Oldest living full-blood Chickasaw has simple answer for longevity

Lillian Underwood, the eldest living full-blood Chickasaw citizen, credits her 98 years of good health to staying on a straight and narrow path.

“I have tried to live a good life,” Underwood said.

Much of her conversation is sprinkled with chuckles, making one suspect a good sense of humor might also factor in as an important key to her longevity.

Underwood lives outside of Mill Creek, Oklahoma, on 640 acres. Part of it is original allotment; part of it was inherited by her mother, Alice Carhee, whose name is listed on the Dawes Rolls.

“My mother raised us,” she said. “We lived a good life. We had a garden and a cow to milk. We had a horse and hogs. We canned berries, grapes, tomatoes and squash.
“We grew corn and put it up on the top of the roof so the sun would dry it. After it dried, we’d put it in jars and cook it.”

Underwood said times have changed from the day she and her family would hook up the horse and wagon, and travel 5 miles to the town of Mill Creek.

“We used to drive along, and after a while we would jump off and walk, and after a while jump back on. It was a lot of fun,” she said. “Now we have these old cars,” she said a bit irreverently, chuckling.

She and her husband, Andrew “Bud” Underwood, who died in 2000, used to hunt and fish in the old style.

“My husband taught me how to rope fish,” she said. “You make a noose with a copper wire, put it around a fish, and when you jerked it up, you had a fish.”

She said catching fish with a bow and arrow was also common.

“My husband made his bows, his arrows and his arrow heads. He was also good with a gun,” she said.

The area was more populated as Underwood was growing up, and she misses that sense of community today.

“There used to be houses all around here,” she said. “My brother would get out here on the porch and holler, and you could hear somebody way down there holler back. And then somebody else would holler. They don’t do that anymore.”

Underwood has five children (four living and one deceased), 13 grandchildren, 20 great-grandchildren and 11 great-great-grandchildren.

“They still come around, see me and call out, ‘Granny, Granny, Granny!’” she laughed.
Underwood worked at the Stromberg-Carlson Telephone Manufacturing Company in Sulphur, Oklahoma, where she repaired rotary telephones. When that company folded, she sewed jeans for the Levi Strauss Company locally until it shut down.
Later still, she served as cook for 20 years with Chickasaw Nation Senior Centers in Sulphur and Connerville, Oklahoma. She retired at 90, which is not to say she is idle. Underwood said her push lawnmower is broken, but when it’s working, she still mows the grass on her property.

As a girl she knew and spoke the Chickasaw language, but her teachers at Carter Seminary in Ardmore did not allow it and punished the students if they heard it being spoken.

“I regret that I’ve lost the ability to speak our language. I can say a few words but have lost the ability to make a sentence,” she said.

Underwood said she has a prized relic from her grandmother’s trip along the Removal route out of the Homeland that was passed to her by her mother.

“I’ve got her black, potbelly cooking pot. I wish I had met my grandmother but never did. Her name was Julie Carhee,” she said.

Despite Underwood’s good humor, a trace of wistfulness is apparent. Granddaughter Celia Underwood lives with her, but the rest of her family is relatively far flung compared to years past.

“We always had a houseful during Thanksgiving and Christmas,” she said. “My nieces and nephews would all come in, and we’d have a good time. Those days are gone forever. We don’t get together like we used to.

“I like family,” she said.