Like I said in my
post of September 10, Sam Paul divorced his wife Sarah when he got out of
prison because she had run off with his codefendant, Jim Ross. It must have
been a frightening time for Sarah. Several years before, when she had fled to
her parents' house to escape her husband's wrath, her father, Hiram Lambert,
had turned her away, saying "it is better for one to be killed than the
whole family." Sarah's father had died in 1883 though, so when Sam
returned to the Chickasaw Nation she was staying with her mother.
This was Sarah's
testimony before the Dawes Commission:
Q: Where were you when he (Sam Paul) came back?
A: At my mother's
Q: He did not come to see you?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Did you ask him to live with you?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Did you propose to go back to live with him?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: What did he say to that?
A: He said no, he wanted a divorce.
I kind of doubt that
Sarah begged Sam to take her back, but that's what she said anyway. It's
pretty clear though, from the evidence that her attorney, Owen Patchell,
presented at her citizenship hearing, that her life with Sam Paul had been a living
Hell. As he said in his brief: "the plaintiff had been so uniformly brutal
and had led her such a dog's life for the ten years that she did live with him
that she looked upon a permanent separation as a mercy of God."
After making the
point that Sam Paul had multiple affairs during their marriage and had several
illegitimate children, Patchell asked Sarah:
Q: Did he make any pretense of keeping these matters secret to you?
A: No, sir, told me I could leave if I did not want to stay.
Q: How did he treat you in other respects?
A: He tried to starve us out.
At this time, Sam Paul's oldest boy, Joe, was living on his own, and he helped Sarah and his two younger brothers. My grandfather, Bill, whom his mother called Willie, said that there were times when they would have starved had it not been for Joe.
At this time, Sam Paul's oldest boy, Joe, was living on his own, and he helped Sarah and his two younger brothers. My grandfather, Bill, whom his mother called Willie, said that there were times when they would have starved had it not been for Joe.
Joe Paul, second from left
Mr. Patchell went on with his questions:
Q: Did he ever make any serious threat on you?
A: Yes, he tried to shoot me lots of times.
Q: Describe one instance of what he did and said to you?
A: He came home --- he was just like a stranger --- came in that time
and asked me if I heard about some men getting killed and I said I did and he
just run a pistol up my head, and said he would show me how they were killed,
and tried to kill me but I broke away.
Q: Was anybody present when that occurred?
A: Yes, Frank Beckly and his wife.
Sam's libertine behavior, and his cruel treatment of his wife Sarah was certainly not typical of Chickasaw men. For example, Sam's brother Tecumseh was happily married to the same woman all of his life. Sam did follow Chickasaw tradition however in taking responsibility for his children and for their mothers. He apparently even paid one man to marry Fanny Briley, with whom he had a daughter pictured below. You'll remember that Fanny had been Sam's partner in the saloon business.
Sam Paul
certainly was a brilliant man, as I'll try to show later,
but he was also volatile, and at times violent. At one point in her testimony
Sarah estimated that during his life he had killed fifteen or sixteen men.
If my mother had
known her grandmother Sarah at an earlier time, she might not have thought of
her as being so timid, since she was able to stay with Sam Paul, and occasionally
she even stood up to him.
But what of this trip
to the Cherokee Nation? Was it just simply a brief love affair interrupted by
Sam's release from prison? "That just doesn't quite ring true. Well, the
answer took a long time in coming, at least to Sam's descendents in Oklahoma,
and it came from California, from a Baptist Preacher named Dr. Jim Phillips,
who read the book, Shadow of an Indian
Star, and realized that he had been hearing stories about the characters in
the book all of his life. He contacted the authors, Bill and Cindy Paul, and
the two branches of our family were finally joined.
Dr. Jim Phillips and great aunt Mable Stewart, Hattie Jane's daughter.
Jim was raised by his
great grandmother, Hattie Jane Stewart. Nobody paid much attention to Hattie
Jane's stories, partly because she was an old woman, but also because the
family was of Indian descent on both sides, and didn't want to be labeled as
such by the largely prejudiced community. Jim loved his great grandmother's
stories though, and gradually as he grew older he pieced together the story of
her life.
Hattie Jane Stewart
Hattie was the daughter of Sam and Sarah Paul. When Sam was taken to prison at Fort Smith, Sarah was pregnant, and
when he was sent to the federal penitentiary in Detroit, she went to the Cherokee Nation
to have her baby, secretly. About that time Sarah's sister Juliana was also
pregnant, but she lost her baby, so Sarah asked her to raise her daughter, whom she
named Hattie Jane, as her own daughter. Sarah was afraid that if Sam were to be
released from jail he would take custody of his children. She knew that she
would lose her two boys, but she didn't want to lose her daughter also. So the
switch was made. Hattie Jane was raised by her Aunt Juliana, and Sarah denied
that she had ever given birth to her.
For the next couple of posts, My cousin, Dr. Jim Phillips has kindly agreed to write the story of his great grandmother, Hattie Jane Stewart, as she told it to him.
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