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Before going home, Governor Murray retired to a room in a bank where his favorite brand of mattress (a "Beauty Rest") was put on a cot for him. He lay down, drank two cups of steaming coffee and hot water, held an informal reception for old timers who had known him before he ran away from home.
Hunger. That runaway led to hard hungry years for a 12-year-old. Young Murray chopped wood, picked cotton, hired out as a farm hand, led a prodigal outdoor life. Deep within him was another kind of hunger—a hunger for learning which he has not fully satisfied to this day. He attended rural schools here and there, now and then, and finally got admitted to a freshwater college in Parker County, Texas, called Springtown Male & Female Institute. Here he discovered what to study, went back to his odd jobs, returned to the Institute later to take and pass 18 examinations in a row, emerge with a B. S. degree. Thereafter he taught school, did newspaper work, studied law at night. At 29 he crossed over to Indian Territory, began to practice among the Chickasaws.
Perhaps because of his Pocahontas ancestry, Governor Murray has always had a deep and abiding interest and affection for Indians. Settling at Tishomingo, he became the tribal attorney for the Chickasaws. He studied their treaties, laws and customs, collected nearly a thousand rare books on Indian lore;—another manifestation of his innate scholarliness. Today he is an authority on the history and habits of the Oklahoma Indian. For a wife he picked Mary Alice Hearrell, half-white, half-indian. Her uncle was Governor Douglas H. Johnston, Chief of Chickasaws. Today Governor Murray still calls her "squaw" and her name for him is "Big Chief." They have four sons and a daughter. "Now the Negroes, the Indians and the poor white trash of Oklahoma have a Governor," exclaimed "Alfalfa Bill" upon his election, and the 172,198 Negroes and 92,725 Indians of Oklahoma knew he meant it.
His marriage made Murray a member of the Chickasaw tribe and, through his wife, he came into possession of several thousand fertile acres of land on which he began farming. At this time he was tagged with his familiar nickname because of his persistent advocacy of alfalfa as the proper hay to plant in the short grass country of Oklahoma. Even today he cultivates the popular use of "Alfalfa Bill" rather than the less common "Cocklebur Bill" which his political enemies tried to fasten on him. As a farmer, Murray was successful and is supposed to have made several hundred thousand dollars from his Tishomingo land. Soon, however, he transferred his interest in Agriculture from practice to politics and has largely made his living in that way in recent years.