University of Virginia Library

5. Chambers, Jennie McCoy

Mary D. Dorward,

Field Worker

Jennie McCoy Chambers

A Biographical Sketch

From a personal Interview with the Subject.

(1530 East 14th Street; Tulsa, Okla.)

(The subject of this sketch was very difficult to interview, for, while she was very willing to talk, she is very deaf, is eighty-three years old, and her mind seems to wander.)

Jennie McCoy Chambers was born April 24, 1854, in the Koo-wee-skoo-wee (her spelling) district of the Cherokee Nation, near the town of now Claremore. The house, a log cabin, still stands. It is at the north end of Claremore Lake on Dog Creek, has two large rooms and a small room downstairs and a room upstairs. Has clapboard doors.

Mrs. McCoy is about half Cherokee (which she calls Cher o 'kee, just as she says Tahl ee 'quah), her mother, Mary Hicks, coming over the Trail of Tears from Alabama when a child. Her father, Joseph McCoy, was a rancher and the family lived on the place near Claremore until the Civil War when they went over near Saline, and "refugeed" in the Cherokee Nation until the close of the War. Evidently they did not remain at Saline because she said that she and her sister many times walked from Tahlequah to Fort Smith and back for supplies from the Government, and many times they almost starved. Her people sympathized with the Union.

Mrs. Chambers' grandfather and grandmother Hicks, together with her own mother, came in the emigrant train over the Trail. On the way they picked up to children who were lost. One, a boy whose people had all died of smallpox, came to them when they were encamped along a creek. He was known as S. S. Stevens and never knew but what he was an Indian. The other child was a little girl who knew no name but Polly. When she grew older she married and was known as Aunt Polly Myers.