The last witch killings in America
Cold Springs was a small community near Hugo in Choctaw County.
It was in Cold Springs, according to the April 15, Metropolitan Library podcast at https://tinyurl.com/ea593am8, “The Last Witch Killings in America” occurred.
On Feb. 20, 1944, The Daily Oklahoman published an article titled “Indian Medicine Man” in which the story of “witch-slayer” Solomon Hotema was told.
…Many people recall the case of Solomon Hotema, and not a few of them, knew intimately the defendant, Hotema, son of a Choctaw who immigrated from Mississippi in 1830, was born in old Kiamitia county, I.T. in 1851. He joined the Presbyterian church when 19, and in 1878 he attended Roanoke college in Virginia, and several years later, af
ter having traveled with a missionary as interpreter, he took to preaching himself, after being ordained. The small church which he built within 200 yards from his home in the Cold Spring community is still a landmark in what is now Choctaw county.
On April 14, 1899, Solomon Hotema, who had become a loved and respected member of his tribe, gave himself up to the authorities, because in his own words, he “had killed three persons who have been known as witches for years, causing sorrow, deceiving many and sending precious souls to hell.”
At his trial for murder in the U.S. district court in Paris, Texas, Hotema was sentenced to be hanged. But the late Judge T.C. Humphrey of Hugo, his attorney, was successful in appealing to President McKinley and obtained commutation to life imprisonment…
Samuel Hotema died in 1907 and is buried in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary Prison Cemetery in Georgia.