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Bookplate Index by Library or Collector
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J. B. Milam, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa Loyal Au Mort translates
to Faithful Unto Death. These words adorn the personal bookplate of
J. B. Milam as well as describing his philosophy and dedication toward his
Cherokee Nation. Jesse Bartley Milam
(1884–1949), Cherokee Roll #24953, was born near Italy, Texas, of Sarah
Ellen Couch Milam, a descendant of the Cherokee Adair family and a member
of the Long Hair Clan, and William Guinn Milam. In 1887 the family
returned to the Cherokee Nation near what is now Chelsea, Oklahoma. There
J. B. Milam attended grammar school and went on to the Cherokee National
Male Seminary in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and, in 1901–02, to a course of
study at the Metropolitan Business College in Dallas. After returning from
college, he resumed work in his father’s hardware store in Chelsea and,
at the same time, entered the oil and gas business. With his
brother-in-law he formed the Phillips and Milam Oil Company, which by the
early 1930s had an interest in more than one thousand producing wells. In
1904 he also married Elizabeth Peach McSpadden, Cherokee Roll #12943, and
later produced two daughters and one son. Milam was actively
involved in the banking business, and in 1915 became president of the Bank
of Chelsea, the first bank in the Cherokee Nation. He was also one of the
founders and the first president of the Rogers County Bank in Claremore,
Oklahoma, the hometown of another Oklahoma favorite son and fellow
Cherokee, Will Rogers. Perhaps Milam’s
most enduring legacy was as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation from
1941 to 1949. In 1907 the dissolution of the Cherokee government in Indian
Territory was coincident with the formation of the state of Oklahoma.
After the death of the incumbent Cherokee Chief W. C. Rogers in 1917, the
U.S. government would from time to time appoint a principal chief for a
day or so to sign official Cherokee documents. In 1941 President Franklin
D. Roosevelt appointed Milam as Principal Chief of the Cherokees for a
one-year term. Milam set about to obtain better living conditions for the
Cherokees, better schools, outlets for their arts and crafts, roads into
remote communities, and more realistic appraisals of land belonging to
Cherokee families. As Chief, Milam had
two main goals for the Cherokees: to reconstruct the tribal government and
to reactivate tribal claims against the U.S. government. Another of
Milam’s goals was identification and preservation of items that were
historically significant to the tribe. In 1942 he worked with
representatives of the Carnegie Library in Tahlequah, the University of
Oklahoma, and Northeastern State College in Tahlequah to recover
historical items from these three institutions and place them in the
Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City. J. B. Milam also
had a life-long interest in Cherokee history. In the 1920s Milam
underwrote the expenses of having Emmet Starr, the author of several books
on the Cherokee including the landmark Early History of the Cherokees (Claremore,
Okla.: published by the author, 1917), carry out extensive research on the
life of Sequoyah, including financing an expedition into Mexico to find
Sequoyah’s burial place. In the late 1930s, he began book collecting on
the advice of his physicians to help control his high blood pressure. Even
during his service as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, book
collecting held a predominant interest for him. In the obituary he
wrote for the autumn 1949 Chronicles of Oklahoma, historian Grant
Foreman noted that Milam had left “one of the most extensive and best
selected libraries in the state.” The obituary in the Tulsa World called
the collection “one of the state’s greatest private libraries with
many rare books on the Cherokee tribe in particular.” The library
focuses on Oklahoma, the Southwestern United States, and Cherokee Indian
history. It contains more than 1,600 items, along with many photographs
and hundreds of newspaper clippings. Milam maintained
author, title, and subject card catalogues, acquiring printed Library of
Congress cards where available and producing typewritten cards when they
were not. Fragments of correspondence and occasional notes and marks in
some books make it clear than he was in contact with booksellers in
Oklahoma, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, and elsewhere, buying from
lists and catalogues and visiting bookshops whenever and wherever he
traveled. He also maintained a fascinating accessions book with pages
dated between 4 April and 21 July 1945, on which are recorded, apparently
in the order acquired, 1,621 items. Milam was also in the habit of
underlining in red pencil any occurrence of the word “Cherokee” and
passages that related specifically to Cherokee history. Among Milam’s
books and papers are an 1851 set of Schoolcraft’s History of the
Indian Tribes of the United States (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo
& Company, 1851–57), the second edition of the McKenney & Hall
folios, minutes of the Cherokee government (1880–90) in longhand, and an
extensive run of the books of his friend, the historian Grant Foreman of
Muskogee. Important
government documents are part of Milam’s library as well. Document 512
of the 23rd Congress gives notice from the U.S. Government to the Indian
tribes to remove themselves from Georgia and Tennessee to the West; an
original copy is in the library. A copy of the Final Rolls of the Five
Civilized Tribes (the Dawes Commission Rolls) is there with the allotment
maps of the old Cherokee Nation as the state of Oklahoma was created. Milam’s
bookplate, which appears in virtually all volumes of his library, is 6.5
by 9 cm., with black letters on a silver background. Ex Libris and J.
