Dianna Rogers

Dianna Rogers was an Old Settler Cherokee who emigrated from Tennessee to the Arkansas Territory in 1817. Her first husband was killed in the Osage wars with the Cherokee people. Forced to move further west in 1828 into what would become Indian Territory her extended family, which included John Rogers and John Jolly, lived in what is now the northeastern part of Oklahoma, along the Arkansas border. In 1829, she married Sam Houston and operated a trading post with him near Fort Gibson. She also tended their small farm and the slaves who assisted them. After Houston left for Texas in 1833, Dianna remarried. She left no living children. Many myths and fanciful stories have been told of her and Houston's relationship, their meeting, and eventual parting, but very little is actually known. A body purported to be hers, but disputed by several historians, was exhumed and buried at the Fort Gibson National Cemetery in 1904. The tombstone bears the name Talahina, which according to legal documents and historians' analysis was never her name.