When Mary DeArmon called me in August to ask if I would talk today, I had no idea what she expected me to talk about. I'm neither an expert nor an entertainer; I'm an enthusiast. I'm enthusiastic about a lot of things—and many of you are already expert in my enthusiasms. But since this is the Pocahontas Club, I finally decided to share with you one of my more recent enthusiasms—Cherokee history, with special emphasis on my great-grandmother's antecedents. I'm sure most of you have been studying this subject and know far more about it than I could ever hope to know, but I hope you will find some of my observations entertaining and that I can point you in directions you may not yet have explored. I've always wondered why the founders of the Pocahontas Club decided to name it after a Powhatan—not a Cherokee—girl whose identity was cynically used by an English soldier of fortune in a PR campaign to bring more English settlers to Virginia and whose people were slaughtered by those same English settlers after she died of smallpox in England (see Appendix I).

Then, purely by chance, I came across a short article in Widener Library at Harvard, last month. Written by 19th-Century anthropologist William Wallace Tooker², it alludes to a tradition in Virginia that those few Powhatans who escaped the massacre fled to the Blue Ridge and joined the Cherokee living there. The Pocahontas Club founders had most likely never heard of that tradition, but I thought it was an interesting footnote to Club history.

The Princess and the Poor Scotsman: a tale of new beginnings³

Now, I want to tell you a fairy tale. The Swiss psychiatrist, Karl Jung, was convinced that fairy tales—he called them archetypes—are ways of making sense of the world and telling ourselves who we are. My fairy tale follows the standard European folk-tale conventions and makes use of the obligatory tactic consequent on English primogeniture laws of "The first son inherits, the second son is made a priest, and the third son goes for a soldier."

Have you noticed how many fairy tales involve three brothers, the youngest, stupidest (or laziest) of whom eventually triumphs and wins the hand of the princess along with half her father's kingdom? Those were undoubtedly the same fairy tales our white ancestors heard as children.

This fairy tale is called "The Princess and the Poor Scotsman," and this is how it goes:

Once upon a time, there was a poor Scots laird who lived with his old 'ooman and their three sons in a peel tower⁴ built by their ancestors on a high rock above a burn in a brae so deep and narrow, the sun lit the grass only at midday.

Once he had sent his heir to be schooled in Edinburgh, and his second son to be made a priest, the old man could not persuade the moneylender to advance more guineas without the lost, wide lands as collateral. There was nothing for it but to give the third son a letter to carry to the only friend he had left to him in London Town, a man he had studied with at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before the family had lost its luck.

The old 'ooman wrapped some cold barley cakes and a withered apple or two in a kerchief for Wat, for that was how their youngest son was called, to tie to a limber rowan wand, and he knelt for his parents' blessing. Rising, he put the wand over his shoulder and, whistling to keep up his spirits, set forth to seek his fortune. He walked down the deer track that would take him to the nearest Border town, Berwick-upon-Tweed .

The sky was darkening when he reached a ford crossing a shallow burn, where a toothless old woman knelt to beat a length of her woolen cloth out in the running water.

"Good eve to ye, Old Mother," he said politely.

"And a blessed eve to yourself," she replied. "Do you have a morsel for a puir old 'ooman in yon parcel?" And she gestured at the kerchief hanging from his wand.

Since the boy had heard the old tales at his mammy's⁶ knee, he knew how to answer: "It's little enough I have, but a share of that is yours in Jesus' name." And he sat on a bank to untie his parcel and remove a barley cake, which he broke in two, handing half to the old woman.

After they had blessed the food and eaten it, he took a few steps upstream for a drink of the cold, clear water and to refill the bottle his mother had sent with him.

'Tis a kind lad that you are, so I will tell you what you must do to mend your fortunes: Your luck lies in water; when you find yourself between two courses, one that takes you to water and the other that keeps you dryshod, choose the path of the waters.

And when you find yoursel' at London Town, a proud, black cat will cross your path. Tak' your cover from your heid and bow to her. She will lead you to your father's friend. And all else will follow from that: You will cross the wide waters to a green and fruitful shore where the red deer flock to the streams and the waters run with silver fishes, and on that shore, a queen's daughter will await you. She will mend your fortunes. But mind you keep your honor bright. Remember, too, that queens' daughters are no ordinary wenches; they know their own worth."

And so saying, she wrang out her cloth and departed.

As she had foretold, a proud, black cat met Wat in London Town. When he had paid her homage, she turned, waving her elegant tail and led him to the house of his father's friend.

