Author: Sophia Alice Callahan

Sophia Alice Callahan (1868-1894) was an American novelist of Muscogee descent. Born in Sulphur Springs, Texas, Callahan was raised by a mixed-race father and a white mother. Samuel Benton Callahan, her father, was a member of the Muscogee-Creek tribe who served in the Confederate States Army as an officer after fleeing from Indian Territory during the outbreak of the American Civil War. When the war ended, the family returned home to Okmulgee, where Callahan’s father established a farm and cattle ranch. Raised in Indian Territory, Callahan moved east to study at the Wesleyan Female Institute in Virginia before returning to teach at several schools in the Creek Nation. Over the next few years, she worked as a teacher, wrote articles in the school journal of the Harrell International Institute, and joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Muskogee. In 1891, Callahan published Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891), a novel that fictionalized the recent Massacre at Wounded Knee and the Lakota Ghost Dance movement. At the age of 26, Callahan succumbed to a bout of pleurisy, cutting short the promising life of the first American Indian woman to write a novel.