Cherokee Chief Research Articles

Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab. By Steve Inskeep. Penguin. 2016. 421pp. $17.00.

Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab. By Steve Inskeep. Penguin. 2016. 421pp. $17.00.

Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory by Andrew Denson

Reviewed by: Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory by Andrew Denson Christina Snyder (bio) Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory. By Andrew Denson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 304. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $29.95.) Cherokee removal is perhaps the most well known episode in Native American history. In Monuments to Absence, Andrew Denson explores how and why this came to be by exploring public commemorations of Cherokee removal, focusing on the American South and Oklahoma from the 1920s to the present. This multivalent study highlights a diverse range of white and Indian heritage workers, business professionals, politicians, and activists. Other scholars of memory have pointed out that “white heritage workers in the South generally excluded the histories of people of color from public commemoration until after the civil rights movement” (2). Denson, however, demonstrates that white southerners zealously commemorated removal beginning in the 1920s and continue to do so now. The reasons why have shifted over time, but heritage workers and the general public agreed on one basic premise: removal was a tragic injustice. Cherokees engaged in public commemorations for their own reasons and, as Denson argues, seized on whites’ critical view of removal to cultivate political and economic change in subsequent periods. White commemorations of removal began in southern Appalachia in the 1920s. Buoyed by the rise of the automobile and the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, tourism boosters highlighted the culture and history of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. This group had managed to evade removal and still lived in western North Carolina. In some ways, boosters described the Eastern Band and white Appalachia similarly: as “colorful primitives” whose supposedly premodern cultures offered a respite from industrialized America (7). But boosters also touted the Cherokee story as exceptional owing to their status as the most “civilized tribe” and their tremendous suffering during removal. Acknowledging such [End Page 167] injustice complicated public commemorations like Chattanooga’s 1938 Chickamauga National Celebration. Marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga and the one hundredth anniversary of the Trail of Tears, Chattanooga’s civic leaders linked the memory of removal and the Lost Cause (the historian John P. Brown, for example, described the anticolonial Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe as “Tennessee’s first secessionist” [98]), while denying African Americans a role in the celebration. Such commemorations drew on Cherokee history, but they also distorted it to heighten dramatic effect and to please predominantly white audiences. While problematic, white commemorations of removal also opened a path to Eastern Band Cherokees seeking to retain their separate, sovereign status during Jim Crow. The 1950s and 1960s brought a new wave of commemorations. In Georgia, the state government restored—and reimagined—the old Cherokee capital, New Echota, while businessmen and politicians in southern Appalachia championed the hugely successful outdoor drama centered on removal, Unto These Hills. Denson explains that as white southern elites confronted the civil rights movement, they embraced the memory of removal while continuing to shun African American perspectives and experiences. This may seem like a paradox, but it made sense to white leaders seeking a “politically safe way to consider their region’s heritage of racial oppression” without discussing slavery or Jim Crow (9). Their rationale gets to the heart of Denson’s title; whites framed removal as the tragic end of Native history in the South. Monuments to absent peoples were politically cheap, allowing southern elites to claim moral authority in crafting a narrative of progress. Commemorations often included Eastern Band Cherokees who were very much alive, but the dominant removal narrative cast them as a notable exception, ignoring the many other Native peoples who remained in the region. Eastern Band Cherokees found jobs in heritage work and, more important, leveraged their visibility to ward off the federal government’s termination policy, which sought to extinguish tribal sovereignty. The Oklahoma Cherokees, subject to an earlier policy that terminated their sovereign status and allotted their landholdings, also launched public history projects during this period. In his most fascinating chapter, Denson explores how a diverse Oklahoma Cherokee populace debated how best to deal with...

Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab

Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab

Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab by Steve Inskeep (review)

Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab by Steve Inskeep (review)

Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab by Steve Inskeep

Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab by Steve Inskeep

Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab by Steve Inskeep

Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab by Steve Inskeep

Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab

Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab

Signature Stories: Helen Timberlake‘s Petition to George III

This article explores the process of female self-fashioning in two previously neglected petitions dated 1786-87 by using signatures to analyse their texts and construct their contexts. In them, Helen Timberlake revises the account of frontier and Cherokee life her husband, Henry Timberlake, had published in his Memoirs (1765). Her intense maternal voice, focused on loss, entangles her history with that of the Cherokee chief Ostenaco, providing a grounded but often untrue narrative of shared family life and a persona tailored to evoke a history intertwined with that of George III. This article explores the mystery of Helen Timberlakes origins, while connecting the rhetoric of her petitions to the gendered emergence of sentimentalism, narratives of Indian captivity, and the historiography of ‘the Atlantic’.

