Tahlonteskee, Principal Chief of the first Cherokee Nation (West)

Tahlonteskee was a Cherokee man

Section 1

Biography

Tahlonteskee, whose name is sometimes translated as "Common Disturber" or "Upsetter," was probably born about 1760. His parents are unknown, although he is described as the brother of John Jolly, who is himself described as the brother of Jennie Due, (daughter of white trader Robert Due and Cherokee Elizabeth Emory) [1] [2] Tahlonteskee first appears in records as a signer of the 1791 Holston River treaty. [3] [4]

According to Emmet Starr, he was married to Jennie Lowrey , but there is no record of any children. [5]

He was one of the young men who had followed Dragging Canoe and the "Chickamauga" Cherokee after the rift at Sycamore Shoals. Dragging Canoe died in early 1792 and John Watts became the leader of the Chickamauga with Tahlonteskee as one of his war captains. Ignoring the 1792 Holston treaty, Watts and the Chickamauga continued their war against the Americans. Tahlonteskee was leader of an attack on Black's blockhouse in October, 1792. [6] The Chickamauga finally ceased their attacks in November, 1794.

In 1798 Tahlonteskee was one of the signers of the treaty at Tellico which ceded Cherokee lands in Tennessee and North Carolina. [7] In 1805 Doublehead and Tahlonteskee were promised tracts of land in exchange for agreeing to yet another land cession. In 1806 he was a member of the Cherokee delegation that went to Washington to negotiate the treaty and met President Jefferson while he was there. [8] [9]

The Cherokee were furious with the terms of the treaty and arranged for the assassination of Doublehead. Tahlonteskee decided that his best course of action was to gather his friends and family and move West to join the Cherokee who had already moved to the new Indian Territory in Arkansas. In 1809 he presented Cherokee Agent Return Meigs with a list of over 1000 Cherokee who wished to move. They took with them cattle, horses, hogs, household goods and 68 enslaved black people. [10] Tahlonteskee wrote to Meigs in June, 1810 stating that they had arrived safely and set up a settlement along the Missouri River but following the 1811-12 New Madrid earthquakes [11] the group moved farther south to the Arkansas River. For the next several years the Cherokee had difficulties both obtaining title to their new land and in conflict with the Osage whose home it had been. The Treaty of 1817 settled the new boundaries, but Tahlonteskee did not attend the negotiations or sign the treaty. He died early in 1819 and was succeeded as chief by his brother, John Jolly. [12]

Tahlonteeskee Museum - original capital of the Cherokee Nation in the west. Located 2 miles east of Gore, OK, on Hwy 64 off of I-40 in Sequoyah County.

Research Notes:

• Tahlonteskee was at one time a Cherokee headman of Cayuga town (or Cayoka), on Hiawassee Island (in modern-day Hamilton County, Tennessee), but he was born in western South Carolina.
• Brother of John ‘Ahuludegi‘ Jolly (Due), Principal Chief of the western
• Starr, A32, pg 472:Tah-lon-tee-skee was a prominent Chicamauga warrior in 1792.In the United States_Cherokee October 25, 1805 Doublehead, who had hitherto been an implacable war chief was granted three seperate tracts of one square mile each and Tah-lon-tee-skee received a square mile of land on the north bank of the Tennessee River, for their influence in negotiating the treaty.This action becomming unpopular, Tah-lon-tee-skee emigrated to the Western Cherokee country where he was elected Principal Chief in 1818.
• In 1818, Tah-lon-tee-skee, chief of the Western Cherokee, requested the American Board of Commisioners for Foreign Missions establish a mission in the west.Subsequently, Dwight Mission, near present Russellville AR, was established in the spring of 1820.Tah-lon-tee-skee, having died in the meantime, was succeeded as chief by his brother, John Jolly, the adopted father of Sam Houston, who had moved west in 1818.

