Volume 10 , Issue 6

Pioneer William Thomas Little

William Thomas Little was born at Newark Ohio, June 14, 1862. Four years later his parents migrated to Kansas, settling at Olathe, and, in 1873, they moved to Abilene, where William T. Little graduated from the high school in 1882.

William Little then entered the University of Kansas. In 1885, he had an attack of the pioneering fever and settled in Western Kansas, at Leoti, Wichita county, where helped to build the town, organize the county and pilot it through a county-seat war.

Subsequently, he attended the law school of Columbian University, at Washington, District of Columbia, but left on account of ill health without graduating. He was admitted to the bar, but never practiced.

He came to Guthrie on the opening day, April 22, 1889, where he published the Guthrie Get-Up, a small paper printed on a job press and the first to be actually printed in the Oklahoma country after it was opened to settlement.

Little secured a homestead claim in Noble county in the race at the opening of the Cherokee Strip. In 1894 he was elected as the representative of Noble county in the Territorial Legislative Assembly. He was custodian of the historical society from 1895 to 1899, when he resigned to enter the service of the Dawes Commission as a land appraiser in the reservations of the five civilized tribes.

In 1901 he was placed in charge of the appraisement of the school lands in the newly opened Comanche-Kiowa and Wichita-Caddo reservations. A few months later he was appointed postmaster at Perry, which position he held until he relinquished it on account of failing health shortly before his death, which occurred July 5, 1908. William Thomas Little will be remembered as the pioneer arborculturist of Oklahoma, for he was an enthusiast as a tree planter, the public square and parks of his home town attesting not only his love of trees, but also his skill in inducing them to grow when others were skeptical of the success of the experiment. -- [A Standard History of Okalhoma, Vol. 2, by Joseph B.Thoburn.]
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