Between Indigenous and Settler Governance ed. by Lisa Ford, Tim Rowse (review)

Reviewed by: Between Indigenous and Settler Governance ed. by Lisa Ford, Tim Rowse Julie Evans Between Indigenous and Settler Governance Edited by Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse. Oxford: Routledge, 2013. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of scholarly publications on the intersections between history, law and colonialism. In 2012 alone, three major review essays in mainstream journals canvassed the breadth and depth of the literature: “Breaking Britannia’s Bonds: Law, settlers, and space in Britain’s imperial historiography” by Zoe Laidlaw in The Historical Journal;1 “Law and Empire in Global Perspective: Introduction” by Lauren Benton in American Historical Review;2 and “British Worlds, Settler Worlds, World Systems, and Killing Fields” by Stephen Howe in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.3 These followed on from Russell Smandych’s comprehensive preliminary overview in 2010 (“Mapping Imperial Legal Connections: Towards a Comparative Historical Sociology of Law”).4 While Lauren Benton’s global history approach has helped shape the field (Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal regimes in world history, 1400–1900 [Cambridge, 2002]),5 the British Empire has nevertheless remained a popular context of inquiry, with the distinctiveness of the settler colonial formation emerging as a widely influential conceptual intervention. The titles cited above, and of the volume under discussion here, attest to the import of academic work on the theory and practice of settler colonialism: in 2013, the analytical significance of the terms “Indigenous” and “settler” is appreciated, though of course not uncontested, across the humanities and social sciences. Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, edited by Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (who are themselves well published in the area, and also appear in this volume), makes a very important contribution to this rich and varied literature, particularly to that which is accruing in polities continuing to live with settler colonialism. Ford and Rowse bring together a characteristically diverse range of scholars— from history, law, criminology, economics and political science—to consider the extent to which Anglophone settler polities are, and always have been, confounded in their pretensions to domination by producing spaces where Indigenous people are able to assert various modes or degrees of autonomy (Ford conceives this more fulsomely in her introduction as “self-determination”). The volume comprises fifteen essays, developed from presentations at an earlier symposium, that examine the nature and extent of possibilities for Indigenous autonomy in settler polities in the past, present and future. There is one chapter on Natal, but Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States are the main contexts of inquiry. The introduction provides a tight focus for the essays, which fall into five sections: “intellectual history” (Ian Hunter; Paul McHugh and Lisa Ford); “histories of legal pluralism” (Janna Promislow; Tim Garrison; Heather Douglas and Mark Finnane); “the survival of indigenous normative domains” (Richard Boast; Norman Etherington; Tim Rowse); “Australian indigenous economy” (Diane Austin-Broos; Jon Altman); “the impact of legal doctrine on the encounter between indigenous peoples and settlers states since the 1960s” (Kent McNeil; Jacob Levy; Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh); and “the normative dimensions of individual and corporate agency in Australasia and North America” (Carwyn Jones; Kirsty Gover). While it is of course impossible adequately to represent the entire collection in the space available here, some brief observations on two of the sections will suffice to indicate its quality and scope. The chapters by Promislow, Garrison, and Douglas and Finnane in turn consider evidence of legal pluralism in Canada’s remote northwest trading frontier as European fur traders were obliged to work primarily within Dene legal frameworks in the early nineteenth century; the achievements of Cherokee Chief John Ross in securing political autonomy for his people post-Removal and in also seeking to establish an international pan-Indian confederation in mid-nineteenth-century Indian Territory; and the continuing jurisdictional uncertainties and practical difficulties concerning the attempted assertion of any one law (whether settler or Indigenous) in the case of inter se “crimes” in colonial and present-day Australia. Taken together the chapters in this section seek to complicate simplistic assumptions of settler hegemony, and their empirical evidence of legal pluralism thoughtfully informs the research field within which the collection is placed. They can also be read productively...