Sources

1. ↑ Meserve, John B. "CHIEF THOMAS MITCHELL BUFFINGTON and CHIEF WILLIAM CHARLES ROGERS" Chronicles of Oklahoma Volume 17, No. 2 June, 1939. p. 141
2. ↑ National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the Cherokee Agency in Tennessee, Meigs to Calhoun, Feb. 19, 1818. "Jolly is the brother of Talonteeskee the head of the Arkansas Cherokees... " Image at Fold3 Meigs
3. ↑ Treaty digitized at 1791
4. ↑ Hoig, Stanley W. The Cherokees and Their Chiefs. University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville. 1998. p. 75
5. ↑ Starr, Emmet. History of the Cherokee Indians. Oklahoma Yesterday Publications edition, Tulsa, OK. 1979. p. 367. Digitized edition at Starr
6. ↑ American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Vol. 1, p. 294, information of John Christian. Digitized at Christian
7. ↑ Treaty digitized at Tellico
8. ↑ Hoig, Cherokee and Their Chiefs, pp. 92-93
9. ↑ transcript of Jefferson's speech at speech
10. ↑ Records of the Cherokee Agency in Tennessee, letter of Agent Return Meigs, August 12, 1809.
11. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1811%E2%80%931812_New_Madrid_earthquakes
12. ↑ Records of the Cherokee Agency, letter of Return Meigs to Western Cherokee Chiefs, 14 June 1819. Image at Fold3 Meigs

See also:
https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/tahlonteskee-561/
Wikipedia.com: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahlonteeskee_(Cherokee_chief)
https://www.werelate.org/wiki/Person:Tahlonteeskee_(1)
FamilySearch.org,https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/2:2:3ZPT-PGG.
Ancestry.com: Diceman Family Tree.
Ancestry.com: Horton Family Tree.
Ancestry.com; Minard Family Tree.
Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/81000668/tahonteeskee-brother-of-jo...
Bolton, S. Charles. Arkansas 1800–1860 : Remote and Restless. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998.
Everett, Dianna. The Texas Cherokees: A People between Two Fires, 1819–1840. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.
Washburn, Cephas. Reminiscences of the Indians. Edited by Hugh Park. Van Buren, AR: Press-Argus, 1955.

Source: The WikiTree Native American Project @ https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Cherokee-281
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Section 2

Tahlonteskee (?–1819)
AKA: Tolluntuskee

Tahlonteskee, whose name is roughly translated as “Common Disturber” or “Upsetter,” was the principal civil chief of the Arkansas Cherokee when they coalesced in the Arkansas River Valley about 1812. As the Arkansas Cherokee’s most respected member until his death in 1819, he represented them in their struggle to acquire legal control over lands in Arkansas and to secure relief from threats from both Osage and American settler incursions.

Son of a mixed-race couple, Tahlonteskee was Lower Town Cherokee (a group located primarily in what is now western South Carolina) and a supporter of efforts to stop American advances into Cherokee country after the Revolutionary War. In Cherokee opinion, Americans failed to keep previous agreements and treaty provisions and relentlessly encroached on Cherokee territory. Reciprocal raids created widespread tensions that were exacerbated by other factors, including social and political differences among Cherokee communities, and continuous American efforts to gain access to Cherokee lands. By the 1790s, some Cherokee were intermarried with white people and were deeply involved in mercantile and agricultural enterprises, while others struggled to maintain traditional Indian lifestyles.

Although he was involved in plans to confront the Americans militarily and was courted by Spanish Florida authorities in 1792–93 to embark on a war strategy, Tahlonteskee became involved in treaty-making after 1793, especially after he became a proponent of removal as a means of putting distance between the Cherokee and American settlers. He was one of several chiefs signing a 1798 treaty relinquishing some lands, and in the winter of 1805–06, he was member of a delegation to Washington that was pressured to grant more concessions for roads and settlements on Cherokee lands.

By 1806, the issues of land concessions and removal were so contentious that pro-removal leaders, including Tahlonteskee, were declared deposed from the governing council at a general Cherokee Council held at Hiwassee, near the modern border between Tennessee and North Carolina, that year.

