calsfoundation@cals.org
May 8, 1829
Sam Houston—traveling in disguise on the steam packet Red Rover, by flatboat, and by steamship into Arkansas Territory—arrived in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on his way to live “in the wigwam of his adopted father,” John Jolly, chief of the Cherokee in Arkansas Territory. Houston had resigned his office as governor of Tennessee following the collapse of his marriage to eighteen-year-old Eliza Allen under mysterious circumstances. From May 1829 until November 1832, Houston lived in Arkansas Territory among the Cherokee.