The Oklahoma Bar Journal September 2024

W omen in L aw

Mirabeau Cole Looney

M IRABEAU LAMAR COLE LOONEY WAS BORN JAN. 16, 1871, in Talladega County, Alabama, to William Isaac Cole – a Gatesville, Texas, lawyer – and Martha (Mattie) Ann Nixon. 1 She was named after Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second president of the sover eign Republic of Texas. 2 It is believed the Cole family moved to Robertson County, Texas, around 1880 because the census from that year shows a Lamar Cole living on a farm with her mother; her brothers; her mother’s brother, William A. Nixon; and her grandmother, Talitha Walston Nixon. 3

Ms. Looney was still standing in 1921. 13 She planted her first crop of 20 acres in blowing sand with her 10-year-old son holding on to and guiding the plow handles while she drove the mule team. 14 After the children were in bed that first night, Ms. Looney went outside and walked around the new sod house in the moonlight and would later say, “Nothing I have ever lived in since has seemed so grand as that place did that night.” 15 The next day, before going to El Dorado to buy a windmill, she traded two of their 12 cattle and gave notes for an organ. Once the sod house was finished and the crop was in, Ms. Looney would again teach music lessons. With the money from those lessons and the crop, she purchased a two-room frame shack that she had moved to the farm. As she would later say, “We never felt richer than when we settled in our two-room house, with a new organ to take the place of the old one, and a windmill to

the land, but the patent was can celed by ruling on June 21, 1900. 9 To put food on the table, she taught music for a year and then saw the opportunities inherent in becoming a landowner. She filed a claim on a quarter section of government land one mile from Hollis, traded her organ for a team of mules and set about building a sod house on the hard-baked prairie soil. 10 With courage of the “chilled steel variety” and “fires of deter mination glinting in her blue eyes,” Ms. Looney started digging her own dugout. 11 The basement home where the family lived for the first year was four feet deep and lined with boards that stood on end and capped with a shingle roof. 12 Once the home was complete, Ms. Looney drove her mule team 13 miles to the Red River, where she cut the posts that would form a fence around her quarter section of land. If the posts were too heavy for her to lift into the wagon, they were dragged by a mule onto the wagon. Part of the fence built by

Ms. Looney’s interest in the law surfaced early in her life, and she could often be found reading her father’s tan calf law books or fic tional accounts of trials. Paralleling her interest in the law was her interest in civil government and history – interests that would serve her well in later years. 4 In 1891, she married “Doc” Tourney Looney in Texas. Shortly thereafter, the young couple crossed over the Oklahoma line into the future Greer/Harmon County in the southwestern part of Oklahoma Territory and settled in what would later become the Looney commu nity, named after the family. 5 The Looneys filed for a 160-acre home stead in December 1897 in Greer County, where they would begin their family 6 and where Doc Looney would become one of the earliest postmasters in the new area. 7 While still a young man, Doc Looney died, leaving his wife with five children under the age of 10 to raise alone. 8 It is not known whether she sold the family farm or just left

Statements or opinions expressed in the Oklahoma Bar Journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Oklahoma Bar Association, its officers, Board of Governors, Board of Editors or staff.

10 | SEPTEMBER 2024

THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL