Special Collections at The University of Tulsa McFarlin Library is pleased to note that we have recently added new entries to our growing digital collections site.
Over the summer we applied for and received a grant from the Oklahoma Department of Libraries to update the old finding aid for our Indians of North America collection. That set of documents is what’s known as an artificial collection, which means that it’s actually a group of items brought together because of their subject similarities; in this case, Native American history. IONA has changed substantially since its initial creation in 1975, so a thorough overhaul was definitely needed.
Working on this project is an OU student earning her library degree named Avery, and she’s been doing a great job! She found several items of interest among the documents, which we’ve scanned and put on ContentDM.
- The first is a typewritten, unofficial copy of Senate Bill No. 2, written in 1905 and dismissed by the White House in 1906. It’s signed by Teddy Roosevelt on the last page. The bill concerns whether the Cherokee Nation could retain its principal and vice principal chiefs for a certain period of time. You can view it here.
- Avery also located a letter from the Baron de Carondelet (Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet) to his son. Carondelet was a member of the Spanish aristocracy and the governor of Louisiana until 1797, the year this letter was written. He was very much against the U.S. efforts in western expansion during this period, and made alliances with various Native American tribes to prevent encroachment on access to the Mississippi River. Carondelet also granted slaves some rights for quality of life, and ignored the resulting protests from slaveholders, choosing instead to improve his relationship with slaves and freedmen in the Spanish colonies. You can view his correspondence describing his relationship with a group of Cherokee warriors here.
- Lastly, we have a letter from Silas Dinsmoor (also spelled Dinsmore), the Agent for the Cherokee from the United States, written to James McHenry, the Secretary of War for the United States. Dinsmoor describes his efforts to purchase looms and ploughs for white settlers to use to teach Native Americans how to use them. You can view that letter here.
Separate from our Indians of North America collection, we’ve also added quite a bit of the Charles Alfred Bredin World War I papers to its own separate category on ContentDM. Bredin wrote quite frequently to Grace Manning, and describes working in the post office in New York City. The collection also contains photographs of Bredin in uniform, and has some post-war slice-of-life ephemera in the form of furniture store account books for the items that Grace (later Mrs. Bredin) purchased as the couple moved from Jamaica Bay to Tulsa. You can view those items here.
