Jesse Bartley Milam (1884–1949) was best known as the first Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation appointed by a U.S. president since tribal government had been dissolved before Oklahoma Statehood in 1907.
[1] His mother's family had fled the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory to Texas in 1863 as refugees from the fighting during the American Civil War.
According to the Cherokee matrilineal kinship system, he was considered born into her clan, receiving his social status from her people.
[3] In 1887 his family returned to Cherokee Nation lands in northeastern Indian Territory and settled near what is now Chelsea, Oklahoma.
These numbers are from the census rolls of Cherokee citizens from 1899 to 1907 documented by the US federal government's Dawes Commission to allot tribal lands.
[1] Milam, an avid bibliophile, amassed a collection of over 1600 volumes about Cherokee and Native American history and culture.
[1][5] The Cherokee Nation's tribal government had been dismantled by the US Federal government under the Curtis Act of 1898, an amendment to the Dawes Act that applied to the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory in allotting communal tribal lands to households of members of the tribes.
Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller writes also that the Cherokee did not want to follow this model because of the difficulties related to "our historical relationship with the United States and our belief in our inherent sovereignty as a nation.
On August 8, 1938, in Fairfield, Oklahoma, a grassroots National Council of Cherokees gathered to choose their own Chief.
He started negotiations for the tribe to purchase the site of the original Cherokee National Female Seminary,[8] the tribal college in Park Hill, Oklahoma, that had burned down in 1887.
In the interest of intertribal treaty rights, Milam was one of the founding members of the National Congress of American Indians.
[2] His daughter, Mildred Elizabeth Milam Viles was active in Cherokee community development, particularly in Cookson, Oklahoma.
Her son, Philip Hubbard Viles, grandson of J.B. Milam, served for two decades as Chief Justice of the Cherokee Nation.
[1] Many of his personal effects and items connected to his membership to the Freemasons and Shriners are in the collections of the Cherokee Heritage Center.
Principal Chief Ross Swimmer writes of Milam: "His story is in large part the internal history of the Cherokee Nation as it continued to function and grow despite the policy of the government in Washington.