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Men and Things Are Changing Fast
On March 19, 1860, Israel Folsom, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister active in Choctaw politics, wrote to his friend Peter P. Pitchlynn, then representing the Choctaw Nation in Washington, D.C., âRapidly do men of all classes seem to be losing confidence in each other. It seems men & things are changing fast.â Noting that the white Christian missionaries were involving themselves in Choctaw Nation politics, he continued, âSurely as you say the whites will eat up & consume the Red Men where ever they come in contact with them.â1 This letter and his other writings suggest that Israel Folsom never forgot the injustices in past Indian-white relations, particularly the forced removal of his people from their old Mississippi homeland in the 1830s. Although his primary concern was Choctaw Nation affairs and current disagreements over its latest constitution, Folsom, along with many Indians who lived in the territory, kept a wary eye on developments in âthe States,â as the Indians called them. They knew the southern states were threatening secession if Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November and that trouble might then spill over onto their Indian neighbors.2 Indeed, they were right. Within months the United States slid into civil war that engulfed the Indian nations, too.
Too often, histories of that Civil War either ignore or skim over events and conditions west of the Mississippi River between 1861 and 1865. That is somewhat understandable because the largest campaigns and battles took place hundreds of miles away in the eastern United States. The Indian Territory, along with its nearest neighborsâthe frontier states of Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texasâare seen as a backwater of the conflict. However, for the people of the Indian Territory the war was a catastrophe. Indian peoples of the territory, as well as some that would be removed there in the following two decades, had to choose whether to remain loyal to their treaties with the United States or to ally themselves with the Confederacy. Their choices had less to do with the issues dividing the states than with their own leaders, history, conditions, and fears. One of their greatest fears was that the federal government would ignore its treaties with them and allow Anglo-Americans to overrun their lands and dispossess them again. As they struggled to find the right road, the Civil War engulfed the Indian Territory. It devastated their lives, homes, and communities, scattering them like leaves before a storm wind, as one territorial writer described it. When that storm was over, the Indian Territory would never be the same, and what had happened there would affect the rest of the United States.
What was the Indian Territory and how did its people become involved in the American Civil War? By 1860 the âIndian Territoryâ was roughly todayâs state of Oklahoma, minus the Panhandle and the far southwestern corner. Native peoples knew it well for its rich resources: animals good for fur, hide, utensils, and meat; plants for food and medicine; and useful minerals, wood, and stone. Alonzo Chalepah, an elder of the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, recalled in 2003 that his ancestors lived comfortably in western Oklahoma for centuries. They hunted game and in season collected nuts, plums, prickly pear, and berries. âThose are some the things that we highly relied on to gather and eat,â he said, âbecause nowadays we know theyâre highly nutritious.â3 Native peoples knew where those resources were located and the trails to reach them. Many tribes hunted in Oklahoma, including the Osages, who were based in Missouri and then Kansas in the 1700s and 1800s, respectively. Charles Whitehorn, an Osage, said in 1969 his ancestors âused to come hunting through here, in Oklahomaâ on their way to âthem places there was buffalo. Certain time theyâd go there; then they kill them buffaloes . . . packâem on the horses . . . . Theyâd travel through here. Theyâd see these trees and lots of game and good water, lots of good wood.â4 Caddoan peoples, too, such as the Wichitas, had lived in Oklahoma for hundreds of years, hunting and raising crops in the river valleys. In fact, by the early 1700s Wichita farmers, living in stockade-encircled villages along the Arkansas, Canadian, Washita, and Red Rivers and their tributaries, had used their surplus crops to base a flourishing trade network along those early trails. They profited by connecting nomadic Plains tribes such as the Comanches with French traders bringing European goods from the Mississippi Valley to exchange for furs, bison robes, horses, and slaves. However, the Wichita trade network had collapsed under Osage and then Spanish pressure by the late 1700s.5
In 1821 when Maj. Stephen H. Long followed the Canadian River eastward across a summer-scorched western Oklahoma, he reported it as sparsely populated although plenty of game trails marked its sandy soil. His report to the federal government included maps that labeled todayâs Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma the âGreat American Desert.â The public took that to mean it was not suitable for white settlers interested in farming as they knew it then. During the two decades after Longâs exploration, as Anglo-American settlers pushed the frontier westward across Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, Kansas, and other areas, the federal government referred generally to the lands still farther west as âIndian territory.â By 1860 it had designated parcels of this vast space between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains as reservations for Indian peoples who had been displaced by the settlers. The large area south of Kansas and north of Texasâpart of the âGreat American desertââremained relatively open, and a number of Indian peoples were concentrated there by choice or federal action. Consequently, the âIndian Territoryâ shrank over time to the main body of the state of Oklahoma.6
