Outcasts

I am a fortunate woman. My adult life has been spent filling in the family blanks with tales not shared from previous generations. Cousins (sisters) and Ancestry.com helped bridge the gaps. 

Stories were erased by a family history mixed with trauma combined with a complicated history to include Native American roots and relations. 

I was the third and last born. I entered the world when many of the family elders had passed to the other side. My parents worked to change, deny and edit our rich but complicated family history to fit into a predominant cultural narrative. Changing the story was required to survive. Part of the coverup was to rarely give me interaction with remaining grandparents or other relations. 

I did hear tales how our ancestors created Texas dating to the late 1700s in places like Rusk, Beaumont, San Angelo, Whitesboro and Collinsville. 

Wille & Addie Clary (above)

There was her “Swedish” grandfather, George Washington Clary Sr. (1834-1877), except he wasn’t Swedish but Cherokee. This branch of the Clary family is descended from Daniel Clary, who was living in North Carolina during the American Revolution. 

Great-grandpa George was married first to “unknown” Hobbs. They had twins, George Jr. and Willie. During her second pregnancy, “Hobbs” died three days after their daughter, my grandmother Scynthia, was born. 

Great Grandpa Clary Sr. married his second wife and moved to Cotulla, Texas, where he had 16 sections of land in a place called Artesian – Wells. 

It didn’t go well with the new stepmom. She was ruthless, a “frontiers woman” in Southwest Texas. She dipped snuff and was known to use a rifle to protect her land. 

One day when Uncle Willie returned home after a hard day’s work, his stepmother came out of the house and attacked him, giving him a hard time before he could get off his horse. 

He had taken all he could from his stepmother. That day, he roped her, dragged her around the house three times, tossed his rope in the air and rode off. He never went home again. 

Uncle Willie raised Grandma Scynthia from that day forward, too.

Uncle Willie married Sarah Adie Wright. Perhaps because of his traumatic childhood, Uncle Willie’s life was complicated at best. 

He separated from Sarah Adie. She kicked him out of the house because he refused to work as he earned the title “lazy.” He had a very large feed bill against his land, so Aunt Scynthia paid the bill and made claim on the land. 

Uncle Willie moved around a lot, too. They lived in Breckenridge, Texas; Cook County, Texas; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Ardmore, Oklahoma; and traveled to Honduras Central America looking for gold with no luck. They moved back to the Chickasaw Nation. 

As a professional gambler, Great-grandpa Clary was shot several times for cheating in a poker game, and out there someone of this family knows where this newspaper clipping is telling all about it. 

Uncle Willie’s son, Willie Jr., said his dad would come home, empty his pockets and they were full of gold coins and nuggets. 

Great-grandpa Clary is buried in the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma.