Rural Life In Muskogee County

Willa Council Sloan was interviewed in 1976. This is the story of her life in Muskogee County.

In the same year World War I ended, Willa Council and her husband Claude moved to Muskogee County. Willa rode the train to Warner with all of their possession loaded in a freight car. It was agreed that she would take a room in the hotel and wait her husband's arrival the next day.

The trip itself was uneventful. However, upon arrival in Warner, Willa found the town's sole hotel to be empty. That day, the former owner had walked out before the new hotel owners arrived. In between Willa walked in with no where else to stay. The night she spent in the vacant hotel she heard mice and every creak in the wooden floors. The next day, the new owners arrived and Willa helped them take inventory. That evening her husband joined her.

The couple rented a wagon and drove to their new farm on Dirty Creek. It was located between Warner and Webbers Falls and was not in good shape. The house was missing a corner support. Inside, the pot-bellied stove sat on a box of sand that had been used as a spittoon. Willa's first task was cleaning out the sand. Her dictum "there will be no spitting in here again" came shortly afterwards.

A well was located in the front yard. Often it was used by travelers who stopped for a drink and to water their horses and mules. One day a traveler named Henry Starr came by. Setting the bucket down after getting a drink, he told Willa that he was going to dig up some money he had buried nearby. Later, Willa followed in his footsteps and found a hole in the ground. The imprint of a box in the hole told her Starr had found his loot.

Another traveler a decade later stopped by. He was Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd from the Cookson Hills. He arrived with another young man in a buggy. After getting a drink, the two asked for something to eat. Willa professed that she and her husband had already eaten. Furthermore, she had nothing else prepared. Later, she regretted that she hadn't fixed a bite for the two young men. She said "He was just as nice a person as you would want to be around."

An old unused railroad track passed through Willa's farm. The rails had been removed, but not the ties. The creosote ties made great fence posts. Willa and her husband worked together re-establishing the fence rows around the fields using the ties.

The agricultural market crashed in 1921, making it unprofitable to harvest their cotton. In other years, flood waters from Dirty Creek washed out the fields of corn, cotton and wheat. One year she had to wade in two feet of water in order to reach the henhouse. Eventually, Willa and her husband turned to raising livestock. Over time the operation became a dairy farm.

Willa never had children of her own, but supported a boy named Gene N. Eastin in a Masonic Orphans Home in Kentucky during the middle of the Great Depression. Later she took in two foster boys, but never adopted them.

At age 68 she retired to a house in Webbers Falls. She remained active in the Order of the Eastern Star as long as she could get around. Willa Council Sloan passed away in 1984 after surviving two husbands and a full, full life.