Since the death of my father I have been thinking about the stories of my ancestors. Here are some parts of some of their stories. The first member of my family to enter history in this country did so a private in the Pennsylvania militia during the war of 1812. No one knows how he performed during the war. We do not know what battles, if any, he fought. We do not know if he survived the war. The next time one of my ancestors is mentioned in history is during the Civil War. We were Unionists and fought in the guerilla battles in Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri. During the Battle of Springfield my grandmother’s grandfather was taken prisoner by Union soldiers while in a Confederate uniform. He was a spy. He was up on a horse with a rope around his neck when the word came to get him down. Had the messenger been slower would I be here today? Before the Civil War he and his brother were pioneers and Indian fighters. His brother lost his life during an Indian counter-attack. My great-great grandfather survived that particular attack. My great-great grandmother hid in the cabin during the fight and heard her brother-in-law’s screams as he was scalped alive. She would tell the story to my grandmother (my father’s mother) when she was a little girl. My grandmother told it to me. My father’s mother’s mother together with her husband (grandma and grandpa Jones) were in the land race for homesteads on the Cherokee Strip. They staked their claim and he went back to the land office to file it. While he was gone a man came and tried to steal the claim. She killed him with a shotgun blast in the stomach. The land was lost to bad investments sometime before the Great Depression. My father’s father worked in lead and zinc mines around Commerce, Oklahoma, on US oute 66. During the summers he, my grandmother, and my father would move out of the house and go down to the river to camp. They spent all summer on the river. During the day he would go to the mines but at night he and my dad would fish. This was my dad’s fondest memory of his dad. (I have the tackle box that my grandfather bought my Dad when he was 9). The mines were a horrible place. There was no safety equioment. Before the men went down in the mines they would inhale aluminum dust. The theory was that the lead would stick to the aluminum and be coughed up at the end of the shift. The aluminum dust and a wet handkerchief over his mouth was his only safety equipment. My grandfather was also a union organizer. He helped organize the workers in the mines of the Tri-State Zinc and Lead Ore Producers Association. My dad said he saw his dad leave the house many nights with a pistol and a yellow arm band. And many nights he came home beaten up very badly. Silicosis killed him when he was 42. My mother’s mother’s mother was called Grandma Reynolds. She was Cherokee. She and her husband lived on a farm in Oklahoma. They had five sons and one daughter. The farm was sufficient to feed them but for cash my great-grandfather and his sons cut wood. Their daughter married my mother’s father when she was 16. He was in his thirties. They had a stormy marriage. Her husband, my gradpa Cagle, died a couple of months before I was born. His father worked as watch repairman in St. Louis. I do not know how they met. My Grandpa Cagle fought in WWI. He was in charge of a horse team that pulled a canon. After the War he became a preacher in the United Pentecostal denomination (they are modalists). He was beat up by his neighbors in Waterloo, Illinois for showing hospitality to some black people. Later, sometime in the late 1950s he was kicked out of his denomination because he came to believe in the Trinity. But before that happened his 3rd daughter met my father in a hop field in Oregon. My father was kicked out of his house when he was 14. His mother had inherited a house when my grandfather died but a few days after the funeral she had a new man and signed the house over to him. He had four sons. He told my Dad to leave. None of my relatives would take him in so he lived on the streets of Commerce, Oklahoma. He would sleep in doorways or in the town theater. (he would hide inside after the last show.) When the man died my father moved back in with his mother. But the house was left to the man’s sons so my father and his mother had to rent a place. Shortly after that is when my Dad became a Christian. He was 17 when that happened. For work he did just about anything. He said the hardest job he ever had was sharpening the bit of a drill when he worked as a roughneck. The drill had two bits. As one was being used to go into the earth he would sharpen the other. The process was to heat it over a fire and then pound it back into shape with a 12 lb. sledge hammer. He swung that hammer from dawn till dusk. But the job that took him to Oregon where he met my mother was following the wheat harvest. When he was 21 he signed onto a crew in Oklahoma that kept moving north as the season progressed. When he got to Oregon he stopped, got a job (he had learned the butcher’s trade. That is what kept him out of WWII. He was a crew leader in a meat packing plant that supplied the Army with beef.) , an apartment, and started preaching on Sundays as a supply preacher for the Four Square denomination. One day his room-mate saw an ad that said harvesters were needed in the hop fields. Well, my Dad and his room-mate went down to the field on their day off and each took a row of hops to pick. In the rows next to them were several teenage-girls, they were singing hymns. My father and his room mate, Cecil started talking to them. Cecil started courting the woman who would be my mother. But my father was secretly in love with her. For two or three Sunday mornings Cecil and my Dad drove to my mother’s house to pick up her and one of her sisters for church. But one Sunday, Dad woke up before the alarm went off and made sure it would not go off. He got dressed very quietly and went to pick up my Mom. When she asked “Where’s Cecil?” he answered “I guess he wanted to sleep in.” By that afternoon they were going steady. Her father was horrified that his daughter had fallen in love with a Trinitarian. To get her away from him my grandfather immediately resigned his pastorate and moved his family back east, to Oklahoma, I think. But they kept writing to each other. And 7 weeks after they met my Dad drove into the town where my mother was living. 8 weeks after they met they were married.