Ancestors

Mary Catherine Chevalier

Mary Catherine Chevalier was born on 22 April 1837 in Indiana. A family account written for her grave says she was full Cherokee and gives her maiden name as Bearpaw. The records of her own life do not name her parents. In 1880 the census taker wrote that she did not know where either of them had been born, and the census takers of 1860 and 1880 counted her as white. In 1910 and again in 1920 both of her parents were said to have been born in Ohio.

By the same account she married Peter Chevalier in 1859, at Delaware in Leavenworth County, Kansas Territory, not long after he had come from France. In August 1860 they were farming in Delaware Township, both 23. The township was named for the Delaware Indian reserve that covered that part of the county until the tribe sold it in the 1860s.

Her five children were born in Kansas between about 1862 and 1870: Francis, Albert, Ernest, Julia and Martha, called Mattie. By 1864 the family was at Melvern in Osage County. On 29 June 1870 the census taker found them in Agency Township, Osage County, with their mail coming to Olivet. Peter was farming land worth 1,400 dollars. The census taker wrote both Peter and Mary as 25, though both were past thirty, and the four children then born were all at home. In June 1880 all seven were living on the farm there, and the Kansas census found them together again in 1885.

Land passed through her own hands in Kansas. In March 1871 the Melvern Town Company bound itself to deed Mary C. Chevalier the whole of Block 15 in the new town of Melvern, as soon as it had title from the United States, and Peter signed as her witness. She joined Peter in a deed in 1884 and in a mortgage in June 1886 on their 160 acres, the northwest quarter of section 15, township 18, range 16. On 30 November 1889 she made a deed to her son Ernest. In the first week of December Ernest made a deed of his own, to W. M. Mixon.

The marriage ended between 1885 and 1895, and the family account says they divorced. Mary went south to Payne County in the Oklahoma Territory, which had been opened to settlers in the land run of 1889. Her son Albert and her daughter Mattie settled near her, and both had children born in Payne County in 1893. The family account says the land she farmed at Ingalls was in her own name, and that she gave the ground for the town's cemetery.

Her son Ernest settled near Ingalls as well, and in 1892 the county paid him as an assessor. That fall her daughter Julia married a neighbor, Lige Samples, and bad blood grew between the two young men. Meat stolen from a butcher shop in Ingalls was found in a corn crib on the Samples place, and Samples swore that Ernest had taken it. Ernest was charged and tried at Stillwater, with Samples as the main witness against him, and was released.

In June 1893 Ernest was appointed postmaster at Ingalls. On the morning of Thursday 22 June he went to the Samples place, and Lige Samples shot him dead there. A coroner's jury found that the killing was "wilful and felonious". The minister who buried Ernest wrote that "it was a sad affair to see and hear the bereaved mother." Myrtle May, the first child of Julia and Lige, was born six weeks later. In May 1894 a jury at Stillwater found Samples guilty of manslaughter in the first degree, and he was sentenced to four years. The governor of the Oklahoma Territory pardoned him in April 1897.

On 9 September 1895 she married John Smock in Payne County. The wedding took place at the Chevalier house, before Johnson Whiles, a justice of the peace. He was 57 and born in Indiana. She gave the clerk her age as 45, though she was 58, and the county marriage book wrote her name as Mary Chavalier. The license had a column for each party's birthplace, father and mother's maiden name. His were filled in. Hers were left empty. The family account says they divorced very quickly. About 1899 or 1900 she married Harrison Fletcher Orvis, a man of about 64 with children from an earlier marriage, and helped raise his two youngest sons, Floyd and Ira. In May 1910 she and Harrison were living on his farm in Pawnee Township, Payne County, which he owned free of mortgage. He was 74 and she was 71. The census taker wrote that they had been married eight years, which points to about 1902. She told him she had borne five children and that four were living. She could read but could not write. In 1910 Floyd married Myrtle May Samples, the daughter of Mary's daughter Julia, so that Mary's stepson became the husband of her granddaughter. In 1920 Mary and Harrison were living in Floyd's household in Payne County, with his wife Myrtle and their two small children, Glen and Ethel. Harrison died that year.

Mary died on 16 February 1922, aged 84. She most probably died of pneumonia at the Mable Dale hospital in Yale, east of Ingalls. Ten days later her stepson Floyd Orvis died there of the same disease, and the report of his death said that his mother had died at the same place the week before. She is buried in Ingalls Cemetery, and her son Albert was buried there in 1933.

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Cite: Heirology, "Mary Catherine Chevalier (1837-1922)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/mary-catherine-chevalier-1837-1922-a9d30a.