(Well Damebugg, I hope you don't mind me sharing your idea...I have a slightly different story about my father...

I’m not from such a noble family, and I know very little about my ancestors, beyond grandparents…reason being that they were Native Americans, also known as Indians, Injuns, Red-Skins, Heathens, and any number of other less desirable monikers!! I’m a Cherokee Indian, to be more specific…3/4 Cherokee and ¼ Irish. And it’s not so easy to trace your roots, when you’re an Indian. They didn’t keep records until they moved us onto a reservation, and spread us out in land foreign to us, and far away from our ancestors.

My father was born in a portion of the Cherokee Indian Reservation near Fort Smith, Arkansas. He was the youngest of 5 kids, and had a paternal twin sister just a few minutes older than her. His father and his older brothers all worked in the coal mines, and by the time he was 14, they had all died. It was now just his mother and sister, yet his mother refused to let him quit school and work in the mines. It may have only been and Indian school, but she was determined that he get an education and grow up to be something more than a coal miner. So she took in laundry, and raised vegetables and chickens (for eggs), and sold them to the miner’s families to earn money.

When he and his sister were 15 years old, his sister died of TB. He went to school for another week, and listened to his Momma cry herself to sleep at night. He determined right then that no matter what his momma said, he would go to work and get them out of there. Against his mother’s protests, he quit school and went to work in the mines. They chose to use very little of what he made, getting by instead on what she earned, and they put the bulk of what he made away. Two years later, at 18, he bought his first dump-truck, and began hauling it instead of mining it. When he was 19 he moved his mother from the reservation to a small town nearby.

For three years he worked, and bought 2 more trucks, and hired drivers to drive the other trucks. For that entire 3 years, he heard his mother talk about a friend she’d made…another Cherokee woman who lived nearby. Her Indian husband had died years earlier, and left her with 4 kids. But then she’d met an Irishman who took her off the reservation and moved her there, and now she had 2 more kids with him…a girl 13 and a boy 11. Back then, it was shameful for an Indian woman to marry out of the tribe, and equally shameful for an Irishman to take an Indian bride. Daddy thought that was pretty boring stuff, but humored her all the same. Then one day, she asked him to stop by this friend’s house to drop off some egg to her, and pick up some vegetables in trade.

That’s when he first laid eyes on my momma…He was now 23 and owned 3 trucks, which was quite a big deal back then…and he was considered quite a catch. At 13 yrs old, it was hardly appropriate to ask her parents for permission to court her. But he made regular stops for eggs from then on. When she turned 14, her daddy approached my daddy, and told him that they knew he was interested in my momma, and gave him permission to ‘call on her’. Still and all, she wouldn’t be allowed to marry until she was 18 and out of school.

So for 4 years, he courted my mother, and bought 2 more trucks in the interim. As soon as she was out of school, he took her to Fort Smith and bought her a set of rings…something that just didn’t happen to Indian girls….especially Indian girls with Irish fathers. In my father’s eyes though, my mother WAS and Indian Princess. (I still have the ring(s) and the box they came in, says Fort Smith Jewelers inside of the little lid). They got married at a justice of the peace and spent the night in a motel room.

The next morning, upon returning home to her parents house, he took her inside and told them that he was moving her and his Momma to Amarillo, TX, and if they wanted to go, they better get packing. He said they had good TB hospitals there, and he wanted my mother’s father, who now had TB, to get the best care he could get. Besides, the climate was dryer there, which was better for someone with TB. So they moved to Amarillo and his mother lived with them. A few months later, they moved her parents and younger brother to a house near them.

And they immediately got about the business of making babies. He had drivers running his fleet for him, so he was gone quite often, but was home most of the time. Momma told me years later, that she thinks he knew that he had TB, before they got married, but he never let on to her until after they had been married for almost a year. Then he made out like he just found out. Her heart was broken, but it made the business of making babies, and having a son for him to carry on his business, all that much more important to her. He had worked his entire life to give all of them a better life, and she wanted to make his dreams come true. She would worry later about how she would get by when he died. They hoped it would be a long time away.

The first child was a boy, born premature, who died at 8 days old. She turned right around and had another boy, who was stillborn 8 months into her term. Daddy was getting weaker all the time, and had now been in and out of sanitarium twice. Still he worked, and they set about getting her pregnant again. A year later, I was born, and momma nearly died, because I was determined to come out feet first. For 6 days, she labored with me, and twice they manually flipped me over in the womb. I flipped right back over, and finally they delivered me feet first. My daddy was on cloud nine…I might not have been a son, but I was born on my feet, and he took that as a sign. (My mother never talked about how that must have been for her to lose those first two babies, one right after the other, and then to turn right back around to have another. And she never allowed me to bring it up either.)

From the day I was born, I was daddy’s girl, and he constantly told me that when I grew up, I could be anything I wanted to be. He joked about how I would be the first female tycoon in the coal mining industry, and I would own a whole empire of coal trucks! Momma let him dream his dreams. A sister was born eighteen months later, just as he had to check himself into a sanitarium for the last time. They arranged for he and my grandfather to have rooms right beside each other, and she would take me around to the windows and stand outside with me so he could see me. We would press our lips to the glass and lay our hands against one another’s as he fought back tears. Momma said he never let me see him cry…but he never got to hold me again. He might have gotten better, and got out again, just like her daddy did, but he suffered a heart attack and died 9 months later, just shy of my 3rd birthday.

Fast forward…at 11 yrs old, my mother divorced my first step father…he was a wonderful gentle man, and a good father to me. But they apparently didn’t get along. Back then though, even if your parents fought, that was something they just didn’t do in front of the children….in most homes at least. You just grew up thinking everybody’s house was like “Leave It To Beaver”. There’s something to be said for that. But I still stay in touch with him.

About a year later she married again. This man took up where my real father did…teaching me that I could be whatever I wanted to be. He taught me how to drive in a truck…how to drive tractor, how to build a barn, how to ride a horse, and raise farm animals, and grow a garden, and how to roll and stack hay bales. He also taught me how to clean a house properly….and DARRELL, he also taught me how to quit sitting like a Tomboy when I got too old to sit with my legs ‘hanging open’…he taught me how to be a LADY.

I think my real daddy would be proud of who I became…I did grow up to own a fleet of trucks, although not coal trucks. Now I just own a small crane company. But I grew up believing I could do whatever I set my mind too. I wasn’t afraid to try whatever struck my fancy…and just because I’m a lady doesn’t mean I can’t do what a man does too. I figured out real fast, that you just have to work ‘smart’ instead of ‘hard’. (No offense men!!)

My step father died 3 yrs ago yesterday…and I thought a lot about how very much he contributed to my life. Luckily, I realized that all along, and never failed to tell him that I appreciated the things he instilled in me. My mother followed him 8 months later…too much in love to go on without him. She, too, knew how very much I loved her.

Then when my husband died last year, he left behind a 25 yr old son, who is angry and resentful now. I think he is angry at himself…but it’s easier to be angry at the world, than to admit something as painful as that. So just remember that when that last breath is drawn, you can’t go back and say the things you should have said….NOW is the time….