By 1809, Tahlonteskee was ready to leave, declaring that over 1000 of his people would join him. The departure took place early in 1810 and included several hundred head of livestock, slaves, household items that included spinning wheels and looms used by women, and plows for reestablishing farming enterprises.

By June of 1810, Tahlonteskee’s group was living with other Cherokee in the St. Francis River valley, where they resided at several places in Arkansas and Missouri until early 1812, when they moved to the Arkansas River Valley. Within a short period of time, most Arkansas Cherokee were establishing farms and settlements along the Arkansas River between Point Remove Creek and the mouth of the Poteau River, near present-day Fort Smith (Sebastian County). Tahlonteskee invited missionaries to establish a school to serve the Cherokee there, and he lobbied Washington and territorial authorities for a trading post and a military garrison. A government trade factory was relocated from the Memphis area to Spadra Bluffs, near present-day Russellville (Pope County), in 1818, and a garrison that became the site of Fort Smith was established a year earlier.

The Arkansas Cherokee had three concerns that Tahlonteskee and his successor John Jolly, who was also his brother, were never able to resolve fully. The Osage, who had claimed north Arkansas as hunting territory, became a constant threat that led to years of reciprocal raids and murders. They also blocked Cherokee access to hunting grounds and salt sources on the southern plains. The Americans, meanwhile, never clearly established Cherokee land rights in Arkansas. Settlers and land speculators continually encroached on Cherokee improvements. An 1817 treaty meant to secure Cherokee boundaries in Arkansas carried additional provisions that were not acceptable to eastern Cherokee, renewing animosities between the two groups.

Tahlonteskee died in Arkansas in the spring of 1819. His brother continued working for Cherokee interests, but in 1828, the Cherokee agreed to give up their Arkansas settlements and move to Indian Territory, west of Arkansas and Missouri. As a measure of respect and remembrance, the newly-erected council house and community center at the mouth of the Illinois River in eastern Oklahoma was named Tahlonteskee. This became the central governing location for the former Arkansas Cherokee, who came to be known as the Old Settlers. The original council house still stands near Gore, Oklahoma, at the modern site of Tahlonteskee, the first Cherokee Capitol in Indian Territory.

For additional information:

• Bolton, S. Charles. Arkansas 1800–1860 : Remote and Restless. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998.
• Everett, Dianna. The Texas Cherokees: A People between Two Fires, 1819–1840. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.
• Hoig, Stanley W. The Cherokees and Their Chiefs. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998.
• Washburn, Cephas. Reminiscences of the Indians. Edited by Hugh Park. Van Buren, AR: Press-Argus, 1955.

Source: Early, A. M. (2020, December 7). Tahlonteskee (?–1819). Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/tahlonteskee-561/
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Section 3 - A Hidden History

Many River Valley residents have heard of Dwight Mission, one of the first Protestant Missions west of the Mississippi. But much of its history is hidden in the fog of time and the waters of Lake Dardanelle.

From 1820 until 1829, Pope County was home to a large Cherokee school known as Dwight Mission. It was located near present day Russellville on the west bank of the Illinois Bayou and about four miles from the Arkansas River. The site housed at least 24 structures, including multiple residence halls, a post office, carpentry and blacksmith shops. Today only a portion of the cemetery remains, located on a hill that once overlooked the settlement. A small sign on Highway 64 marks the historic location, but otherwise this history has long disappeared from the public discourse. Though many of the buildings were sold off of the property when the Cherokee were forced into Oklahoma, the foundations of those buildings were likely buried deep under water when the Corps of Engineers created Lake Dardanelle in 1965.

