Robert Latham Owen - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Owen was born in Lynchburg, Virginia on February 2, 1856, the younger of two sons of Col. Robert Latham Owen, Sr. (1825-1873), a civil engineer and former surveyor who had become President of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, and Narcissa Chisholm Owen. The Owens were a family of Welsh origin, with a record of public service as doctors and teachers: Owen's grandfather, Dr. William Owen, and Owen's uncle, Dr. William Otway Owen Sr. (1820-92), both practised medicine in Lynchburg, and W.O. Owen Sr. served as Surgeon-in-Chief in charge of thirty hospitals in Lynchburg (which became a major wartime hospital center) throughout the Civil War.

During Owen's boyhood the family lived in Lynchburg's best-known mansion, Point of Honor. Owen attended private schools in Lynchburg and in Baltimore, Maryland. Narcissa relates that, at some point after the Civil War, her husband resigned his position as President of the Virginia and Tennessee Railway due to his opposition to a proposed railway consolidation, and ran for election as a Virginia State Senator. In 1873, however, when Owen was 16, his father died a financially ruined man, and the family fell on hard times. Owen, writing in 1934, connected their misfortune to the Panic of 1873, which is known to have struck the nation's railroads especially hard: "the value of my father's property was completely destroyed, and my mother, from a life of abundance, was suddenly compelled to earn her living by teaching music." With support from scholarships, some engineered by his mother but also the 1876 President's scholarship awarded on merit, Owen was able to graduate in 1877 as valedictorian from Washington and Lee University. He also received the University's gold medal for debating prowess. His older brother, William Otway Owen, Jr. (1854–1924), meanwhile, attended the Virginia Military Institute and the University of Virginia, and went on to a medical career with the US Army, eventually retiring with the rank of Colonel.

Owen was Cherokee through his mother, though there are conflicting indications of the extent of his Cherokee ancestry. Owen's own listing on the Dawes Rolls, dating from around 1900, records him as 1/16th Cherokee by blood. Yet his mother, Narcissa Owen, according to her own account in her memoirs (1907), would herself appear to have been only 1/16th Cherokee, which if correct would imply that her son was 1/32nd Cherokee. Beyond this, the editor of Narcissa's memoirs has raised the possibility that Narcissa might unwittingly have missed out "one generation or possibly two" in her account of her family tree; adjusting for this possibility might further dilute her Cherokee blood. However this may be, Narcissa had grown up largely among the Cherokees, and she was capable of making skillful use of her Cherokee heritage, colorfully describing her father, Thomas Chisholm (a leader of the "Old Settlers" who moved west before the Trail of Tears), as "the last hereditary war chief of the Western Cherokees." She also gave both her sons parallel Indian names derived from famous Cherokee chiefs: she named Robert Oconostota after a noted Cherokee chief of the late eighteenth century who was also, according to Narcissa's Memoirs, her own great great uncle. On the advice of Col. William Penn Adair, a family friend, former Confederate Colonel and a leader among the Cherokees, Owen moved in 1879 to Salina in Indian Territory (now Salina, Oklahoma), where he was accepted as a member of the Cherokee Nation. He served during 1879-80 as the principal teacher of the Cherokee Orphan Asylum. His mother joined him in 1880 and taught music for several years at the Cherokee Female Seminary.

Owen studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1880. During 1881-84 he served as Secretary of the Board of Education of the Cherokee Nation, and worked on reorganizing the Cherokee school system. In parallel, he served in 1882, 1883 and 1884 as the President of the International Fair at Muscogee, IT, now Muscogee, Oklahoma (sometimes billed at the time as "the Indian Capital of the World"), the only fair held in Indian Territory at the time. He was owner and editor of the "Indian Chieftain" newspaper, based in present-day Vinita, Oklahoma, in 1884. In 1885, with a Democrat in the White House, Owen launched a successful lobbying campaign that saw him appointed as the federal Indian Agent for the Five Civilized Tribes, described by one student of his career as "the most important position to be held in Indian Territory". In the absence of a court system, he promoted the use of compulsory arbitration to settle thousands of civil cases between 1885 and 1889, when he assisted in the establishment of the first United States Court in Indian Territory. His mother served as his hostess until his 1889 marriage to Daisy Deane Hester, with whom he was to have one daughter, Dorothea, born in 1894 (later Mrs. Dorothea Whittemore).

After the White House again changed hands in 1889, Owen left government service and organized the First National Bank of Muskogee in 1890, serving as its president for ten years. He later wrote that the bank's narrow survival of the Panic of 1893 was to influence his thinking about the need for fundamental reform in the US banking system:

This bank, like many other banks, lost fifty percent of its deposits within as many days because of the panic, which frightened people and caused them to withdraw their funds for hoarding throughout the United States and led creditors to strenuously press their debtors for settlement... This panic demonstrated the complete instability of the financial system of America and the hazards which businessmen had to meet under a grossly defective banking system.

As a lawyer and lobbyist, Owen handled a number of significant cases dealing with Indian land issues. Most notably, in 1900 he took on a celebrated case on behalf of the Eastern Cherokees against the US Government, seeking compensation which the Cherokees claimed was due to them under a treaty of 1835 for eastern lands lost at the time of the Indian removals. In 1906, after six years, Owen won the case and obtained compensation of close to $5 million for the Eastern Cherokees. He was also successful in his handling of important cases for the Western Cherokees, Choctaws and Chickasaws.

Beyond his obvious drive and ambition, neither his legal nor his political career was to be hampered by Owen's physical presence. He was a tall man of erect bearing, who kept a full head of hair to the end of his life. One contemporary newspaper profile described him as looking "like a leading man in a society drama." The New York Times spoke of him on his arrival in the Senate as "the square-jawed, black eyed, lithe young man from the West" and continued that "The Senator's voice is his most impressive asset. Liquid and soft in quality when he is talking dispassionately, it is as harsh and rasping as a file when he is aroused".

By the time he launched his political career, the combination of Owen's lucrative legal and lobbying practice, sometimes controversial land deals, and business activities including investments in ranching, mining and oil, had made him a wealthy man.