Dacoma, Oklahoma, USA: Stories from the West

By Nyle Kardatzke

When the Cherokee Outlet was opened to homesteaders in the great Land Run of 1893, Wilbert Bruner and his wife Eliza lived in Kansas with two very young sons. Avoiding the mayhem of the land rush, Wilbert staked a claim in the Cherokee Outlet in spring 1894. He slept on the ground and lived alone in a crude sod house until he could build a small

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nyle Kardatzke
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781732822252

Nyle Kardatzke

Nyle Kardatzke lives and writes in Indianapolis, Indiana. His mother grew up in Oklahoma, and her father was the first human to plow the soil on his homestead there. The author was a member of the Future Farmers of America in Ohio. As a teenager, he plowed his grandfather's Oklahoma farm and began to learn about his ancestors' westward migrations from the East Coast. Unable to make it in farming, the author has lived by his wits in cities most of his life. He plans to be buried in a rural cemetery near Dacoma.

Book preview

The Bruner family migrated from the East Coast of America to Northwestern Oklahoma over a period of 250 years. Here is their story, told briefly.

1

Dear Hearts and

Gentle People

I WOULD HAVE KNOWN LITTLE about my Oklahoma relatives if my family hadn’t made trips there almost every year during my childhood and college years. Our family migrated to Oklahoma during spring break or summer vacations. Our path to Dacoma took us southwest from near Toledo on a route that paralleled the western part of the Bruner family’s 250-year migration from the East Coast to Western Oklahoma.

Our rural Ohio neighbors made no such migrations to see their families, who generally lived nearby. I know some were puzzled by our travels, but they didn’t know Grandma and Grandpa Bruner and our treasured relatives out West. They didn’t know the pioneer history of our family or the history we were making for future generations by making those migrations.

Our trips took us from the green fields and orchards of Ohio to the rolling semi-desert of western Oklahoma, from our familiar rural Ohio neighborhood to a place where adventure and excitement were in the air. The trips were long, and parts of them were tiresome. The hours were punctuated by endless lines of farms and small towns with slow traffic. Bridges over major rivers such as the Wabash and the Mississippi broke up the monotony of travel, but there were not enough big rivers to keep us interested all the time. When we reached the wheat country of Kansas and Oklahoma, the tall concrete grain elevators made the small towns seem important and full of stories, but most of the time, the miles just rolled on and on.

No interstate highways sped us across the countryside in those days, and most of the state and county roads had only two lanes. Passing slow-moving cars was sometimes dangerous. One time while my dad was attempting to pass a slow car, a truck suddenly popped up out of a shallow valley ahead of us. I was in the front seat, and the truck’s radiator appeared to be coming straight at me. My dad swerved into the right-hand lane, and no one was injured, but we kids couldn’t stop thinking of that truck the rest of the day. Another time a truck was passing our car when a farm tractor appeared in the other lane. My dad pulled off into a shallow ditch at highway speed, and the tractor swerved into the ditch on the other side of the road as the truck zoomed between us. I was always thankful when we were on a patch of four-lane road where it seemed our lives weren’t in danger for a while.

Soon after World War II ended, Grandma and Grandpa moved off their farm into the little town of Dacoma. When our family arrived at last at their house in Dacoma, out would come Grandma Ann and Grandpa Bert Bruner, and sometimes Aunt Irma and Aunt Ella, too, with hugs and kisses for everyone. Grandma would lean down to hug and kiss us kids, and our aunts picked us up in their arms to kiss us. We were embarrassed, but we loved all of our Oklahoma relatives. They loved us, and they showed it.

Besides Grandma and Grandpa and aunts and uncles, I had lots of Oklahoma cousins. There were forty-three first cousins on my mother’s side and thirty-one on my father’s side. Between my mother’s side and my father’s side, I had seventy-four first cousins (if my counting is correct). Five of us cousins were my age on both the Bruner side and the Kardatzke side.

Two popular songs seemed to have been written just for our Oklahoma trips to be with family. The first was Dear Hearts and Gentle People, first sung by Bing Crosby in 1949 and later by others. It seemed as if the songwriter must have known a town like Dacoma.

          I love those dear hearts and gentle people

          Who live in my home town

          Because those dear hearts and gentle people

          Will never ever let you down

          They read the good book

          From ’Fri till Monday

          That’s how the weekend goes

          I’ve got a dream house

          I’ll build there one day

          With picket fence and ramblin’ rose.

          I feel so welcome each time I return

          That my happy heart keeps laughing like a clown

          I love the dear hearts and gentle people

          Who live and love in my home town

The second song, Mocking Bird Hill, sung by Patti Page in 1951, seemed to us to have been written on a cool spring morning in Oklahoma.

