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Carrie
LeFlore Perry
From: Sturm's Oklahoma Magazine (Jan. Feb 1911)
A Selected
Edition By Amanda L. Paige
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Carrie LeFlore Perry was born about 1874 at Boggy
Depot, Choctaw Nation, the daughter of Forbis LeFlore (Choctaw) and his
third wife, Anne Marie Maurer, whose father, like Forbis LeFlore’s, was born
in France. LeFlore, a well-known and respected leader in the Choctaw
Nation, served as superintendent of Choctaw schools, as a tribal judge, and
as a representative for the Choctaw Nation in Washington. Marie
LeFlore,
according to family tradition, was the granddaughter of one of Napoleon’s
bodyguards. Carrie, the youngest child of their marriage, grew up in a
cosmopolitan, Catholic household in which French was often spoken.
Carrie LeFlore was educated in the
convent schools of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, which were considered
premier schools for well-bred young ladies. She first attended the Sacred
Heart mission school in the Potawatomie reservation in Oklahoma Territory
and later graduated from Maryville College in St. Louis.
In 1896, she married Adolphus
Edward Perry, a Canadian-born entrepreneur, who was set on making his fortune in
Indian Territory. As an intermarried white citizen of the Choctaw Nation, Perry
could thereafter conduct business as any native Choctaw could. But as a
permitted resident in the Choctaw Nation, he had already established himself in
the business community by the time they married. Born in 1867, Perry had moved
with his family at age twelve to Denison, Texas, where he obtained his early
education, which was continued under the Jesuits at Montreal. He began his
career as a “drummer,” spending his vacations in the Indian Territory, where he
made friends among influential people such as Douglas Johnston and the Colbert
and Love families of the Chickasaw Nation; Robbert L. Owen of the Cherokee
Nation; and Choctaws such as Green McCurtain, Peter Hudson, and Charles LeFlore,
Carrie’s half brother. In 1888 he moved to Atoka, Choctaw Nation, where he
entered the general mercantile trade with his brother. After a year, the Perrys
moved their business to Cottonwood, which later became Coalgate, where they
continued in the mercantile trade and began mining coal. Apparently backed by
his father, the contractor who had overseen construction of the Missouri, Kansas
& Texas Railroad, Perry flourished. Except for a period after 1891, when he
attended Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, Perry remained at
Coalgate until he and Carrie LeFlore married.
For a year after their marriage, Perry managed
a ranch at Citra, Choctaw Nation, before returning to Coalgate, where he began
to expand his enterprises. He remained in the mercantile business, developed
his mining operations, and entered the real estate business. By 1905 he had
amassed enough capital, influence, and confidence to offer the government $15
million for the segregated coal and asphalt lands of the Choctaw Nation, an
offer the Secretary of the Interior refused.
The wealth amassed by Perry provided his wife
with the life style of a typical well-to-do woman of the late Genteel Period.
Always referring to herself as Mrs. A. E. Perry, she entertained, traveled
frequently to St. Louis, Kansas City, or elsewhere to visit friends, and, with
her mother, spent time at Lake Michigan to escape the heat of the summer
months. After more than a decade of marriage, her husband said of her, “She is
the loveliest and sweetest of women. We are very fond of each other and are
exceedingly congenial. We are almost always together.” And, he said, “She is
very retiring and dislikes notoriety.”
By the time he made these comments, Edward
Perry was a well-known politician, whose own notoriety certainly eclipsed his
wife’s. As Oklahoma statehood approached, he had become active in Republican
politics and had earned the nickname “Dynamite Ed” as a result of having tossed
lighted sticks of dynamite from a moving excursion train to call attention to
his political cause. In 1907 he served as chairman of the Oklahoma Republican
Campaign Committee and the following year ran for chairman of the Oklahoma
Republican Party. He lost but was rewarded with an appointment as
vice-chairman. In the latter year, perhaps seeking relief from a difficult
political season, Ed and Carrie Perry went on an extended tour of Europe.
During their tour, Carrie wrote frequently to her mother, Anne Marie LeFlore,
sometimes daily.
The Perrys remained in Coalgate until 1920.
After a year in Texas, they moved to Oklahoma City, where Ed tried the real
estate and oil businesses before becoming president of the Concho Sand and
Gravel Company, which position he held until he retired. He had continued to
dabble in politics until 1926, when he withdrew from the lieutenant governor’s
race because the state would not allow him to appear on the ballot as “Dynamite”
Ed Perry. Throughout this period, Carrie Perry faded from public view. Ed died
while they were on vacation in Colorado in 1939. She lived on until July 27,
1966, her life all but obscured from public view.
Despite her reticence, Carrie LeFlore Perry apparently had literary aspirations.
As a student at Sacred Heart Mission, she had published a series of stories and
narratives, for the most part related to Choctaw history and lore before Choctaw
removal to the West. In 1905, she became a writer for the newly
established Sturm’s Oklahoma Magazine, publishing a piece on Choctaw and
Chickasaw history. It was the publisher, O. P. Sturm, who in 1910 and 1911
published her 1908 series of letters to her mother as “An Oklahoman Abroad.”
Her last piece of writing, which appeared in 1928, was a biographical essay on
her father, Forbis LeFlore.
After Sturm called her an Indian
when he introduced the series of letters in 1910, he received expressions of
surprise from Easterners “that she could have manifested such vivacity,
enthusiasm and intelligence as mark her articles.” Sturm answered one
stereotypical view with another, apparently believing it necessary to denigrate
her Choctaw heritage: “With her mother the daughter of one of Napoleon’s
‘Old Guard,’ and her father Col. Forbis Le Flore, youngest brother of the first
governor of the Choctaws, is it any wonder that Mrs. A. E. Perry should find
that she is dominated by the hot blood of the French, only to be bewitched now
and again by the call of the wild, and again that she often arises to the
heights of her dignity through her English ancestors?. . .Like a large per cent
of her people in Oklahoma, Mrs. Perry’s Indian blood is the smallest of the
strains; but her French blood not only dominates her physically but
intellectually, and both evidence a high degree of culture.” In reality,
much of Carrie LeFlore Perry’s writing is typical of that done by tribal
writers, especially women, of the Five Civilized Tribes during the closing years
of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. Possessed
of a romantic, nostalgic, patriotic attachment to the past, they set about
writing the folklore and history of their tribes, the subjects of the largest
number of Perry’s published works. Thus “An Oklahoman Abroad” is the odd
work among her writings.
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