It’s fall, and the sides of Vernon Road are deep and muddy, so I drive down the middle. I’m going parallel to the interstate now—the hum of the highway still audible—but on this road there is no traffic. After two big curves and a hill, the road stretches out flat and straight in front of me. The gravel is the color of faded rust, a burnt orange teetering on beige. I pass a Muscogee cemetery on the left, then a little yellow house, before reaching a spot on the road between the cow pastures and the trees that looks like any other spot except for one thing: a large, metal, white cross. The cross stands with a lean in the ditch. Garden stones have been placed in a circle around the base. The white paint is chipping and rust curls around the edges, but in faded letters I can still read the name George Jacobs. It was a few days after the murder, in the summer of 1999, when the Jacobs family came to his house. Over twenty years later when we speak, Anderson Fields Jr. can’t remember exactly who it was, maybe a sister and a nephew. Probably through small-town talk, Anderson figures, the Jacobs family heard he was the one who found George. They wanted to put up a cross where their loved one had died, and they wanted Anderson to show them the place. And so he took them. At the time, it was an otherwise nondescript section of dirt road, except for one undeniable mark: blood. There had been so much of it, it stayed for months. “Even after it rained, you could still see that spot,” he told me. “After a while, it started to look like an oil stain.”
Many of the most important legal decisions about tribal land and sovereignty come from surprising places.
The cross commemorates George Jacobs’s life. But it also marks the exact location of his murder—a fact that would become crucial evidence in the appeal of his killer. That appeal would eventually go all the way to the Supreme Court. Under US law, tribes occupy a precarious legal status which often makes it difficult for them to bring cases on their own behalf. As a result, many of the most important legal decisions about tribal land and sovereignty come from surprising places. Like this one, which started in 1999 as a small-town murder.