Sketch of Dwight Mission at Russellville (Pope County), the first formal Protestant effort directed at the education and conversion of Native Americans in Arkansas; 1824. From Historic Arkansas, courtesy of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library System

Dwight Mission was inspired by Brainerd Mission, an onsite residence school for Cherokee children near the Tennessee/Georgia border. Like other mission schools of the early 1800s, and hundreds of others that would come later, Brainerd’s central purpose was to convert Native American children to Christianity and western culture. Operated by the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, a Presbyterian organization, Brainerd School employed New England missionaries like Cephas Washburn who would eventually make his way to Arkansas to found Dwight Mission. Cherokee students were expected to learn English and Anglo traditions, but missionaries seldom made any efforts to learn Cherokee or communicate with their students in their native tongue.
In the early 1800s, the western Cherokee who populated the River Valley area were not originally from the region. They moved to the territory in the late 1700s and early 1800s escaping war and strife in their homeland of Appalachia. According to J.W. Moore, editor of Cephas Washburn’s book Reminiscences of the Indians, 1793-1860, by the time Dwight Mission was constructed, the western Cherokee were living all along the Arkansas River “from Pointe Remove to where Van Buran now stands.”

Cherokee Principle Chief Tahlonteskee (also known as Tolluntuskee) was originally from western South Carolina, but by the early 1800s was one of a handful of leaders who made his home in what would eventually become the Yell and Pope County area. According to historian Charles Russell Logan, author of The Promised Land: The Cherokees, Arkansas and Removal, 1794-1839, Tahlonteskee (spelled Tolontuskee in Logan’s article), traveled back to the Cherokee homeland in 1818 to “lobby for eastern support for the Arkansas reservation.” It was there he visited the Brainerd Mission and requested a similar mission be created near his own home in Arkansas. The missions board met and agreed to send two Presbyterian ministers in to the Arkansas “wilderness,” as they described it. Rev. Cephas Washburn and Rev Alfred Finney were dispatched along with two assistants, Jacob Hitchcock and James Orr.

It’s hard to say why Tahlonteskee requested a school focused on the eradication of traditional Cherokee ways of life, especially after he had moved to Arkansas at least partially to distance himself from Anglo settlements in his homeland. Most likely, says Leslie Stewart-Abernathy of the Arkansas Archeological Survey, his decision was based on keeping his people safe. “It was not an easy thing to be a Cherokee in the early 1800s,” Stewart-Abernathy explains. “The Cherokee had been on the wrong side during the American Revolution. There had been a great deal of pressure on settlements. There were thousands of Cherokee and so thousands of opinions on what way to go. Do we go hide someplace? Do we become white people? What do we do?” And because the Cherokee were still new to the region, they were often engaged in fighting with the Osage as well. Creating a school and settlement would, many believed, helped ward off further dangers from both whites and other tribes.
By the time the missionaries were making their way toward Arkansas, the lines between who were and who were not Cherokee were not always so clear. Cherokees from the eastern and western bands often intermarried with white families and, in some cases, black families. Tahlonteskee himself was the son of a mixed-race couple. Many of these Cherokee owned large homes, pieces of property and even black slaves.

Other Cherokee, including those of mixed ancestry, openly rejected this assimilation, especially slave ownership. “This was one issue,” historian Charles Logan writes, “that divided the Cherokee traditionalists form the assimilationists.” For example, a leader known as the “The Bowl,” also sometimes called Duwali, lived for a short time near the Petit Jean River in northern Yell County and openly discouraged any act of assimilation. Even Tahlonteskee, Logan explains, started out somewhat anti-assimilation but eventually “began to believe in the need for a balance between Euro-American civilization and Cherokee traditions.” It’s essential to note there was not one unified position among the tribe. They’re were upwards of twenty different perspectives just in the River Valley area alone, Stewart-Abernathy explains. “Some say let’s stay with the old and some say let’s combine the two, but how do you really combine the two?”

Chief Tahlonteskee died of natural causes before Dwight Mission was realized. He was succeeded by his brother Ooluntuskee, also known by the anglicized name of John Jolly, who had mixed feelings about the school and the ways in which it would take children from their homes, their language, and their culture. Chief Takatoka, a leader who made his home near present day Clarksville, was openly against the school and loudly discouraged family members from sending their children. In the end, Chief Takatoka proposed the school be located near Spadra Creek, most likely an effort to keep his eye on what was taking place at the mission. Despite these Cherokee misgivings, by 1820 Cephas Washburn and Alfred Finney chose a site on the Illinois Bayou and began construction. They named the mission after Timothy Dwight, a man who had been the president of Yale University and member of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions.