And good fortune was in that for him: Footsore and lacking food and drink, he would never have found his way through the stinking streets of the city or avoided the press gangs without her guidance.

And had she not called softly at the door for Lord James' housekeeper, the butler, seeing his scruffy state, would have called the footmen to cast him forth into outer darkness.

When Lord James had welcomed Wat and directed his servants to feed and bathe him and clothe him as befit a gentleman's son, and when Wat had had a night's rest—sleep was impossible in the cacophony of London Town—to recover from his long, footsore journey, Lord James gazed at the lad appraisingly. "Your father writes that you've a brain in your head and that you write a fair hand and cypher with the best," he said. I could send you to my estates to apprentice with my steward—or you could help my factor stock the ship for the colonists who will be sailing with me to settle the new land. Which will it be, lad?

Your luck lies in water, the words of the old woman's prophesy rang in Wat's memory. "An it please your lordship, sir, I will sail wi' ye."

"You run before my thoughts, lad, but I could use a likely aide-de-camp during the crossing. Have you ever sailed upon the deep?"

"Not as yet," came the response.

"Get your hat, and I will introduce you to the other trustees."

During the long voyage of the good ship Anne to the Oglethorpe Colony⁷, Wat met a Muskogee princess, Mary Musgrove, the Indian wife of an English trader⁸.

Mary wore her long, thick, black hair in shining braids that framed her vivid face and held herself proudly erect with the bearing and manner of a great lady. Wat was impressed, despite himself and despite her being a heathen savage. During the voyage, she taught him how to behave toward the native nobility of the New World, so by the time they sailed back to England, his patron, Lord Jamie, was prepared to recommend him to Pitt the Elder, King George's Prime Minister, as a man who could represent the Crown in its dealings with the native nations adjacent to the Oglethorpe Colony.

The boy who had been the disregarded youngest son was now the king's man! Maybe there's a princess for me, he thought secretly when he was feeling particularly full of himself. After all, that old grandmother at the burn said there would be all those years ago.

When he had sailed back to the colony, he went to parlay with the Cherokee in the Middle Towns, hoping he could make allies of them in the struggles against the French in Canada. There he finally met his Cherokee princess, a lady named Gosaduisga. After her mother and uncles had judged him honorable and industrious, they were married and eventually had two children, a girl named Nancy and a boy named Richard.

Most stories like this end, "And they lived happily ever after."

I'm sorry to tell you that if Wat and Gosaduisga lived happily ever after, it was not together.

The Revolution came along, and Wat found himself without a king to serve or a country that honored nobility. He needed capital to set himself up in business as a trader, but Gosaduisga, whom he had gotten into the habit of calling Nancy, explained to him that the land was hers, not his, and that it belonged ultimately to all the Cherokee.

By then, he was older and getting tired of having a wife whose status was higher than his, so he found another princess, one with a white father who thus understood that men were meant to be owners and women were meant to be chattels. (At least, she was clever enough to make him think she believed it and had been taught by her father that money was more important than land or clan.) She was willing to sell enough of her land near Spring Place, Georgia, to set him up in business.

Wat and his second princess had three more children. And one of those had a daughter who was eventually known as the ghigau, the closest thing to a queen the Cherokee ever had.

By the time Wat died the new nation was twenty years old and he was a rich man.

"And who lives the longest will know the most."

There are several people I must thank for reawakening my interest in things Cherokee: my high school classmates Jimmy Johnson and Curtis Rohr, my father's cousins Phyllis Hanes Armstrong and Blanche Green Brannan, our Pocahontas sisters Dolores Ward Johnson, whose mother, Vivian, was one of my earliest teachers, and Betsy Hoffmeier and Minta Keyes, who made sure I experienced the blessed peace of the Saline Courthouse and heard 19th-Century Cherokee law and history expounded. I am grateful for the blessing of having known and been taught by a wonderful set of Cherokee elders, and my seventh-grade Oklahoma history, civics, and catechism teacher, Jewell Blaine Spann (who was probably not Cherokee), my own Cherokee Princess Grandmother, Anna Victoria Hanes Dickerson (see Appendix III), and her Cherokee Princess Mother, Delilah Ann Thornton (see Appendix III), my grandmother's siblings (see Appendix III), including past Pocahontas President Ruth Hanes Gerard, and many, many others who probably had no idea they were teaching me by story and example.

I have a couple of easy questions for you.

