Interview: Author of North Caddo, Louisiana History and Retired Army Officer, Sam Collier

I first met Mr. Collier a few months back when he and his wife called me for a quote to clean their home. Soon after, I was excited to learn that he was an author of two books on the history of North Caddo. Being an aspiring author and lover of history, myself, I became extremely intrigued with what his books were about.

I finally got to read the two books and his style of writing had me drawn to every line. I asked Sam many questions and he answered them differently than my other interviews. I believe that you will find this unique interview rather interesting and gain better knowledge about where I have lived for the past 15 years or so.

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My father moved our family from Ohio, where he worked as a welder in a defense production plant, to the Vivian area in mid 1944 so that we would be near his family members. I hasten to add that I am not a transplanted northerner. My father was born in Mississippi, my mother in Alabama, and I was born Georgia and raised in Louisiana. For 120 years prior to the Civil War my ancestors lived in the Orangeburg District of South Carolina. I am of original old stock Anglo-Saxon southern bloodlines as my ancestors arrived in Virginia from Europe in about 1700 or earlier.

My professional life consisted of 37 years in the aerospace and defense industry. During the first 20 of those I was a regular army commissioned officer retiring in 1979. My areas of specialty included air defense unit command, foreign nation technical intelligence analysis, missile systems staff officer functions, and research and development coordination. I commanded units in Italy, California, and Viet Nam and spent seven years on the staffs of general officers. While in the army I earned my masters of science degree in operations research.

The last 17 years of the 37 were spent as an engineering program manager leading design teams assessing the application of stealth technologies on advanced military weapons systems. I was a member of the team that during the early 1980s designed and produced the Army's Tactical Missile System that was first employed in Iraq during the first Gulf War. In my last employment I worked for Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Fort Worth as a Systems Engineering Consultant on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program that will reach operational status in 2013. From 1966 until 2008 I held a Department of Defense Top Secret codeword security clearance. In 1993 I retired and moved from Dallas to Vivian.

Had I taken one more upper level course in southern history while earning my undergraduate BS in mathematics/physics I would have had a double minor. My interest in history, particularly of the south and more so of my own family, has always been one of my interests and hobbies. The local historical society asked us to put our house on the Christmas tour of homes in 1993, we agreed, one thing lead to another, and before I knew it I was the vice president of the society. I eventually spent six years as the society's president. During that time I conducted considerable research on local and area history and that provided the basis for the two books I authored.

My first book, "Terrapin Neck, Frog Level, Horseshoe", was a survey of the history of Caddo Parish north of Blanchard, the area of interest for the local historical society. It briefly addressed the Native American Caddo people, where they lived, their lasting influence on the area, and the cultural forces and economic engines of agriculture, timber, trains, and petroleum that so uniquely defined this area. The book consists primarily of text having few graphics. It has both a general and surname index and contains a bibliography.

My second book, "North Caddo Parish", is a captioned pictorial history of the area containing more than 200 historical pictures of both historic and extant villages and towns as well as the Caddo Pine Island oil field. Many people are identified as well as events and activities of the time period in the area from about 1900 until World War II. Both books are available for purchase at the Vivian Railroad Station Museum.

The Caddo people throughout the majority of their history in the larger ArkLaTex area primarily traversed what became north Caddo Parish. An exception to that generalization is demonstrated by the presence of the Caddo burial mounds near Dixie and Belcher which date back about 1200 years. The main Caddo village was along the Red River near where the states of Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas meet.

Because of war losses with the Osage and the encroachment of Americans on their lands in that area they moved south in 1795 down the Red River to a site on the Cedar Bluffs overlooking the river. That site was on the Bossier Parish side of the river between Gilliam and Hosston. Because of a communicable disease in their village they moved 2 years later into north Caddo Parish to a location referred to as the Flood Plain Village Site. It was located just south of LA Highway 2 east of Hosston and the Gilliam-Scotts Slough Road along what remains of Red Bayou.

