Our Arklahoma Heritage: The first appointed female Chief of the Seminole tribe was born in Park Hill
Alice Brown Davis was born on September 10, 1852, near Park Hill in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, to Dr. John Frippo Brown, a Scottish physician and graduate of the University of Edinburgh who had served as a military surgeon during the forced removal of the Seminoles from Florida, and Lucy Redbeard, also known as ConoHaGe, a full-blood Seminole woman of the Tiger Clan, or Katcvlke.
Her parents married after meeting during the removal period around 1837 and together had seven children, of whom Alice was one. Her older brothers included John Frippo Brown, who later became Principal Chief of the Seminole Nation for many years, and Andrew Jackson Brown, who served as tribal treasurer.
She was enrolled as one-half Seminole by blood on the Dawes Rolls. Four members of her mother’s family held significant leadership roles among the Seminoles between 1832 and 1935, reflecting the traditional prominence of the Tiger Clan in tribal affairs.
Alice grew up near Fort Gibson and learned both English and Mikasuki as first languages. At the age of fifteen, in 1867, she assisted her father during a severe cholera epidemic that struck the Seminoles. Both of her parents died in that epidemic, after which she moved to Wewoka, the Seminole capital, to live with her brother John Frippo Brown on his ranch.
She received schooling at the Ramsay Mission School, which had been established by the Episcopal Church and later operated by Baptist missionaries, and one of her influential teachers was a Cherokee woman, Caroline Bushyhead. She was also educated by private tutors and in boarding schools, becoming well educated in a manner comparable to her brothers.
On January 20, 1874, at the age of twenty-two, she married George Rollin Davis, a European American merchant from Leroy, Kansas. The ceremony was performed by Samuel Checote, Chief of the Creek Nation.
The couple established a trading post, post office, and general store at Arbeka in the Seminole Nation, along with the Bar X Bar Ranch near the North Canadian River, and they helped found the settlement of Arbeka around 1882.
They had eleven children, of whom ten survived to adulthood. Among the children were Jess Edwin Davis, Clara Estelle Davis (also known as Kitt), Laura Myrtle Davis, and others who later married into families including Key, Kiker, Aldridge, Fleet, Twinam, and Locke.
Sources differ on the end of the marriage: some indicating that George Davis died when the youngest child was still a toddler, while others state that the couple divorced around 1898. After the separation or death, Alice managed the ranch with its twenty cowboys, the trading post, the post office, and her large family on her own while also serving as postmistress of Arbeka.
She was known as an excellent athlete who excelled in outdoor sports and was observed swimming across the North Canadian River while carrying two of her children on her back.
After 1885, she worked closely with her brother Chief John F. Brown as an interpreter, liaison, and record-keeper for the Seminole Tribe, acquiring extensive knowledge of tribal affairs. She taught school at Sasakwa and later became superintendent of the Seminole Nation’s Emahaka Female Academy, which opened in 1892 and offered instruction from the first through the tenth grades.
She also taught at Mesukey Academy for Boys and worked with integrated classrooms that included children of freedmen after 1874.
She served as an interpreter for the Dawes Commission in 1893 and in court cases because of her bilingual ability. In 1903, she traveled with a Seminole delegation to Mexico to pursue land grant claims, returning in 1905 and 1910, though the Mexican Revolution ultimately ended those efforts.
She belonged to the Spring Baptist Church at Sasakwa, where her brother John served as pastor, and she performed missionary work among the Florida Seminoles in 1909, as well as participating in the Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, and Wichita Baptist Associations.
In 1922, at the age of seventy, she was appointed Principal Chief of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma by President Warren G. Harding, succeeding Hulbutta Micco and following the long tenure of her brother John F. Brown, who had died in 1919.
She was the first woman to serve as Principal Chief of the Seminole Nation and is often described as the first woman chief of any tribe west of the Mississippi and possibly the only chief selected by both her own people and a United States President.
The appointment was initially controversial because of her gender, even though her maternal Tiger Clan held traditional prominence, yet she gradually won broad support. During her tenure, most of her duties involved questions of oil leases and Seminole allotments.
She firmly opposed the reassignment of certain Seminole lands to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation based on a 1910 survey that included the grounds of Emahaka School and local churches. She refused to sign the related deeds, declaring that if the refusal caused her resignation, she would feel she had done what was right and just to herself and her people.
The school was subsequently emptied, burned, and never rebuilt because of the unresolved dispute. She had earlier resisted yielding control of Emahaka School to the Bureau of Indian Affairs under the Curtis Act and Dawes Act, preferring continued Indian oversight of education, though her brother eventually persuaded her to comply.
Alice Brown Davis continued to serve as Principal Chief until her death on June 21, 1935, at the age of eighty-two in a Wewoka hospital after a long illness caused by heart disease. Funeral services were held on June 23, 1935, at Oakwood Cemetery in Wewoka, Seminole County, Oklahoma, with both white and Indian ceremonies conducted because of her standing in both communities.
The white service was led by Reverend W. H. Hodges, pastor of the Missionary Baptist Church of Wewoka, and the Indian service by Reverend Louis Harjo. Large crowds attended, including Chief George Jones of the Seminole Nation, his assistant Chili Fish, and members of the tribal council.
Flowers arrived from across Indian Territory and the Five Civilized Tribes, and pallbearers included both white and Indian men. Police and the sheriff managed traffic on Highway 270 for the large procession.
She was buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Wewoka.
She had been inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1930. A bronze bust of her, sculpted by Willard Stone, was unveiled at the 1964 New York World’s Fair on Oklahoma Day and later placed in the American Indian Hall of Fame in Anadarko.
Davis Hall at the University of Oklahoma was named in her honor in 1950, and she was inducted into the National Hall of Fame for Famous Native Americans in Anadarko in 1961.
