National Register Listing

Chisholm, Jesse, Grave Site

a.k.a. Left Hand Spring;Raven Spring

NE of Geary near N. Canadian River, Geary, OK

Jesse Chisholm's death March 4, 1868 while he visited the camp of his Arapaho friend, Chief Left Hand, was fortuitous. The precise cause of death is not known; it may have been food poisoning, or pneumonia. That he was buried here, rather than at the home base for his trading operations a hundred miles or so the southeast, was determined by the exigencies of communication and transportation of the time. Yet the grave site is uniquely deserving of preservation because it represents a significant Indian/white man friendship at a troubled time in the history of the West when all too many whites subscribed to the dogma that the only good Indian was a dead Indian Historically, the white man traded with the Indian to make money, the Indian traded to get those things he needed or wanted - whether guns, flour, beads, copper pans, or cheap whiskey. Chisholm and Left Hand were friends. That friendship may well have been a deciding factor in the Indian's valiant attempt to adapt himself to "the white man's way."

Chisholm, himself a half-blood Cherokee, was born in 1805. He was primarily a trader. Incidental to this business was his engaging in the manufacture of salt (some miles north and west of where he died) and laying out wagon trails to connect his various operations. It is ironically coincidental that one of his freight routes was incorporated into the most famous cattle trail of them all. Up it in the years after his death, from Texas to various rail-heads in Kansas, moved an estimated ten million head of cattle. Yet Chisholm himself, who gave his name to the trail, lies buried some twenty miles west of the trail and was never a cattleman.

Left Hand, for his part, cane close to typifying Rousseau's "noble savage." An eloquent speaker, he championed the cause of his people in negotiations with the government preparatory to breaking up the Indian lands for white settlement-in 1892. In later years, though totally blind, he became something of a lay preacher. Through it all, however, he never forgot the old ways. His creed was simple: "There are many ways to God." While clinging to old values, however, he recognized the inevitability of the white man's culture and economy, strove dutifully to adapt himself. In 1883, Agent John D. Miles in his monthly report notes that Left Hand had "herds today which for grade of cattle and amount of care ere surpassed by few..." It is because of this success that the government decided to reward him with a proper "white man's house," the dilapidated remains of which now overlook the Chisholm Grave Site. (A recently prepared paper on Left Hand and his house is enclosed for additional reference.)

This nomination, then, is based essentially on the accomplishments and human_qualities of two men, both of whom are probably buried on or near this site. (Left Hand nearby resting place is known by some of the older Indians still living in the area. There are those Indians and whites who hope he might some day be moved to the nominated site and the two friends could thus be, symbolically, reunited.) Jesse Chisholm's name is widely known, Left Hand's virtually unknown. Preservation of the spring and grave site will focus attention on both of them - and a friend ship that, had it not been interrupted by death, might have helped to smooth Indian/white man relationships in the 1870s and 1880s in what is now western Oklahoma.

Local significance of the site:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1971.