Information from David Vance’s Early History of Pope County in the 19th Century and Part of the 20th says the school opened on the first day of 1822 with three students present. “By the twelfth of January,” writes Vance, “they had eighteen children, which was a larger number than they were equipped to accommodate.” Two years later the enrollment was over one hundred. The growth of the school brought more missionaries from the east and there were multiple marriages among the missionaries on site, making these the first marriages on record in Pope County. By this time, Finney and Washburn’s wives had also joined the mission and were teaching sewing and cooking classes to young Cherokee girls. Certainly there were marriages and children born to area Cherokee families, but the records of the mission focus only on the experiences of the eastern missionaries and say virtually nothing about the daily lives of the people who populated the school.

During the school’s tenure the settlement was also one of few Anglo outposts in the region. It was home to the first post office in the area, the first ferry, the first doctor clinic and “the destination of the first steamboat to come up the Arkansas River above Arkansas Post,” writes Vance. Maps of the school’s early days give historians an idea of how the community was laid out, which included a sawmill and grist mill located about a mile away on Mill Creek, the area known as Mill Creek Road today.

While it’s possible to gain a sense of what life for the missionaries was like, it’s virtually impossible to find information about the experiences of the young Cherokee children caught between the culture of their parents and life on the school grounds. Converting the adult Cherokees to Christianity was seldom successful, as the early missionaries often lament in their journals. But children were a different story. And while the Cherokee had already become very anglicized, Dwight Mission certainly played an instrumental role in children separated further from their cultural heritage. In an age when many Americans are starved for information about their own native history, the diaries of the missionaries can be difficult to read.

Writing in his journal as published under the name Reminiscences of the Indians, 1793-1860, Cephas Washburn has this to say about his experience working with Native American communities in both Appalachia and Arkansas: “There is a great chance since we came among them. At that time there were not twenty men in the nation who wore hats and pantaloons. Now there are not twenty who do not wear pantaloons and the great majority wear hats…the people use coffee and sugar daily…there is very little serious regard paid to their heathen rites. The green-corn dance is now observed by a very few, and not as a religious ceremony, but as a scene of amusement and revelry.”

Despite the western Cherokee’s assimilation into Anglo culture, there were large groups of whites in Arkansas territory who continually sought Cherokee removal. Even the Arkansas Gazette supported mass removal and federal officials did little to change public opinion. To address these growing pressures, a delegation of several western Cherokee including Sequoyah—the man who created the Cherokee syllabary and made his home near Russellville for a short time—traveled to Washington to secure permanent access to their Arkansas lands. Amid growing pressure to leave, the meeting eventually resulted in the Treaty of 1828, which ceded all Cherokee land in Arkansas for land in what would eventually become Oklahoma.

Dwight Mission closed in 1829, moving with the Cherokees to a new location near Sallisaw, Oklahoma where Washburn and others continued the school. The Oklahoma Dwight Mission continued to operate as a school for Cherokee children until 1948 and later became a Presbyterian summer church camp and meeting facility. It still stands today and operates as both a church and camp, and is rented out to various groups for conferences and events. Visiting the Oklahoma site today you’ll find little mention of the history of the Native Americans students save for a few photographs which can be found on the walls of the cafeteria building. Histories of the white missionaries, however, can be found in abundance.

It’s hard to say exactly what happened to the Dwight Mission site in Pope County. After the mission was moved, Washburn decided to sell the buildings to white settlers who were coming to the area in increasing numbers. Over the years this history virtually disappeared, making its way into Russellville culture only in small and isolated snippets, such as with the founding of Dwight Elementary which bears the schools namesake.