The first one is: When you tell a white person you're Cherokee, what does that person say? Nine times out of ten, I have heard this:

The second question is: When you're in a group of non-Cherokee Indians and you tell them you're Cherokee, how do they react? I bet this is the response you get:

Did you ever wonder where all those Cherokee princesses came from? I know I did. And then I started thinking about what a princess was to a young, Eighteenth-Century Englishman.

When you were a teen, did you read the novels of a writer named Margaret Widdemer? Several of them had as protagonists Sir William Johnson, the British Agent to our cousins, the Iroquois, and his Mohawk wife, Deganawidanti. When Miss Sissler was the librarian at the Will Rogers Public Library and it was across the street from the old high school, she kept the place stocked with wonderful, historically interesting books like those, and I devoured them! But it never occurred to me that they had any direct relationship to my life.

Just this month, I visited the new Will Rogers Public Library—where I am forbidden to take out books but can, at least, read them so long as I sit in one of their comfortable chairs while I do it. In a locked cabinet in that beautiful, new building are kept dozens of rare, old books on Cherokee history and genealogy. Some of those books, collected lovingly by Miss Sissler and her predecessors, are still in Claremore only because my sister Mary saw one out on the library sale table for 25c and, horrified, persuaded the librarian that it would be a crime to sell it. Among those books is one published in 1940 by Muriel H. Wright, called Spring Place. Remember that name—Spring Place—it was where Wat, our prince lived, remember? And we'll come back to it, again, in a minute. In Ms. Wright's book, there is reference to a Cherokee delegation to "Johnson Castle" in upper New York State. "Johnson Castle" was the name of the mansion of the Sir William Johnson I referred to just a moment ago. At that time, Mohawk longhouses were referred to by the English as "castles." Widdemer writes eloquently about the matrilineal society of the Mohawks and the women's ownership of the land (just like that of the pre-contact Cherokee) and about Deganawidanti's refusal to bow to English mores. After all, she was a Mohawk princess!⁹

To understand why Cherokee and Mohawk women were called princesses by the English, it helps to consider the European feudal system and English nobility. (Please forgive me if I repeat what you already know):

Under the feudal system, land was allotted to barons by the king, not only to reward them, but primarily to give them the means to support footsoldiers and knights who would be brought to support the king when he required them. The baron, in turn, allotted land to his knights—mounted soldiers—for the same purpose. Thus, we see, land and nobility were roughly equivalent in the minds of our 18th-Century European forebears—and especially the English ones, because in England, the Industrial revolution had already begun. That's significant, because the Industrial Revolution made nobles who had sometimes barely subsisted on poor land into wealthy mine-owners and laid the basis for a capitalist economy that was supported by the mills of the northern counties and the export of their cloth to new colonies in India and by the railroads that shortly came into existence to transport the products of the mills and the mines easily and quickly.

This capital was based in "The City," London's financial district. Those who, in the minds of the previous generation, had bought their way into society, rather than inheriting seats in the House of Lords, were sneered at as "cits." The nobility needed money, but that money had to come from the land, rather than from commerce—or labor. So we see that to an Englishman, a woman who owned—or at least controlled—land had to be a noblewoman.

Next, let's consider chattel marriage: The word "chattel" was originally "cattle," that is, personal property (as opposed to "real property"=land and "improvements"). Chattel marriage was a form of marriage in which the husband actually owned the wife and any children they might have—in about the same way slaves were owned. The only meaningful difference was that there were a few legal restrictions to the husband's right to physically abuse or sell his wife or child. Most European noblewomen were party to chattel marriages, as well, although if they brought money or property with them to the marriage, there were usually contracts involved, and "dower rights" were preserved to the wives. The only English wives who were neither wealthy nor chattels were princesses, the daughters of kings. So we see the second reason that an Englishman would consider a Cherokee woman—a person who knew she was owned by no one but herself—to be a princess.

There is a third characteristic of princesses: Their fathers were kings or princes. Cherokees had no kings, but the English saw powerful, influential war chiefs among the Cherokee and called them "kings" and "princes," because they needed some honorific that was familiar to them. Thus, Phyllis' and my ancestress, Betsy Kittagusta, the daughter of Kittagusta, Prince of Chota, would naturally have been considered a princess by the English—even though Kittagusta's title was given him by the English, rather than the Cherokee.

That doesn't leave any Cherokee woman to be a commoner—so they were ALL princesses—your grandmother, my grandmother, your grandmother, and yours and yours and yours.