Some population estimates suggest that by 1860 as many as 100,000 people may have been in âIndian Territory,â that large rectangle of forested mountains and hills, fertile river valleys, and grass-rich prairies. It was hard to know for sure just how many there actually were. Some Caddos lived and hunted in western Oklahoma, and the Leavenworth Dragoon Expedition visited the Wichita villages in Devilâs Canyon in 1834. Two years later Pawnee horse raiders struck a large Wichita village on the site of todayâs Fort Sill. In fact, Pawnee and Osage parties came through frequently to hunt, visit, and steal horses, while nomadic Plains peoplesâparticularly the Kiowas, Comanches, and Plains Apachesâconsidered western Oklahoma part of their range. Parties of Kickapoos, Shawnees, Delawares, Piankashaws, and other tribes sometimes set up camps while passing through this part of the frontier. According to the federal government, though, lands in the territory legally belonged to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations. A small area in the far northeastern corner had been carved out for the Quapaws and some of the Senecas and Shawnees. In the west-central part of the territory, by 1859, just before the Civil War, several tribesâincluding the Wichita and Caddo peoplesâwere forced out of Texas and resettled on lands leased from the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. A small population of non-Indiansâsoldiers, federal officials and employees, missionaries, traders, and other individuals licensed by the Indian governmentsâalso lived among them. So, too, did their slaves and freedmen. Most were of African descent, but some had been captured in Mexico or other parts of the West. However, it was the five Indian nations not three decades removed from the southeastern United States who made up the majority of the Indian Territory population, and it was through them that the Indian Territory became so deeply embroiled in the Civil War.7
Although each Indian people had their own culture long before the arrival of the Europeans, these newcomers had been labeled âthe Five Civilized Tribesâ because of cultural changes that began in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Before that time, the Cherokees were the largest tribe in the southeast, with a population estimated at about thirty thousand. They lived mostly in todayâs North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia but also claimed parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Alabama. Their neighbors included the Muscogees, later called by British colonists âCreeks,â a confederacy of ceremonial towns with a population of about fifteen thousand in 1685.8 They lived primarily in parts of Alabama, Georgia, and northern Florida, with a few in Tennessee. To the west of the Muscogees, the Choctaws lived in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. They were organized into three districts and had become the most populous of the southeastern tribes by about 1830. To their north were the Chickasaws, a related people, fewer in number and very independent. They lived mostly in northern Mississippi and northeastern Alabama, but they claimed West Tennessee and far-western Kentucky as their hunting ground and fiercely contested the Shawnees for it. The Seminoles, an offshoot of the Muscogee confederacy, were the smallest in number. While they had much in common with other Muscogees, they moved farther south into Florida in the 1700s, eventually becoming separated geographically and politically by about 1800. The Cherokees were an Iroquoian people, but the other four were Muskogean, most speaking the Muskogee language or variations of it. What they all had in common was their way of life: They were sedentary peoples who lived communally in towns of thatch-roofed timber houses, often clustered around a council house and protected by a stockade. The men hunted, fished, and protected their people, while the women, who owned those houses, fed, clothed, and otherwise cared for their families. Farming was an important part of their economy, and the women raised crops of corn, beans, squash, and melons. These peoples had their own rich cultural heritage and strong spiritual life with ancient roots.9
Europeans entered what would be the southeastern United States in the early 1500sâfirst the Spanish, then the French, and later the British. As they did, warfare increased and epidemics such as smallpox swept the tribes, greatly reducing Indian populations. So did trade between Indians and Europeans. British/Indian commerce flourished when traders from the Carolina colony, founded in 1680, pushed deep into the southeastern Indian country. They offered European manufactured goodsâfirearms, brass kettles, knives, hatchets, beads, cloth, tools, and rumâin exchange for deerskins and slaves. Native people in the southeast became so dependent on the traders for these goods that over time they became commercial hunters, killing off herds of deer for their hides and competing with hunters from other tribes to pay growing debts to the traders. They also raided other tribes for captives that could be sold as slaves in New England markets or sent to West Indies plantations. In the early 1700s the southeastern tribes rebelled against abuses and conditions growing out of colonial trade but were unsuccessful in ending them. Surrounded by the British in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, by the Spanish in Florida, and by the French in Louisiana, the southeastern Indians struggled to maintain their independence.10
