Samuel Houston Mayes

His maternal grandfather belonged to the Deer clan, and his father was allied with members of the Cherokee Treaty Party in the 1830s, such as the Adair men, Elias Boudinot, and Major Ridge.

Born in Indian Territory, Mayes attended a Cherokee school, served with the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and become a cattle rancher before entering politics.

He was elected as the United States was dissolving tribal governments and communal lands, and making allotments in severalty to individual households of Native Americans, in an effort to force assimilation, under the Dawes and Curtis acts.

His mother Nancy Adair was of Scots-Cherokee descent, a granddaughter of Ga-hoga, a full-blood Cherokee woman of the Deer clan.

[3]: 229 At age 16, Samuel Mayes volunteered for the Confederate Army in the American Civil War, serving in Company K, under Capt.

They had three children who survived: William Lucullis, Joseph Francis (who became a doctor), and M. Carrie Mayes, who married Clarence Samuels.

During Mayes' term as Chief beginning in 1896, the Dawes Commission took over the power of the Cherokee Nation to determine its citizenship rules.

It had been established to manage a process of allotments of communal Native American lands to provide for assimilation of the people as farmers in the European-American style.

In furtherance of planning to abolish tribal governments to allow the Oklahoma and Indian territories to be admitted jointly as a new state, the Dawes Commission set up to register the members of the Cherokee Nation.