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TAHLEQUAH, Okla. – Jason Helsley eased his black Jeep Cherokee into park and slid out of the driver’s seat. He unhooked the fence loop and swung the metal gate open, got back in the car and drove slowly over the soft ground.

There, in a sloping green pasture dotted with red and white oak, ash, hickory, blackjack and a few maple trees, he took a good long look at the calf born the previous afternoon. Its arrival gave him a herd of 20 certified Red Angus cattle.

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The calf looked healthy enough and apparently had a healthy dose of good judgment, too, because it took one look at the two middle-aged men (Jason and myself) staring at it and wobbled over to its mother.

Above the pasture is the family home Helsley had built about five years ago, a small fortress on a hill with a gray stone façade. Just down the opposite ridge is the tree stand where Jason Helsley’s son Ryan, a 25-year-old flame-throwing St. Louis Cardinals pitcher, spends many a cold, predawn hour in the fall and winter. He gets there by 6 a.m. and waits for hours until an unsuspecting deer wanders in range of his crossbow.

Jason Helsley tells his son he picked the perfect occupation, because bow-hunting season in Oklahoma goes from Oct. 1 through Jan. 15. Even if the Cardinals win the World Series, he tells him, he’ll have plenty of time to try to bag the trophy buck that has eluded him the past four winters.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a family more in love with the place it calls home than the Helsleys are with their little slice of northeast Oklahoma, where the ancient Ozark Mountains slowly peter out on the Great Plains.

Helsley’s love for this place is as obvious as his dry, self-deprecating wit, which is delivered in an Oklahoma drawl. That pride becomes apparent after about five minutes of conversation over burritos at the local Mexican joint. Everybody in town seems to know him.

On a tour of the area, he pauses to point out a giant thunderhead forming on the horizon. He whips around a bend on the road near Lake Tenkiller and points out the downed trees on an island in the lake. It’s the scar from a tornado that ripped through here a couple of years ago.

He says he wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. He works as a heating, venting and air conditioning specialist at the Cherokee Nation hospital — known in town as the “Indian hospital” to differentiate it from the general hospital next door — and drives 20 minutes out of town every evening to take care of his cattle. He vaccinates them against disease, feeds them supplements and nurses them through the calving and mating seasons.

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His wife, Sherry, a radiology physician’s assistant, drives around the 14 counties that contain Cherokee Nation health clinics, mainly reading mammograms and conveying the findings to doctors.

A sense of place

Ryan Helsley is one of the Cardinals’ most prized young pitchers. He picked up his first major league win Sunday with a strong 2 1/3 innings, in which he struck out four of the seven batters he faced with a fastball that topped out at 100.4 mph and a strong curveball.

He spends every winter back home in Tahlequah, hunting and fishing for fun and working in the local Cherokee immersion school with third and fourth-graders five days a week.

He said he can’t imagine living anywhere else.

“It’s right between a river and a lake, so you can’t really ask for anything better than that, you know?” Ryan asked.

There is, perhaps, a happy irony to the Helsleys’ devotion to these rolling hills, rivers and man-made lakes. The family is of Cherokee descent — Sherry is nearly full-blooded Cherokee, while Jason is one-quarter — and these are not their ancestors’ lands.

In 1838, President Martin Van Buren and more than 7,000 U.S. soldiers removed the Cherokee and other tribes, often at bayonet-point, from the southeastern United States to clear the land for white settlers. The Cherokee marched more than 1,200 miles to what was then called the Indian Territory and is now Oklahoma. Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera and starvation claimed about 5,000 people out of 16,000 along the way. It became known as the Trail of Tears.

“It really wasn’t that long ago when you think about it,” Ryan Helsley said. “My grandparents’ grandparents could have been on that march.”

Nowadays, to be eligible for a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB), which entitles the holder to federal benefits, a person must provide documents that connect them to an ancestor who was on the Dawes Rolls, a list of people accepted between 1898 and 1914 as members of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw or Seminole tribe.

