Vinita, Indian Territory, 1913

Emma Blue Jacket was the ¾ blood (Dawes Roll) Cherokee Adopted Shawnee daughter of Henry and Eliza Blue Jacket. Emma was born in 1854 at Blue Jacket's Crossing of the Wakarusa River, Kansas Territory, near Kansas City, Kansas. Henry traveled to Washington DC that year to sign the Shawnee Treaty with his brothers, George and Charles. Henry died in 1855, leaving Eliza with six children and one yet to be delivered.

In 1870, 16 year old Emma married Henry Payne, 22, in Johnson Co., KS. The following year, her Shawnees moved to Indian Territory, settling around the siding of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad called Blue Jacket Station. Emma had a daughter, but the child apparently died early on. She and Henry divorced and he later married Susan, a Cherokee Adopted Shawnee, 1/2 blood.

A tryst with John Anthony Foreman. ½ Cherokee, produced Gertrude Alice, a ½ (Dawes Roll, listed as Alice G. Grass) Adopted Shawnee, born west of Blue Jacket, near Timber Hill in 1880.

Another out of wedlock child, son Felix G. Cowan, was born in 1886 in Vinita, Indian Territory.

After attending Carlisle Industrial School from 1893 to 1896 in Carlisle PA, Gertie went to work keeping books for her cousin, Ida May Blue Jacket and her husband William T. Wade, who owned two stores in Vinita, Indian Territory.

At age 24, Gertie was feeling like she would become an old maid. NOT SO! George Austin Hinshaw, a 35 year old widower, met Gertie in Wade's general store, easily swept her off her feet and they married in 1904, honeymooning at the Worlds Fair in St. Louee. Actually, George needed to marry an Indian gal in order to do business in the Cherokee Nation, just like Bill Wade and all other white men, excepting school teachers and preachers. It just so happens that he got a very lovely one.

Their first child, Gaylord Adolphus, Cherokee Adopted Shawnee ¼ blood, was born in Vinita in 1906, six months before Oklahoma Statehood. His wife bore their daughter around 1930, who died several years later. As an engineer in Tiverton RI in 1933, he was killed while inspecting a fuel storage tank when it exploded. Gaylord Adolphus is buried in the family plot in Fairview Cemetery in Vinita.

The second, Joe Dale, born in 1907, went to Oklahoma A&M College, became a civil engineer and had a career as a civilian with the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. He was a world traveler with the Corps and died in Walla Walla WA in 1976.

The little kid in the photograph is Felix Carlyle, who was born in 1910. He married Evelyn Laura Dukes in 1933 in Vinita and the ceremony was performed by no other than Judge George Austin Hinshaw, Justice of the Peace. T hey had a son, Gaylord Carlyle, in Stockton CA. Divorcing shortly thereafter, he re-married, became a small businessman in the Sacramento CA area and died in 1968.

Emma died in 1916, in the Hinshaw home in Vinita, three years after the photograph was taken and was buried in Mt. Hope Cemetery in Afton, OK.

The ensuing years produced three additional Hinshaw's. Lottie Emmalyne was born in 1913 and married Pharmacist Dwight Mitchell of Nowata OK and died there in 1971. Gertrude Alverda was born in 1914 married twice and spent her career in San Diego CA. She was buried as Alverda Housdorfer in Fairview Cemetery in Vinita in 1978. George Robert was born in 1921, also was a pharmacist, spent his career in the San Diego area and died there in 1982.

It happened that way, moving west.

Gaylord Carlyle Hinshaw

Registered Member

Shawnee Tribe

Norman. Oklahoma

June 7. 2001