Cherokees wlecome back troubled Raven
Bartee Haile / History columnist
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During the first week of April 1829, Sam Houston sent his teenaged bride home to mother, decided to resign as governor of Tennessee and prepared for a self-imposed exile among his boyhood friends, the Cherokees.
Twenty years earlier, the 16-year-old had rebelled against his older brothers’ plans for his future, which included clerking in a general store, by running away. He found refuge among the neighboring Cherokees, who welcomed the headstrong youth with open arms and named him “The Raven.”
Chief Ooleteka, called John Jolly by the whites, filled the painful void created three years earlier by the death of Houston’s father. At Ooleteka’s knee the white boy learned the language, customs and values of the Cherokees while developing what one historian would describe as “a deep sympathy for the Indian character.”
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