Stone Gardens: First in the ground of a remote Cherokee County cemetery lends his name to the burial grounds
They named the ground Bill Batt Cemetery because that is how Cherokee places often keep a name. Not for a chief or a hanging or a newspaper headline. For the man whose people were already putting their dead in that hillside when the maps still said Cherokee Nation and not Oklahoma.
William Batt was born in 1853 in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory. Later records would print Oklahoma as if the state had always been there. It had not. He was a second-generation child of the west, born after Removal, into a nation still putting itself back together after the Civil War had split families, burned farms, and left the hills poorer than they had been before the soldiers came.
His mother was Susie Sunday Batt, born about 1831. She lived long enough to see her children grown and not much longer. His brothers and sister were Sarah, Eli, and Thomas, called Tom.
The Batt name sat among other Cherokee families of the north county, near what would be called Oaks, Rocky Ford, Teresita, and Lowrey, about sixteen miles north-northeast of Tahlequah, on ground that USGS later pinned at 36.1522 north, 94.8956 west, a little under a thousand feet up.
He married twice. First was Nanie Batt, born about 1860. Then Eliza Lowery,
born about 1851. Eliza had been married before, to William Roach, who died about 1879. She was a daughter of Switzler Lowery and Rachel Brownlow. Switzler came out of the old Lowrey line that ran back to George Lowrey, a Virginia trader, and Nannie Watts of the Long Hair clan.
That is the same broad family that produced Assistant Principal Chief George Lowrey, the translator and constitutional man whose name still marks the little community a few miles south of the cemetery. Eliza’s first marriage and her sister Nannie’s first marriage even crossed the same Roach household, the kind of tight knot Cherokee families made when the pool of neighbors was small and the rolls were about to get smaller.
Bill Batt’s children, as later memorials list them, included Susie, born 1871; Jennie, later Bird, born 1874; Aggie, later Youngbird, born 1876; and Daniel, born 1878. The stone note also names Co-hil-li, a Cherokee name that did not always get written the same way twice. Some of those children would live into the middle of the next century. Some of the little ones would not.
The year 1889 is written all over that ground. Susie Batt, the mother, about fifty-eight. Tom Batt, the brother, born 1862. A child Emily, age three. Richard Batt, age one. An unnamed person, age twenty-nine. Nanie, Bill’s first wife, also died in 1889.
James W. Tyner and Alice Tyner Timmons walked the place in the late 1960s for their book Our People and Where They Rest and found the cluster still readable enough to copy. They also listed Bluford Batt, dead June 27, 1886, at ten years old. Whatever took them, fever, winter, a season of hard luck that old people would later refuse to name, it hit one household and then the next. In Indian Territory those years, death did not always leave a newspaper. It left a row.
Bill himself died in 1898, about forty-five years old. That is the year Congress passed the Curtis Act, the law that finished what the Dawes Act had started, breaking up tribal government and pushing allotment onto Cherokee land whether the Nation wanted it or not.
He did not live to stand in the enrollment line. Eliza did. She died in 1906, about fifty-three, and they put her near him. Daniel, the son born in 1878, would be buried there in 1944. Sarah Batt Smith, the sister, 1856 to 1923.
The Tyner list still carries Lucy Batt, Emily Batt 1859 to 1907, and stones that say only a year and an age. Plot 9 is given for Bill on the later memorial. His own marker, when Tyner saw it, was spare enough that the transcription is just his name.
The cemetery sits in Section 6, Township 19 North, Range 23 East. By the time the surveyors came through it was fenced and kept. Batt Church stands next to it, close enough that the two names share a hill.
That is the old pattern. Family land, then a family burying ground, then a church, then the neighbors. Hildebrand, Freeman, Vann, Hart, Cummins, Strong, Mellowbug, Runabout, Youngdeer, Galcatcher, Gahgawee. English surnames and Cherokee names on the same fence line.
Oaks Cemetery is two miles east. Tahlequah is the county seat sixteen miles off. The road later picked up the name Batt Cemetery Road, which is how a private grief becomes a public place.
He was not famous. No council speech of his survives in the usual histories. No outlaw tale stuck to him. The record that remains is kinship, a hard year, a second marriage into the Lowreys, and a hillside that kept taking people after he was gone.
In Cherokee country that is often what “somebody” means. The man whose name you still have to say when you give directions. The plot that became the neighborhood’s stone garden because his people were already there, and because the living needed a place that belonged to them when the Nation itself was being cut into allotments.
Stand in that fence line now and the story is not a statue. It is a sequence. Susie Sunday’s generation after Removal. Bill’s generation through Reconstruction and the last years of tribal courts. Eliza’s generation through Dawes cards and statehood. Daniel and the daughters into a county that printed Oklahoma on the birth line as if that had always been the word.
The cemetery absorbed all of it. Flowers still get left. The name on the gate is still his. That is the whole argument for why they called it Bill Batt Cemetery. He was the one the ground remembered first.
