When the Cherokees were driven from their homes in Georgia and Tennessee nearly a century ago, some of their most prominent families settled within the present limits of Adair County, attracted hither no doubt by the primitive forests and beautiful streams where game and fish were plentiful.

     Among them were the Ryder family, Augustus and Austin, who came from Tennessee in 1832, and settled a few miles east of the present City of Stilwell. Here in 1856, Thomas L. Ryder was born, who not only became prominent in Cherokee affairs but since statehood has been elected three times to serve his district in the lower house of the Legislature and once in the State Senate. At the age of sixty-six he has now retired and resides in Muskogee, surrounded by a family of children. Mark Bean, another Cherokee, emigrated to this neighborhood in 1832, developed a farm and reared a family of boys.

     The Starr family, George, Caleb and Noon, were also prominent Cherokees who established homes here in an early day, locating on the beautiful Barron Fork, a tributary of the Illinois River, and on Sallisaw Creek, farther south.

Louis Downing, a full-blood, who was afterward elected Chief of the Cherokee Nation, established his home on Lee's Creek.

     Walter Duncan and his brothers, Clint and Charles, were among the other prominent .Cherokees who located in the Valley of Barron Fork.

     Charles Duncan, for many years, was a prominent Cherokee preacher. One of the historic spots in this vicinity is the site of the old Flint District Courthouse of Cherokee days. This temple of justice was a two story frame structure, located on Sallisaw Creek, seven miles east of where Stilwell is now located. Many important trials both civil and criminal were held in this historic old courthouse during the days when the laws. of the Cherokee Nation were in full force and effect. Many good old Cherokees will tell you that their old time laws were more rigidly enforced and penalties for violation of law were inflicted with more certainty and with less delay than is now customary under the rule of the white man.

     Some of their old laws provide that such offenses as theft and assault should be punished with a given number of lashes upon the bare back of the offender, with double the number of lashes for a second conviction of the same offense, and it was not unusual, in the olden times, for an offender to be arrested, tried, convicted and punished all in one day.

If not recently destroyed, the old forked tree still stands near the Flint District Courthouse, to which the criminals were tied while receiving their punishment. During the later years of the life of the Cherokee Nation, however, punishment by fine and imprisonment was substituted for the whipping post. Under the old Indian regime, much annoyance and chagrin was often experienced by the tribal officials by reason of the fact that no white man, no matter how detestable he might have been, nor how flagrant his offense, could be tried or punished by the tribal courts. It is barely possible that the careers of certain white interlopers.