NOTABLE ARKANSANS

SSPECIAL TO THE DEMOCRAT-GAZETT ome sources say he was born in 1763, others say 1770. In either case, it was into an influential mixed-race Indian family in Tennessee. His father was probably a Scottish trader named Robert Due. By 1809, he was operating a successful trading post and was headman of Cayuga town on Hiwassee Island in present-day Hamilton County, Tenn. In 1810, he adopted a 16-year-old runaway white boy named Sam Houston and gave him the Cherokee name Ka’lanu, meaning the “Raven.” Houston lived with him for two years, attending school, helping with the trading post and in 1830 married his adoptive father’s niece, Tiana.

Prior to 1824, the Arkansaw Territory included present-day Oklahoma. After the Treaty of 1817 granted a large part of Northwest Arkansas, west of Morrilton, to the Cherokee, his older brother, Tahlonteeskee, and several other Cherokee chiefs, voluntarily moved a large group there. A year later, he followed his brother with another group and established a homestead and trading post in the Spadra area (present-day Johnson County).

He was a mild mannered man, who dressed in buckskin, and probably understood several languages and dialects. When he was elected president of the Arkansas Cherokee, Indian agents and other government officials sought his counsel. For years, he used diplomatic methods to keep American settlers and government representatives off restricted lands — lands promised to them in 1817. But in 1828, two years before the mass Indian removal called the Trail of Tears began, the Arkansas Cherokee were forced to give up their lands in Arkansas and move west into present-day Oklahoma. Under his leadership, the Cherokee Nation West adopted a constitution in 1828 establishing a tripartite government.