Old Katy Pond

Building the Katy Pond was Muskogee's first civic project. The near light pole marks the deep end of the old lake.

Maj. John A. Foreman called a meeting of area residents to consider building the pond. A. J. Coleman tells about the effort of Maj. Foreman in a 1923 Oklahoma City interview. Coleman said construction of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad tracks south from Kansas had not yet reached present-day Muskogee. There was some discussion of locating the town east of its current location. This discussion of where to lay tracks was going on despite the railroad survey crew having already marked the way.

Maj. Foreman wanted the tracks to follow the earlier right-of-way and not change to another location. To promote the new station's location, he supported building the pond as an inducement. Coleman suggests that the iterant residents were largely uninterested in helping dig the pond and build a dam. Unfortunately, Coleman does not say how the pond was built. However, its construction ensured that railroad engines could obtain water in the location soon called Muskogee.

Foreman selected a low area for the construction of the pond. The pond backed up roughly from North Fourth Street to east of North Main Street. At an early date, Main Street ended at the south side of the pond because the pond extended almost to the railroad tracks. This put the pond's eastern end just behind the MKT railroad roundhouse.

On the western end of the pond, F. B. Severs built his cotton gin. A one-inch water line stretched from the gin down to the pond. It fed Severs' steam engine used both to remove the seeds and to compress the cotton into bales.

Commercial Street served as the southern boundary of the pond. This street used to run east and west just north of the Arrowhead Mall building.

According to a 1904 map, the pond stretched north to Lake Street. The dam forming the pond ran under Lake Street. It ran parallel to Fondulac Street one block south. The parking lot "road" on the northeast side of the mall partially follows the old Lake Street path.

Fondulac Street also received its name from the Katy Pond. "Lac" is the French word for "lake." Today the street is known as Martin Luther King Street.

Walter P. Johnson came to Muskogee in 1882 as an employee of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad. He recalled that the pond already existed by that date. Actually, it was already nearly a decade old. By February of 1884, fencing along Main Street reached all the way to the Katy Pond's edge. In the next decade, buildings began to crowd the pond.

After 1900 Jim Swift and Beverly Berry, a Kansan and an Englishman respectively, built a small wooden boat. It had a small steam engine for power. A boy could take a date for a ride around the pond for twenty-five cents. This enterprise set the stage for the later construction of another pond for public amusement on the west side of town.

Fishing was a pleasant pastime on the Katy Pond. One African American sold a pole, hook and line to an out-of-towner. The town visitor stayed longer in town than he planned in order to spend the afternoon fishing. Anglers caught perch and catfish when they were lucky.

The Katy Pond was a natural swimming hole. Youngsters regularly swam there in the summer. The shallowness of the pond also meant it was convenient for ice-skating. Accounts of ice-skating during the hard winter of 1884 surely refer to skating on the Katy Pond.

By 1907, the pond is gone. The Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad built the new Katy freight house at the eastern end of the pond. Nearby, the Nichols Wire Company built their wholesale house. A dozen railroad tracks chris-cross the pond's area within a half decade.

The construction of Arrowhead Mall obliterated Commercial and Lake Streets. The south edge of the Office Depot parking lot is where Lake Street ran. The land contouring covered the last vestige of the dam. However, if you stand near the east end of Sears looking slightly east of north to the intersection of Martin Luther King and Main, you can imagine the light shimmering off the surface of the Katy Pond.

Carrie Starr, Heroine

Maybe it was the sounds of horsemen coming that alerted the household. If that was not it, maybe it was the masks and gowns the approaching men wore. If it was neither of these two, the first shot certainly got their attention.

Carrie Starr was in her home near the shipping pens. She was Pony's wife. Joe Davis was with them throughout the following shootout. Carrie Starr's actions that morning saved lived. In the Porum Range War saga, her actions are almost an unmentioned part of the story.

This story needs a preface in order to understand the relationship of the principal characters to the story. It begins with cattle thieves plaguing the area around Porum for decades.

The problem started with the arrival of the Davis family from Alabama about 1880. It did not help matters that the Davises chose a brand that exactly covered the brand of Judge Hester. A large rancher, Hester blamed the Davises for any losses that occurred. Over the years, the feuding included barn burnings and murder on both sides.

