My name is Billy James Chance.  I was born in Louisville, Alabama.  My father, grandfather and great grandfather are Cherokee and Creek Indians.  My great, great grandfather left the Indian lands in North Carolina in 1835 and moved south into the upper Chattahoochee River Valley to keep from being sent to the mid-west reservation. When he got into upper Georgia, he hunted, trapped and fished to live and at times he would do jobs for the white men for food or money. After his family was killed by the white men in North Carolina he, his wife Elizabeth and his two children moved west into Alabama where they had six more children and one of whom was my next grandfather, Joseph Carter Green, who lost sight in one eye while serving in the Civil War, but I will get to that story later.

     One day a trader said, “Indian, how would you like to go along and help with the pack mules, you may have food and clothing for your woman and kids.”

     “Of course,” said my grandfather. He had been wishing he might get work because it was not easy for an Indian to get work, so he went with the trader. The next day he was riding through the wilderness of Alabama, driving a team of pack horses before him. 

     When the pack train reached the lower Chattahoochee River Valley, the trader told my grandfather, “Just ahead is where we will be doing the trading with the Indians.”

     My grandfather walked around until he found a Creek Indian with some rabbit skins to trade. He told the trader that this Indian wished to trade with them. The Indian could understand my grandfather and what he was saying because the Creek and the Cherokee’s had been trading with each other for a very long time. We called each other brothers but the white men did not know what was being said, so they learned to trust my grandfather and what he said to the other Indians.  He had been away from Elizabeth and the children and was looking forward to returning home, for he was trying to build a log cabin for his wife and children to live in. This cabin is still standing in Barbour County, Alabama today.

     To tell you a little about Alabama, there was not a railroad in Alabama or in the United States when Alabama became a State in 1819; in fact, this state was nearly fifteen years old when the first railroad west of the Allegheny Mountains was finished. This railroad was only forty miles long and ran between Tuscumbia and Decatur.  The man who had this railroad built was a cotton planter who lived near Florence, Alabama. The planters of this part of Alabama used the Tennessee River as a waterway, but they could not ship things by water farther than Florence because of the shoals in the river. So when the man who built the railroad heard of a new way of moving goods that were being used in Pennsylvania, he decided to make the trip to that state and find out about the new railroad.

     He left Florence on horseback and rode all the way to Pennsylvania where the first railroad train in the United States was run. The Pennsylvania railroad was only twenty miles long and was very crude, but over this unfinished line miners were hauling coal.  If these people can move coal with such a train, we can move cotton the same way. So he built a railroad in Alabama.