Jas. Boyd

James Boyd believed he was more than a hundred years old when he was interviewed in Itasca, Texas. He was born Scott Bird in an Indian hut in what he called Phantom Valley, Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. His father was Blue Bull Bird and his mother Nancy Will. As a small boy he was fishing in the river during a fight between white settlers and Native people. Hearing shooting and screams, he hid in the brush, and a white man named Sanford Wooldridge told him everyone had been killed and took him to Texas, somewhere near Waco. He never saw his family again.

Wooldridge held about 1,600 acres, and James said the mistress was hard on the people she enslaved and that those who wouldn't work were whipped. When freedom came, they threw their hats in the air, then grew frightened when the enslaver asked how they would eat and clothe themselves. About a year later he became a cowhand on a South Texas ranch and drove cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Kansas, becoming a top hand. Working for a rancher named Boyd, he drove a herd to Mexico, sold it as instructed, and took the name James Boyd.

In 1869 he married Martina in Matamoros; they had four children before she died. He then drifted back to Texas and married several more times, in Huntsville, Fort Bend, Burleson and Washington counties and in Austin. He said he had fathered about twenty children. In 1924 he married Hagar Price near Milford, and they were living together in Itasca. He said he usually wore a black suit to get married.