The last site was aptly named. Because of the log jam in the Red River and spring and fall rains common to the area, freshets frequently swept out of the river and over the flat lands along the river in the northern part of the parish. The Caddo tolerated that for 3 years before moving in 1800 to a site just into Texas and south of Frazier Creek. They referred to the site as Timber Hill and there they remained until the cession of their lands to the federal government in 1835. In 1825 the Caddo Indian Agency moved from their location near the confluence of the Sulphur and Red Rivers in Arkansas to a site near where Herndon Magnet School is now located.

In 1831 the agency moved to its final location south of Shreveport. The interactions between the Caddo and the agency while in its three locations resulted in the Caddo blazing trails from their village site to the agency locations. The Caddo also established a trading trail to the east from their village crossing the Red near Miller's Bluff. Those cultural trails evolved into engineered roads we travel on today. It is an homage to the Caddo that our parish and the major lake in the area were named.

After the Caddo sold their land, essentially Caddo Parish Louisiana and Miller County Arkansas, in 1835 the federal government began a land survey of their new asset in 1838. A very large amount of inexpensive land became available for purchase. Wealthy southerners who both desired to relocate to the area as well as land speculators moved quickly. For the next 40 years large land owners of plantations thinly populated the area. It was not until 1878 that the first homesteaders began to acquire land in this area. By 1839 buyers of large tracts of land were moving in, having surveys conducted and establishing their plantations. Just 6 are noted, there were others.

The Government Land Office recorded their purchases in 1843. Just west of Pelican Lodge and barely in Louisiana, John Rives established his 1000 acre plantation. Most of Timothy Mooring's land was south of where Mooringsport is located today. His holdings at his plantation and along Caddo Lake totaled 2,500 acres. Richard Noel bought 2,000 acres with most being south of Mooring's land. Going up Black Bayou from its confluence with Caddo Lake was first located the 4,400 acre plantation of James Wadsworth.

Next along the bayou was the 6,085 acre holdings of James Erwin. His plantation home was on the bluff just east of where Highway 170 crosses Black Bayou today on its way from Vivian to Gilliam. His, and the others cited, plantation was on the flood plain across the bayou and he built a bridge there so that he and his slaves could easily get from the living to the working area. Just up from him along Red Bayou was the 1,000 acre plantation of John Herndon, the namesake of the magnet school located today nearby.

Further up Red Bayou Robert Hamilton owned a 1,843 acre plantation. Hamilton also owned a large plantation on Long Prairie adjacent to the Red River in Arkansas and another one in Texas along the river near where the Caddo had their village. It was said by an observer of Hamilton in 1840 that he treated his 4-legged animals better than he treated his slaves and spent his time traveling among his plantations living off the hospitality of other plantation owners in the area. Robert Hamilton was a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and was said to be the wealthiest man to do so. Neither Wadsworth, Erwin, Herndon or Hamilton had a wife. They either lived alone or with free women of color or Caddo females.

William Browning settled in the area by 1838 just west of where Vivian is located today. He married Rebecca Rives daughter of John Rives who owned the plantation near where Pelican Lodge is located. In 1848 Browning built his plantation home. He owned a store, grist mill, cotton gin and warehouse at the historic village of Monterey. He was also a member of the Masonic Lodge that was located there. His descendents still live in his original plantation home west of Vivian.

James Shennick owned and operated a ferry across Caddo Lake where Mooringsport is located today. He operated the ferry from 1824 until the early 1850s when his sold his operation. Until 1842 he was paid annually by the Caddo Indian Agency for transporting Caddo and agency personnel across the lake. Until the early 1900s Caddo Lake was called Ferry Lake after his business. James Bayou, corrupted to Jeems by many, and originally called Coushatta Jim's Bayou was also named after Shennick. People surnamed Holt and LaCaze living in the area today, as well as others, are descended from Shennick. By the mid-1850s Shennick had moved to where Myrtis is located today, bought land there and died in 1860.

All of the towns and villages in north Caddo Parish except for Oil City and Mooringsport owe their existence to two railroads that traversed the area from north to south beginning in the 1890s. Oil City is aptly named since its inception in 1905 and its continued life today derives from the oil boom that began there in 1905. Mooringsport began as a small, relatively minor, port of call for steamboats traversing Caddo Lake beginning in the late 1830s and early 1840s. It experienced only small growth until the 1905 oil boom when it too boomed to become what it is today.

