"Where in the world did you get the name?"

I had thought I was simply being clever in joining the universal symbol for family study onto the land from whence my generation of family arises. Uncovering the true answer has been personally enriching and the inspiration for this preface.

As I began to reflect a flood of emotional and intellectual associations emerged that confirmed how appropriate the choice......at the least for my domain. I know my brother shares some of these memories and must certainly hold others and some contradictory as well. I believe you will find as I have many dreams conceived by vistas of the land and mind before and of us. It will be with awe and humility that I add occasional expressions to those of other family members made in conversations speaking aloud and as clearly in the letters and memorabilia from the two preceding centuries.

For my grandfather's uncle Rolandus Hirst it was the high mountain country but for me the prairies are what home looks like. For both of us it is the trees that focused our attention. On the prairie each rare tree is, like each unique human, memorable for form and place. Even now some 50 years since I could claim them as "home," a sense of contentment unlike any other fills my heart when I view these "great plains." I never feel completely free in regions where the trees are not distinguishable against a visible horizon.

Some years back when I was on a small segment of remaining prairie free of most reminders of the year, I found myself fully expecting to see decorated Indians on spotted ponies appear over each next rise. On my most recent revisit I was again struck that this is indeed "God's Country." Our Native American predecessors understood this land could fulfill the needs of man safely but only when used in harmony with its needs.

Many of my emotions and associations stem from the seemingly numerous and long journeys on narrow roads across the plains of southwestern Oklahoma. I recall how, with the help of Mother and Daddy, my brother and I memorized and anticipated virtually every tree along the route, the elms beside the road that provided a moment of respite from the sun's heat and the mesquite and especially rare willows that gave reassurance of water nearby.

I do not think we ever permitted a piece of land under cultivation to pass the window without remarking what was growing and how it flourished. A practice that yet lingers in my thoughts when driving in solitude.  Our letters are replete with crop information, a culture with its feet in the soil. There of course were then as now a number of familiar man-made "trees" that remind us of the progress of human habitation. These also continue to populate many of my dreams.

At the time that we were counting trees it had been a few short decades since that hot summer of 1901 when our great grandfather Rolandus Aurelian examined and recorded in his pocket notebook descriptions of each Comanche County lottery section. One of these was to become the boyhood home of our father and birthplace of his brother Ralph.

Even less time had passed since our cousin William Clark had created the green space  plan for the to be new capital, Oklahoma City. The Capitol Building yet resides at the end of a broad boulevard designed to give place for oil wells that provided funding for the parks. And Kendall and Ralph had romped with cousins George, Tom and Roger on their boy-made tree, their own invention and construction. "Our father had gone to work as a driller in the oil fields . The derrick was George's idea with Tom and Roger, and anyone else who came by, as labor recruits. I don't know what happened to it but it was there on the farm a long time." ... Ellen Victoria Sheppard Jones, September 2000.

A surprise reward of my research has been the discovery of how many of our progenitors were born in this country or resided for significant portions of their lives in regions not yet states — accounting I believe at least in part for the optimism, energy and images of new beginnings in their writings from the two centuries preceding this. A complementary gift has been their exquisite awareness and sensitivity of all around them and as well the understanding and illumination of context. My childhood memories are filled with the gentle demands by all the adults to observe and understand.

I warn that you will find no individuals of particular wealth or celebrity or even much about the "great events" of the times, for that is all transitory. The facts I present are many well documented and all accurate to the best of my knowledge. My aim for these particular pages is I believe modest and I make no pretension to completeness nor even coherence. I hope instead for a literary expression presenting the lens through which most of us experience and best understand history and life ... an ordinary family... in our case one whose roots in this nation go deeply into the early New England experience. "... I wonder why I do not care for the things that are, like the things that were.