Sail of Tears

(pg. 2) John and Harriet had three sons and one daughter. Different accounts variously name the sons Alex, Douglas, Alson Douglas, John and John Douglas. They named their daughter Iona, after the Ionian islands to where he had once sailed.

John Douglas, my great-great-grandfather, married Mary Alice Erikson, a Swede who reputedly had hair long enough to sit on. They had only one surviving child, a girl, and Mary Alice died shortly after her birth. She also had a daughter by a previous marriage; at that child's birth, it's been said that someone wrote on a gate post, "Mary Louisa Alice Jane, That is Alice's baby's name."

The daughter of John Douglas and Mary Alice was born in 1889 and named Ivy, and was my great-grandmother. Later her first name changed to Myrtle. Her middle name was Luella. Due to her father's tuberculosis, the authorities placed her in the foster home of Samantha Depew, whose husband was a sheriff of some sort. They didn't adopt her in order to preserve her Indian land rights.

But her father wanted her back, so he kidnapped her from a basket on the porch when she was tiny. The authorities, however, returned her to the Depeu's. Although as a child she did meet her aunt Iona, she was kept away from most Indian contact, and her father died of tuberculosis when she was eleven, in 1900. Myrtle was said to not like to talk about her Indian half. Curiously enough, my grandmother -- Myrtle's daughter -- once told my wife that Myrtle was sent to a foster home because Mary Alice had been "mean" to her.

Since Mary Alice died shortly after childbirth, perhaps the Depew family told the mixed-blood Myrtle a lie in order to alienate her from her Indian relatives. At the time immersion in white culture was viewed, even by many Indians, as being in the best interest of the red man. Finding devious ways to control Indian lands and allotments was also a pastime among many whites. At the same time, interracial friendships, cooperation, marriages and births between Indians, whites and blacks did occur on the frontier much more frequently than is commonly believed. As to the motives of the individual whites who raised and married Myrtle, we can only speculate.

Myrtle married a hired hand, George Washington Webb on June 5, 1902. Although only 13 she claimed to be 14, then the legal age for marriage. He was about ten years her senior. Granny Depew lived with them. At the birth of her firstborn the midwife checked the afterbirth and predicted eight more children. Eight more followed, and they had nine in all; Ethel, Etta, Birdie and Bessie (who both died in childhood), Georgia, Roger, Otis, John and Dorothy. George died in 1955 in Oklahoma, and Myrtle in 1942 in California.

The eldest, Ethel Samantha, my grandmother, was born in 1903 and included in the Dawes Indian Census. In 1905 Oklahoma struck oil, so the remote regions to which many tribes had been banished in the last century suddenly became a source of cash revenue for Indians -- one of those jokes of history that we still laugh about. In 1907 the federal government deeded 120 acres to her, shortly before her 4th birthday, when it privatized tribal lands. As a child she became so used to the sound of an oil derrick pumping in the backyard that when she moved away, it took her awhile to get used to the silence.

She and her closest sister Etta briefly attended a government boarding school, which they disliked so much that when they returned home to recover from an illness they never went back. The sisters treated their Native blood very differently, Etta disliking any mention of it and Ethel passing along the family stories.

At 17 Ethel married Leo Arthur Estel, whose family came from Indiana, then moved to California's Coachella Valley (also a center for later Web and Estel family migrations from Oklahoma.) They also lived in Hawaii and Ohio. Although he never finished the eighth grade, Leo eventually earned a doctorate and taught anthropology at Ohio State University. They had two sons, David and Leo, and one daughter, Barbara.

For awhile she and my grandfather ran a general store in the Coachella Valley. Then, like many wives, she had to manage alone while her husband and sons spent the Second World War overseas. If every person has one great passion, my grandmother's was raising her children and grandchildren, and to her I owe much of my Native spirit, my moral center, and my ability to love. In January 2000 she passed away at the age of 96.