James McDonald Biography ID 29

James L. McDonald, a Choctaw, served as a model for the Indians' capacity for full integration into American society. As a boy, he was raised by Thomas L. McKenney, the nation's first commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and learned to read Greek and Latin. Later, he studied law under John McLean, a future Supreme Court justice, and became the country's first Indian lawyer. But he began to drink, and after a white woman spurned his marriage proposal, he fell off a cliff to his death. McKenney would later claim that McDonald's sad story would make him an advocate of removing eastern Indians west of the Mississippi River.

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