Then father came to Texas on horse-back and located eight miles from Honey Grove on Sanders Creek. When mother heard from him she put us five little boys in a carry-all, followed on horseback herself, and the negroes brought up the rear with the household goods in covered wagons. Whenever we went over a steep place, mother got off of her horse and got hold of the hind-end of the hack to keep us from turning over. This move was made in the fall of 1852. One night we camped across the road from a house that had a porch. There came a pouring rain and mother went and asked the people in the house if she and the children might stay on their porch out of the rain, and they would not let her. We had to sit up in the hack all night. I was only three years old, but I remember the trip, and remember that my brother and I kept count of the big trees along the way.

We went from Lamar County to Parker County, and there was where I was reared. When I was in my sixteenth year I enlisted in the Confederate Army, in Billy Mason’s Company from Parker County, doing frontier duty. The Indians came in on a raid one time, and two or three miles from where my father lived, they found Bill Hamilton and his little brother twelve years old, and scalped them and cut their hearts out and laid them on their breasts.

When I was about twenty years old I came into this part of the country. I located eight miles east of where Wichita Falls now is. My father was here during the war, and we came up in 1871. We came here to farm for we had heard that farmers made good money. Colonel Whaley’s son Tom was a farmer south of the Big Wichita, and raised from 15,000 to 20,000 bushels of oats in a year, and sold them to the government at Fort Sill. They came to the farm for the oats and paid from 75 cents to $1.25 per bushel.

One day I saw about 80 deer at one time. They were about four miles from Thornberry on this side of the river. They were scattered out enough so that I could count them.

I had a grey pony named Dixie which I bought in 1871 in Weatherford. I paid $125 for him. He was a race pony. He went so fast that he could step on his front shoe with his hind foot and pull the shoe off, and never make a bobble.

My brother and I were located right between the Waggoner Ranch and the Curtis and Atkinson Ranch and we decided we were crowded too much. So my brother went up in the bend of the river that fall, and made a brush fence across the bend, and I and a friend named Bill Pierce went up and located with him, a mile or so from the mouth of Beaver Creek. In those days there weren’t very many mesquite trees,a and they were only about three feet tall, and in the river valley there was tall grass, so tall that you couldn’t see a man more than 100 yards. One year in August there was a prairie fire, and it jumped the river and caught the tall grass on the other side.

Right above the ranch, about eight or ten miles, there was a herd of about 10,000 buffalo that drifted down from the north and stayed for the winter. The last time they were there seven buffalo stayed in with our cattle on the ranch. We wanted to keep them, but they got out and some other men killed them.

My brother and I plowed all winter there on the ranch, and then I went to the home of my aunt that died, and got a gold watch and a draft for $5,000. I went to Waco to cash it. I had two little mules and no top to the buggy, and went on to Leon County and stayed about six weeks, and never told anybody about having that money. I had a little cousin that had chills and fever until his spleen was enlarged, and they let him go home with me. He stayed a year or two and then my uncle George and his wife came after him.

In 1873 the Wichita River got pretty high. A man named George Gardner lived where Wichita Falls now is, in a little log cabin covered with dirt. The water got so high that they were penned in the house, and a man named Court Babb and some boys went in on horseback and got them out.

On September 18, 1877 I married Miss Kate Lewis. I was told many times by different people that she was the prettiest young lady in Parker County. We were married three miles north of Weatherford at her home. We married about eight o'clock in the morning and she had a lunch fixed for dinner. We stopped and had dinner and when we got up I missed my pocketbook. I said I had to hurry on to Ft. Worth and get some money. My cousin, a young man who was riding to Ft. Worth with us, said he never thought I’d have to borrow on my honeymoon. When we got to Ft. Worth I told my wife I had to hurry on to the bank and get some money, and I kissed her goodbye and went; it was the first time I had ever kissed her. We went on to Dallas and then to Chicago. We stayed at the Palmer Hotel in Chicago, which was the only fire-proof hotel there. (When we celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary we had dinner at the same hotel, which was then called the Palmer House.)