          When the sun in the mornin’ peeps over the hill

          And kisses the roses ’round my windowsill

          Then my heart fills with gladness when I hear the trill

          Of those birds in the treetops on Mockin’bird Hill

          Tra-la-la, tweedlee dee dee it gives me a thrill

          To wake up in the morning to the mockin’ bird’s trill

          Tra-la-la, tweedlee dee dee

          There’s peace and goodwill

          You’re welcome as the flowers on Mockin’bird Hill

2

Following the Frontier

AMERICA WAS DIFFERENT FROM the settled villages where most Europeans were living when the New World was discovered. In Europe, families often lived in the same villages for generations. In America, there was a line known as the frontier that divided settled land from the open country. For generations, settlers moved farther and farther into the new lands. The American frontier was to the west, and people who wanted a new life could always go West.

When my family’s ancestors came to America, Europe already seemed full of people. There was no single direction to go. There was no West like there was in America. Not only was Europe full of people, but it was full of quarreling religious and political groups that seemed to surround people and limit their lives. My Bruner ancestors must have felt hampered and closed in by their home countries in Europe. Like other pioneers, their minds were stirred by visions of a better land, and the troubles in the Old Country led them to cross the cold Atlantic Ocean.

My Bruner ancestors arrived in North America in the 1600s. Records from Maryland report the births of William Richardson in 1642 and his wife, Elizabeth Matthews, in 1644. The place was near the present site of Washington, DC, but they were born there more than a century before the United States was formed. Elizabeth Matthews was from the same Matthews family that gave birth to Orlinda Matthews, my great-grandmother, who would one day marry George Bruner, one of the major figures in this book. A long history of the Matthews, Wharrys, Bruners, and other strands of the family now exists on this side of the Atlantic.

Only a small part of the history before my Bruner ancestors’ years in Illinois from 1833 to 1883 is known. One heartbreaking story, however, has been part of family history since 1856. In that year, a terrible epidemic swept through Licking County in central Ohio. My mother told me part of the story of what happened during that time to the family of her grandmother, Orlinda Matthews, in Ohio at the time.

There was an epidemic in Licking County, Ohio, and one of the children died, Mama said. Then another child died. When the men were on their way back home after burying the second child’s body, someone came out to meet them on the road to tell them that still another child had died. Before the epidemic was over, four children from that family had died. My grandmother Orlinda cried when she told me many years later.

Orlinda Matthews was eight years old when her four siblings died. The child who died during the burial must have been Martha Emily Matthews, age twelve, sister of my great-grandmother Orlinda Matthews Bruner. Here is a list of the Matthews’ children’s deaths from a family Bible:

Orlinda’s survival in 1856 foretold her lifetime of living through other losses and challenges in Illinois, Kansas, and Oklahoma. In Ohio, Orlinda left school at age fourteen to care for her grandmother, Mary Hannah Matthews Wharry, whose parents had been born in Pennsylvania in 1642, the earliest date in our family records.

One other story has come down in the family from the Ohio years. Mary Hannah Wharry is said to have been a wet nurse for William McKinley, the future president, when he was a baby. He was sickly, and his mother had too little milk for her failing child, so Mary Hannah took little William to her own breasts. He survived to adulthood and became our nation’s twenty-fifth president. President McKinley was elected in 1896 and 1900, and he was assassinated on September 14, 1901.

The Matthews family lived in Ohio until their migration to Illinois in 1883. By then Orlinda was thirty-five, was married to George Bruner, and had a family of her own to protect. She and George and their four children eventually migrated to Kansas in 1883, and one of their children, Jennie Bruner, is buried in Kansas (her story is told later in this book).

Their move into Oklahoma in 1894 was the last migration as a family. Never again did the entire Bruner family pack up all their belongings and travel farther west to a new place. Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, they didn’t join the thousands of Okies who headed for California. Their children and great-grandchildren did, however, move to other parts of the country. By the 1960s, there were Bruner family members on both coasts and at points in between. By 1970, there were family members living in Alaska. The family’s geographic frontier had reached its end point, but family members even now crisscross the nation for education, work, fun, and the callings of God.

(Details in this chapter would have been impossible without the genealogical research performed by Everett and Irma Schrader in the 1960s to 1990s.)

3

Migrating to Poorer Land

IN SPITE OF THE HARDSHIPS my earliest Bruner ancestors experienced in Ohio and Illinois, the soil had been richer there and better watered there than what they found in Kansas. Weather records show that in the 1880s, they enjoyed good rainfall in Kansas, but it wasn’t