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• 1 2024-05-10T01:27:01+00:00 Emberry Mayfield 3 CFD-131 plain 2025-01-02T00:06:53+00:00 Emberry Mayfield (Freedmen applicant) was the son of Sallie Mayfield and Miles Mayfield. Emberry previously lived in Texas, “just rambling around.” In her testimony, Sallie agreed that Emberry was known to wander and “had no particular place to live.” Emberry had been back and forth to Fort Smith with his mother Sallie, working at times in cotton fields. However, after he provided answers that were deemed unsatisfactory, commissioner C. F. Breckinridge questioned whether he had been in a “Lunatic Asylum.” 
  
  Emberry married Josephine, a “colored woman,” who was born and lived in Denison, Texas, with her family. They had a daughter, Sallie, also born there in 1881. Emberry tried to enroll this daughter as a Cherokee Freedman as well; however, Josephine was dead at the time of their application. 
  
  Emberry had lived in the Cherokee Nation ever since his mother, Sallie Mayfield, brought him there in 1866 after the war. He remarried to a woman named Joanna. When Emberry’s mother Sallie testified for Emberry, she knew little about his wife except her name, and she was unaware how long Josephine had been dead.
  
  Commissioner Breckinridge summarized his decision concerning Emberry’s enrollment as follows: “He is either utterly unable or unwilling to give any connected account of himself, but his mother states that he has lived in a settled way in the Cherokee Nation since his second marriage, some six years ago. If it be assumed that he came to the Cherokee Nation with his mother in 1866, it still appears extremely probable that he has abjured his citizenship by his continued absence, and as far as the evidence shows, protracted absence down to six years ago [sic] at which time he was 30 years of age, but giving him the benefit of all existing doubts in the case, he will be listed for enrollment as a Cherokee Freedmen on a doubtful card.”