John Ross served as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation during the tumultuous removal era. Like other Cherokee slaveholders, when Ross and his family traveled west in 1838-39 on the Trail of Tears, they took their slaves with them to Indian Territory. “John Ross, A Cherokee Chief,” hand-colored lithograph by John T. Bowen after a portrait by Charles Bird King, Philadelphia, 1843. This lithograph was placed between pages 176 and 177 of the History of the Indian Tribes of North America, with Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of the Principal Chiefs: Embellished with One Hundred and Twenty Portraits from the Indian Gallery in the Department of War, at Washington, Vol. III, Thomas L. McKenney, Esq. and James Hall (Philadelphia, 1844). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.