1852 – Birth of Alice Brown Davis, first female Principal Chief of the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma, multi-racial
We must never forget that Europeans did not discover the Americas. People lived in the area we now call the United States of America for thousands of years before anyone sailed from China, Spain, or Scandinavia looking for lands and goods. The onslaught of invaders resulted in the genocide of entire Indian nations. Alice Brown Davis became the first woman Principal Chief of the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma at a time when the survival of her people was in doubt.
When Davis was born on September 10, 1852, her mother’s Seminole people had been forced from their homelands into a region that whites at the time didn’t consider worth their time, the land that would become the state of Oklahoma. In 1832, Indians from the East were forced to move further and further west along the Trail of Tears. The Seminole people split into two groups – those who resisted white domination, who went to Florida to try to hide and find ways to fight back; and those who felt that acculturation on some level might allow them to maintain some of their ways as well as to simply survive. Davis’s mother’s family was forced from Florida and marched westward.
The Indians were not the only people who marched westward during that traumatic period. Davis’s father, John F. Brown, was a Scottish immigrant and military physician who officially went with the soldiers enforcing the move. Davis’s mother, Lucy Greybeard (also called Redbeard or ConoHaGe), was a member of the Tiger Clan, which often served in positions of leadership for the Seminole. Greybeard and Brown married and had eight children. Davis was born near Park Hill, Cherokee Nation, Oklahoma.
Davis grew up surrounded by her older brothers as well as Indians and whites who lived in the Fort Gibson area. Two of Davis’s brothers held formal leadership positions among the Seminole. The eldest, John Frippo, served under the Confederacy during the Civil War, and then he served as an aide to the Seminole Chief John Jumper when that war’s treaty was signed in 1866 before going on to become Principal Chief himself for many years. Another brother, Andrew Jackson, was the Seminole Treasurer for many years.
While they accepted many aspects of European culture, such as education and religion, they also tried to maintain some of their own traditions. Fort Gibson was a large area and allowed Davis to attend mission schools for Cherokee and Seminole children. Her father held his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh and may have also been a factor in promoting the European style of education for his family through private tutors.
She helped her father care for those struck by a cholera epidemic in 1867 at the Seminole settlement in Greenhead Prairie, where the family moved after the Civil War. While the illness may not have killed him directly, the strain of caring for so many may have led to her father’s death. Her mother also passed away during that period. Davis lived with her brother, who was then Chief of the Seminole.
Seven years later, in 1874, Davis married George Rollins Davis, a white man whom she had met while she was teaching in Sasakwa. Together they lived with the Cherokee for about ten years, running a trading post in Arbeka, Oklahoma. Together they had ten children, created the Bar X Bar ranch, and worked for the United States Postal Service, where they not only dealt with mail but with financial matters such as disbursing the headright money (in part to compensate for the land taken from Indians in the East) as well as Civil War pensions that might be due veterans in the area. Davis’s husband was also an official tasked with stopping the flow of illegal alcohol into the area.
Sources are conflicted about what happened to Davis and her husband. Some claim he simply died, while others say that they divorced. Since Davis seems to have run the ranch, continued with the trading post, and served as postmaster, it seems more likely that her husband died, since divorced women would rarely have been in such a powerful position at the end of the 19th century.
As her children grew older, Davis turned her attention back toward education. At some point, she may have taken a teaching position at the Mekasukey Academy for Boys in Sasakwa, Oklahoma, but that school was not founded until 1890 or 91. She also took on the position of superintendent for the Emahaka (Girls) Mission for only a few years. Davis resisted the orders of the new state of Oklahoma (1907) to turn over control of the Emahaka Mission to the state, but she was forced to do so. The result was that no Indian was allowed to teach in the school, and the subjects taught were strictly curtailed. Davis’s resistance to state takeover was not limited to fighting for the school. In 1910, while still superintendent, she had refused to sign over land rights shifting the boundaries between Creek and Seminole nations as the US government wanted. She even took the case to court after being ousted from her position, but the land deeds became unimportant when the mission was abandoned in 1914.
During her lifetime, Davis also took on tasks for both her people and for the white government that allowed her to use her talents and training in multiple languages. She served as a legal interpreter in the courts from 1893 until her death in 1935, specifically with but not limited to work with the Dawes Commission, which was supposed to be negotiating land allotments and payments between the federal government and the five nations it had forced to move west. Davis traveled to try to assist the Florida Seminole on some legal matters, including a murder trial in 1905. Between 1903 and 1910, she helped the Seminole pursue a decades-old land grant with Mexico, but that fell short when revolution came. A Baptist, she went back to Florida with missionaries to reach out to other Seminole people.
After the death of her brother in 1919, President Harding named Davis the new Principal Chief for the Seminole in 1922. Like the Emahaka school, the Seminole nation was being stripped of its power, yet Davis tried to serve as best she could. She was the first woman to be Chief of the Seminole, and eventually she seems to have been accepted, even though she was not named under traditional means. While she was the first of several women Chiefs that would soon be named among the Five “Civilized Tribes” that were forced west, she was not the first woman to ever hold such a position among any Indian nation.
She fought with the state and federal government over land rights issues after oil was found in the area in 1897, suddenly making the land much more valuable. Her major role as Chief, as far as the US government was concerned, was to sign land grants. In fact, her brother had resigned from his position a few years before his death because he believed that he had done all he could to oppose the federal and state government. Davis disagreed and would not simply sign over lands and oil rights without negotiating. Unhappy with Davis’s refusal to sign over lands, the federal government tried to appoint another Chief and then another, but each successive man refused to sign. Eventually, the United States of America simply decided it didn’t need signatures to take what it wanted.
In 1930, Davis was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame for her years of work in Oklahoma and on behalf of the Seminole and other Indian peoples. The Davis House at the University of Oklahoma in Norman was named in her honor in 1951. In 1964, at the New York World’s Fair, a bronze bust of her was unveiled, which was later placed in the American Indian Hall of Fame in Anadarko, Oklahoma. Alice Brown Davis died on June 21, 1935, at the age of 82. She may not have been able to defeat the federal government, but she tried to make a difference when and where she could.