with the Old Settlers. A group of these men targeted members of the Ridge faction for assassination, to enforce the Cherokee law (written by Major Ridge) making it a capital crime for any Cherokee to cede national land for private profit. There is no evidence, however, that John Ross supported or knew of their plans. The list of targets included Major Ridge, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, Stand Watie, John A. Bell, James Starr, George Adair, and others. (Notably absent from the list were Treaty Party leaders David Vann, Charles Vann, John Gunter, Charles Foreman, William Hicks, and Andrew Ross. William Hicks died sometime before or in the year 1837. His death was before removal took place.) On 22 June 1839, teams ranging up to twenty-five in number converged on the houses of John Ridge, Major Ridge, and Elias Boudinot, and murdered them; their attempt on Stand Watie was unsuccessful. They did not attack any others, but the assassinations marked the beginning of the Cherokee Civil War; it continued until after the American Civil War. James Starr was also killed during this period. The Ross partisans forced the Old Settlers to give up their established political system and accept the majority vote and John Ross's authority. Ridge Party families fled Oklahoma and found refuge in what was then Nacogdoches County, Texas (in the area that later became known as the Mount Tabor Indian Community), near present-day Kilgore. Many of their descendants still live in the area along with the Thompson-McCoy Choctaws. Rebecca Nagle, host of the award-winning This Land podcast, is a descendant of the Ridges and uses her ancestry to explore the ongoing toll their actions had. Later developments In 2019, Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. cited a provision of the treaty that states that the Cherokee "shall be entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for the same," in announcing that he intended to appoint, for the first time, a Congressional delegate from the Cherokee Nation. Pending a decision of the Cherokee National Council, Hoskin said he would nominate Kimberly Teehee, a member of the Cherokee Nation who formerly served as a policy advisor in the administration of President Barack Obama, to the post. In 2022, the Cherokee Nation began a campaign to seat Kimberly Teehee as their nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives. In