Robert Rogers - Westville, Oklahoma

DATE VISITED:  05/01/2015

HISTORICAL SITE:  Robert Rogers

  

LOCATION:  US 59, Westville, Adair Co., Oklahoma

MARKER #:  64-1995

“Robert Rogers. A signer of the treaty of New Echota and Grandfather of famed Will Rogers. Robert Rogers moved with his wife, Sally Vann, to Indian Territory about 1837, and established a home about 1 mile NW. He was killed in 1842, in a tribal feud as were many of the treaty signers following the forced removal of the Cherokees in 1838-39. He is buried near his home site about ½ mile north and ¾ miles west of here. His widow later married a Virginian, William Musgrove”

Note: “here” is the Baptist Mission Cemetery at US-59, Westville, Oklahoma

MARKER PLACED BY:  Oklahoma Historical Society

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS: 

In 1835, before the Trail of Tears march, a group of Cherokees signed an agreement (The Treaty of New Echota) with the U.S. government to give up all lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for $5 million dollars and lands in what would become Oklahoma.

Some Cherokees, including Robert Rogers, quietly moved to Oklahoma. They are called the “old settlers”.

Many Cherokees, including Chief John Ross, denounced and defied the treaty.

Finally, in 1839, the U.S. Army rounded up the Indians and forced them to walk, in winter, to new homeland in Oklahoma…this is the “Trail of Tears”.

I wonder…if it hadn’t been for the fact that Robert Rogers was the Grandfather to Will Roger, would we really know him as anything more than a signer of the Treaty of New Echota?

Interestingly, I came upon some disagreement whether it is THIS Robert Rogers who truly signed the treaty. It’s said that if it had been him, he would have been about 20 at the time and a Dr. Robert Rogers in Georgia put it in his will that HE was the one who had signed the treaty.

The Cherokees, to this day, believe it was the Robert Rogers I am writing about and apparently so does the Oklahoma Historical Society since they put in on the landmark…a mystery!

Robert, along with his wife Sally, prospered in the new land and it was conspicuous among the Cherokee. They had two children, a boy and a girl.

In 1842, some full blooded Cherokees crept up on Robert and shot him. The lives of several other signers of the treaty also ended in assassination/murder.

A shame, if this wasn’t the Robert Rogers who signed the treaty, then the murder was a horrible mistake.

 

Their home, along with a small family cemetery was a couple of miles north of the mission church.