Mulit Use Graveyard
Sleeping in the Graveyard
Layout of House Johnny Bear Built
Is having graves in the yard the true meaning of a Graveyard. As I grew backwards in Okla I l literally went from Graveyard to Graveyard. Read on!
Resurrecting the memories of Indian graveyards and those who associated with them
About a mile and a half as the crow flies from where I would eventually grow Up is where my mom and dad lived when I was born! I fondly remembered calling the place the ‘Hill House’!
The first things visitor saw when they would drive in to visit us was the graveyards at the entrances.
Whats amazing to me is how many memories I have of what we called the Hill Top House since we moved from there when I was probably only two or three years old!
However for years afterwards as we would visit friends and family up and down that road we would stop, look around and talk about our first few years together… I was born when Mom and dad lived in the Hill Top House but my youngest sister Rhonda Cheryl ‘Sherri’) was born when we lived at what we called The Farmhouse. I don’t mention my little Sis much in the first few chapters of my life cause she did not become a big part of my life till SHE started grade school! From that day forward we were kinda glued at the hip together. Some of the more dangerous things i did I didn’t feel it would be safe for her to accompany me/us. One reason was that I felt responsible for her and so did mom and dad!
One similarity the hill house had to the farmhouse where I would eventually grow up is they both had Indian graves on the property!
The farmhouse where I grew up had a fairly large cemetery with at least a dozen Graves and no unmarked grave sites but the graveyard on the hill top home site, where I was born, only had one covered grave, two adult size and two child size unmarked grave sites! The inhabitants of which were named the bear family!
And what makes this even more odd is there was no other houses in the area around us that had Indian graves! How the only two that had Indian graves on them wound up in my dad‘s hands is a mystery to me and I’m sad to say I never ask him why! I can’t even speculate why other than maybe they trusted my dad to respectfully watch over them!
Every couple years or so a group of family & friends would show up to clean and trim up the farm house graveyard but I can’t ever remember the graves and the grave sites at the hill house looking as if maybe someone had given them any attention. Even for years after we moved and the house was no more the grave sites became less and less recognizable as gravesites.
The Indian people at that time liked to build a little 4 foot high or so covering over the grave with small name plates in each end. Ever now and then, for some mysterious reason, the end vents in the graves that were covered would become plugged with debris or mud or stuffed with gift items (like scarfs and headbands) and on hot humid days they would become like a pressure cooker (a hot box) and would explode and crack the cement tops. It was more than just a little eerie to hear such a loud crack sound come from an empty graveyard. It was plum scary.
Some of the graves were covered with a pitched roof made of wood and yes some were made of brick with a flat cement top. Some had more elaborate name plates than others but those with cement or mud like roofs almost always had the name of the deceased and the dates they lived scribbled on the top of the flat Roof! Some grave markings even had a stenciled tin like nameplate which I thought was really cool!
Most of the names on the graves was of the Johnny Bear, Paul Jones and Harley Roberts families. Three of the largest Indian families in that area!
From standing on the south end of the farmhouse porch or the top of one of the flat roofed graves you could see the Indian church a mile away!
Being as how I don’t have my mom to help with names I feel restricted in a lot of what I can relate! I wished I would’ve started writing these things down while she was still with us because I would so enjoy making the story complete with names and dates which mom had an uncanny ability of remembering about people, both family and friends of those she barely knew!
Within a few years of us moving from each location the graves were pillaged and eventually were no longer recognizable as Graves!
Another odd thing about the two graveyards and I don’t know why dad did this but maybe it was because he so respected the Graves and the family names engraved on them or maybe simply because the grave had a fence around it and kept the cows and horses from tromping through but in both cases our family truck gardens were always planted near the graves but not inside the fenced area!
However inside the fenced area dad stored the produce from the garden! Big gardens which dad would often call a truck garden meaning it produced truckloads of vegetable!
Inside the fenced area of the graves dad often stored onions, potatoes, carrots and corn until he could haul them into town to sell them!
When we would use my horse Rusty to plow the garden we would turn him loose inside the shaded fenced grave area to graze and rest!
Anyway we (mom & Dad & sometimes Alvin Casey a tall lanky nearby neighbor) would build wooden frame structures (about 4 foot tall and about as high as Graves were built) inside the The graveyard fence of the farmhouse graveyard. Then usually Mom and I would stretch A fine mesh screen over the topography the platform!