B. Milam appear prominently above and below the Arms of Adairs, which
was virtually certain to have been borrowed from the crest appearing in Adair:
History and Genealogy (Los Angeles: J. B. Adair, 1924). As a
descendant of the Cherokee Adairs, J. B. Milam chose the heraldic
symbolism of his ancestors to occupy the prominent position in the
bookplate. Above the crest appears the Adair’s motto Loyal Unto
Death, and below the words Manibus, Victoria, Dextris. Milam
was loyal unto his Cherokees until his death in 1949. His eldest
daughter, Mildred Milam Viles, added a room to her home to house her
father’s collection. In 1971 she and her two siblings made an agreement
which called for donation rather than sale of the library following her
death. She set out criteria for selection of a repository by a committee
comprised of three first cousins, representing each of Milam’s children.
Mildred Viles died in 1987. Adhering to the criteria set forth, the
committee subsequently made inquiries of museums, universities, and three
individuals as to their interest in the collection and their abilities to
store and display the collection. In November 1989 the committee selected
the University of Tulsa. Included in the gift were Milam’s papers and
correspondence from the eight-year period when he served as the Principal
Chief of the Cherokee Nation (1941–1949). A great portion of
the Milam Library filled in the gaps of TU’s existing Native American
collection, and a smaller portion represented duplicates which the library
already held. During negotiations between McFarlin Library and the Milam
family, it was determined that duplicate volumes would be identified for
eventual sale and the resulting income would be used to establish an
endowment for the collection. If the endowment income were sufficient, it
would be used as well to help underwrite the tuition of history students,
preference being given to students of Cherokee descent. Founded in 1884,
the University of Tulsa celebrated its centennial anniversary in 1984. The
roots of the university lie in evangelistic and educational efforts among
the Indians of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, which resulted in,
among other things, the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls in Muskogee,
the capitol of the Creek Nation. In 1894 the school became Henry Kendall
College; and by 1900 Kendall College had the largest enrollment of any
college in the territory that in 1907 would become the state of Oklahoma.
Henry Kendall College moved to Tulsa in 1907, and in 1920 was rechartered
as the University of Tulsa. Alice Mary
Robertson (1854–1931) bequeathed to the University of Tulsa her
substantial private library, including the translation work of her
parents, William Schenk Robertson (1820–1881) and Ann Eliza Worcester
Robertson (1826–1905), who were interpreters, prolific translators, and
missionaries to the Creeks. Her grandfather, Samuel Austin Worcester
(1798–1859), was a missionary and translator among the Cherokees from
1825 until his death. Although he was respected by the Cherokees and
operated the only printing press in their language, it was against Georgia
law for a white to reside in Cherokee territory, and in 1831 he was
arrested. His case led to Chief Justice John Marshall’s enduring opinion
in Worcester vs. Georgia reaffirming the freedom of the press.
Worcester and his family followed the Cherokee and Creek to Indian
Territory, where Worcester’s Park Hill press became the first source of
printed materials in Indian Territory. Alice Mary
Robertson’s library also included her own and her family’s papers,
which date back to Samuel Worcester’s 1824 journal, and several hundred
letters exchanged between members of the Worcester and Robertson families
before the Civil War. This contribution was the foundation of the Cherokee
and Native American collection. Other major contributions to this
collection were made by John W. Shleppey, who bequeathed a remarkable
collection of more than six thousand items, which he appears to have begun
assembling before 1920 as a result of his exposure to native cultures as a
Boy Scout. Shleppey acquired anything Cherokee which came his way,
including James Adair’s The History of the American Indian (London,
1755); James W. Mahoney’s The Cherokee Physician, or Indian Guide to
Health, as given by Richard Foreman, a Cherokee Doctor (Chattanooga,
1846); minutes, in Cherokee, for the KeetooWah Society, 1859–1870; and
even the Cherokee syllabary (list of syllables) in phototype, apparently
part of a project to produce a Cherokee dictionary, never published, but
toward which he assembled a great deal of material. McFarlin Library at
the University of Tulsa has other important collections, including the
Walt Whitman collection, considered one of the six most complete Whitman
archives in the country. McFarlin also has an impressive collection
supporting TU’s programs in geology and petroleum engineering, and the
library established a collection of petroleum exploration and production
materials that continue to command international attention. Members of the
university’s Modern Letters program were instrumental in the acquisition
of several collections, including Cyril Connolly’s library. Founded at
TU in 1962, the James Joyce Quarterly has been the impetus for a
distinguished collection of materials on the famous Irish modernist. The Léon
collection includes a set of proof sheets for Joyce’s Finnegan’s
Wake. The donation of the
J. B. Milam Library in 1989 has been an invaluable addition to the Special
Collections of McFarlin Library. The agreement with the Milam heirs
specified that the library would mount an exhibition and publish a
catalogue of the collection. Several hundred copies of The J. B. Milam
Library: A Short-Title Catalog (Tulsa, Okla.: McFarlin Library, The
University of Tulsa, 1993) are still available for those interested in
Cherokee and Native American scholarship. A guide to the J. B. Milam
Library of Cherokee History as well as guides to all of the special
collections at the University of Tulsa McFarlin Library are available. In accordance with
the wishes of Mildred Milam Viles and her two siblings, the grantors,
their heirs, or qualified researchers will be granted “the specific
right to have access to [the Jesse Bartley Milam Library] at all regular
business hours.” Jerrie
Hall, Tulsa, Oklahoma Philip
Viles Jr., Tulsa, Oklahoma Sidney
F. Huttner, Curator, Special Collections, The University of Tulsa Bookplate courtesy of McFarlin Library, Dept. of Special Collections, The University of Tulsa [Originally published in Libraries & Culture, vol. 34, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 64-68.]
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| Last updated June 8, 2001 |
