Cherokee in Controversy

In his biography of Jesse Bushyhead, the retired Oklahoma Wesleyan University historian Dan B. Wimberly raises intriguing questions about the role his protagonist played in a crucial era of Cherokee history. Reviewing recent scholarship on Cherokee removal and early accounts that exalted Bushyhead, the author found no satisfactory monograph and concluded that “someone of Bushyhead's significance deserves attention” (p. xviii). Born in 1804, Bushyhead was the first son of Cherokees of modest means. Family lore identifies his grandfather as John Stuart, the British superintendent of Indian affairs for the southern colonies. His unruly mane of hair provided a surname for many of his mixed-blood descendants, yet Wimberly claims that Stuart had left the Cherokee nation before the conception of Bushyhead's father and suggests that his subject possessed more Indian blood than the five-sixteenths typically attributed to him. The author concludes that Bushyhead's Anglo ancestry “gave him the advantages of a European education, fluency in Cherokee and English, and an understanding of the political and economic characteristics of both worlds” (p. 9

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