Cold Case Files: An old Adair County legend weaves historical accuracy with speculation about a forgotten gravesite

What follows is folklore. The only hard line in the record is a cemetery note from the late 1960s. James Tyner and Alice Tyner Timmons, in Our People and Where They Rest, found July Springs in Section 26, Township 16 North, Range 24 East, Adair County. A dying mulberry. An old Cherokee known only as "July', thought to have died in the 1850s.

Two people born there in the 1880s remembered a grave under shaped and fitted stones. Other burials had stood nearby. The plow and the pasture had taken the names. Nothing in that survey says treaty, assassin, or firing party. The rest of this is talk laid over those bones so the tree will have a reason.

The first Cherokees on this ground were not the people who cried on the road in 1838. Old Settlers had already come west under the treaties of 1817 and 1819, some of them from the Carolina and Tennessee towns, and they had made farms in Arkansas and then in the Nation West. After the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, signed by a minority that included Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot, the United States treated Removal as law.

John Ross

The Ross party called the signers traitors. In 1838 and 1839, the late immigrants arrived, among them people from the North Carolina mountains and the Valley Towns, detachments that buried children on the way and then looked for water and timber in Flint and Going Snake. Two bodies of the same nation now stood on the same creeks. One had sold the old country. One had been driven from it. That was the climate. It did not cool because a surveyor drew a line.

On June 22, 1839, the climate became a method. Major Ridge was shot on the road. John Ridge was pulled from his house and killed in front of his family. Elias Boudinot was cut down at his place. Stand Watie lived.

Issac Bushyhead

The killings were not random. They were the old law of blood against the men who had marked the paper at New Echota. Isaac Bushyhead, brother of the Baptist missionary Jesse Bushyhead, whose mission and cemetery still sit north of present Westville, was later murdered in the same long quarrel by men of the Ridge and Watie side.

Jesse himself died in 1844 and was buried beside an unmarked daughter at Baptist Mission. The Nation tried an Act of Union and a new constitution that same season. The shooting did not stop. It ran in the timber through 1846, when another agreement tried to bury the feud on paper. Paper is a poor grave.

September 10, 1853, brought the quarrel onto ground that is now Adair County in a way a map can still almost hold. Andrew Raven Adair and his son George Washington Adair were ambushed and killed at Starr Springs, near the old community of Blanch, on land that had been Caleb Starr’s.

Family tradition put them in the little Adair Cemetery, already fading when the WPA counted about fifteen graves and only seven stones in 1937. The murders were remembered as the Adair Massacre. The cause, people said, was the same old Removal grudge that had never finished its list. Cherokee authorities caught the killers and executed them under tribal law.

Father and son had names. July did not.

The folklore puts him in the years between those public deaths and the last of the 1850s, a man of the late immigrant wave or of a mixed household that had chosen the wrong porch to sit on.

He is not a Ridge. He is not an Adair. He is the kind of person the feud ate when it had already taken the famous ones and still wanted supper. Some tellings say he had spoken for Ross in a district that remembered Watie’s kin. Some say he had sheltered a Treaty man after 1839 and the Pins, or the friends of Pins, came later.

Some say he only lived too near a spring that both parties used and would not name who drank there after dark. Three men, or four, or a party that did not count itself. The fitted stones are the only ceremony the story allows.

No monument like Bushyhead’s. No WPA sketch like the Adair plot. A cover of rock, a mulberry that outlasted the names of the neighbors, and a month written where a surname should have been.

July as a name is a thin hook. It can be a birth month, a translation, or an English ear catching something older. Later Bibles in the hills are said to have copied it into a margin beside a date in the 1850s, then, generations on, to have whispered that the same house later claimed kin to a younger man called Jim July, who took Belle Starr’s name at Younger’s Bend on the Canadian in the 1880s and died in the Fort Smith jail in 1890.

That later man is history of another county and another crime. He does not belong under the mulberry except as the way families borrow a loud name to keep a quiet grave from going completely dumb.

What belongs is this. Old Settlers and North Carolina people and Tennessee people stacked their dead on the same benches after two different journeys. The Treaty of New Echota split the living. June 22, 1839, taught the Nation that a road and a doorway were lawful enough.

The 1840s taught that union papers do not stop a rifle. Starr Springs in 1853 taught that the lesson still held on the very ground that would become Adair County.

July Springs, if the tale is believed, is where that lesson landed on a man whose English name was only a month, whose killers were never written down, and whose marker was stone fitted by hands that then went home and said nothing.

The mulberry is what Tyner found. The assassinations are what the Nation remembers. The meeting of the two is folklore, and it should stay labeled that way, or the plow will have told the truer story after all.