the banks of the Big Skin Bayou Creek. He pulled off his shoes and stockings, and waded fully clothed into the creek until the coffee-colored water reached his knees. There in the sight of an old-time-religion God, with his family and friends watching, Walter allowed the preacher and some deacons to dip him backward under the murky water. He came up gasping for air, dripping, with his hair slicked back. Walter Floyd now was baptized. All around him, the others stood in the creek, with folded hands, waiting their turn to take the plunge and receive the Holy Ghost.
In the tall grass, Mamie, with tears in her eyes, held her new baby daughter and beamed like an angel. All up and down Big Skin Bayou Creek echoed shouts of hallelujah. Another soul had been saved. Charley observed the ritual and then went home with his family to eat dinner. As the Floyd wagon creaked down the dirt roads, the summer sun climbed into the afternoon sky. By the time the Floyds reached their house, Charley saw that his father’s wet clothes and hair had dried.