From FB. My father owns the original tintype from which this digital photograph was derived:
“From a website, I found this photograph (circa 1869) of my Great Great Grandfather, Campbell H. Taylor, and his first wife, Stacy E. (Welch) Taylor. Standing between them is their oldest and only surviving child, Elizabeth “Bettie” Haseltine (Taylor) Keys.
This is his obituary from a local Coffeyville, OK paper:
“Campbell H. Taylor, a Pioneer Indain [sic] Lawyer of this city, died at his home, 504 East Fourth Street, this afternoon shortly before 3 O’clock. He had been in poor health foe [sic] some time and had not been in the active practice of law for a number of years. He was the father of Mrs. Shelly Keys.”
He also apparently had eight children with his second wife, Minnie Rebecca (Grayson) Taylor, who survived him.
Cambell H. Taylor was a Captain in the Confederate Army under “Confederate Colonel and Cherokee Chief” William Holland Thomas.
Thomas later became Principal Chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (the only white man ever to be a chief of the Cherokees), and was an officer in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War in which he led a legion of mixed Cherokee and Scots-Irish Highlanders (both races of which I am descended) under Jubal Early during his Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864.
(Prior to this in 1862, a portion of the Legion was sent to Powell’s Valley on the border of Tennessee and Virginia and was ambushed at Baptist Gap. When Cherokee Lieutenant Astooga Stoga was killed leading a counterattack, enraged Indian comrades scalped several dead or wounded Union soldiers. To defuse the situation, Colonel Thomas had the scalps returned to the Union with apologies.)
My Great Great Grandfather is probably most famous for bushwhacking a Unionist named Captain Goldman Bryson, who was raiding numerous Western North Carolina communities during the Civil War. Bryson had previously been implicated in 1856 of the murder of a Cherokee constitutional convention delegate who resided in Cherokee County, NC. In the autumn of 1863, Bryson and his Federal Mounted Company of 120 to 150 troops marched into the town of Murphy in Cherokee, then sacked the town. Confederate General Braxton Bragg, North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance, and Thomas’ Legion determined to put an end to Bryson and his troops. The Cherokees of Thomas’ Legion tracked Bryson’s troops for two days. Upon locating Bryson, Campbell H. Taylor demanded that he stop. When he refused, my GGGF apparently shot him – November 01, 1863.
In a book we have on the famous Thomas, it is written:
“In late October, Captain Campbell H. Taylor and about twenty-five of Thomas’ Indians pursued Bryson. They killed him, but all of his men escaped. The next day some of the Indians were seen wearing parts of Bryson’s bloody uniform as they patrolled the streets of Murphy. General Braxton Bragg thanked Taylor, praised the Cherokee solders for their loyalty, and gave Thomas permission to recruit two more companies of Indians.”
My Dad has provided information that indicates that Taylor, “…was a POW near the end of the Civil War. He then went to IT (Oklahoma Indian Territory) after the war, was an attorney in (the Cherokee government seat of) Tahlequah, also had a stable there. His first wife, Stacy Welch Taylor died in 1888 near Coffeyville, Oklahoma. He remarried Minnie Rebecca Grayson in Independence, KS and registered his second family on the (Cherokee) Miller roll in Coffeyville. I thought that he died in 1912 but have copy of an obit that is dated 1914. He died in Coffeyville (OK). He was then living with his oldest child, Elizabeth Haseltine Taylor Keys. His second wife lived until 1953 and is buried in Lenapah.”
Song Of Ajax 