Humanitarians on the Frontier Examples from Northeastern Logan County, Oklahoma Territory

Scholars have studied the frontier of Euro-North American settlement from a number of perspectives. James C. Malin and Allen G. Bogue, for example, have examined the turnover of population in the newer parts of the United States. Walter Prescott Webb considered the Great Plains a strange kind of country for most of its pioneers, branding them as woodsmen out of place in the western part of the great interior grassland. Paul W. Gates has emphasized speculation and an incongruous land system as marking the American new lands, while James K. Hastings has recognized cooperative endeavor, a kind of sharing, as being of key importance. Carl Sauer, in his essay Homestead and Community on the Middle Border, in lauding country churches and church-related liberal arts colleges, has come closer than most students of pioneer settlement to emphasizing humanitarians on the frontier.1 In this study I look in some detail at the small, homely acts of human kindness, at the individuals who made a difference in one small community. The human scale is, after all, the only one on which we can see how the pioneers themselves understood what they were doing. I will identify and describe some of those persons who helped build a more humane community in the place I am naming the Coulter School/Mount Hope locality, after its pioneer log school and the early Mount Hope Church and Cemetery (Fig. 1).2 This is the locality in which my father and my mother\u27s parents had homesteaded and where I was born on my father\u27s farm, about five miles northeast of Guthrie, then capital of Oklahoma Territory. The area is in the northeast part of the nearly 2,000,000 acres of land opened to non-Indian settlement in the first great land rush of the North American frontier, which began dramatically with the firing of shots at noon on 22 April 1889.3 The first post office and the first school in the area both served as community centers, and the first school teacher and the first postmistress both were types of the local humanitarian, even though, in this case, both received some pay for their labors rather than serving solely as volunteers. According to the Coulter School Memoirs, recollections of pioneer life written by twenty-six former students who attended the Coulter school, the first school in the locality met for a short subscription term in the winter of 1890-91 in the red stone house owned by the Reverend Edgar F. Boggess, a Christian minister. His wife, Minnie Boggess, a former teacher, instructed the children. Among the memoir writers, only Pearl, Percy, and Harry Gifford, who lived about a mile and one half to the east, and Leila Caldwell, who lived a little closer, had attended Mrs. Boggess\u27s school, but more children must have been in attendance since, according to Pearl Gifford, Each family furnished homemade seats, and books were an assortment from several states. As both the Giffords and the Caldwells had come to Oklahoma from Minnesota, the reference to several states suggests several families, while the need for each student to bring a chair-noted by Harry Gifford as well-suggests that more than four children attended.4 The first post office occupied part of the one and one-half story Canning frame house, owned by homesteaders who had settled between the Boggess and Gifford homesteads. Mrs. Canning served as postmistress for about ten years, beginning 31 January 1891. The post office was named Burwell, after the Cannings\u27 old home town in Maine.5 A number of homesteaders and their witnesses gave Burwell as their address in General Land Office records of the mid-1890s. Neither the first teacher nor the first postmistress left any indelible mark on the community nor distinguished herself by selflessness or acumen, but out of precisely such small humanitarian gestures are communities made