The house on Diamond Hill: a Cherokee plantation story

At the turn of the nineteenth century, James Vann, a Cherokee chief and entrepreneur, established Diamond Hill in Georgia, the most famous plantation in the southeastern Cherokee Nation. In this first full-length study to reconstruct the history of the plantation, Tiya Miles tells the story of Diamond Hill's founding, its flourishing, its takeover by white land-lottery winners on the eve of the Cherokee Removal, its decay, and ultimately its renovation in the 1950s. This moving multiracial history sheds light on the various cultural communities that interacted within the plantation boundaries--from elite Cherokee slaveholders to Cherokee subsistence farmers, from black slaves of various ethnic backgrounds to free blacks from the North and South, from German-speaking Moravian missionaries to white southern skilled laborers. Moreover, the book includes rich portraits of the women of these various communities. Vividly written and extensively researched, this history illuminates gender, class, and cross-racial relationships on the southern frontier.

"A Million Kisses": Love Letters from a Doughboy in France <i>Part One of Two</i>

"A Million Kisses":Love Letters from a Doughboy in France Part One of Two Paul N. Spellman (bio) "Dearest Baby Wife, Each minute that I have spent with you will be recalled many thousand times to my memory while I am away from you. How I would love to take you in my arms and kiss away your tears and hold my lips to yours in loving affectionate kisses like we always had for each other—going away would seem easier to me—your sweet breath will remain fresh with me then until I come back. A million kisses, your loving husband, Ros" In 1917, Roscoe Conklin Chittim and Vera Diamond found each other when worlds apart collided in a quiet Dallas neighborhood, and their love for each other poured out in letters written a world away on the battlefields of a terrible war. A sample here of the more than forty love letters that have survived tells the story of their passion for one another, a passion undimmed by distance, time, or the exigencies of war. Most of the surviving letters were written by Roscoe. Vera wrote her husband many letters, but Roscoe was unable to save them while in France, and only a handful that were returned to Dallas are extant. The spelling and grammar of the letters has been preserved as written by the couple. Roscoe Chittim was born August 4, 1889, in a small hamlet near Springfield, Missouri, the son of a full-blooded Cherokee teenage girl, Edna Hale, and her Anglo common law husband, eighteen-year-old Alf Henry Chittim. A marriage not accepted by their families, Edna and her infant were whisked away by relatives to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) where Roscoe—named by the Cherokee chief for the late New York financier Roscoe [End Page 37] Conkling—grew up in the wide open fields of the American frontier alongside friends like Claremore native Will Rogers. Ros, who preferred his Cherokee nickname Who-Ho, was a gifted athlete, a swimmer of local renown, and a popular baseball and football player when those relatively new American sports were spreading west. As a young man Roscoe worked in the oil fields of Oklahoma until, at age 22, he was recruited to play college football at the Anderson School for Boys (later Middle Tennessee State University) in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His surviving diary and football playbook illustrate the innocence of those early days. After one illustrious season on the gridiron, the school temporarily closed, after which Roscoe found himself in New York training for the 1912 Stockholm Olympics as a freestyle swimmer. But the practices in the frigid Hudson River that February left him in a sick bed with pneumonia and off the U.S. team. Roscoe accompanied the team to Sweden that summer but only as a spectator. (Fellow American Indian Jim Thorpe did make the team, and history.) Upon his return to New York City, Roscoe worked briefly for Chase Manhattan Bank late in the summer of 1912, and then as a lifeguard in Atlantic City, but longed for home and family. He made it back as far as St. Louis, where he worked out with the Missouri Athletic Club for a year, and then he traveled to San Antonio, where his mother had moved with her new husband, H. C. Leete. Roscoe worked for a time in the Humble oil fields, and then went to work for his stepfather in the burgeoning auto business. And it was that industry that brought him to the Dallas suburb of Oak Cliff in 1917. Vera Diamond was the youngest child of a prominent realtor in Oak Cliff, five years younger than Roscoe but smitten with him—as he was with her—at first sight. Vera's life was in sharp contrast to the Missouri-born wanderer. A child of wealth and high society, she attended the prestigious Kidd-Key Conservatory of Music in Denton, traveled extensively with her parents and best friend, Anna Card, and found herself swept off of her feet when the young auto executive, who had moved into an apartment owned by her father, caught her eye. A whirlwind and courtship resulted in their marriage on...