In 1895 the Kansas City Pittsburg and Gulf Railroad laid its rails through the area. Agents of the railroad while identifying rights of way for the rail also identified likely locations where towns could be built. The north to south Shreveport to Lewisville Road, a military road that built upon Caddo trails that had been expanded upon by the earliest settlers, crossed a trading trail/road that had been established by the Caddo that ran from west to east and expanded upon by the earliest settlers. That crossing point was where Vivian is located today.

The Arkansas Construction Company, a subsidiary of KCP&G, constructed a town site there adjacent to the railroad and when they filed the plat in 1897 at the Caddo Parish court house they named it the Vivian Town site. Why they chose the name Vivian is unknown but it could have been to honor one of the many Dutch families who had financed the construction of the KCP&G.

The many saloons, more than a dozen, in and around the town of Vivian were a sign of the prosperity the area experienced because of the petroleum industry with the first boom at Oil City in 1905 and the last boom at Rodessa in 1935. Working in the oil field was back breaking, dirty, hot, cold, for the men who worked 7-12 hour days each week. The men had to have some way of unwinding and dealing with the hardest of working environments. The many bars provided that. As the boom faded, oil production diminished as did the number of men working in the fields; the number of bars followed along.

The stabilizing economy was seeking a steady state which occurred by the end of WWII and growth stagnated. After that Vivian's population remained at around 2,000 until the early 1960s. The town then expanded its corporate limits and drew in roughly another 2,000 people increasing the total to about 4,000. The town's population has remained basically unchanged since then.

There are no new natural resources to be exploited for economic benefit. The oil sands have limited oil reserves that are very difficult and expensive to extract; oil will not boom again in this area. Perhaps there will be growth due to natural gas, time will tell, but there will never again be rapid growth in the size of local towns and villages and the related population like what was experienced three times in our history. Area leaders today attempt to gain economic growth through manufacturing and tourism. Growth in those sectors will probably be experienced but only stepwise and limited in magnitude.

The local branch of the Shreve Memorial Library occupies a very beautiful and historic structure. It was constructed by the Caddo School Board in the 1920s as a primary school building housing the first and second grades. I attended both grades in that structure. After the local school was restructured and facilities expanded upon in what had been the secondary school buildings and renamed a middle school, the primary school building was closed and shuttered. Vivian had lost its beautiful high school building being replaced by an auditorium. Some feared the primary building would also be torn down.

A building across the street from the school plant housed the Vivian Branch of the Shreve Memorial Library. In the 1990s a concerned citizen, Raymond Lee, who attended school in the primary building could not accept that the structure would be razed. He took it on himself and worked with the historical society, the school board, and the library management and convinced them that a trade of buildings could be affected giving the library a larger and historic building while the school board could have a new resource center for teachers. That trade was completed, the primary building was renovated and modernize to create the beautiful structure it is today.

Noah Tyson, one of the earliest settlers in the Rodessa area, had come from an area in North Carolina just before the Civil War where a local village was named Frog Level in the 1880s. Perhaps the name Frog Level was a common one in North Carolina that referred to land that was easily flooded and became frequented by croaking frogs. The area around the intersection of LA Highway 168, the old Shreveport to Lewisville Road, and Buffalo Road was thinly populated by the 1870s. In 1879 the location was added to the postal service Star Route out of Atlanta, Texas. Noah had died in 1874 but perhaps locals had already referred to the area as Frog Level. None the less the community voted on that name for their village.

Marion Spearman was the first post master and the village was said to have had a general store, school and bowling alley. When the railroad came through in 1895 the post office was moved to where the railroad crossed the Shreveport to Lewisville Road to facilitate mail receipt and delivery as the Star Route was discontinued. That location became known as Rodessa. The cultural heritage of north Caddo Parish was uniquely defined by the Caddo Native Americans, steamboats, arable land, timberlands, railroads and the petroleum industry.