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When the Cardinals’ Twitter account mistakenly tweeted that Helsley was the first member of Cherokee Nation to pitch in the major leagues, the first person to respond was former Cardinals pitcher Ryan Franklin.

I’ve been Cherokee card holder for um 46 years now. 🤣

— Ryan Franklin (@franky3131) April 18, 2019

In fact, Cherokee Nation lists seven members who have reached the majors, including Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Adrian Houser, who beat the Cardinals with 5 1/3 strong innings last week at Busch Stadium. Colorado’s Jon Gray and Baltimore’s Dylan Bundy are two other active players of Cherokee descent.

The largest Native American tribe in the United States with more than 350,000 members, Cherokee Nation announced last week it was seeking to appoint a member of Congress, asserting a right granted from the same 1830s treaty that moved most of the tribe to Oklahoma.

A language in peril

Sherry Helsley sent me a text message the morning after I visited the family in Tahlequah. She hated that she hadn’t shared a few Cherokee words when I said goodbye in the parking lot of the same Mexican restaurant Jason and I had met hours earlier.

The words she wanted to share are osiyo, or hello, and donadagohvi, which means “until we meet again.” There is no Cherokee word for goodbye.

“It is completely up to us to learn the language and preserve the language our ancestors spoke,” Sherry texted. “We should want to do it to keep it alive, because when my parents are not here, my siblings and I cannot teach the next generation.”

Cherokee is an endangered language, with only about 1,500 speakers left. Less than 1 percent of Cherokee people speak the language, and half of those speakers are 75 years old or older.

Sherry grew up hearing Cherokee and understands it, but can’t speak it well. Her parents were both fluent, but they mostly spoke it when they didn’t want the kids to understand. Ryan Helsley knows only a few words and phrases, as does Houser.

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“I get mad at my grandparents all the time. I tell them they should have talked to me and my brothers in the language when we were younger,” Ryan Helsley said.

The end of a language doesn’t just rob humanity of another cultural perspective, but it points to social inequalities, according to Washington University professor of applied linguistics, Cindy Brantmeier.

“When a language dies, this usually means that a dominant language, such as English, has taken over and that the users of the dying language have been marginalized,” Brantmeier said. “When a language is maintained through daily social oral interactions, whether at home or in school, beautiful cultural and social practices are transmitted across generations. In this context, language is a source of pride and self-esteem. Language also maintains a strong sense of heritage and unique knowledge, as there are ideas and concepts in one language that may not exist in other languages.”

The Cherokee are fighting back against the erosion of their language.

Teaser: I visited Ryan Helsley’s hometown, Tahlequah, OK, for a story coming later today. In the winter, Helsley works five days a week at the Cherokee immersion school. Here is a teacher at that school, Marie Eubanks, reading a children’s book in Cherokee: pic.twitter.com/qoZPu2r7XV

— Mark Saxon (@markasaxon) August 26, 2019

Kay Callaway, Jason Helsley’s aunt, urges a room full of seventh-graders at the immersion school to sing “Bread and Butter” in Cherokee. It starts slowly. They seem shy around a newcomer. She says, “Louder!” and they sing a few bars nervously, some of them giggling.

She asks one girl to read the Lord’s Prayer in Syllabary, the written language devised 198 years ago by Sequoyah, namesake of the local high school.

Many of the Cherokee children in the area grow up reading and writing in Cherokee, but hearing and speaking only English. Ryan works on reading comprehension and writing (in English) with third and fourth-graders, the majority of whom are below grade level. Between pre-school and third grade, all of the instruction at the school is in Cherokee.

Two of the biggest local sports celebrities are bull rider Ryan Dirteater, who is recuperating from a collapsed lung, lacerated liver and broken ribs after a bull stomped on him at a Tulsa rodeo a few weeks ago, and professional bass fisherman Jason Christie.

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Kay Callaway has been around the kids from the immersion school when Helsley is pitching on TV and seen their eyes go wide with astonishment. She said they know Ryan only as “the big ol’ good-lookin’ guy who comes and helps.”