Nitrogen and Flowering Dogwood. I. Impact of Nitrogen Fertilization Rate on the Occurrence of Spot Anthracnose, Powdery Mildew, and Cercospora Leaf Spot and Their Effect on Tree Growth

Abstract Impact of nitrogen (N) rate on spot anthracnose, powdery mildew, and Cercospora leaf spot as well as their impact on the growth of field-grown ‘Cloud 9’ and ‘Cherokee Chief’ flowering dogwood was assessed in 2003, 2004, and 2005. From 2001 to 2005, ammonium nitrate was applied at 4.1, 8.3, 16.5, 33.0 and 66.0 g N·m−2 (37.5, 75, 150, 300, 600 lb N·A−1). Heritage 50W fungicide was applied to one ‘Cherokee Chief’ and ‘Cloud 9’ flowering dogwood in each plot, while the second was untreated. Powdery mildew and Cercospora leaf spot were impacted by N rate more than spot anthracnose. In two of three years, powdery mildew intensified, particularly on the non-treated trees, as N rates increased. Cercospora leaf spot intensity (AUDPCI) and defoliation (AUDPCD) on the fungicide-treated and non-treated trees was influenced by N-rate in two of three and one of three years, respectively. Regardless of fungicide treatment, Cercospora leaf spot incited leaf spotting and defoliation was often lower at the two highest than the two lowest N rates. A reduction in the bract and leaf spot phases of spot anthracnose at the highest N rate was noted in 2004. While spot anthracnose was negatively correlated with trunk diameter in all three years and tree height in 2003 and 2004, Cercospora leaf spot intensity and defoliation were negatively correlated with tree height and trunk diameter in all three and two of three years, respectively. Powdery mildew had no impact on tree height or trunk diameter. Heritage 50W not only controlled spot anthracnose and powdery mildew but also slowed Cercospora leaf spot development sufficiently to enhance leaf retention and fall color.

Nitrogen and Flowering Dogwood. II. Impact of Nitrogen Fertilization Rate on Flower Bud Set and Tree Growth

Abstract Impact of nitrogen (N) fertilization rate on the growth of ‘Cloud 9’ and ‘Cherokee Chief’ flowering dogwood was assessed in a field planting from February 2001 until January 2006 in southwest Alabama (USDA Zone 8a). Starting at planting in 2001 and ending in 2005, ammonium nitrate was broadcast in a 0.3 m2 circle around the base of each tree at 4.1, 8.3, 16.5, 33.0 and 66.0 g N·m−2 (37.5, 75, 150, 300, 600 lb N·A−1) with the application of half of each N-rate in April and June of each year. In each year, disease control was maintained with approximately six applications of Heritage 50W fungicide made at 2-week intervals. Trunk diameter and tree height were recorded in early-winter from 2001 through 2006; flower bud counts were taken annually from 2003 to 2006. With the exception of 2004 when N rate had not influence on bud formation, highest flower bud counts were associated with elevated rates of 33 and 66 g N·m−2 (300 and 600 lb·N−2). Nitrogen rate had no influence on the height or trunk diameter of flowering dogwood until three and four years, respectively, after planting. Impact of N rates below 66.0 g N·m−2 (600 lb·A−1) per year on tree height was minimal. In 2005 and 2006, trunk diameter was greater for trees receiving the two highest than the two lowest N rates. Regression analysis was used to calculate optimum N rate for flower bud set, as well as change in trunk diameter and tree height.

Boudinot's Change: Boudinot, Emerson, and Ross on Cherokee Removal

This essay engages Cherokee editor Elias Boudinot's shift from resisting to supporting Cherokee Removal and his treasonous signing of the 1835 Treaty of New Echota. Reading Boudinot's change alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1838 "Cherokee Letter," published in New England newspapers, and Cherokee Chief John Ross's insistence on the limited "freedom" of the Cherokee national press in his 1828 annual address, I turn away from readings of Boudinot as trapped between white and Cherokee identifications, reorienting the question from "why" to "where" did he do what he did. Boudinot's change of opinion had a long history of suppression and appearance in the Cherokee and United States national presses. I argue that that this publication history portrays not the polarization between but the increasing geographical, political, and legal overlap of the Cherokee Nation and the United States.

AFLP Markers Identify Cornus florida Cultivars and Lines

Flowering dogwood (Cornus florida L.) is an important tree of forests and urban landscapes in the eastern United States. Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers were generated from genomic DNA of 17 cultivars and lines, and four duplicate samples of selective cultivars. Specific markers were identified for all except the following two lines and cultivar: MW94-67, MW95-12, and ‘Plena’. A dichotomous cultivar identification key was constructed based on AFLP data, and specific peaks or combinations of peaks were identified for all cultivars and lines. The key was assessed with seven anonymous (unlabeled) dogwood samples, and all unknowns except one were identified using the dichotomous key. Two of the unknown samples, ‘Cherokee Chief’ and ‘Cherokee Brave’, were difficult to distinguish using the AFLP markers. Intracultivar variation, up to 36% dissimilarity, was observed between duplicate samples of the same cultivar from different trees, suggesting that some mislabeling of trees had occurred at the nursery. The cultivar-specific AFLP markers can be used in breeding applications, patent protection, and in future projects, such as mapping the C. florida genome.