Eliza Catherine "Carrie" Horn Starr was born in August 1877 in Indian Territory. She became acquainted with Pony Starr when she worked in the home as a servant helping to raise Pony's brothers and sisters in 1900. She and Pony were married shortly afterwards.

Pony Starr was born Samuel Saguila Starr in June 1876, also in Indian Territory. Joe Davis was a grandson of Old Man Davis. Joe turned nineteen on the day of the shootout.

The recent murder of a Deputy Sheriff trying to bring in several of Joe's uncles antagonized area residents. They felt justice was never going to be carried out. Whenever the Davises went to trial, the evidence proved too insufficient for conviction. Afterwards the rustling would resume.

The last straw proved to be the murder of the peace officer. At the same time, reports swirled that stolen cattle were in railroad shipping pens at Porum that day. This added urgency to the coming conflict. Frustration over the shortcomings of the law ran high. This augmented the failure of not solving who was behind the thefts. The Hester crowd, and the independent ranchers who also lost livestock to thieves, were boiling mad.

That day the law-abiding ranchers decided to take the law into their own hands. Their aim was to shoot down any member of the Davis clan. Pony Starr was a target, too, because he sided with the Davises. The cattle pens near the Starr home, located a mile northeast of Porum, reportedly contained the stolen livestock. Retrieving the cattle and striking a blow for justice was the goal of the masked riders on Monday morning, May 29, 1911.

Pony Starr and Joe Davis immediately reached for their weapons when the shooting started. They instinctively knew they were targets.

While her husband and visitor fired their guns as rapidly as they could, Carrie reloaded the empty ones. Altogether, close to a hundred rounds were fired into the house without hitting an occupant.

With ammunition running low, Carrie calmly walked out of the house into the hail of gunfire from the vigilantes. One masked gunman tried to shoot her down, but his rearing horse caused him to miss each time he fired. In disgust, he finally threw his pistol at her. Whereupon, Carrie picked up the gun and threw it back at her assailant.

Reaching the barn, Carrie saddled two horses and led them back through the gunfire to the house. Her husband and Joe Davis bolted out the back door, jumped into the saddle and rode off through downtown Porum. They had just three bullets left as they rode away.

Carrie's calmness enabled her husband to flee to safety. A week later Pony turned himself in at Eufaula. The county court acquitted Pony of having committed any crime during the shootout. Afterwards, the family left the Porum area. In 1920, Carrie lived with Pony and their daughter in Craig County, OK.

A fuller account of the Porum Range War is at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/2480/rangewar1.html. Olevia Myer's account contains more information about Carrie.

Muskogee's Three Federal Jails

Construction of the first federal jail in Muskogee occurred in conjunction with the establishment of the first federal courthouse in Indian Territory. It stood just behind the courthouse. The courthouse was located on the southwest corner of the intersection of North Second and Court Streets. The government built both in 1889. Only one man ever escaped from this jail, called the "wooden shack." It burned down in 1892. The prisoners spent time cooped up in the courthouse until the construction of the next jail.

The federal government built the replacement for the first jail on the west side of North Third Street, about three blocks away. There, the cellblock stood at the center of an exercise yard. A fence with an elevated guard walk surrounded the yard. In twelve years, there was only one escape from this facility, too.

The last federal jail in Muskogee stood on the northeast corner of Court and North Third Streets. It opened September 19th, 1904. It cost the United States government $40,000 to build.

The new jail was one of three in Indian Territory. The other two were near the US Courthouses in Vinita and South McAlester. Statehood brought about the creation of counties and county jails. Many inmates in federal jails went to the counties shortly afterwards. The federal government abolished all federal jails in Oklahoma in1911.

The modern (1904) facility consisted of eighteen cells in the main room. There were additional cells for special situations. The concrete floor was an improvement over earlier wooden jails.

There were, for example, two hospital cells. One was for men; the other served women. The jail needed these cells. In 1902, a woman gave birth to a daughter while serving a year's sentence for adultery in the old prison. Generally, men occupied their hospital cell because of gunshot wounds. Later stages of consumption and pneumonia resulted in men transferring to the hospital cells, too.