Another consequence of colonial/Indian trade was the appearance of mixed-blood children among the southeastern tribes. English, Scots, and Irish traders from the British colonies sometimes married or formed liaisons with Indian women. Their Anglo-Indian children would not have been welcome in the colonies. Among the southeastern Indians, however, a motherâs children were accepted into her family, clan, town, and tribe. Anglo-Indian children often grew up learning the culture of both their parents, including English and their motherâs language. Some learned to read and write and were exposed to Christianity. When they grew to adulthood, their skills in the English and Indian languages, literacy, and understanding of both cultures made them valuable to tribal leaders attempting to deal with Euro-Americans. Gradually some moved into leadership positions in their nation and increasingly influenced its affairs. By the early 1800s it was not unusual to encounter mixed-blood Cherokees named Vann, Rogers, or Adair; Chickasaws named Colbert, Cheadle, or Love; Choctaws named Folsom, McCurtain, or Harkins; and Muscogees named McIntosh, Kennard, or Carr. When Protestant Christian missionaries began working among the southeastern tribes about 1800, some mixed-blood Indians such as David Folsom, a Choctaw, supported their mission stations, which offered English education along with Christian teachings.11
Some mixed-bloods also led the economic change among the southeastern Indians in the late 1700s as the deer herds dwindled and the buckskin and slave trade declined. Farming had traditionally been an important part of their economies, and Indians expanded it to include raising cattle, horses, hogs, geese, and chickens, as well as European grains, peaches, apples, and cotton, which Indian women learned to weave into cloth about 1800. Unlike Anglo-Europeans, these southeastern tribes held land in common in the belief that it was not something that could be owned, bought, or sold. Rather, an individual could use as much land as he wanted as long as he did not intrude on land used by someone else. Now, though, some Indians, particularly the mixed-bloods, began taking up large tracts of land for farms and other enterprises. For example, James Vann, a Cherokee, had a large farm and operated a mill and a ferry on the Conasauga River in north Georgia by the early 1800s.12
Vann was also one of those southeastern Indians who acquired African slaves to work his farm and serve in his home. There are different theories about why and when the southeastern Indians adopted African slavery, but all five tribes eventually did, adding it to forms of slavery they had practiced for centuries. A census taken in 1832 found that the twenty-two thousand Muscogees enumerated owned more than nine hundred African slaves. By then African slavery had become one of the issues that led to the separation of the Seminoles from the Muscogees about 1800, and it continued to trouble their relationship after they arrived in the Indian Territory. The Seminoles were mainly of Muscogee origin but included other peoples, too. Boundaries drawn during the colonial period and the early years of the United States placed some of their towns and camps in the Spanish (briefly British, 1763â1783) colony of Florida. The Seminoles allowed runaway slaves from Anglo-American Georgia and South Carolina plantations to settle among them, not as Seminoles but as slaves under their protection. These runaways lived in their own camps and used their farming skills to raise crops and livestock, a small part of which they paid their new Indian owners or patrons when required. The Seminoles resisted the demands of their slavesâ former owners for their return and attempts by slave catchers to recapture them. Abraham and John Coheia (Cowiya, or Gopher John), two slaves who could speak English and knew Anglo-American ways, became valuable interpreters and negotiators for the Seminoles. Over time they and other skilled slaves achieved some status within the tribe. By about 1815 Euro-American colonial boundaries, internal politics, and the runaway slave issue had effectively separated the Seminoles from the rest of the Muscogee confederacy. However, some Muscogees who objected to developments among their own people in the early 1800s moved south and joined the Seminoles, further widening the gap between the two nations.13
In those early days of the American republic, the federal government was trying to find a way to deal with American Indians it viewed as blocking frontier settlement. It adopted the policy of establishing reservations for Indians, which would limit contact with non-Indians and, it was hoped, prevent conflict. Within these reservations the federal intent was to provide Indian children an English education that would help instill Anglo-American values, including Christianity, landownership, and individualism. The expectation was that Indian cultures would vanish within a short time as Indian young people acquired a higher (in the opinion of Anglo-Americans) level of civilization. This would lead to eventual U.S. citizenship and finally end the need for reservations. Consequently, Congress created the Indian Civilization Fund in 1819 to provide financial support for educating Indian children in agriculture and academics. In those days, the federal government was willing to cooperate with Protestant Christian missionary efforts to help accomplish its goals in Indian education. About the same time, a strong religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening was sweeping through the American population. Among other things, it spurred missionary activity directed at native peoples in the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii, and the southeastern Indian country.14
The first Protestant Christian missionaries to make lasting in-roads among the southeastern tribes represented the Society of United Brethren for the Southern Statesâthe Moraviansâwho began work among the Cherokees at Springplace, Georgia, in 1801.15 After them came Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist missionaries who offered English education as well as Christianity. They generally taught reading, writing, and arithmetic in addition to Anglo-American homemaking skills for Indian girls and agriculture for the boys. By 1825 some young Indian men could attend Choctaw Academy, a Baptist school founded in Kentucky by Richard M. Johnson and supported financially by the Choctaw Nation. Literacy received a large boost among the Cherokees in 1821 when Sequoyah, or George Gist (Guess), developed a syllabary for the Cheroke...