Dementia diagnosis, treatment, and research with American Indians

Researchers at the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center’s Alzheimer’s Disease Center (ADC) have been diagnosing, treating, and studying Alzheimer’s disease in American Indians (AIs) for the past 15 years. In 1991, we were awarded a minority satellite by the National Institutes on Aging (NIA) to provide clinical care to underserved persons and to database clinical information for future research. We first served the Cherokee Nation in northeastern Oklahoma: our satellite was established with the permission of Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller and her council. We asked patients and families to allow us to store de-identified clinical data for research. Most agreed. Patients or their caregivers signed and kept a copy of informed consent documents approved by the UT Southwestern IRB and by the appropriate tribal body. Patients were seen by a neurologist and his staff in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in the Hastings Indian Hospital in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, 70 miles from Tulsa. We were not able to engage Hastings Hospital staff, and ultimately, all patients were seen in Tulsa. When we later tried to develop an epidemiologic study of dementia in the Cherokee Nation, we were unable to obtain the tribe’s permission because we had published a study suggesting that Cherokees might have partial protection against AD [1]; therefore, this disease was not perceived as a problem by the Cherokee Nation. In 1998, we contacted the Dallas Urban Inter-Tribal Center of Texas (UITC), approached their outreach director, and presented our goals. The UITC staff asked what immediate benefit we could be to them and asked for assurance that we would not exploit their clients as researchers had done elsewhere. We agreed that all research would be done as part of good clinical care and pledged to do no research without the explicit permission of subjects and to maintain the confidentiality of all patient material. After consultation with a council of elders, we established the Honoring our Elders Memory Clinic. We transferred our satellite from Oklahoma, hired an AI nurse, and arranged a quarterly clinic at the UITC where individuals could be evaluated by ADC staff. Unfortunately, we were able to recruit only a few elderly patients. We were told that AIs came from Oklahoma to Texas for employment, but when they reached retirement age, they returned to Oklahoma to use tribal resources such as free medical care. In 1998, with the help of a new UITC administrator, we met the administrator of the Choctaw Nation Healthcare Center in Talihina, Oklahoma. He was enthusiastic, and

Self-incompatibility in Cornus florida

Low seed set has been reported following self-pollinations of flowering dogwood (Cornus florida L.). The objective of this study was to verify the presence of self-incompatibility in C. florida. `Cherokee Princess' stigmas and styles were collected 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 24, 48, and 72 hours after cross- and self-pollinations, stained with aniline blue and observed using a fluorescence microscope. Pollen germinated freely following self-pollinations, but self-pollen tubes grew slower than those resulting from cross-pollinations. By 48 hours after cross-pollination, pollen tubes had reached the bottom of the style while pollen tubes in self-pollinated flowers had only penetrated the upper third of the style. Evidence of reduced pollen tube growth rate in self-pollinations of `Cherokee Chief' and `Cherokee Brave' was also obtained. This study provides evidence of a gametophytic self-incompatibity system in C. florida. It was also determined that stigmas of C. florida `Cherokee Princess' are receptive to pollen from 1 day prior to anthesis to 1 day after anthesis.

Local Origins of National Indian Policy: Cherokee and Tennessean Ideas about Sovereignty and Nationhood, 1790-1811

