User:CristinaTejeda17/sandbox

Early life and family background[ edit]
Born on October 3, 1831 in a log cabin near Webbers Falls   (in what was then Arkansas Territory, soon became Indian Territory and would become Oklahoma) to Cherokee chieftain Thomas H. Chisholm (1790–1834)  and his Virginia-born wife Malinda Wharton (1803–1864) (great-granddaughter of British Jacobite politician Philip Wharton, 1st Duke of Wharton).

 < Narcissa was the youngest of four siblings. Her sister Jane Elizabeth married Caswell Wright Bruton and became Mrs. Jane Bruton  and   Neither of her brothers, Alfred Finney Chisholm (1830-1862), who married Margaret Harper, and William Wharton Chisholm(1830-1862), who married Susie Pindar, survived the American Civil War. added information on siblings>

< moved up Her paternal great-grandfather, John Beamor, had emigrated to the Carolinas to spread the gospel among Cherokees. In 1699 the 23 year old English missionary married 16 year old Quatsis, sister of chief Caulunna. Rev. Beamor later became a member of South Carolina's House of Burgesses and owned a plantation and at least 10 negro slaves. < Around 1730 he traveled with a group of Cherokees to England. There he made a treaty that was opposed by a Cherokee group led by Oconstota, a war chief prior to the Revolutionary War and an ancestor to Narcissa. added info> Eastern Cherokees later entered into treaties with the Americans in 1777 and 1782 (after further conflict and a smallpox epidemic). One of his grandsons, Rev. Jesse Bushyhead (1804-1844), became a noted Baptist preacher, as well as a schoolmaster. 





In 1819 the Old Settlers or Western Cherokees , moved westward with their slaves and settled on the Spada and Arkansas Rivers. A century earlier (according to an estimate of Christian Priber whom Narcissa labeled a French Jesuit, but who was actually a German utopian), the nation had about 50,000 warriors, but by 1819 only about 15,000 remained, of which a third (including the Chisholms) lived west of the Mississippi River. In 1827 the Cherokee Nation held a general convention and adopted a national constitution, at a convention led by John Ross and which elected Charles R. Hicks Principal Chief.



Narcissa's mother remarried a widower and future Judge William Wilson (1811 - 1897) His first wife was Ruth Drumgould, whose mother was Kah-ta-yah, whom young Narcissa met in 1836 when the grandmother was nearing 100. Young Narcissa also learned about her Cherokee heritage from "Granny Jenny," her father's former nurse and the daughter of enslaved Africans.  

Shortly before eastern Cherokee moved through the area, forced from their homes along the Trail of Tears. Narcissa later wrote of witnessing a group of Army-supervised Cherokee camp on their mother's farm in January 1839, noting the cruelty of herding human beings accustomed to warm winters through the cold and wind. She described how many refugees were sick and dozens died and were buried in what had been the family graveyard.



Education and family life[ edit]
Having lost her father so early, Narcissa Chisholm was to some extent transferred between family members during her youth. Initially, her elder sister and brothers were educated at Dwight Mission School while her mother raised her.   Narcissa attended Rev. Bushyhead's mission school circa 1843. '''

Narcissa Chisholm moved to Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1846 to live with her decade-older sister Jane and attend an academy there run by Melvin Lynde. She then moved to southern Indiana where she attended a school run by John Byers Anderson. She returned to Fort Smith in 1848 and attended a female academy, Mrs. Sawyer's School, in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  She also briefly served as a bridesmaid at the wedding of prominent Cherokee Wash Mayes.

She then accepted a position teaching music in east Tennessee. While teaching in Masonic High School in Jonesborough, Washington County, Tennessee, she met Virginia-born civil engineer Robert L. Owen Sr., who was surveying a railroad route over the Appalachian Mountains from Lynchburg, Virginia toward Nashville, Tennessee. They married on October 4, 1853.  

They moved  near the Clinch River while Mr. Owen continued his survey work, and then to Lynchburg, where Owen became President of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad. < info added Narcissa bore two sons: the future U.S. Army Dr. William Otway Owen, born 1854 in Broylesville, Tennessee and future U.S. Senator Robert Latham Owen Jr. born 1856 in Lynchburg, Virginia. info add>  In Lynchburg, the Owen family (and their slaves) lived at Point of Honor, a mansion overlooking the James River and various railroad lines serving the city. Through his mother (and grandmother Betty Lewis, George Washington's niece), Robert Owen inherited several relics of the first President.

Virginia[ edit]
During the American Civil War, Robert Owen ran the railroad (a crucial supply and troop line for the Confederacy) and his wife and Mrs. Thomas J. Kirkpatrick led the women of St. Paul's Episcopal Church who sewed uniforms and otherwise assisted the same cause. Their sons were too young to fight, but Robert Owen's brother, Dr. William Owen, ran 30 hospitals in the city (a major hospital center for the Confederacy). Lynchburg never fell to Union forces, which withdrew after false reports (for some of which Narcissa Owen later took credit) of Confederate troop strength in the town.  

