The Boyds

My grandmother was a Boyd. I didn’t realize the importance of the Boyd family until I went to one of their family reunions. There were 900 people there. Actually I don’t think everyone there was a Boyd. The family had invited anyone who wanted to come. I think most of Dewey County was there.   

My grandmother’s father, Grant Alexander Boyd, came to Indian Territory from St. Joseph, Mo., with his parents, three brothers and a sister. Some of the family made the run of 1893 into the Cherokee Strip. Others came later and settled in the same area, along the banks of the South Canadian River. My great grandparents, Grant Alexander and Laura Cavey Boyd, came in the early 1890’s and bought a homestead from a man whose crops had failed the year before. All he wanted for his land was $35, the price of a train ticket home.  

The Boyd brothers were all tall, one almost seven feet from what I was told. I don’t know my great grandfather’s height, but you can get some idea from a picture of him standing next to his house with my great grandmother, Laura Cavey Boyd. You can see in the picture that the house was made of bricks. Grant and one of his neighbors, Cadie Jones, fired the bricks using sand from the nearby Canadian River. The old house was still standing in the early 1990’s, 100 years later.   

                                        Grant and Laura Boyd

Grant and Laura Boyd's farm was successful, and they also built and operated a hotel in the nearby town of Fay, Oklahoma. I don’t know much about my grandmother’s childhood, except that she attended school with some Indian children who camped across the river from her parents’ farm. She apparently had a low opinion of these Indians, which of course didn’t go over well with my mother, but one of her classmates, a Cheyenne Indian named David Oakeater, turned out pretty well. He got an education, was converted to Christianity and became an Episcopal minister, a bishop, and was later canonized by the Episcopal Church for his work among his people.  

Grant and Laura Boyd had five girls: Ruth, Jesse – my grandmother, Eva, Alta, Imogene, and two boys: Gene and Chester. Chester, known as Check, was just a little older than my dad, and they were childhood companions.  

                  Check (upper left), Don (center), Gene Boyd (right)
                                    

My great grandfather, Grant Boyd, must have been quite a guy. My dad told me a couple of stories about him. Dewey County, where the little town of Fay is located, is right in the heart of “tornado alley,” the portions of Kansas and Oklahoma where tornadoes are common. Don said that one day the sky clouded up, and the air got that typical warm moist feel to it that means a tornado is coming. Laura started rounding up the children to take them down into the storm shelter, but when beckoned for her husband to come inside, he told her he had decided to stay outside and watch.  

Laura listened to the noise of the wind and debris outside as the tornado passed over, ready to open the door if her husband called for help, but the tornado came and left without her hearing his call. When Laura and the children emerged from the shelter, Grant was sitting in his rocker on the porch, seemingly unperturbed, even though only a hundred feet away the  windmill had been turned into a pretzel. The tornado had been heading straight for the house, but  at the last moment it turned aside, sparing the house and Grandpa Boyd.  

The other story I know about Grandpa Boyd is his first experience with a motor car. It was about 1910 when his oldest son Gene bought the town’s first automobile. It was a Model T Ford, and it created quite a stir around Fay. When Gene brought it home Grandpa wanted to drive it himself, so Gene instructed him on how to steer and how to put it into gear. Then he got out and cranked the engine. When Grandpa heard the engine start, he put the car into gear and away he went.

Gene didn’t have a chance to get back into the car before Grandpa took off, and then it was too late. Grandpa didn’t know how to stop, so the car sped around the yard at 10 or 15 miles per hour once, then twice. Gene tried to yell instructions to Grandpa about how to stop, but Grandpa was a little hard of hearing. Finally as the car made a third pass by the house Gene made a flying leap onto the running board, then reached over and pulled back the
throttle to stop the car.    

 

 

                                          Model T Ford, 1910