A Cherokee Matriarch Remembered: The Enduring Legacy of Nancy Dry Sixkiller

in the peaceful hillsides near Westville in Adair Count, beneath a canopy of old-growth trees in Old Green Cemetery, lies a woman whose life story is stitched into the very soil of Indian Territory.

Born in Georgia in 1817, Cha-wa-yuke--known in English as Nancy Dry Sixkiller--lived through the most harrowing chapter in Cherokee history and emerged as a matriarch whose memory still stirs the hearts of her descendants.

Nancy was a full-blood Cherokee and a survivor of the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of her people from their ancestral homelands in 1838–1839.

She was just a young woman when she and her family were rounded up by federal troops and marched westward under brutal conditions.

Along that trail, Nancy endured a loss that would mark her forever: the death of her infant child. Oral tradition holds that she buried the baby herself, using a broken case knife to dig a shallow grave along the roadside. There was no time for mourning--only the relentless push westward.

She eventually settled in what would become Adair County where she lived until her death in 1924 at the age of 107. Her long life bore witness to the Civil War, the dissolution of tribal governments, and the birth of the state of Oklahoma.

Through it all, Nancy remained a keeper of Cherokee traditions and a living link to a world that had been violently uprooted.

But her later years were shadowed by a tragedy that would haunt her family’s name. In 1890, Washington “Wash” Lee, a respected Cherokee lawman and former sheriff of the Goingsnake District, was ambushed and fatally shot on his farm.

H

e died three days later. The crime shocked the community--and the investigation led to Nancy’s own sons, George and Fred Dunawas (also known as George Quarles and Fred Grant).

The motive remains murky, tangled in family disputes and whispers of betrayal. Some accounts suggest a quarrel over stolen horses; others hint at deeper personal grievances. Regardless of the cause, the outcome was grim.

George and Fred were arrested, tried, and executed by hanging in Tahlequah on April 17, 1891. Their deaths marked one of the final public executions in the Cherokee Nation and cast a long shadow over the Sixkiller family.

Nancy spent a week beside the graves of her sons after he executions to ensure their spirits would be tended to by chanting and saying prayers nonstop to help usher their souls into the next world.

Nancy, then in her seventies, lived on for more than three decades after the execution of her sons. She carried the weight of their actions alongside the memory of her people’s suffering.

Her grave bears a bronze plaque from the Trail of Tears Association, honoring her endurance during the forced removal. But her story is far more than a footnote in Cherokee history--it is a testament to the complexities of frontier life, where justice, grief, and survival often collided.

Today In remembering Nancy Dry Sixkiller, we remember not only a woman who lived through the darkest chapters of American history, but one who bore its burdens with quiet dignity.