TRIGGER WARNING

TRIGGER WARNING:

Cease and desist from scrolling if you are faint of heart.

That being said, do you have an ancestor who was brutally murdered? Did you ever find out the circumstances of that death? 

I do, and I did. Here’s what I know. It was quite treacherous living on the frontier of Indian Territory in the early 1900s as Oklahoma was becoming a state. My Great Grandfather Amos Rolland, a Muskogee Creek, sold his “Indian Allotment” of land for an undisclosed amount of money. Said land became the start of the town of Haskell, Oklahoma as evidenced by this excerpt from the Chronicles of Oklahoma.

 Word on the street was that my G-Grandfather didn’t believe in banks and so carried large sums of his money on his person at all times. Safest place, no? Presumably SOMEone in the town knew of his practice.

Enter an unsavory character or characters who confronted him with a hatchet. Irony to kill a Native American with a hatchet? Or maybe the perpetrator chose that weapon to throw suspicion to indigenous peoples living in the area.

They struck the hatchet down the center of his head, deep enough to disable him while they stole his money.

 However, he didn’t die right away. Family lore has it that he walked around town like this, made his own funeral arrangements, bought a suit to be buried in, then died three days later.

Someone at the funeral captured the aftermath with a camera. The only solace I can take from this tragedy is the pride in knowing of Amos Rolland’s part in the history of Oklahoma.

In my own way, I honor my ancestors by using some of their names as characters in SEEDS OF DECEPTION, so that their names can live on and keep their memory alive for future generations. Taking it a step even further, I also used the details of my Great Grandfather’s murder as the basis for a similar situation with one of my characters, Tiger Tee Hee, in SEEDS OF DECEPTION.

Ancestors can continue to live on as long as we talk about them.