Historical records indicate that Okah Tubbee, originally known as Warner McCary, was born in Natchez, Mississippi, around 1810 to an enslaved African American woman. From 1837 to 1840 he worked at odd jobs along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and during this period met and married Laah Ceil. In the decade that followed he took to the lecture circuit as a musician and “Indian doctor,” one step ahead of the claims of creditors and malpractice lawsuits. He relocated to Toronto, Canada in 1852, and in 1854 the Toronto Globe identified him as an “Indian quack doctor.” The details of his subsequent life and death — as well as the fates of his family members — remain unknown. Laah Ceil was born in New York in 1817; treaties for the removal of Delaware Indians led to her family’s relocation to Missouri and ultimately to an area near the Kansas-Missouri border where she met Warner McCary a/k/a Okah Tubbee. Encouraged by Reverend Lewis Allen, a published author and traveling lecturer for the temperance movement, Laah Ceil recorded a narrative of her husband’s life in 1848.