Samuel Checote
muscogee political leader, military veteran and Methodist preacher
Samuel Checote (1819–1884) (Muscogee) was a political leader, military veteran, and a Methodist preacher in the Creek Nation, Indian Territory. He served two terms as the first principal chief of the tribe to be elected under their new constitution created after the American Civil War. He had to deal with continuing tensions among his people, as traditionalists opposed assimilation to European-American ways.
Checote fought with the Confederacy during the war; most Creek supported their cause. He served as a lieutenant colonel with a Creek mounted unit in Indian Territory. After the war he resumed preaching.
Early life and education
Checote was born in 1819 to a Muscogee family in the Chattahoochee Valley, traditional Creek territory. It is in present-day eastern Alabama, near the Georgia state line. He started school at the Asbury Manual Labor School, established by Methodist missionaries near Fort Mitchell, Alabama. In 1829, he and his family were forced to move to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) as part of Indian Removal.
“Samuel Checote” enters the record as muscogee political leader, military veteran and Methodist preacher. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Samuel, Checote and muscogee can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Samuel Checote” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.