Trailblazer: Jesse Chisholm, 1805-1868
Mixed race Natives provided a valuable link between indigenous and European cultures trying to co-exist on the American frontier and in the west. One of these was Jesse Chisholm, a mixed-race Cherokee born in what is now Tennessee. His mother was Martha Rogers, the daughter of a Cherokee leader, John Rogers. Jesse's father, Ignatius Chisholm was a trader of Scottish descent. The Rogers family moved voluntarily to Oklahoma in the decades before the Trail of Tears and forced removals. In 1826, Jesse joined a prospecting party, and helped blaze a trail from what is now Wichita, Kansas, to Fort Gibson and Fort Towson, in Oklahoma. In 1834, he was a guide with the Dodge-Leavenworth Expedition, one of the earliest contacts between the Army and Plains tribes. Like his father before him, Jesse entered into the trading business. He married a woman named Eliza Edwards. Her father owned a trading post near the junction of the Canadian and Little Ri...