My grandfather on my father’s side of the family was an Irish emigrant to this country in 1820 when he was only seventeen years of age and was living among the Cherokees in Tennessee where he was married to my grandmother, Eliza Heldebrand in 1829. To that union were born ten children, William, Nancy, Rachel, Marguret, Elias, John J. (my father), Washington, Polly, Lucy, and Mikel.

As grandmother was Cherokee, she and grandfather and the children that were born up to that time were driven out of that country with the removal of the Cherokees to this country in 1837 with the general exodus of the Indians over what has been referred to in history as the “trail of tears”, the darkest blot on American history. According to the stories told to me by my grandmother when I was a small girl it would be impossible for anyone to graphically portray the horrors and suffering endured by the Cherokees on that journey. The hardships were many all along the trail, rough country, bad roads and all kinds of weather. A seeming endless march of weary, struggling mass of humanity, driven from a country they knew and loved as their home, deprived of most of their individual possessions, to the wilderness of a new country. A procession miles in length of wagons, two-wheel carts, vehicles of every description drawn by horses, mules and ox teams, long troops of pedestrians of all ages and conditions, mothers walking and carrying their babes on their back. Many walking and driving their small herds of cattle and other stock. After a few days out on the trail you could see them scattered along the roadside falling out of line of march from exhaustion and illness, and so the long journey from east of the Mississippi to the Indian Territory was made after several months of hardships and sorrow and the cost of many lives of the Cherokees. I have read of the “Trail of Tears ” by different writers but none portray the horrors of it all in detail as grandmother related to us when we could persuade her to talk of it, as she would often tell us it was too horrible to talk about and it only brought back sad memories.

Soon after the arrival in the territory my grandfather taken up a claim in what was afterwards known as the Whiteoak Hills in the Illinois district of the Cherokee nation about seventeen miles east of where the town of Bragg now stands. He built a large two room log house with a railway between the rooms and a stone fireplace at each end of the house. At this place they reared their family of ten children and resided the remainder of their active lives. Their last few years were spent among the children who were all married and living at different places in the Territory. Grandfather died at the home of his son Washington Patrick near Braggs in 1887. Grandmother died at the home of another son at Vann, Oklahoma in 1903