His middle name came from his grandfather, Pines Allen.

His father was the founder of Truxton, Missouri, the town in which he was born, and he was one of the first, and possibly the first, child born there. He grew up in Truxton and married his childhood friend and half-cousin Kate Verser.

Soon after their marriage he moved to Rich Hill, Missouri, along with his sister Ada and brother-in-law. Initially he worked in the lead mine there but soon acquired a wagon and team and began freighting. He and his brother-in-law, who was a doctor, formed a partnership in which they would pool their income and share it equally. In a booming mine town there was a lot of freight work to do but folks of that time seldom called on a doctor, so it looked like a bad deal for Charlie. Eventually an epidemic came along and the pendulum swung the other way.

In Sept. 1881 shortly after the death of their second child he and Kate bought a small farm in south central Missouri for taxes owed. They had two children there a boy and a girl, who lived, but he was unable to make a go of the farm or sell it so five years later they moved to an area that is now the Oklahoma panhandle but at the time was not assigned to any state or territory. One of Charles' brothers was already there as were his sister and brother-in-law, Dr. Errett. Folks were trying to organize the area into a state.

The family lived in a dugout and made money by hauling buffalo bones to the railhead at Liberal, Kansas. He had two more sons during this time. Then hard times started, half the team died and he had to trade on of the remaining horses for a yoke of oxen. Times were very hard, near starvation, and he took work with a rancher in Kansas homesteading 160 acres of land that the rancher wanted. He had to live on the land and improve for 18 months but was then able to sell to the rancher for a decent amount of money and move back to his homestead in what was by then the panhandle of the Oklahoma Territory. The land there was not very good, though, and rain unreliable, so when he heard that some land in the area previously reserved for the Cheyenne and Arapaho would be opened up for settlement he decided to participate in the "run."

He moved his household goods and livestock and to the edge of the area to camp out for the winter in a dugout for the April 1 start of the run. It was a hard winter and he lost about half of his livestock. He and his brother cut trees for fence posts and hauled them across the line into Texas with the ox team to trade them to farmers for corn to feed the cows.

Finally April the 1st came and he successfully got 160 acres of land on the Canadian River. For the first two years the family lived in a one room sod house. Then a two room log cabin was built next to it that was used for four years. Finally a good house made out of lumber with two basement rooms and four above ground rooms. The family lived in that house for five years. During that time the last three children were born to Charles and Kate.

He decided to sell out and auctioned everything off and took the family to California. They only stayed there for 30 days though, as California was not what he expected. He decided to take the family to Miles, Texas, because a man he knew lived there and wound up buying property in the Orient community and living there with Kate the remainder of his days.