Alexander
Majors (October 4, 1814 – January 13m 1900) was a U.S. businessman, who
along with William Hepburn Russell and William B. Waddell founded the
Pony Express, based in Kansas City, Missouri.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Majors
(Golden Square Lodge 107, Westport, MO)
“Our Hearts are Sickened”: Letter from Chief John Ross of the Cherokee, Georgia, 1836
By President Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828, the only large
concentrations of Indian tribes remaining on the east coast were located
in the South. The Cherokee had adopted the settled way of life of the
surrounding—and encroaching—white society. They were consequently known,
along with the Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw,
and Choctaw, as one of the “Five Civilized Tribes.” “Civilization,”
however, was not enough, and the Jackson administration forced most of
these tribes west during the first half of the 1830s, clearing southern
territory for the use of whites. Chief John Ross was the principal chief
of the Cherokee in Georgia; in this 1836 letter addressed to “the
Senate and House of Representatives,” Ross protested as fraudulent the
Treaty of New Echota that forced the Cherokee out of Georgia. In 1838,
federal troops forcibly displaced the last of the Cherokee from their
homes; their trip to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) is known as the “Trail
of Tears.”
[Red Clay Council Ground, Cherokee Nation, September 28, 1836]
It is well known that for a number of years past we have been harassed
by a series of vexations, which it is deemed unnecessary to recite in
detail, but the evidence of which our delegation will be prepared to
furnish. With a view to bringing our troubles to a close, a delegation
was appointed on the 23rd of October, 1835, by the General Council of
the nation, clothed with full powers to enter into arrangements with the
Government of the United States, for the final adjustment of all our
existing difficulties. The delegation failing to effect an arrangement
with the United States commissioner, then in the nation, proceeded,
agreeably to their instructions in that case, to Washington City, for
the purpose of negotiating a treaty with the authorities of the United
States.
After the departure of the Delegation, a contract was
made by the Rev. John F. Schermerhorn, and certain individual Cherokees,
purporting to be a “treaty, concluded at New Echota, in the State of
Georgia, on the 29th day of December, 1835, by General William Carroll
and John F. Schermerhorn, commissioners on the part of the United
States, and the chiefs, headmen, and people of the Cherokee tribes of
Indians.” A spurious Delegation, in violation of a special injunction of
the general council of the nation, proceeded to Washington City with
this pretended treaty, and by false and fraudulent representations
supplanted in the favor of the Government the legal and accredited
Delegation of the Cherokee people, and obtained for this instrument,
after making important alterations in its provisions, the recognition of
the United States Government. And now it is presented to us as a
treaty, ratified by the Senate, and approved by the President [Andrew
Jackson], and our acquiescence in its requirements demanded, under the
sanction of the displeasure of the United States, and the threat of
summary compulsion, in case of refusal. It comes to us, not through our
legitimate authorities, the known and usual medium of communication
between the Government of the United States and our nation, but through
the agency of a complication of powers, civil and military.
By
the stipulations of this instrument, we are despoiled of our private
possessions, the indefeasible property of individuals. We are stripped
of every attribute of freedom and eligibility for legal self-defence.
Our property may be plundered before our eyes; violence may be committed
on our persons; even our lives may be taken away, and there is none to
regard our complaints. We are denationalized; we are disfranchised. We
are deprived of membership in the human family! We have neither land nor
home, nor resting place that can be called our own. And this is
effected by the provisions of a compact which assumes the venerated, the
sacred appellation of treaty.
We are overwhelmed! Our hearts
are sickened, our utterance is paralized, when we reflect on the
condition in which we are placed, by the audacious practices of
unprincipled men, who have managed their stratagems with so much
dexterity as to impose on the Government of the United States, in the
face of our earnest, solemn, and reiterated protestations.
The
instrument in question is not the act of our Nation; we are not parties
to its covenants; it has not received the sanction of our people. The
makers of it sustain no office nor appointment in our Nation, under the
designation of Chiefs, Head men, or any other title, by which they hold,
or could acquire, authority to assume the reins of Government, and to
make bargain and sale of our rights, our possessions, and our common
country. And we are constrained solemnly to declare, that we cannot but
contemplate the enforcement of the stipulations of this instrument on
us, against our consent, as an act of injustice and oppression, which,
we are well persuaded, can never knowingly be countenanced by the
Government and people of the United States; nor can we believe it to be
the design of these honorable and highminded individuals, who stand at
the head of the Govt., to bind a whole Nation, by the acts of a few
unauthorized individuals. And, therefore, we, the parties to be affected
by the result, appeal with confidence to the justice, the magnanimity,
the compassion, of your honorable bodies, against the enforcement, on
us, of the provisions of a compact, in the formation of which we have
had no agency.
