Oklahoma Pioneer! is a biographical narrative about Horace Greeley Teeman Hall (1877-1965) and Mallie Rue Karr (1882-1971), whose families migrated from Georgia to Arkansas following the Civil War. In 1900, when Mallie was eighteen (and therefore capable of making her own decisions) and Greeley was twenty-three, these two eloped on horseback to the Indian Territory and were married near Welling on Barren Fork Creek. In 1907, a few months before Oklahoma became the forty-seventh state in the Union, they loaded all of their belongings into a covered wagon, including three tiny children, and moved to the new state.

Horace Greeley Teeman Hall was the third son of William Newton Hall, a tobacco planter in Bulloch County, Georgia, who rose to the rank of captain in the Georgia Cavalry during the Civil War. Completely wiped out by the war, especially Sherman's March, the family moved by covered wagon to the Drake's Creek area of Madison County, Arkansas, nextdoor to the Twin Territories, as the Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory were called in those days.

There Greeley met Mallie Rue, a very pretty redhead (and a town girl), in nearby Wesley, while selling wicker furniture from the bed of a farm wagon. After their wild elopement, they returned to Madison County and began sharecropping for Greeley's father. In the spring of 1907, just months before that vast area between Texas and Kansas became the 47th state of the Union, they migrated by mule-drawn covered wagon to the Welling and Tahlequah area of the Cherokee Nation, and began sharecropping.

This is the story of a young white couple struggling to carve a living (and raise a family) out of a raw, new land previously occupied by buffalo, wild Indians, and renegade whites. It was a country so new to farming that most of the land was still virgin forest or prairie land fit only for buffalo, sidewinders, and antelope.

Beginning in Cherokee land, even before Oklahoma was a state, Greel moved his growing family down across the state to Kiowa County, spending one or two growing seasons at each farm that would take them on. By 1915, when the Great War was raging in Europe, this family, now eight strong, was in Seminole County, where, in 1917, they found and purchased a 165-acre farm. It was located in a wild and woolly place called the River Bend, a small community almost completely surrounded by the south branch of the Canadian River, along which 'Whiskey Towns' had sprung up a short time before statehood.

The farm, mostly woods, thickets, and briar patches, was located in the center of the River Bend, about four miles from where the three 'nations' had come together (Seminole, Choctaw, and Oklahoma). On this spot the Corners Saloon(s) (a Whiskey Town) had flourished from 1890 until 1907. This was the hangout of Hookey Miller, an infamous 'one-arm' bandit who tended bar and hired out as a killer. From 1917 until the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Greeley and his sons farmed this unlikely place.

Oklahoma Pioneers! details the trials and errors that this very talented hardshell Baptist/moonshiner/sorghum molasses maker/fiddler and occasional farmer made during that period. For one thing, Greeley swapped the farm for one in Texas in 1926 (with the agreement that, after one year, he could change his mind). In small print that he did not see, another agreement was that if the deal fell through, he would lose a five-acre strip of mineral rights. He did change his mind, took the farm back, and, in doing so, gave up over a million dollars in oil revenues a short time later!

Published in January, 2004, by The Writer's Club (iUniverse), this very realistic (and occasionally hilarious) story is for sale in paperback at Barnes and Noble and all chain bookstores. 176-pages, $15.95, ISBN: 0-595-30828-7. Since it is a POD book, you will need to call and order a copy which, in most cases is only a two-day delay.