Mount Scott near Lawton, Oklahoma Photo by C. Packer
By Rev. Danny Scott
I remember when I was still a very young child, my dad’s mother, my grandmother, Alice Watson, came to live with us in our small home in Shannon, Alabama (now called Oxmoor Valley and Ross Bridge).
Granny Scott, as I sometimes called her, was a native ArapahoSouix Indian from the area of Lawton Oklahoma and Fort Sill. In 1876, my Grandpaw Monroe Scott purchased her. He traded 7 horses for her. She was only 13 years old at the time.
Grandmaw’s Indian name was Little Feather, but Grandpaw Monroe changed her name to Alice Watson.
“The Country” means a hundred different things to a hundred different people. To me, it has always meant freedom.
There’s something about the lack of people and the open space that gives you an opportunity to stretch out and have an adventure. As a teenager that meant the ability to get into trouble without having someone on your back. Blow something up. Build a potato gun and shoot it at cars that whizzed by on Hwy 36. Build a tree house in the woods and use it as a base of operations for pine cone battles, runs to the bootlegger, or a place to stash our Playboy or OUI Magazines (which we pronounced as “O-U-I”, having no idea that it was French).
The country meant that in the summer you said goodbye to your mom at 7am and you got home when the streetlights came on. What you did in the intervening 13 hours was between you, your little brother, and whatever gang of boys you were running with that day. You were 12-years-old. You solved your own problems. You made your own fun. Read the rest of this entry »