In truth, our cause is your own; it is the cause
of liberty and of justice; it is based upon your own principles, which
we have learned from yourselves; for we have gloried to count your
[George] Washington and your [Thomas] Jefferson our great teachers; we
have read their communications to us with veneration; we have practised
their precepts with success. And the result is manifest. The wildness of
the forest has given place to comfortable dwellings and cultivated
fields, stocked with the various domestic animals. Mental culture,
industrious habits, and domestic enjoyments, have succeeded the rudeness
of the savage state.
We have learned your religion also. We
have read your Sacred books. Hundreds of our people have embraced their
doctrines, practised the virtues they teach, cherished the hopes they
awaken, and rejoiced in the consolations which they afford. To the
spirit of your institutions, and your religion, which has been imbibed
by our community, is mainly to be ascribed that patient endurance which
has characterized the conduct of our people, under the laceration of
their keenest woes. For assuredly, we are not ignorant of our condition;
we are not insensible to our sufferings. We feel them! we groan under
their pressure! And anticipation crowds our breasts with sorrows yet to
come. We are, indeed, an afflicted people! Our spirits are subdued!
Despair has well nigh seized upon our energies! But we speak to the
representatives of a Christian country; the friends of justice; the
patrons of the oppressed. And our hopes revive, and our prospects
brighten, as we indulge the thought. On your sentence, our fate is
suspended; prosperity or desolation depends on your word. To you,
therefore, we look! Before your august assembly we present ourselves, in
the attitude of deprecation, and of entreaty. On your kindness, on your
humanity, on your compassion, on your benevolence, we rest our hopes.
To you we address our reiterated prayers. Spare our people! Spare the
wreck of our prosperity! Let not our deserted homes become the monuments
of our desolation! But we forbear! We suppress the agonies which wring
our hearts, when we look at our wives, our children, and our venerable
sires! We restrain the forebodings of anguish and distress, of misery
and devastation and death, which must be the attendants on the execution
of this ruinous compact.
In conclusion, we commend to your
confidence and favor, our well-beloved and trust-worthy brethren and
fellow-citizens, John Ross, Principal Chief, Richard Taylor, Samuel
Gunter, John Benge, George Sanders, Walter S. Adair, Stephen Foreman,
and Kalsateehee of Aquohee, who are clothed with full powers to adjust
all our existing difficulties by treaty arrangements with the United
States, by which our destruction may be averted, impediments to the
advancement of our people removed, and our existence perpetuated as a
living monument, to testify to posterity the honor, the magnanimity, the
generosity of the United States. And your memorialists, as in duty
bound, will ever pray. Signed by Ross, George Lowrey, Edward Gunter,
Lewis Ross, thirty-one members of the National Committee and National
Council, and 2,174 others.
Source: John Ross, Letter from John
Ross, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation of Indians, in Answer to
Inquires from a Friend Regarding the Cherokee Affairs with the United
States (Washington, D.C., 1836), 22–24.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6598/
John
Ross (October 3, 1790–August 1, 1866), also known as Guwisguwi (meaning
in Cherokee a "mythological or rare migratory bird"), was the Principal
Chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1828–1866, serving longer in this
position than any other person. Described as the Moses of his people,
Ross influenced the former Indian nation through such tumultuous events
as the relocation to Indian Territory and the American Civil War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ross_%28Cherokee_chief%29
(Lodge uncertain but likely of Cherokee Lodge 21, Tahlequah)
BEHIND
the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient
doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations,
under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or
Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened
visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or
marvellous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India
the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old
books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret
societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is
everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed.
A.E. Waite
Arthur
Edward Waite (2 October 1857 – 19 May 1942) was a British scholarly
mystic who wrote extensively on occult and esoteric matters, and was the
co-creator of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. As his biographer R. A.
Gilbert described him, "Waite's name has survived because he was the
first to attempt a systematic study of the history of western
occultism—viewed as a spiritual tradition rather than as aspects of
proto-science or as the pathology of religion."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._E._Waite
(Marylebone Lodge 1305, London)
That's why so many stars are making pictures in Europe today. The tax guys are making thieves out of everybody.
Bud Abbott
William Alexander "Bud" Abbott (October 2, 1895 – April 24, 1974) was
an American actor, producer and comedian. He is best remembered as the
straight man of the comedy team of Abbott and Costello, with Lou
Costello.
(I can't find his Lodge, but evidently he was an active Mason and Shriner).
