POSEY, pO'zl, Alexander Lawrence, Creek Indian educator, journalist and poet: b. near Eufaula, Okla., 3 Aug. 1873; d. 27 May 1908. His father was a white man of Scotch-Irish descent, born about 1842 in the Indian Terri tory, being the child of white intruders in the Cherokee Nation. His mother was a Muskogee Indian of unmixed blood. Until he was 12 years old, Alexander Posey spoke only the lan guage of his mother's people. Then his father, who was in independent circumstances, em ployed a private teacher and compelled the son to learn to speak and write English. A year or two later he was sent to the public (tribal) school at Eufaula. When he was 17 he entered Bacone Indian University at Muskogee, where he acted as librarian, learning to set type on The Instructor, a small paper published by the faculty, and discovered his own bent for liter ary work. In October 1892 he published The Comet's Tale,' a lengthy poem relating to the Indian tradition of the coming of the first ships of the white men to discover America. Imme diately after his graduation, in 1895, he entered public life, elected a member of the Creek House of Warriors, the popular branch of the tribal legislative council. In 18% he was ap pointed superintendent of the Creek Orphan Asylum at Olanulgee. A year later he became tribal superintendent of schools, but held it only a short time, resigning to settle on his farm near Stidham. There he continued to write as inspiration prompted. He was pre-eminently a poet of nature and loved the solitudes of which he wrote. Then he was called back to educa tional work as superintendent of the Creek National High School at Eufaula, with a brief term of service at a similar institution at Wetumka, but soon relinquished that work to take charge of the publication of the Indian Journal at Eufaula. There he found his liter
ary opportunity, developing marked ability as a satirist. His inimitable "Fus Fixico' letters, in which he humorously discussed the white man's politics through the medium of dialogues be tween fictitious characters who were typical of the older and more conservative Creek full blood element—Wolf Warrior, Hot Gun and others — who talked in the broken Creek-Eng lish dialect, were widely copied in States far from Oklahoma, where the force of their satire could not be appreciated because its object was unknown. Because of his sympathetic under standing of the uneducated people of his tribe, whose interests were jeopardized in the read justment incident to the allotment of lands in severalty, he gave up newspaper work to be come a field agent of the allotting commission, in which position he rendered valuable service. In 1905 he was chosen a delegate to the Sequoyah Constitutional Convention, which met at Muskogee, and of which he was elected sec retary. The simple, terse, clear English of the instrument framed by that convention was said to have been largely due to his writing and revising. He met death by drowning in the North Canadian River. A volume of his poems was published after his death.