[14] According to Cherokee historian and physician Emmet Starr,[15] her mother was the daughter of Elizabeth Emory and Robert Due (or Dews).
[21][22] Sororal polygamy (or polygyny) was common among the Cherokee, but discouraged by the Moravian missionaries who worked among them and who were shocked that Dianna's mother and grandmother were both married to the same man.
He worked as a trader in Indian country,[7] for the Muscogee people and then lived among the Cherokee for thirty years before moving to Arkansas.
He operated a ferry on the Clinch River in Tennessee and had a large plantation where he grew corn and cotton with slave laborers.
[33] The records of Springplace Mission, located near James Vann's plantation at what is now Spring Place, Georgia and founded in 1800,[34] make numerous mentions of Dianna's father,[35] but state that Rogers' children in 1807 were attending the school of Mr. Blacke, near their home.
[26][37][Note 4] Jolly had adopted young Sam Houston in 1809 when he ran away from his home near Maryville, Tennessee and crossed the river to live with the Cherokee community on Hiwassee Island.
[42] There is little doubt, per Gregory and Strickland, that Dianna knew Houston as he lived with her uncle,[7] and he became close friends with her brothers John and James.
Newlyweds David Gentry and Mary Due are found in the 1800 census of Greenville County, South Carolina.
[57] In 1825, the United States entered into a treaty with the Osage Nation, who agreed to cede land that established the western boundary of Arkansas as the 100th meridian.
[60] Dianna and David moved west and lived near Frog Bayou,[61] which is now in Crawford County, Arkansas, near Mountainburg.
[64] No explanation for their separation was ever given, but Houston resigned his governorship and headed to the western Cherokee country, where his friend Jolly was living.
[70] Williams stated that regular stickball games were held in the field behind the council house at Tahlonteeskee, followed by a night of dancing;[71] at one of these events, Dianna and Houston began their relationship.
[1][85] Wigwam Neosho was located on the Texas Road and Houston ran a trading post there, taking advantage of the numerous caravans of settlers passing.
Houston's home was a one-room, rough-hewn cabin and Fort Gibson, they said, was not a place that someone with Dianna's background would likely have visited.
[82] The Fort was called the "Hellhole of the Southwest" and frequented by adventurers, soldiers and gamblers who played poker nightly and drank heavily.
[86] Gregory and Strickland said that entertaining the rough traders, stray soldiers, gamblers, and Native people who visited them and were rowdy and drunk, would have been trying for "any well-bred woman", and "must have been offensive" to Dianna.
[87] On the other hand, they also entertained figures like Matthew Arbuckle Jr., Auguste Pierre Chouteau, and Washington Irving, among others, and she may have traveled with Houston when he was on official business.
[92] On June 27, he drafted a power of attorney to represent Dianna in her claims for property lost in the removal from Arkansas,[6] but was back in Texas by July.
[101][Note 7] In May 1904, Williamson, Wilson, and Holden located the grave marked with a sandstone near a red cedar tree.
[99][100] Holden petitioned the War Department to allow Dianna's body to be buried in the officer's circle at the Fort Gibson National Cemetery,[105] and was given permission by the army.
[105][106] Holden and O. H. Farley, a Muskogee undertaker, exhumed a body from Skin Bayou, near Wilson's Rock on the Arkansas River.
The woman's remains were reburied after a well-attended ceremony at the National Cemetery in Fort Gibson on September 4, 1904, with a marker reading "No.
[11][98] Ross thought Houston's wife was buried near Fort Gibson and Starr said that the remains disinterred by Holden belonged to a woman named Coody.
[98][108] W. P. Campbell, editor of the Oklahoma Historical Society journal, Historia, wrote that Dianna was buried near the mouth of Fourteen Mile Creek, (now in Cherokee County).
[118] Dianna Everett, editor of the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture,[119] called this story "possible though perhaps barely probable".
[121] Another son, William Houston came to Oklahoma from Dallas in 1919, and after visiting places his father had lived with Dianna, declared that he recognized them as husband and wife.