Mrs. Ikard related the following incident from the honeymoon trip: "I had had my traveling dress made in Weatherford: it was black silk alpaca. It was made like some of the pictures, but I wasn’t sure it was just right. That night at the Palmer Hotel when we were about half-way to the dining room, I saw somebody with a dress on just like mine, so I began to feel good and thought my dress must be just the thing, and about that time Mr. Ikard said: "I’ll bet that is the biggest mirror you ever saw," and I found that there were mirrors on both sides of the hall and the other black dress I had seen was my own reflection. I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t tell Mr. Ikard for more than a year. We bought a suit of bedroom furniture in Chicago and had it sent back home. We went to Niagara Falls on our wedding trip, which was considered a very long journey in those days. Mr. Ikard had a pass on the railroad because he shipped so many cattle, but I never had one."

One time we had to be in Coleman County on the 10th of April to receive some cattle, and when we got there they were not ready. So "Cap" and I stayed all night and went turkey hunting. I got on his horse and rode on ahead and I looked up the bank and saw our horses straggling up the bank and the Indians following the horses. We let out after them. They were behind a thicket and had not seen us. One Indian was riding a little pony: he went as fast as that pony could go, and when we got in about three hundred yards of him he jumped off, but he took his saddle and bridle and quirt and rope. Soon he dropped his bridle, then his quirt and then the rope, and last the saddle. Then he started shooting. We were about fifty steps from him. He shot one of our horses in the side of the neck. We thought he was shot in the head, so "Cap" said "You run around and stop those horses." I did and we took them back to camp. We changed horses and went back but we couldn’t find the Indians.

One year Dick Phelps and Perkins and I went to Ft. Griffin to buy cattle. I bought 300 steers and paid cash for them, and 100 cows on credit. After we got through dinner I counted out the money for the 300 steers. On the way back we had no road or trail and had a hard time to keep the 400 cattle together, so I hired a man named Buffalo Bill to help us until we got back to the ranch. On the way back the boys were joking me about carrying all that money over there with me, and saying what they would have done if they had known that I had it, and Buffalo Bill heard them. Well, we got over there and branded the cattle and turned them aloose. I took a bunch of the steers on to Dennison.

I went down there and shipped the cattle but didn’t buy any more. That afternoon I was out doctoring a horse’s back that had screw worms, putting axle grease on it, when some one came up behind me and said: "Stick ‘em up." A man was holding a big six-shooter up in both his hands, and as I neared the ranch house he told me to get all the money I had and put it there in a chink between the logs in the side of the house. I just had $60, but he thought because I had bone to buy cattle and didn’t buy any that I would have a lot of money. Then he told me to get out in the yard, and I said "What do you want me to do that for?" and he said, "I don’t want you to get the drop on me." As I started out I saw my chance and darted back in the house and shot at him, but he must have shot first, for he hit my right hand and knocked two knuckles out of joint. I saw the coat tail of his old yankee coat, around the corner of the house and I thought, "I got him now," but he got on his horse and left. Perkins and I followed. They caught him at Belknap, and brought him back to Henrietta and put him in a little jail house. A man named George Wilson went to the jail with an axe one night and broke the lock to let out a friend of his that he thought was in there, and Buffalo Bill got out at the same time. Later Buffalo Bill was captured at Belknap and he killed the sheriff and the sheriff killed him.

In the spring of 1872 I took 400 steers to Wichita, Kansas, and made $8,000 clear; and I still had 200 steer yearlings at the ranch. When I drove cattle across country I always camped near a creek at night, and the next morning I didn’t start out again until the dew was off the grass, and I did not have any trouble with hoof disease like some other ranchers did.

One time Dick Phelps and I were on the way to Kansas with some cattle, and camped for the night in a creek bottom. I told him to be sure and tie the horses to trees, but he tied them to bushes. At 10:30 we heard the Indians: I called out "Every fellow to his horse," but the Indians had pulled up the bushes that the horses were tied to and gone with them. A deaf and dumb man was my cook; he didn’t know what was going on. The Curtis and Atkinson ranch was three or four miles away: we all let out for there. Some got lost and were out all night.

