Encyclopedia of the Great Plains

POSEY, ALEXANDER (1873-1908)

Alexander Posey, 1908

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Alexander Lawrence Posey, a well-known Muskogee Creek poet and journalist, lived in Indian Territory during the turbulent years prior to and one year beyond Oklahoma statehood. He is best remembered for a series of humorous and politically insightful articles printed while he was the owner and editor of the Eufaula Journal. "Fus Fixico Letters," some seventy-two in all, became a weekly feature of Posey's newspaper and made use of voices and personae of traditional Creek Indian figures to comment on territorial politicians, elections, members of the Dawes Commission, the issues of coming statehood and an Indian state to be called Sequoyah, as well as the general resistance to "progress" and land allotments led by the Creek historian Chitto Harjo.

Posey was born near present-day Eufaula, Oklahoma, on August 3, 1873, the first child of Nancy and Lewis Henderson Posey. He received his postsecondary education at Bacone Indian University, Muskogee, Oklahoma, where he gained some recognition as a budding poet and as a writer of commencement orations. He was elected as a clerk in the Creek House of Warriors and appointed as superintendent of the Creek Orphan Asylum near Okmulgee. He married Minnie Harris, a school-teacher from Farmington, Arkansas. In his writings, Posey emphasized the importance of conforming to the new American society and to what he felt were progressive viewpoints.

Although he had achieved a national journalistic reputation, his interests had expanded to include tribal folkways, land development, and even oil and gas speculation. But his life was cut short by a tragic drowning accident on the morning of May 27, 1908. He was survived by his young wife and two children.

Charles Ballard University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr. Alex Posey: Creek Poet, Journalist, and Humorist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

Posey, Alexander. The Fus Fixico Letters, edited by Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. and Carol A. Pretty Hunter. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.