Muskogee is the thirteenth-largest city in Oklahoma and is the county seat of Muskogee County. Home to Bacone College, it lies approximately 48 miles (77 km) southeast of Tulsa. The population of the city was 36,878 as of the 2020 census, a 6.0 percent decrease from 39,223 in 2010.
Edward Bates was an American lawyer, politician and judge. He represented Missouri in the US House of Representatives and served as the U.S. Attorney General under President Abraham Lincoln. A member of the influential Bates family, he was the first US Cabinet appointee from a state west of the Mississippi River.
James E. Edmondson is a justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court. He was appointed to the Court's District 7 seat by Governor Brad Henry in 2003.
Abraham Jefferson Seay was an American lawyer, soldier, judge, and politician. Seay attained the rank of colonel in the Union army during the American Civil War. Later, Seay would serve as an associate justice on Oklahoma Territory's supreme court and as the second governor of the Oklahoma Territory.
Samuel Benton Callahan was an influential, mixed blood Creek politician, born in Mobile, Alabama, to a white father, James Callahan, and Amanda Doyle, a mixed-blood Creek woman. One source says that James was an Irishman who had previously been an architect or a shipbuilder from Pennsylvania, while Amanda was one-fourth Muscogee. His father died while he was young; he and his mother were required to emigrate to Indian Territory in 1836. His mother married Dr. Owen Davis of Sulphur Springs, Texas, where they raised Samuel.
John Charles Tarsney was an American politician from Missouri and an associate justice of the Oklahoma Territory Supreme Court (1896-1899). He then returned to Kansas City, Missouri, where he had a private law practice until he died in 1920.
Bird Segle McGuire was an American politician, a Delegate and the last U.S. Representative from Oklahoma Territory. After statehood, he was elected as an Oklahoma member of Congress, where he served four consecutive terms. He retired from politics in 1915. He was a cousin of William Neville.
William Addison Phillips --
The Sequoyah Constitutional Convention was an American Indian-led attempt to secure statehood for Indian Territory as an Indian-controlled jurisdiction, separate from the Oklahoma Territory. The proposed state was to be called the State of Sequoyah.
Fred P. Branson was a justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court from 1926 to 1929, serving as chief justice from 1927 to 1929.
James Buchanan Cullison was a justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court from 1929 to 1931.
John H. Burford (1852–1922) was a justice of the Territorial Oklahoma Supreme Court from 1892 to 1906, serving as the final Chief Justice of that court from 1898 to 1903. After the territorial supreme court was dissolved at statehood, Burford served as City Attorney for Guthrie, Oklahoma, where he had made his home. He was the Republican Party nominee for U. S. Senator in 1914, but lost the election.
Joseph A. Gill was an American federal judge.
Joseph Bradfield Thoburn was an educator, civic leader, writer, and historian.
Jesse James Dunn (1867-1926) was a judge on the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
Samuel W. Hayes (1875–1941) was born in Arkansas, and moved to Texas with his parents when he was a small child. He completed his basic education in Texas, then attended the University of Virginia. He apparently did not graduate, but his college experience sufficed to qualify him as a school teacher. He spent the next three years teaching in the community of Ryan in the Chickasaw Nation, then part of the Indian Territory. He also began studying law in a local law office and was admitted to the Territorial Bar in 1899.
Henry Wilson Scott (1866–1935), also known as Henry W. Scott or H. W. Scott, was a native of Illinois, who moved with his parental family while he was growing up. First to Iowa, then to Kansas, where Henry completed high school. After reading the law under the supervision of William J. Fuller, Esq., he was admitted to the bar in 1884. Scott opened a private law practice in Larned, Kansas until 1891, when he moved to Oklahoma City, then the second largest city in Oklahoma Territory.
Edward B. Green was an American attorney and jurist who was appointed by Benjamin Harrison as the first chief justice of the Oklahoma Territory Supreme Court on May 4, 1890. Green, presided over a three-man panel of judges, who were also appointed by President Harrison. The other two judges, known as Associate Justices, were John G. Clark, from Illinois and Abraham J. Seay, from Missouri. Other court officials included Charles H. Filson, as clerk, Warren G. Lurty, as marshal and Horace Speed, as United States Attorney.
Orel Busby (1890-1965) was born in Batesville, Arkansas on February 6, 1890. who came to the Indian Territory communities of Allen and Ada with his parents when he was about 10 years old, and finally settled in the community of Konawa, Oklahoma. His parents were G. C. Busby and E.C.. The father was reportedly a native of Alabama and a very successful farmer and rancher after moving to Indian Territory in 1901. He later quit farming and ranching to open a mercantile business at Allen. Harlow wrote that Orel Busby was born in Batesville, Arkansas, and that he lived in Allen from 1901 to 1906 and in Konowa from 1906 to 1912.