The platform was built at somewhat of an angle so you could easily see all the produce as if in a Grocery store type display! As a kid I remember it seem like the structures we’re always about to fall in just like some of the graves but they worked for the purpose they were built for just as and Graves did!
Dad would buy what he called starter onions or potatoes or other Perishable items to place on top of the screens without touching each other so that if one of them developed a rotten spot it wouldn’t contaminate the rest of other produce! Eventually those onions and/or potato’s would grow sprouts which we would dice and slice and plant in the nearby garden!
My City cousins love to come out and spend the night and they always wanted to sleep on top of the graves which we would occasionally do!
They would often asked me about who was in the grave and how they died and I always had a good story to tell, some of which I embellished and some of which I just simply made up! But most of which I got from my mom and dad as we would sit on the porch of the farmhouse and talk about dead Indians and their survivors!
My Childhood friends, most of who at the time were Creek, were very quiet and seldom talk about themselves or their families but as time went and I cared enough to ask they would speak in an economy of words about those in the graves and those who survived them! That was enough for me!
My mom would talk and speak of them as if she knew each one of them intimately! She didn’t but she kept their memories alive! Which when you think about it was quite a feat in itself being as how she didn’t have a phone to keep up with all the drama and family gossip of our neighbors dead or alive.
Most likely most of what she heard was secondhand information so she could take liberties with their life and the drama she recalled.
One really funny yet scary incident involving the grave yard happened when I had just become a teenager!
A City Cousins of mine, Harold Jones (idolized Elvis Presley and could copy him to a T even combed his hair like him and talk like he and weirdly enough even look like him), Jasper & Mitchel Roberts (my Indian brothers), a local neighbor Phillip Casey and myself were spending the night in the back of a 1955 Chevy wagon
That particular night a storm was a brewing and we couldn’t sleep openly on top of the Graves so Dad parked the back of the 55 Chevy station wagon up against the graveyard gate! Dad was often our partner in crime.
Well it started raining and I mean raining hard with lots of thunder and lightning! Exciting and scary for sure! As we were laying on our pallet and I was telling a scary story all of a sudden our old pet milk cow decided to lick up and drink rain water running down the side glass of the back of the station wagon!
We all saw it at the same time – this big ugly looking cracked tongue monster of a thing with teeth and double barrel nostrils – completely captured our attention and scared the crap out of us! OK maybe not the crap but it took us by surprise and scared us so much that we all almost Peed all over ourselves!
We all tried to crawl under the other one for protection thinking the one on top would be the most vulnerable and would surely be eaten first by this unknown creature lurking in the rain. Harold’s hair didn’t look so Elvis like after him trying to plunge himself to the bottom of the pile so often.
For the rest of the night we laughed until our stomachs ached but none of us would dare go to sleep for fear of what actually might be diabolically waiting in the dark until we nodded off.
We had figured out most likely what it was that scared us so bad but we weren’t sure until the sun come up and we saw our old milk cow grazing around the station wagon! And even then we was convinced that we have not confronted a horrible horrible demon from inside the graveyard! Probably my first conspiracy theory! How could a harmless old cow be so menacing!
When we first took up residence in the farmhouse, rumor had it Johnny Bear had 2 wives that he had built two log cabins for near the main house. Then he got a third wife and he gave his favorite wife his room, move his two other wives into the main house and he moved into the big south room across from the main house. His room was accessible by a breezeway. I guess Johnny (now with 3 wives ALL living in the main house) needed his own room to live, work, play and rest!!
In Chapter 2 we will move from graveyards to farmhouses! From a small four room house with a small one hole outdoor toilet, a hand dug we’ll, and a falling in old barn – to – a huge five (5) room house with two water wells, two outdoor two hole toilets, two big barns, a one car garage and two storm callers 1) a cement cellar with a loft & storage shed built on top of the cellar 2) a dirt cellar we would build because we was never able to keep the cement seller dry! It was always full of water!!!
Just to wet the appetite every room in our new home (the farmhouse) except one room had four doors and two windows! One big room (The patriarchs room) had a porch wrapped around it and that room had two doors and four windows! The house had five porches and two fireplaces!
There was no house like it anywhere that we knew of! Mom and Dad loved and cherished that house until I left home for the Air Force and they decided to move into Okemah! A thriving metropolis of 600 people!
No Ordinary Farmhouse or Ordinary Life!
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