She told me one time about she and Aunt Minerva were out riding on the horses (I remember her old side-saddle that her dad had gotten for her was stored at the farm in Colt, AR and it was a beautiful saddle) and she said she and Nervie (what she called her sister) were out riding and they got to galloping those horses and they’d let their hair down and they were letting it blow in the wind. (Granny said at that time her hair was so long that she could sit on it. She laughed and said, “Daddy’d whupped the tar out of us if he’d caught us doing that”

She also said that every summer they would load up the wagons and go to Shiloh battleground and camp down there for some period of time. And apparently they did that every year. In the summer, they’d get the crops laid by, load up the wagons and go down there and stay for some period of time. We talk about a vacation being a week or two now, but she said they would stay there for about a month to six weeks before they came back home.

She always said that her daddy had had a large hand in the building of Doe Creek Church and school…. He did a bunch of the hewing of the logs, etc. Granny always said her Dad built that church, but that’s all we have to go on

Granny told about being out in the fields plowing and somebody that she called Uncle Joe, he was an Indian lived up there in a log house that didn’t have any windows in it, (which would have been a typical Cherokee house). He had a high, cackling laugh and she said she’d be plowing and he’d cackle out right behind her and she’d look back and he’d been following her for 3 or 4 rounds and managed to stay behind her as she turned the plow without her ever seeing her. She said, “Used to make me so mad I could have just choked him!”

I know one other thing she talked about….they had this mule named Bob. In fact, that mule died after I remember him…. they brought him to Arkansas with them and that was the contrariest mule I ever knew, and apparently the most contrary mule she’d ever known too. You couldn’t catch him. He didn’t want to work, so you couldn’t catch him. And if you didn’t watch him, he wouldn’t work after you did catch him. But they’d been trying to catch him for several days. They were been clearing land down by the Tennessee River and they had a big brush pile that started at the river and ran out from it. And they thought they’d hem him up between that brush pile and the river and thought they’d catch him. But he jumped in the Tennessee River and swam across it and Granny said it was 3 weeks before they got that mule back! I think that old mule was about 42- 43 yrs. old when he died. I can remember when I was a kid we had to climb a hill to get out away from our barn there at Colt and taking a bale of cotton to the gin and Dad had an old mule that when you said, “Get up”, she either moved it or died trying. And they’d start up that hill, old Bob looked like he was straining every muscle he had, but if you looked at those trace chains they were slack. Daddy would just say “Bob” and that mule would tighten up those trace chains. But if you watched, they’d slowly start going slack again, but old Bob still looked like he was straining every muscle he had.

Granny was a crack shot with any kind of gun. She had a younger brother, Sam, that she said had bought and sold no telling how many rifles and pistols trying to find one that he could out shoot her with, but he never did. She bought me my first rifle, a 22, when I was 12 yrs old and, of course, I was so proud of it. And she had told me the story about him trying buying all these guns to try to out shoot her with, so I wanted her to shoot my new rifle. She said, “Oh, son. I can’t see to shoot anymore.” I said, “Well, you don’t have to hit anything. Just shoot it!” So she said, “Well, load it for me.” So I did. And she said, “Does it take a fine or a coarse bead?” I said, “It takes a fine bead. What’cha gonna shoot at?” And there was the elm tree out there about 30 yds away and there was some green lichen on the side of it, about the size of your hand. And she raised the gun up and when it bumped her shoulder, she fired, handed me the gun and said, “I can’t see to shoot anymore” But when I went out to the tree, there was a hole in the dead center of that lichen. I’ve always been a pretty good shot, but I’ve never been able to do that.

Her brother Sam, had 6 boys; Jack, Tom, Lewis, Hughie, Marshall, and E.L. Marshall and E. L. never married to my knowledge…they stayed home. Jack had one or two children. He wasn’t around much, so I didn’t know much about him except a few times I was around him. Tom never had any children. Lewis had one daughter. Hughie had 1 daughter and either 2 or 3 boys.

One story Granny used to tell me about her brothers farming. I don’t remember which brother it was, but one brother didn’t plow with horses or mules, he plowed with an ox. One day they were out plowing a pretty good distance from the house and it came up one of those sudden thunderstorms, so they all unhooked real quick and made a race for the barn. Of course, he unhooked his ox, got on it and made for the barn and he and his ox outran both the horses and the mule and beat them all to the barn!

After she had married my Granddad, John Thomas Ponder, in 1913. They came to Arkansas somewhere around 1917 and they came to a place called Marked Tree on the St. Francis River. They had shipped most of their goods on a flatboat down the Tennessee River, then the Mississippi River, and finally up the St. Francis River. When they got there, the only place they could find to stay was in a whole row of shotgun houses that slaves had been in previously. All the people living in those houses then were either old slaves or children of slaves. There was one house right in the middle that was empty, so they were able to stay in this empty house right in the middle of this row of house until they could find their own place. The overseer of that had a big white stallion and he carried two old western-style six-shooters. He’d get drunk, pour whiskey down the horse and get the horse drunk. Then he’s get that horse running and jump it up on those porches and than jump it from porch to porch, shooting his guns through the roofs of the porches, and just scare those people to death. He did that after my Granddad and Granny moved in there. After he’d run off the other end, Granny stepped out on the porch with a shotgun and she said, “If you come back through here again, I’ll kill you.” He looked her in the eye, spurred that horse, and here he came. He got about two porches away and Granny shouldered that gun. He jumped the horse off the porch, and there was just a little one-lane wagon road between the steps of the porches and the river, and he jumped the horse off the porch, across the road and into the river. Granny thought he’d probably drowned, but he made it across. He came back down a few days later when he got sobered up and asked Granny, “Mrs. Ponder, would you really shoot me?” She looked him dead in the eye and replied, “You run that horse across my porch again and find out.” He never did! In fact, he never rode that horse back across those porches the entire time Granny and Granddad Ponder lived there.

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