Imagine the delight of all those third sons who had little or no hope of inheriting from their fathers and all those poor yeomen and slumdwellers, thinking of themselves marrying Cherokee princesses. Knowing nothing of any but chattel marriage, they would have visions of themselves going home to make their bows to the King and take their rightful positions among the aristocracy!

And imagine their chagrin when they discovered that they could never own their wives' land! It took only about three generations for them to "correct" that patent injustice. The Cherokee Nation is the poorer for that change, but it is because of that enormous sacrifice and the self-respect and sense of responsibility our princess foremothers inculcated in us that we have lived to begin to recoup what they lost.

Let's change gears for a minute and talk about another book, Theda Perdue's Cherokee Women.

Have you read this wonderful book? It's available at Amazon.com and at both the Cherokee Bookstore in Tahlequah and the Talbot Library in Colcord. One of the things that charms me about the book is that Professor Perdue documents what she has to say—and one of the documentations is a quotation about an ancestor of mine and Phyllis', The British Commissary to the Cherokee, Lt. Walter Scott. It doesn't make me like him or respect him, but it offers some insight into my great- grandmother and her upbringing: His daughter, Margaret Scott Vann, "recalled that her father, a trader named Walter Scott¹⁰, 'safeguarded me from heathen revelries. On one such occasion he called me away from an Indian dance. Since then I shunned such occasions¹¹.'" That kind of thing makes it even more amazing that our Cherokee ancestors, taught by their white fathers to despise their mothers' and other Cherokee relatives' culture, survived at all. It can only be a tribute to the self-respect those Cherokees had already been taught by their mothers, grandmothers, and uncles before the coming of the whites that any of our culture has survived at all!

It's sad, but no wonder, that Big Halfbreed, apparently a self-respecting Cherokee even though he did not follow his own cultural norms, threw out Guulisi, his wife of more than 50 years, when she became a Christian convert!¹²

At the University of Kentucky, where she teaches, Professor Perdue once had a doctoral student called Rowena McClintock. Dr. McClintock , I discovered last March, has completed a transcription and new translation of the diaries of the Moravian missionaries at the Spring Place Mission School in northwestern Georgia. (Didn't I tell you we'd be coming back to Spring Place?) Those two words "transcription" and "translation" are very important, here.

Take a look at this:

Can you read it?

Very few people can nowadays; my husband, who earned his doctorate in Germanic languages and literatures, is one of them: When we were courting, he taught me to read it, too, so I could decipher his letters to me. Of course without practice, I long ago lost the ability to do so. Rowena McClintock is another of the people who can read this stuff. Imagine reading and transcribing whole notebooks full of this writing—as Dr. McClintock has been doing—and then translating it from 18th-Century German into English!

Last March, at a meeting of the Goingsnake District Historical Society, Jack Baker read us a few pages of McClintock's translation; immediately, I wanted to read the rest: The missionaries who wrote the originals were a chatty, gossipy bunch—unlike what I have read of the more readily available writings of the Reverend Buttrick—and I'm dying to find out the rest of what they had to say. (To be fair, Jerry Clark tells me that some of Buttrick's other diaries are less sententious, and I'm planning to spend time in the Houghton Library at Harvard this winter to see for myself.)

Maybe now you can see why Miss Wright's title, Spring Place, called out to me. Upon reading her text, I found a reference to "Johnson Castle" and a visit there made by a party of Cherokees from Virginia; amazing how it all ties together!

Last month, I spent three wonderful hours with two marvelous new friends, Jim Hicks and Jerry Clark. Using copies of the original documents that Jerry brings him once a month from the National Archives, Jim is updating Emmet Starr's Cherokee genealogies. The results are just amazing! Jim's friend, Jerry, is the son of past Pocahontas president Christine Clark, and for years, he has been in charge of the American Indian collections at the National Archives in Washington , D.C. The man has more information in his skull than most libraries have on their shelves—And he and Jim have suggested that I meet with them every month when I visit my daughter in Virginia!—And record our conversations so the knowledge that pours out of Jerry's mouth like a river won't be lost! That evening without even pausing to think, he solved two family mysteries that had been puzzling me for years: One was, "Who was the Lieut. Walter Scott of Ringgold, Georgia, whom Phyllis' and my ancestress, Gosaduisga, married?" Jerry's instantaneous answer was, "The British Indian Agent in Georgia." As we were saying "Good night," Jerry remarked casually, "You know, there's a reason why all Cherokees have grandmothers who were princesses," and that's what inspired this lecture!

