[Cherokee National Male Seminary, Tahlequah, Oklahoma]

Cherokee Drug Company, c 1909, reproduction
Ann August Robertson Moore Collection/Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection
Oklahoma Historical Society and the Gateway to Oklahoma History

William Wirt Hastings and William Pressley Thompson entered Vanderbilt after graduating from the Cherokee Male Seminary, an elite boarding school established in 1846 by the Cherokee National Council to prepare the Nation’s boys for university education and future leadership in tribal politics and business.  Historians Devon Mihesuah and Natalie Panther have described how the curriculum drew from New England schools such as Boston Latin, and by the 1880s, students could study astronomy, calculus, psychology, political economy, classical history, and comparative anatomy.  Hastings famously scored 100s in all of his classes and was hailed in 1883 by the Vinita, Indian Territory, Chieftain as “the hardest and best student in the Cherokee Nation.”  The state of Oklahoma took over the Cherokee Nation’s schools in 1907.  The school burned three years later and never reopened.