Our Arklahomla Heritage: A music teacher with claims of Russian Prince hood spent three years in Tahlequah
Imagine yourself in Tahlequah, Indian Territory, on a Monday morning in the late 1880s. Sunlight slips through a half-drawn curtain. Birds work the grass beyond the stoop. A branch ticks the pane and you remember what day it is.
Music day. You might be a student at the Cherokee Male Seminary or the Female Seminary at Park Hill. You might be a young adult who wants the piano. You might sing in the Presbyterian choir. Across town, a small, bearded, middle-aged man in a tall hat is already preparing his lesson.
He is strict. People who sat under him said he would crack inattentive knuckles with a lead pencil. He called himself Prince Edwin V. Dolgorouki, sometimes Edwinrin, sometimes G. Dolgoruki, and the newspapers of the Cherokee Nation spelled him Dolgouski, Dolgoruky, and Dolgorukov. He was, and remains, one of the stranger figures to pass through the capital of the Cherokee Nation.Ksmu
He did not appear first in Tahlequah. Ozarks historian Brooks Blevins, working from letters in the University of Arkansas Special Collections, found him already in Washington County, Arkansas, by 1877.
A young woman writing to a cousin after a community Christmas tree that year wondered who had left her a gift and guessed it was “Professor Dolgoriki.”
Local memory, set down much later by a columnist signing himself Uncle Walt in the Fayetteville Northwest Arkansas Times on September 17, 1938, placed the same man in the hamlet of Cincinnati in the early 1870s.
He was plainly a foreigner. His manners, languages, and playing marked him as someone who had once mattered. A Professor Welch, almost certainly Rev. H. M. Welch of nearby Cane Hill College, heard him play Anton Rubinstein and was told, “I ought to know how to play Rubinstein, for I studied under him.”
Welch put him to work teaching in the Cincinnati neighborhood and at Cane Hill, which had opened a music department in 1875 when Welch took charge of the female side of the college. After a concert in Fayetteville drew notice from papers as far as Springfield and New York, the professor vanished from northwest Arkansas. He turned up in Tahlequah about 1887.
The tale he told anyone who would listen was a full opera of royalty, war, prison, and wandering.
He said he was born to the Dolgorukov house, studied piano under Rubinstein in St. Petersburg at fourteen, fought in the Crimean War, took a ball in the stomach, fell into Ottoman hands, and then spent nearly five years in a Siberian salt mine. Christian sympathizers helped him escape.
He spent nine more years in Asia, reached San Francisco, and walked east until he reached the Cherokee capital. One version even had him riding out of the mine inside a salt barrel.
The geography alone should have given listeners pause. Ottoman jailers did not consign prisoners to Siberia. Siberia was a Russian sentence. The Crimean War ended in 1856. Rubinstein did not open the St. Petersburg Conservatory until 1862. A boy of fourteen in the war years could not have been a conservatory pupil in the later sense, though Rubinstein was already a celebrated pianist in the 1840s and 1850s.
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No Edwin, Edwinrin, or Edwin V. appears in published Dolgorukov genealogies. The family itself is real and old. The name means long-arme.
Yuri Dolgoruky is credited with founding Moscow. Maria Dolgorukaya married Ivan IV. Vladimir Andreyevich Dolgorukov served as governor general of Moscow from 1865 to 1891, and some later writers wondered whether the Tahlequah teacher might have been a sidelined son, perhaps of a morganatic marriage.
There is no document that says so.
Blevins looked for the man in the 1880 census of Washington County and found no Dolgoruki. He did find a Russian born music teacher named Francis Morgan, married, with an eight month old son.
Whether Morgan and the prince were the same person is a guess, not a proof.
Either way, the West in those decades was thick with self-anointed counts and princes. A good accent, a good story, and a real gift at the keyboard could carry a man a long way through small towns that wanted culture and had few ways to check a pedigree.Ksmu
What is not in doubt is the teaching.
Local accounts, later books, letters, and notices in the Cherokee Advocate agree that from about 1883 until 1890 he taught piano and voice in Tahlequah. Pupils included seminary students by the dozen and several young men who became prominent.
William Wirt Hastings, born December 31, 1866, in Benton County, Arkansas, graduated from the Cherokee Male Seminary in 1884, took a law degree at Vanderbilt in 1889, served as Cherokee attorney general and superintendent of education, and later sat in Congress.
William P. Thompson, Hastings’s seminary classmate and Vanderbilt roommate, became a judge. John Henry Covel, born July 18, 1848, near the capital, taught in district schools and at the Cherokee Orphan Asylum, clerked for Saline District, and from 1887 served as executive secretary to Principal Chief Joel B. Mayes. Covel kept a house in Tahlequah and two farms. Traditional lists also name a student called Clu Guligar.
The seminaries themselves already prized music. Kathleen Garrett, writing in the Chronicles of Oklahoma in 1955, described how singing had been in the Female Seminary curriculum since the school opened in 1851 on a Mount Holyoke plan, how demand for lessons grew until a staff of teachers was needed, and how pianos, some hauled into the Nation by ox cart as early as the Fort Gibson years, became household marks of refinement.
A traveling teacher who could deliver Rubinstein in a parlor was not a luxury. He was part of how Cherokee families claimed the same cultivated life they saw in the states
In 1890, at a social gathering in Covel’s home, a stranger walked in wearing a uniform no one recognized.
The prince decided the man had come to drag him back to Russia. He left the house that night and was not seen in Tahlequah again. No reliable trail follows him after that door closed.
There is no matching exile in Russian military or prison records for a teenage Dolgorukov captured in the Crimea and worked in salt. There is no later American census that plainly continues the Tahlequah teacher under that name. He may have been an actual Russian musician who borrowed a princely name because it opened doors.
He may have been Francis Morgan or another immigrant who rebuilt himself. He may have been an American running from something farther east.
The only solid ground is this. For about seven years in the Cherokee capital, and for several years before that in the Arkansas hills, a small, severe man who played extremely well taught a generation of students, some of whom went on to run courts, schools, and a nation, and then he stepped off the edge of the record as cleanly as he had stepped onto it.
