The Burial in the School Yard

The Death of a Horse at the School

           Mamie Irene Tripp, my grandmother, along with her mother, stepfather, and siblings were living in the Big Bend community west of Ralston, Oklahoma. (To view a photograph of her mother and stepfather go to the blog entry posted on October 6, 2013, entitled The Marriage of Robert and Nettie Black.) My grandmother and her family were living near where my parents’ farm is now located. (For more explanation as to where Mamie and her family lived, see the blog entry entitled Calamity in a Tent posted on March 30, 2014.)
           Even in the early 1900s, there were two separate rural schools in the Big Bend. The school called Belford was located on the east side of the Big Bend. Greg and Vonda Goad now own the land on which the first Belford School building was constructed. The other school called Woodland was found on the western side of the Big Bend community. Incidentally, the community received its name because of the large bend made by the Arkansas River.              

The First Belford School is obvious in this photograph of
Greg and Vonda Goad's home.

Greg and Vonda Goad's renovation and addition to the first
Belford School. This place was owned by Bernard and Mabel
(Snow) Lynn prior to the acquisition by the Goads.

The location of the first Belford School as seen from Big Bend
Road just after exiting from the west off the Belford Bridge
spanning the Arkansas River.

             Mamie and her sister Cora attended Belford School. Around 1910-1911, Mamie was being courted by my grandfather, Edmund Gates, Sr. He provided her a horse – a saddle horse, not a work horse – to ride from the Deal place where Mamie’s family lived to the Belford School.  My grandmother, always conscientious about whatever she did, securely tied the horse as soon as she dismounted. I can only imagine her horror when she emerged from a day of diligent studying to find somehow the horse had managed to choke itself to death. Grandmother probably could hardly see her feet through her tears as she trudged to her home. As sensitive as she was, she must have agonized as she walked the couple of miles attempting to find words to tell her beau, my grandfather, the catastrophe that had occurred at school that day. According to the account my father related to me, Edmund, Sr. simply went to the school and began digging until he dug a hole large enough to bury the horse right on the school grounds since he had no other way to move it.  He then rolled the horse into the hole and covered it up. That’s how a horse came to be buried on the school grounds.

           Many people in the early 20^th century viewed education as a waste for young women, but apparently, not my grandfather. His provision of the saddle horse for my grandmother, his girlfriend, would have been like a car being provided today. That allows one to see the magnitude of my grandfather’s gift of the saddle horse as well as the great loss experienced when it accidentally choked to death. The loss in today’s terms would have been equivalent to totaling a good car! There was more to their relationship than material stuff since their marriage lasted over 50 years!