In 1905, the staff bragged that the prisoner death rate was one-half of one percent. This was five to six deaths per year in the jail.

Men and women occupied separate cells. A newspaper article indicates the men and women were also separated according to race.

The City of Muskogee used one cell, called the "holdover," for its prisoners. The occupants of the holdover cell were the weekend drunks and citizens working off fines.

Prisoners ate twice a day. Breakfast consisted of meat, potatoes, sauerkraut, turnips, biscuits and coffee. Occasionally, the prisoners got oatmeal, too. They ate at 8:30.

The dinner meal was the heavy one. Guards served it at 2:00 in the afternoon. It consisted of meat, potatoes, beans, cornbread, light bread, coffee and fruits. On holidays, the prisoners got turkey, chicken, more fruit and pudding.

The 1904 jail enjoyed steam heat produced in the office basement. Bare bulbs provided electric lighting throughout the cellblock. Prisoners also had lockers and used slop buckets. There was no privacy. Then, as now, incarceration was not pretty, despite the flowers planted in front of the jail.

Booker T. Washington in Muskogee

Booker T. Washington's arrival in Muskogee caused a commotion. His arrival attracted a crowd estimated to number between five and six thousand when he arrived on November 20th, 1905. Naturally, most in the crowd were African Americans. The heavy foot of Jim Crow still separated the Black race from everyone else. Consequently, many in Indian Territory wanted to hear how they could finally, fully be free.

The Civil War ended forty years earlier in Virginia. It was not lost on the crowd that Dr. Washington was born a slave in Virginia. It was also common knowledge that he had dined with the President of the United States. Everyone who came to Muskogee, it seems, wanted to learn how he overcame his humble beginnings.

Booker Taliaferro Washington lived under slavery for nine years. After the war ended, his mother moved the family to the new state of West Virginia. There he began studying in school for the first time. It was under these circumstances that he learned to read and write at a later age than students do today.

At age sixteen, Booker left home to enter the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute back in Virginia. A couple of years later, he attended a seminary in Washington, DC. In 1881, he became the first principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. When the Katy train pulled into the Muskogee station, Washington had been teaching for less than fifteen years. C. E. Jones extended an invitation to visit Indian Territory to survey the progress of African-American life.

Onlookers crowded the streets and the station that Monday morning. Some were atop boxcars that sat idle on adjacent tracks. A few who wished to get a glimpse of the "Moses of the Negro race" hung from telephone poles nearby. When Washington walked out of his special boxcar, the pressure to surge closer brought a call for calmness, order and silence so that everyone could hear Dr. Washington.

The welcoming committee consisted of A. G. W. Sango, W. H. Twine, J. H. Lilly and Louis T. Brown. Sango feted the visitors and city representatives at his home. Dr. Washington and his party of four spent the night at the home of Dr. R. H. Watterford because all of the Watterford children studied at Tuskegee.

The original plan was for Dr. Washington to speak in the Raymond Auditorium. However, the news of his visit to Muskogee attracted thousands more than the available seating allowed. The city then agreed to arrangements to block traffic on Okmulgee Avenue. The committee erected a platform at the intersection of Second Street for Dr. Washington. Here are a couple of points he made that Monday evening.

"Here in the south both races labor under a disadvantage, because the bad that there is among whites and blacks is, almost without exception, flashed all over the country, while the worthy acts of both races are seldom know beyond the borders of the community or state."

"For the present, and, in my opinion, for centuries to come, we are to live here side by side, and, since this is true, the wise and safe policy for each one to pursue is for each race to live in peace and harmony, each striving to promote the welfare of the other."

"We must continually train our children, setting the example ourselves, that there is no disgrace in any kind of labor but that there is a disgrace in all idleness. We as a race have got to learn the dignity and duty of labor."

"Fertile farm after fertile farm has been pointed out to me on my trip through this country, with but a little two-room house, no stable, and the harness and tools exposed to the weather. That's not living; it is existing. Stop existing and go to living."

"A farmer should make more than a living. He should build a four or five room house, get books, carpets on the floor, pictures on the wall, then he will commence to enjoy life."

Muskogee has a reminder to of Dr. Washington's 1905 visit. On Highway 69, the Booker T. Washington Memorial Cemetery is named in his honor.