“Maybe one of them aspires to be a musician or a writer or something else, but here they are in little old Cherokee County at a little school and they’re Indian. I tell them those are not negatives,” Jason Helsley said. “That’s a badge of honor and something you need to take hold of and go out and represent. He’s a good example of, ‘If the good Lord blesses you with it and you take care and work hard, then good things can happen and you can go do really big things.’ ”

Needle in a haystack

The Sequoyah High football field where Ryan Helsley starred at wide receiver and his twin brother, Kyle, starred at defensive back sits in a little grassy bowl. The townspeople back their trucks up around the rim of the bowl to tailgate on game nights. It gives opponents the illusion of being surrounded.

“That’s small-town football right there,” said Houser, who was born in town at the Indian hospital but attended high school 25 miles north in Locust Grove. “You go into an atmosphere like that, it’s always kind of intimidating.”

The Hesleys’ first clue that Ryan Helsley had a powerful right arm came when he was 11 or 12. Some of the other parents began to complain that he was throwing the ball too hard from third base. Jason suggested they instead teach their kids to catch it since it’s a hell of a lot easier than asking all the runners to slow down.

As talent-rich as the area is — the great Mickey Mantle grew up about 90 miles north of Tahlequah — it’s sparsely populated and scouts have a hard time getting there. But if you throw 95 mph or faster, they’ll find you just about anywhere nowadays.

The scouts started showing up by the dozens at Ryan Helsley’s college games in his sophomore season, after he had touched 97 mph while pitching in the wood-bat West Coast League for the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Foresters. Helsley’s coach at the time, Travis Janssen, had to practically beg the Foresters to take him.

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Helsley’s only scholarship offer was to Northeastern State, about six miles north of the Sequoyah High football field and the immersion school. It’s a Division II school, and the West Coast League typically takes players only from the big programs.

Word spread fast. After the Helsleys drove back from Santa Barbara late that summer, the scouts started showing up to all of Northeastern State’s games. They would leave as soon as Ryan Helsley came out of the game. Scouts would wear out his pitching coach, Jake Hendrick, with questions. After Helsley had thrown a long bullpen session working on off-speed pitches, his velocity dipped one game to the low 90s.

Hendrick’s phone lit up with concerned messages from scouts.

“They were like, ‘What’s wrong with him?’ They were going crazy,” Hendrick recalled. “I was like, ‘He’s still trying to learn to pitch. He’s still working. It’s not all about velocity for him. Come back next week and he’ll be fine.’ “

Once, while watching a game at Lindenwood College just outside St. Louis, Jason Helsley met a scout who asked him how he was doing.

“I’d be doing a lot better if that big dumbass on the mound would get these guys out so we can go home,” he responded.

The pitcher on the mound that afternoon was Ryan Helsley. The scout made small talk about how he had had to rearrange all his flights to catch Helsley’s innings. That was when the Helsleys knew something special could happen in the upcoming draft.

Though scouts for the Miami Marlins, Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays had appeared the most eager, the Cardinals swooped in and drafted Helsley in the fifth round of the 2015 draft. He signed for $225,000. It was the highest pick Northeastern State had ever had. The school advertises Helsley’s success on its website. Hendrick, now the head coach, still keeps a locker for Helsley, who is a frequent visitor in the winter months.

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Ryan Helsley spent the morning after he was drafted working a kids baseball camp on campus.

“There couldn’t be a better guy to represent what we’re trying to do,” Hendrick said.

When prospective agents or financial advisors reach out to make their pitches to work for Ryan Helsley, Jason insists they make their way to Tahlequah to make the pitch in person. He wants them to know what the family is all about, and he doubts they would grasp that while sitting across a conference table in Beverly Hills or Dallas.

Some of the Cherokee people refused to leave their ancestral lands back in the 1830s, saying that to abandon them was akin to throwing away the mother who gave them life. Those people, of course, died ages ago and now their language could be slipping toward extinction. The devotion to a place they call home hasn’t changed a bit.

(Top photo: Jeff Curry/USA TODAY Photos)

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