A series of remarkable phenomena marked the bitter last years of the two-decade intermittent conflict between the Cherokees and the pioneers in the Tennessee region. Chronicled by the Knoxville Gazette, numerous frontiersmen recounted attacks against them by Indians in which bullets passed through their clothes without touching their flesh. The first published account in 1792 originated in eastern Tennessee when a man hunting horses related that a party of Indians fired on him. Four balls passed through his clothes and shattered his powder horn without injuring him. Over the next several years, settlers described numerous similar occurrences throughout the territory. This bizarre chain of events terminated in 1796 when Oconostotee, a Cherokee chief, responded to the Gazette that the settlers attacked the Cherokees. The white men removed and fired into their own clothing to establish self-defense in order to escape prosecution by the national government, which was pressuring the frontier people to keep the peace under the federal treaties.1Oconostotee's letter and the Gazette's publication of his rebuttal revealed significant tensions in the tripartite relationship between the Cherokees, Tennesseans, and the federal government-frictions generated by different ideas about Indian policy, Cherokee sovereignty, and nationhood. This article explores the ideas and assumptions underlying the construction by the Cherokees and the settlers of their relationship with the United States from the organization of the Southwest Territory in 1790 and the recognition of statehood in 1796 until the advent of the War of 1812. My focus is on local perceptions and the robust ways in which these ideas informed and were transformed by events. I study federal thought only inasmuch as it impacted or was influenced by Cherokee or settler formulations.Historians narrate a story about Indian policy from the formation of the American nation through removal in the 1830s in which federal officials are the lead and (especially in the earlier period) almost the only actors. In these accounts, the United States originated and implemented a policy that aimed to civilize Indians. The national government entered into treaties with Indian tribes as separate political entities but believed that they would soon be absorbed into the superior white society. When this failed to occur, pressure grew to appropriate Indian lands. In response to state aggression on Indian jurisdiction in the 1830s, Chief Justice John Marshall, a Federalist, judicially recognized partial Indian sovereignty. Granting the states the right to determine policy about Indians in their jurisdiction, Democratic President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce Marshall's rulings and permitted removal of the eastern Indians to the region west of the Mississippi.2The traditional narrative neglects the role played by transmontane local parties-both aboriginal peoples and settlers-in promulgating ideas about sovereignty and nationhood that informed federal policy. Writing primarily from the perspective of the northwestern tribes, Native-American students generally conclude that the decline of European influence in the United States in the 1790s terminated the ability of the aboriginal peoples to play off one European power against another and foreshadowed their decline. This finding inadvertently discourages examination of the intellectual formulations by Indians of the connection between the first peoples and the national government.3 Meanwhile, most students of the trans-Appalachian West have overlooked the contentious development of nationalism among the settlers in this region. Writers have studied the internal political strife associated with moving into statehood, but few have examined the difficulties of the larger adjustment between the national and local governments. The federal government's handling of Indian affairs was the cause of much of this friction.4 Scholars have further overlooked the connection between these local ideas about nationalism and theories about Indian sovereignty. …

Archaeological Investigations and Oxidizable Carbon Ratio Dates from 41RK476, Rusk County, Texas

Volunteer survey work on a section of Rabbit Creek in Rusk County, Texas, found a possible buried midden deposit at 41RK476. This ongoing survey, which has resulted in 10 new sites being recorded, was conducted with the assistance of Bryan Boyd, also a member of the Texas Archeological Society and the Texas Archeological Stewards Network. Also aiding with shovel tests were Bo Nelson, Patti Haskins, Tim Perttula, and Bobby Gonzalez. Of particular interest in selecting this area for archaeological survey was the presence of protohistoric Caddo and historic Cherokee Indian groups that have been reported on Rabbit Creek. The creek derives its name from Chief Rabbit, a Cherokee chief. With the landowner's permission a 1 x 2 m test unit was placed at 41RK476 adjacent to a shovel test (ST 1) that indicated a possible midden deposit. This article reports the findings from this limited investigation, and includes a series of Oxidizable Carbon Ratio (OCR) dates financed by a grant from the Texas Archeological Society's Donor Fund.

Determination of Parentage of Flowering Dogwood (Cornus Florida) Seedlings Using Dna Amplification Fingerprinting

Open-pollinated seedlings of Cornus jlorida L. 'Cherokee Chief were tested to identify the pollen donor from a list of nearby C. florida trees using DNA amplification fingerprinting (DAF). Tissue was collected and DNA isolated from the maternal 'Cherokee Chief tree and possible pollen donors C. florida 'Cherokee Brave', 'Cherokee Daybreak', 'Cloud 9', 'Springtime', and 'Pygmy'. DNA was also isolated from C. florida 'Fragrant Cloud', 'Cherokee Princess', and 'Appalachian Spring'. Data from DAF were analyzed for similarities and differences between genetic makeup of seedlings and putative parents. Thirteen of 15 (87%) evaluated seedlings were the progeny of 'Cherokee Brave' and 'Cherokee Chief. Using open pollination, progeny of 2 red-bracted C. florida cultivars 'Cherokee Brave' and 'Cherokee Chief were obtained and subsequently verified using DAF.