calsfoundation@cals.org
September 15, 1861
Arch McKennon, also known as Archibald Smith McKennon, married Virginia Arkansas Berry, a sister of James H. Berry, a U.S. senator and Arkansas’s fourteenth governor. McKennon was a Confederate military officer, storekeeper, lawyer, temperance advocate, and political activist in Arkansas during the latter part of the nineteenth century and served on the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, known as the Dawes Commission, which negotiated land allotments to individual Native Americans in order to lessen tribal claims. It also served eventually to open the Oklahoma Territory to white settlements and facilitate statehood for the territory.