Occupation Actor, author Name Chief Tahachee | Role Author | |
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Born March 4, 1904 ( 1904-03-04 ) James Mill, Arkansas, U.S. Resting place Forest Lawn Memorial Park, San Dimas, California Movies Key Largo, The Dark Corner | ||
Chief Tahachee (born Jeff Davis "Tahchee" Cypert, March 4, 1904 – June 9, 1978) was an Old Settler Cherokee Indian who was an author, a stage actor, a film extra, and a vaudeville performer.
Chief Tahachee wrote four books: Poems of Dreams (1942), Drifting Sands (1950), An American Indian Climb Toward Truth & Wisdom (1955), and The Rough and Rowdy Ways of an American Indian Cowboy (1957). Poems of Dreams was his most popular and he renewed the copyright on it October 1972.
Chief Tahachee was an actor, stuntman and film extra in many Hollywood films produced from the 1920s to the 1960s, including westerns, film noir, drama, and historical sagas. His first film appearance was in a silent film, The Last of the Mohicans, in 1920 at the age of 16.
He was married to Cherokee poet and Hollywood film extra Dorothy Lear Evelyn Teters Cypert "Nawana" Yarbrough also known as "Princess Neowana" and after their divorce married six more times, he fathered ten children, and died June 9, 1978 in San Gabriel, California of a heart attack.