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All About Will

Election day, November 4, 1879, in the southeast corner room of a log-walled, colonial-style seven-room house, Mary America Schrimsher Rogers gave birth to the son of Clement Vann Rogers, their eighth and final child.

"I was born on Nov. 4, which is election day. . . . My birthday has made more men and sent more back to honest work than any other days in the year. "

Clement Vann Rogers and Mary America Schrimsher met while attending a boarding school in the Cherokee Nation capital of Tahlequah. Mary loved her studies, was refined, musically gifted and a Methodist. Clem despised school, was a hard-riding cattleman and commercially astute. They married and moved to his Cooweescoowee District ranch two years before the Civil War started.

The proud father dubbed the newborn Colonel William Penn Adair Rogers, as a salute to the Indian military leader who was his battalion commander during the terrible War Between the States. The Civil War that had ended fourteen years earlier had left stains of blood across the Cherokee Nation, where Indian clans and even cousins fought each other in a senseless battle fifteen hundred miles away.