Making Love and Nations

Staunchly opposed to marriages outside his nation, John Ross, the principal chief of the Cherokee from the late 1820s until his death in 1866, helped introduce restrictive laws against intermarriage between Cherokee women and white men. Ross, also known as Kooweskoowe, famously forbade his relatives from marrying outsiders. Yet, after his Cherokee wife died, he courted women in the elite circles of white American society. Mary Brian Stapler, a young white woman from Wilmington, Delaware, became the great love of his life, and their courtship and eventual marriage led to one of Americas epic romances. At the same time as Ross was negotiating his nations treaty with the U.S. government, he was working on his own treaty, as he called it, with Stapler. His courtship letters were sent from Washington, D.C., New York, and the Great Plains