Wednesday, February 1, 2017

I did not make it clear that Cousin Calvin who killed a Delaware was half Cherokee.

"Half-breed Cherokee" Cousin Calvin Coker--Innocent of Murder by Reason of Political Excitement

Follow-up:
The Eureka, Kansas Herald on 1 July 1875 identified Cousin, the descendant of an English immigrant to Virginia in the 1600s, as a "half-breed Cherokee." Uncle Joe Coker was one of the enthusiastic progenitors of half-breed children in northern Arkansas. William Monks in A History of Southern Missouri and Northern Kansas (1907, in the University of Arkansas 2003 reprint) says: "One of the Cokers raised two families, one by a white woman and the other by an Indian woman." There was in fact more than one Indian woman involved, and it was the multiple claiming of their women that the Cherokee men objected to: see the Turnbo story about "Poor Joe Hill." Moncks continues: "The Indian family, after they had grown up and become men, resided a part of the time in the [Cherokee] Nation, where the mother lived, and a part of the time they remained in Marion county where their father and other relatives lived. They were very dangerous men when drinking, and the whole country feared them."

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