“I carry a message from my people to the Government at Washington,” says Princess Galilolie, youngest daughter of John Ross, hereditary King of the “Forest Indians,” the Cherokees of Oklahoma.  “We have been a nation without hope.  The land that was promised us by solemn treaty, ‘so long as the grass should grow and the waters run,’ has been taken from us.  It was barren and wild when we received it seventy years ago.  Now it is rich with oil and cultivation, and the whites coveted our possessions.  Since it was thrown open to settlers no Cherokee holds sovereign rights as before, when it was his nation.  We are outnumbered.  I have come as a voice from my people to speak to the people of the Eastern States and to those at Washington—­most of all, if I am permitted to do so, to lay our wrongs before the President’s wife, in whose veins glows the blood of the Indian.”

    Only nineteen is this Indian princess—­this twentieth century
    Pocahontas—­who travels far to the seats of the mighty for her race.

She is a tall, slim, stately girl from the foothills of the Ozarks, from Tahlequah, former capital of the Cherokee Nation.  She says she is proud of every drop of Indian blood that flows in her veins.  But her skin is fair as old ivory and she is a college girl—­a girl of the times to her finger-tips.

“When an Indian goes through college and returns to his or her people,” she says with a smile, “they say, ‘Back to the blanket!’ We have few blankets among the Cherokees in Tahlequah.  I am the youngest of nine children, and we are all of us college graduates, as my father was before us.”

He is John Ross 3d, Chief of the Cherokee Nation, of mingled Scotch and Indian blood, in descent from “Cooweeskowee,” John Ross I., the rugged old Indian King who held out against Andrew Jackson back in 1838 for the ancient rights of the Five Nations to their lands along the Southern Atlantic States.

She sat back on the broad window seat in the sunlight.  Beyond the window lay a bird’s-eye view of New York housetops, the white man’s permanent tepee.  Some spring birds alighted on a nearby telephone wire, sending out twittering mating cries to each other.

“They make me want to go home,” she said with a swift, expressive gesture.  “But I will stay until the answer comes to us.  Do you know what they have called me, the old men and women who are wise—­the full-bloods?  Galilolie—­’One-who-does-things-well.’  With us, when a name is given it is one with a meaning, something the child must grow to in fulfillment.  So I feel I must not fail them now.”

“You see,” she went on, lifting her chin, “it is we young half-bloods who must carry the strength and honor of our people to the world so it may understand us.  All our lives we have been told tales by the old men—­how our people were driven from their homes by the