Shortly after the war ended, Robert Owen resigned as President of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, after losing a fight against merging the railroad with several owned by former Confederate General (and future Republican Senator) William Mahone. Robert Owen served a term in the Virginia Senate, then purchased a plantation near Norfolk, Virginia from a former surveyor buddy, where he died unexpectedly shortly before the Panic of 1873.  Her husband's death left Narcissa Owen with young children to raise, and what little financial security remained after Robert Owen's death soon vanished. Narcissa Owen returned to teaching to send her sons to college.

Oklahoma[ edit]
In 1880, Narcissa Owen moved< DELETE (with the piano her husband had given her as a wedding present)> to Oklahoma Indian Territory to teach music at the Cherokee Female Seminary, the first institution of higher learning for women west of the Mississippi River.   Her younger son Robert L. Owen, Jr. had graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1887, and already moved to Oklahoma to continue a teaching career as orphanage principal, as well as read law and begin a legal career.  Robert Owen became Indian Agent (1885-1889) during the presidency of Democrat Grover Cleveland, then organized the First National Bank of Muskogee in 1890 (and served as its president as well as practiced law for the next decade).  

In 1895, the 62-year old Narcissa Owen retired from teaching, devoting herself to art and also worked to refute misconceptions of Native Americans as primitive and uncouth.   She studied at the Library of Congress and the Corcoran Gallery, and painted landscapes (as well as portraits and miniatures) using oil paint, as well as used the more traditional women's medium of needlework. Her self-portrait of 1896 displayed above indicates her Victorian-era respectability and wealth. Owen also displayed tapestries at the Oklahoma Territory's pavilion, for she did not believe in hierarchies of artistic medium.

Her painting "Thomas Jefferson and His Descendants," won a medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904. <ADDED info

Displayed in the Indian Territory Building throughout the exposition, Narcissa’s portraits showcased six generations of Jefferson’s descendants: Thomas Jefferson himself, his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph, his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, his great-granddaughter Mrs. R. G. H. Kean, his other great-granddaughter Mrs. John S. Morris, and the Adelaide and Pattie Morris. Narcissa’s interest in honoring Thomas Jefferson comes from her family’s history and friendship with him. In 1808 Owen’s father Thomas Chisholm receives the Silver Peace and Friendship Medal from Jefferson for his efforts to unite the Eastern and Western Cherokees. citation>





In 1900 her son Robert L. Owen began a 6 year legal battle in Oklahoma and Washington, D.C., which ultimately led to a judgment for the balance due the Cherokee from the 1835 treaty ($5 million including interest from 1838). This catapulted him into prominence, and he was elected one of Oklahoma's first two U.S. Senators after the territory achieved statehood on November 17, 1907. Although some Native American leaders disagreed with Robert Owen and had opposed statehood (and some would later disagree with the disbursement of the funds obtained), the Sequoyah Constitutional Convention (which met in Muskogee in 1905) proved a precursor of the statehood convention.

Narcissa Owen moved to Washington, D. C., where she acted as her son's hostess, and continued working to refute misconceptions of Native Americans. On October 3, 1907, Owen privately published her Memoirs, probably in Washington, D.C., although another copy was found at the multi-ethnic, library-friendly Tuesday Club of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which had gathered at her Oklahoma home "Monticello" <DELETE, which as she noted was only 2 miles from the Presbyterian ladies of Caney, Kansas)> in honor of her 75th birthday the previous May 1, as mentioned at the Memoir's conclusion. As Owen's modern editor has noted, the Memoirs combine traditional storytelling modes (and humor, including trickster imagery) and Native perspectives deriving back to Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Paiutes: their wrongs and claims (1883) and Lucinda Lowery Hoyt Keys' Historical Sketches of the Cherokees (1889).

Death and legacy[ edit]
Narcissa Owen died in Guthrie, Oklahoma on July 12, 1911 (far from her ranch as well as Bartlesville). Her corpse was returned to Lynchburg, Virginia for a funeral at St. Paul's Church, and burial beside her husband at Spring Hill cemetery (where her son Robert would later also be buried).

Her former home, Point of Honor is on the National Register of Historic Places, as is the Cherokee Female Seminary. The former is now a city museum for Lynchburg; the latter is a coeducational state university.

Her painting of Thomas Jefferson is now in the collection of the University of Virginia. Her painting of Sequoyah (a copy of a painting by Charles Bird King) is owned by the Oklahoma Historical Society, which allows its display at the Oklahoma Judicial Center; the Society also has her self-portrait of 1896 depicted above and gold medal. <Insert IMAGE and citation> Several of her other paintings are in the collection of the Oklahoma Museum of Art and Gilcrease Museum.