John Ross

(1790 - 1866)

Born in Turkeytown, Alabama, to a Scottish father and a mother who was part Cherokee, John Ross was elected to the Cherokee National Council and served as the nation’s principal chief for nearly forty years. “When taught to think and feel as the American citizen, and to have with him a common interest,” he wrote in a petition to the U.S. Congress in 1836, the Cherokee “were to be despoiled by their guardian, to become strangers and wanderers in the land of their fathers…to seek a new home in the wilds of the far West, and that without their consent.”