A Tale That Is Told: The Autobiography of Opal Earp Pounds

By Opal Earp Pounds

The title of this book is a quotation from Psalms 90:9-10, and the Biblical reference is a key to the Christian concerns that characterize the author's life from her conversion in 1952 at the age of 32 to her death in 2009 at the age of 89. Born in 1920, Opal Earp was reared on a farm northwest of Stroud, Oklahoma where her grandparents had homesteaded. In 1938 she graduated from Chandler High School and the next year she married Archie Pounds of Chandler. They had three children born between 1941 and 1946. The account of her life after 1952 is controlled by her desire to be a Christian mother, and her description of family events after that year is strongly colored by this desire. Thus the narrative is not only an account of the life of a farm girl born in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, it is also a conversion narrative in the tradition of Jonathan Edwards. Fifty years after Edwards' death, large numbers of people were converted in the Second Great Awakening of 1800 and the great revival at Cane Ridge, Kentucky that quickly followed and which became the pioneering event in the history of frontier camp meetings in America. Opal knew very little of these earlier events, but their shadow is felt in the tale that she tells.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Opal Earp Pounds
• Release date: Aug 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370464593

Opal Earp Pounds

Opal Earp Pounds died in 2007. This book was edited by her children Gerry Pounds Robideaux and Wayne Pounds. Gerry writes, "I am a retired grandmother. I enjoy scrapbooking, reading, traveling, music (oldies and Gospel) and last, but not least, genealogy. Blogging is a way I can share my family history with others, so I hope you enjoy my blog for the Earps of Lincoln County, OK." Wayne is a retired university prof. He enjoys writing poetry and factual narratives based on historical data. He has lived in Japan for the past thirty years and loves the same thing his sister loves--except for traveling, which he feels he's already taken far enough.

Book preview

A TALE THAT IS TOLD:

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF OPAL EARP POUNDS

by Opal Earp Pounds

Edited by

Geraldine Pounds Robideaux and Wayne Pounds

Published by

Wayne Pounds at Smashwords

Copyright 2017 Geraldine Robideaux

Table of Contents

Editorial Note

Ch. 1: A Tale That Is Told

Ch. 2: The Gusher: A Short Story

Ch. 3: Family History Notes

Coda by the Editors

Web Site

Editorial Note

Opal left behind three manuscript documents about her life. A Tale That is Told is the longest and most complete, but two other excursions exist. The earliest is a short piece she called Down Memory Lane, which has been collated with A Tale That Is Told and does not appear here as a separate text. The third takes the form of a short story that she hoped to publish. It has no title, so we have called it The Gusher and placed it at the end. It sometimes repeats information in the first part of A Tale That Is Told, but many of the details are new.

The Home Place about 1910 (above).

Chapter 1: A Tale That is Told

As I begin this little composition I am reminded of the words of the Psalmist David. We spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our years are three score years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off and we fly away (Ps. 90:9-10). David’s years were filled with many conflicts, defeats and victories and in them all, his praises to God never ceased. Like David I longed after a relationship with God in my youth but never really found that fount of blessing until I was a young mother thirty-three years old, but I’m getting ahead of my story.

I was born to Hugh Ernest Earp and Arlie Avenell Flatt Earp in Stigler, (Haskell Co.) Oklahoma on June 5, 1920, the second of four children she was to bear to him. A brother, Ernest Faye Earp, was three years old at the time. We also had a half-brother, Kenneth Hugh Earp, who was a few years older than us.

My first memories are of the home northwest of Stroud, which was the first home of all the Earps in Oklahoma Territory, called now the Home Place. I understand that my Grandfather didn’t win it in the great land run of 1891 but purchased it soon afterwards from a man who had staked a claim on it. The farm is located three miles north of Stroud and about two and a half miles west and then north again for half a mile.

I remember a cement porch on the east and a screened in porch on the west. Just outside on the west was a dirt covered cellar. I remember a little stream that ran along the east over rocks where my older brother Ernie and I played and waded in the cool clear water. Also a red barn with a loft full of sweet smelling hay where we romped. Many times I fell out of the loft and thought I was going to die because I couldn’t get my breath. Why didn’t I learn there was a hole there by the ladder where Daddy threw down hay for the horses?

Then there was the day that Ernie and I killed a big black snake. We left it by the side of the barn but when we came back a few hours later to exult over our kill, the snake had disappeared. We puzzled about that for days. But in later years we realized we must have only stunned the snake.

It was here on the old home place that my sister Vera Dene and my brother Wendel were born. My Daddy had sent us three older ones upstairs out of the way, but like curious kids we sat on the stairs listening and wondering why we were banished from the downstairs. Soon we heard the cries of a new baby brother. Wendel came to live among us that day.

I remember visiting Grandmother and Grandfather Earp and our half-brother Kenneth when they lived on the Old Trail. Grandmother’s old Rhode Island rooster chased us and Dena was especially afraid of it. We were also apprehensive around Kenneth’s big brindle-and-white bull dog until someone poisoned him. I’ll never forget how he suffered, slobbering, foaming at the mouth. What a terrible way for an animal to die.

Kenneth was born to Hugh and his first wife Lenna Wilburn Earp on Nov. 30, 1914 at Stroud, Oklahoma. Lenna died when Kenneth was 7 days old from blood poisoning. I was told by Mother that the doctor who delivered Lenna had come from helping to deliver a cow and his hands were not clean. In those days they didn’t understand too much about germs. Lenna is buried in the Black Cemetery north of Stroud, presumably on the Black farm. When I was a child we used to go there yearly so that Daddy could help care for the cemetery and the grave.

As a result of Lenna’s death Grandmother Earp took Kenneth and nursed him back to health as he too was very ill as a result of his mother’s blood poisoning. The grandparents became so attached to him that at the time of my parents’ marriage, when Kenneth was two years old, it was breaking their hearts to part with him. So my Dad quit taking him to his new home and told his Mother that since she had cared for Kenneth when he could not, so she could keep him. In my opinion that was the greatest mistake Dad ever made, for Kenneth grew up without the family circle. Grandmother loved him too much and spoiled him. She was left a widow when Kenneth was ten and she was sixty-four. How does an old lady cope with a teenaged boy?

I remember going to Grandmother’s and finding her in distress many times in those years because she didn’t know where Kenneth was. Daddy would go up town and find him, bring him home, and give him a strapping. I’ve always felt that Kenneth should have been in our home when we came along. I wonder did he ever feel abandoned and unwanted by his only parent? We never really knew him like a brother until he married Laura. But that is another story, and I must return to the present one.

One Saturday evening, I may have been three or four years old, I remember going home with my grandparents the Flatts, mother’s parents. We rode home from Stroud in a wagon. Grandpa had bought me a sack of candy. He was my favorite Grandpa. He was always holding me on his lap and kissing me while his coffee stained mustache tickled my face. He was a loving person. I don’t remember how old I was when I got too big to sit on his lap but I never got too big to kiss. Anyway, I was so happy and felt so important to be going home with them all by myself. But the next morning I was homesick and cried so, I had to be taken home.

It was on the old home place that I started to school at a little one-room school called Buttermilk. My cousin Ruby McDaniels [born 1906, daughter of Ocie Ann Flatt and Homer McDaniel] was the teacher that year. We had to