Cherokee Indian Connection Part 2

A 2-2  Cherokee Indian Connection Part 2

Addition 6/14/2014;  In the Clint Eastwood movie, “The Outlaw Josey Wales”, Chief Dan George’s character talks about the Cherokee’s. 

This was a remarkably accurate account that speaks to the betrayal of the Cherokee’s by our government.  Implied but unsaid, was the depth their culture had been absorbed into the white man’s world.  In North Carolina, the Cherokee had owned farms and slaves.  They were educated and functioned as successful merchants, doctors and lawyers.  Two Cherokee lawyers argued, successfully before the Supreme Court, that their evection from North Carolina was illegal, only to have a Presidential order over rule the court and force the Trail of Tears in the 1838 to the east Oklahoma territories.

The movie begins in Missouri during the Civil War, travels through Kansas and at the war’s end, moves through the Oklahoma Indian Territories to Texas.  Except for the fictional plot, the settings, details and historical background are very true to the actual conditions.  It is historically accurate that the Cherokee’s would have been in the character’s path.   

John Schoonover was born in 1872 in Missouri, 7 years after the Civil War ended.   His parents relocated the family to Kansas, where he married Estella Minkler and raised his own family (Oscar and Ila) before removing them to California.  As noted earlier, Henry Schoonover settled in and lived most his life in the Indian territories of Oklahoma.

Someday I will find and read the book upon which the screenplay was based.  The Cherokee Chief’s character is in the book but I want to believe that Chief Dan George wrote some of those moving lines, he had been a poet and author before he began acting at age 60.   Remarkable and worth repeat viewings, if just for his part.