Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 17.djvu/366



REMINISCENCES OF MRS. FRANK COLLINS, NEE MARTHA ELIZABETH GILLIAM.

By FRED LOCKLEY.

"My maiden name was Martha Elizabeth Gilliam," said Mrs. Frank Collins, when I visited her recently at her home in Dallas. "My father was General Cornelius Gilliam, tho' they generally called him 'Uncle Neal.' Father was born at Mt. Pisgah, in Florida. My mother's maiden name was Mary Crawford. She was born in Tennessee. I was born in Andrew county, Missouri, the day before the Fourth of July in the year 1839. Father and mother were married in Missouri. I don't know the day nor the year. Missouri was the jumping- off place back in those days and they didn't have courts and court records and licenses like they do now-a-days. Any circuit rider or justice of the peace could marry a couple and no rec- ords were kept except in the memory of the bride. Father met mother in Tennessee when she was a girl; fact is she would be considered only a girl when father married her, by people of today, but in those days she was considered a woman grown.

"The women worked hard when mother was a girl back in Tennessee and they had a lot of danger and excitement thrown in with their hard work. My mother lived with her aunt. When I was a little thing I used to get mother to tell me about when she was a girl. When she was betwixt and between a girl and a woman she and her aunt were busy with the house work one forenoon when some Indians came to the house. My mother's aunt shut and barred the door. The Indians began hacking at the door with their tomahawks. They cut thro' one board and had splintered another when my mother's aunt fired thro' the broken panel of the door and shot one of the Indians thro' the chest. While mother's aunt was busy loading the gun my mother boosted one of the