EMERSON, Ark. (AP) - Moving through the rooms of the Canaan Land Church parsonage that Beatrice Riley now calls home is like touring a small museum filled with Native American artifacts.
Paintings, arrowheads, artwork fashioned from rattlesnake rattles, hats, dream catchers, dolls, John Wayne memorabilia - even a couple of saddles and a pair of fancy spurs labeled “Bea” - are behind every door, in every corner. Riley, 87, sits in her living room, a sleepy Chihuahua in her lap, and tells stories of life lived in a land of stark beauty.
Riley moved to Emerson in April to live with her son, Charles, after having lived 64 years in Kansas. She lived for more than 30 of those years on a 53-acre plantation in the midst of the Cimarron National Grasslands, north of Elkhart, where for decades she was a surgical nurse, The (Magnolia) Banner-News (https://bit.ly/1uEF0i3 ) reported.
Nursing, however, was only one aspect of her life. Riley, who is one-quarter Cherokee, is a self-described “outdoors girl.” She operated a horse-riding club on the grasslands her Indian ancestors once called home and worked on a wheat farm she owned with her late husband. Prior to moving to Arkansas, she drove gravel trucks - mostly for the fun of it.
“I always liked to be outdoors more than I liked to be in the house,” Riley said. “I liked to have a babysitter and go out in the field and work. I didn’t too much but I liked to get out there and drive the trucks, maybe plow a quarter.”
Born in Illinois, Riley moved to Phoenix in 1947 for nurse’s training. “I had an uncle back in Illinois who put me through training and I loved it. I always wanted to be a nurse.”
She said she met her husband, Harold Edwin Riley, at the horse racing track in Phoenix. “All my life I owned a horse. On the race track, I had a friend that ponied horses and worked them out in the mornings. So in my spare time, if I didn’t have classes, I’d go to the race track with her and that gave me a little money to spend. I just got to doing that, and I met (Harold).”
She and Harold moved from Phoenix to Elkhart in 1950 and there she stayed, working as a nurse and on the wheat farm he owned. “I drove trucks hauling wheat to market, drove tractors to plow and plant the wheat - that was about all we raised. To make money, wheat was the main source around there.”
“I kept up with my nursing,” she said. “I worked 13 years in surgery. I liked surgery but I’d go hide every time a pregnant woman came in! I didn’t like OB and they knew I didn’t like it.”
She moved to Elkhart, and then in 1980 acquired her property in the Cimarron Grasslands after a friend deeded the acreage to her for nursing a family member.
“The doctors told this lady she could take her mother home if she’d get a nurse to be with her. So they contacted me, and everybody said, ’Bea, get off them trucks, jumping in and out!’”
“One day we were out riding around and went by this old church,” Riley said. “I said, ’I could buy that old church if I had a place to put it.’ The daughter said, ’I’ve got a place to put it.’ They owned the bank in that town and so much land. The property was on a national grassland. She said, ’I’ll deed you this ground if you’ll take care of Momma and me.’ And I said OK. And I said, ’You want me to see if I can buy this old church?’ She said, ’Yeah, go see if you can buy it.’”
Riley purchased the old Methodist church for $2,000 and had it relocated to her 53-acre spread near the Cimarron River. “It had a roof on it but I moved in before I got it ready. I sold my place in town so I had to move in. I really hate to part with it, but you have to do what you have to do.”
She lived there on the river more than 30 years. “I loved it. I loved to hear the coyotes howl at night. I was 17 miles from town. We got snows and that was the only thing I didn’t like. Our summers weren’t as hot and humid as it is down here. We were in a drought, but of course when I left, it started raining.”
She said she would ride a pony along the nearby Santa Fe Trail, looking for trinkets and other antiques.
“I had a little mule I rode all the time. One place I dug up a bedstead and it was real pretty. One time I found a scabbard on the trail. It had fallen down between two rocks. I always carried a pair of pliers in my hip pocket. I made me a little loop and got the scabbard out of the crevice. I was at a spot where the Indians had met the white guys and they had a battle years ago. I carried it to a symposium in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and this archaeologist said he wanted to take it to the Smithsonian. I said, ’No, you are not taking it, I have let them have different things and never got ’em back!’”
Riley stocked a museum in Elkhart with her findings along the Santa Fe Trail and most of those items found their way to Arkansas last spring inside two U-Haul vans. Now she and Emerson residents Beryl and Carolyn Campbell are painstakingly going through all Riley’s collectibles deciding which ones to keep and which to put up in a two-day estate sale.
“I’ve kept all my Indian relics pretty much,” she said. “It’s been a hard thing giving some of it up but I knew I had to. At 87, anything can happen.”
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Information from: The Banner-News, https://www.bannernews.net
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