Though we know virtually nothing about what happened to the Cherokee students who left Dwight Mission to move to Oklahoma, we do know a bit about the missionary families. Cephas and Abigail Washburn eventually returned to Russellville, known as Norristown at the time, and made their home in a two-story log house located near where the Russellville soccer fields stand today. Cephas and Abigail’s son Edward Payton Washburn, a well-known painter, often came to visit his parents and occasionally visited the site of the old Dwight Mission. Historians believe Edward Payton Washburn’s famous “Arkansas Traveler” painting is based on a girl who was living, explains Stewart-Abernathy, “in a cabin at the former Dwight Mission location.” According to oral histories, explains Stewart-Abernathy, the Dwight Mission cemetery was continually used by those with claiming Cherokee ties on up until the 1930s. After the 1930s a number of African Americans were buried in the cemetery. More research is needed to understand this history.

Everywhere in the river valley area you’ll find people in both white and black communities who claim Cherokee ancestry. Are they relatives of students who once attended Dwight Mission? The official stance of the Cherokee Nation, explains Stewart-Abernathy, is that everyone with Cherokee ties left Arkansas after 1828. But local oral histories suggest otherwise. Often people say they’ve heard of Cherokee princesses in their family, for example, most likely a reference to the matrilineal nature of the Cherokee society. While some area families are able to trace their heritage back to the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, others are unable to prove such a lineage. Of course, proving one’s native ancestry is a controversial subject involving politics, history and race — complex topics this short article can’t even begin to untangle.

It’s possible some families never left. But staying on in Pope County meant denying Cherokee heritage and demanded total assimilation into the growing Anglo culture of the area. Perhaps those families who stayed claimed to be Anglo in the public sphere while passing down stories of their Cherokee history within the privacy of their own homes. What further complicates this history is that Cherokee families, even those who moved to Oklahoma, often changed their names to more anglicized forms, making family histories and genealogy difficult to untangle. It’s also likely, Stewart-Abernathy explains, that at least a few Cherokee families originally left for Oklahoma only to slip back in to Arkansas years later to escape the Cherokee civil war. There are even reports that some Cherokee families returned to the area generations later, he says, seeking to escape the intense poverty and desperation of life on the Oklahoma reservation. “Being on the reservation during the Depression was so bad,” said Stewart-Abernathy. “that one couple got on a boat and went down to Cardon Bottoms and became tenant farmers just for something to eat.”

Source: Martin-Moats, M. (2014, April 1). A hidden history. ABOUT the River Valley. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from https://aboutrvmag.com/2014/04/01/a-hidden-history/

Marker Inscription. In the early 1800's Cherokees of this area were under the leadership of Doublehead and Tahlonteskee. After Doublehead's assassination in 1807, Tahlonteskee notified President Jefferson that he and his people were ready to move west. In 1808 Tahlonteskee and 1,130 followers moved to present day Dardanelle, Arkansas. That band became known as Cherokees West and later the Old Settlers. The Blue-Water Town Creek Village was the final Alabama home of both Cherokee leaders, Doublehead is supposedly buried in Butler Cemetery on Blue Water Creek in Lauderdale County. Alabama remains the home to many Cherokees today.

Christian missionaries were sent to Arkansas to teach and minister to the Cherokee in 1818 at the request of Chief Tahlonteskee. Dwight Mission was built on the Illinois Bayou, four miles north of the Arkansas River, near present-day Russellville. It was moved in 1829 to Indian Territory after the Cherokee ceded their lands in Arkansas. The missionaries named this mission, the New Dwight Mission.
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Further Reading:
1. Hoig, S. (1999). The Cherokees and their chiefs: In the wake of Empire. University of Arkansas Press.
2. OsyioTV. (2016). Cherokee Almanac: Dwight Mission. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from https://youtu.be/xgrrh9Sx7iE.
3. Wikipedia contributors. "Tahlonteeskee (Cherokee chief)." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 18 Mar. 2023. Web. 30 Mar. 2023.
4. Wikipedia contributors. "Tahlonteeskee, Oklahoma." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 10 Oct. 2020. Web. 30 Mar. 2023.