National Register Listing

Polson Cemetery

NE of Jay, Jay, OK

Nomination of this site is submitted with full knowledge of (and, with reservations, full acceptance of) the National Park Service conviction that a cemetery is not generally to be considered eligible for the National Register. It is nevertheless presented because one of the "reservations" is thought to be overriding. Were Polson Cemetery not to be considered, another NPS conviction that the National Register program is one of preservation, rather than of memorialization, thereby calling for something physical or tangible to preserve - would almost surely guarantee that a great leader of a great Indian tribe would never be recognized by the National Register. An appeal for "special consideration" has been granted Oklahoma previously in the case of two other important Indian figures: Black Beaver and Jesse Chisholm. It is sought here for Stand Watie. Nothing of a physical nature pertaining to this great Cherokee, who died in 1871, exists today but the stone markers in Polson Cemetery.

Stand Watie was born in Georgia in 1806. His father was a full-blood Cherokee, and his mother was a half-blood Welsh-Cherokee. (His Cherokee name was Degataga, meaning "standing together," thus the "Stand.") He grew up in that tragic era when pressure was building for the removal of the Cherokees from their ancestral home in the Southeast and tribal leaders were sharply divided on the course they should follow. Most of the 17,000 Cherokees tended to follow their chief, John Ross, in opposing removal. But about 2,000 of them, led by John Ridge, felt that further resistance was useless and that moving west was the best way out of an increasingly desperate situation. A removal treaty was therefore signed with the U. S. government on Dec. 29, 1835, at New Echota, Georgia, and this group started west in the spring of 1838. Their leaders were John Ridge, Major Ridge (his father), and his two nephews, Elias Boudinot and Stand Watie.

The bitter cleavage between the two factions, born in Georgia, was merely deepened by subsequent developments that tended to vindicate the voluntary removal course of the treaty signers. When the majority of the Cherokees refused to leave Georgia, troops under General Winfield Scott rounded them up forcibly. By the fall of 1838, the tragic "Trail of Tears" westward had begun. By early 1839 most of the Cherokees were in their new home, in what is now northeastern Oklahoma, and tensions had reached a flash point. A convention called to adopt a new national constitution had failed to agree and broken up. Three days later, on June 22, 1839, Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot were assassinated at almost the same hour in different parts of the country. Stand Watie was also marked for death, but escaped, thanks to an advance warning. The consequences of this tragic event were to plague the Nation for the rest of its existence.

Local significance of the site:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1977.