The Coker Clan
by Lynn Morrow and used with his permission!
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Lynn Morrow is Supervisor of the Local Records Program for the Missouri State Archives, and Editor of the White River Valley Historical Quarterly. Part of this article, in somewhat longer form, appeared in the Spring, 1990, Quarterly.
William "Buck" Coker and his large entourage of relatives exemplified a common type of immigration in the southern uplands. From 1811 to 1815 family members moved from northern Alabama to the upper White River. By 1816 newly arrived Paton Keesee reported that the families of Buck Coker, his son Joe and his sons-in-law, William Trimble and Girard Leiper Brown, were the only white settlers on White River in modern northern Boone and Marion Counties in Arkansas.
These "first families" gave several place-names to the land. Patriarch Buck Coker settled in a wide bottom, the Jake Nave Bend-- ultimately named for a granddaughter's husband. Daughter Katie (G.L. Brown's wife) gave her name to Katie's Prairie in Taney County, Missouri, and granddaughter Becca (Katie's child) is thc source for Becca's Branch, Marion County. Poor Joe Bald in Taney County is a remembrance of son Joe Coker's narrow escape from angry Cherokees, and Trimble Creek in Marion County echoes son-in-law William Trimble. Buck Coker's wife became the first interment in Coker cemetery in Boone County's Jake Nave Bend.
A listing of Buck Coker's large family and their intermarriages reads like a White River Directory of First Families: Anderson, Boatright, Brown, Friend, Hogan, Holt, Keesee, Magness, Manley, Nave, Trimble, Wood, Yocum, and Cherokee women. Many of the Coker descendants became later pioneers in Oklahoma and Texas.