¹Patricia Lemon (A.B., Harvard College, 1968; M.Ed. Umass/Amherst), a registered citizen of the Cherokee Nation and Pocahontas Club member, was born and reared in Claremore and now lives in Warwick, Massachusetts.

²Tooker, William Wallace, (1848-1917). "Problem of the Rechahecrian Indians of Virginia." Reprinted from the American Anthropologist, September, 1898, pp. 261-270.

³ Most of the characters in this tale really lived, and many of the events really happened, but whether their circumstances or characters were as I have depicted them, I cannot say.

⁴A peel tower was a Scottish fortified house or dwelling place normally entered by ladder to the first floor with a vaulted ground floor for the cattle. They were mostly built in the lawless 15th Century as refuges from attack. While some were still standing at the beginning of the 20th Century, most of those have been demolished. You can find further information here.

⁵A Scottish pronunciation of "Saxon," the name they called the English (and anyone else who lived south of the River Tweed.

⁶"Mammy" is the word most often used for "Mother" in Scots lullabies.

⁷The original name of the present State of Georgia. In 1732, Lord James Oglethorpe organized trustees for a new colony where those who had been imprisoned for debt in the Fleet could reclaim their lives. As it happened, there were no spaces left for the debtors by the time the candidates with skills (carpenters, tailors, bakers, farmers, merchants, etc.) had been chosen. Later, it became a Crown colony named for the king, and it retained that name after the Revolution in 1776.

⁸Mary Musgrove was a real woman who served as a translator for the English, and Creeks, and Yamacraws. All three of her husbands (the last of which was an Anglican bishop) were English.

⁹Margaret Widdemer's novels—including Lady of the Mohawks and Buckskin Baronet—are long out of print, but used copies can sometimes be located through Alibris.com.

¹⁰According to Jerry Clark (personal communication, August 18, 2004), Walter Scott was the British Commissary to the Indians in Georgia; he may have become a trader after marrying my full- blood ancestress, Gosaduisga, but certainly was one by 1830. Margaret Scott Vann, his daughter by a half-Cherokee woman, was the mother of the last ghigau, Nancy Ward (whose Cherokee name was probably Chicouelha, not Nan-e-hi, which is a made-up name with no documented attachment to her that I have discovered.)

¹¹Missionary Herald, 4 July 1830. Cited in Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women, Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. A Bison Book.

¹² Hicks, James Raymond, Cherokee Lineages,

"...On the 25th of February the first adult was baptized at Oochgelogy, namely old mother Qualukee, who is already a great-great-grandmother, for she is the mother of Sister Lydia Chrisholm [Lydia Halfbreed], who is the mother of Sister Gann [Catherine Maria McCoy], whose daughter Betsy Field [Elizabeth Miller] has a son more than a year old [Andrew M Fields, born1824]. She received the name of Hannah; and immediately afterwards her great-grandson Isaac Ferguson Gann, was baptized out of the same vessel."

Journal of the Mission at Spring Place [GA], 1827.

Appendix I: The Pocahontas Myth

In the handout I passed out when I gave the speech I printed the entire text; you can find it here.

Appendix II: Sources

All Things Cherokee

This site offers links to many genealogical resources, but the "Culture and History" links at the bottom of the home page are the best, to my way of thinking. Be sure to click on the link to Christina Berry's thoughtful article entitled, "Ned Christie—Cherokee Outlaw?"

Amazon.com.

Your resource for anything in print!

Cherokee Family Research Center - Cherokee Genealogy

If you haven't already established the habit of checking out the Cherokee Nation Web site, this is a good place to start. Tom Mooney has posted information from his forthcoming book, A Sourcebook for Cherokee Genealogy. There are links to just about every genealogy site you could wish for.

The Cherokee Gift Shop

customerservice@cherokeegiftshop.com. (918)456-2793.

Hicks, James Raymond. Cherokee Lineages, Updated August 29, 2004. Jim's annotations of Emmet Starr's work, based on materials in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. are a wonderful resource—the best I've ever seen—if you are a descendant of one of the lineages Starr traced. Unlike others who have set out to update Starr's work, Jim is very respectful of the former's research and simply adds relevant material and well- supported speculations about discrepancies.

Talbot Library and Museum , South Colcord Avenue, P.O. Box 349, Colcord, OK 74338. 918-326-4532. Contact: Donna Clark, talbotlibrary@earthlink.net. At this site there is a new link to their list of history and genealogy books for sale—many of them published by the Talbot Library. This seems to be their principal fund-raising source.