We used to own 11,000 acres of land on Red River, we paid from $1.50 to $2.00 per acre for it. In Clay and Archer Counties we owned 75,000 in one tract, and 17,500 in another, and the two tracts joined. We paid 50 cents to $2.00 for the first we bought, and later we paid $3.00 to $3.20 per acre. My brother, Capt. E.F. Ikard was my partner. He was Captain of the Texas Rangers in about 1874.

In September, 1876, I went to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and there I saw the first Hereford cattle I had ever seen. I bought some and brought back, the first that had ever been in this part of the country. After that I bought some every year or two, but I always lost some of them with tick fever before I could get them home, or in a few months after. One year I bought four Herefords from T.B. Sotham of Chillicothe, MO. One year T.L. Miller of Beecher, Illinois sent a steer free of charge to Kit Carter, president of the Texas Cattle Raisers’ Association. Before the Cattlemen’s Association ever had an inspector, Tom Waggoner, and Burke Burnett and I had an inspector from Fort Sill.

One time we paid Quanah Parker $125 to keep the Indians on the east side of the north fork of Red River. This contract was for a period of a year or two.

I bought a Hereford cow at an auction sale in Kansas that was from the royal herd in England. I bought her from Armour & Co., her name was "Tea Rose" and I paid $1,125. This cow had a calf for which I was offered a big price, but refused it. The sire of this calf was "Anxiety IV." He was imported too, by Gudgell and Simpson, importers. Later the cow and calf both died of Texas fever.

I had one cow named "Lovey" that never had a calf that was not either a blue ribbon or a champion. I was at one time vice president of the Texas Cattle Raisers’ Association.

When I sold out, at the Dispersion Sale of Hereford Cattle, Mr. Boog Scott paid $1,000 for one of my bulls, and I got $500 for two cows, and $800 for one bull. I sold a carload to Larkin.

I rode the same saddle for 57 years. I had my initials, W.S.I. on the front of the hind tree. I rode a horse until three years ago, or until I was 81 years old.

My grandfather and grandmother on my father’s side were full blood Irish. Abel Ikard was killed at the battle of Bunker Hill. Sherman in his raid burned the records and that is as far back as I can get the record on that side. My grandfather and grandmother on mother’s side were named Tubb. My grandmother was named Isabella Tubb. General Floyd signed the Declaration of Independence. My grandmother on my mother’s side was a Floyd.

My father, Milton Ikard, was a member of the Texas Legislature from Parker County during the war. Five men ran against him and he beat them two to one. This was in 1864.

I have made my home in Henrietta since 1878. We have lived in this house for forty-seven years.

The Baptist church was built in 1884 and I have been a deacon in this church for over fifty years. My father was the inspiration for the building of the Baptist Church. The Baptist was the first church here, and the Methodists built soon after. My father was a Methodist until he was twelve years old. He said "I read and found I was wrong," so he changed and became a Baptist.

I am the father of six daughters and two sons, and we reared one orphan. My son, Lee Davis Ikard, went to the World War ahead of Pershing, and served six months with the French. When the American forces got over there he served with them until the war was over. He was killed in a railroad wreck after he got home.

I have been a Mason more than fifty years here in Henrietta. I was conducted into the Masonic Lodge at Henrietta by Judge Barwise. I am today considered the oldest living Mason in Clay County.

The following was added by his daughter, Mrs. Marvin Smith, of Wichita Falls:

"My father was the first man to bring the Hereford cattle into Texas. From a small start and continually adding registered animals, though his losses were heavy, he established a herd that was considered the very best Hereford animals in Texas, up until the time of his dispersion sale. Many of Hereford breeders today, trace some of their herd back to the animals he bred.

He has always been a staunch Democrat, and today he is keenly interested in politics and is informed on all current events. His eyesight had almost failed him, but Mother does all his reading. Through all the fifty-four years of wedded life, he had regarded her opinion and counsel. Their companionship has been a constant and devoted love.

If he was your friend, he was a loyal one. He is devoted to his children and takes a special pride in his grandchildren, whom he charms with his Indian Tales and experiences. He has also had an influence in making loyal Southerners out of them.

On account of signing large security papers, my Father and his brother lost these vast holdings. In spite of these reverses and almost blindness, my Father remains a kindly old gentleman, respected by all who know him."