Part 3

Such were the conditions obtaining among the Indians west of Missouri and Arkansas in the years immediately antedating the American Civil War; and, from such conditions, it may readily be inferred that the Indians were anything but satisfied with the treatment that had been and was being accorded them. They owed no great debt of gratitude to anybody. They were restless and unhappy among themselves. Their old way of living had been completely disorganized. They had nothing to go upon, so far as their relations with the white men were concerned, to make them hopeful of anything better in the future, rather the reverse. Indeed at the very opening of the year 1860, a year so full of distress to them because of the great drouth[90] that ravaged Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, the worst that had been known in thirty years, there came occasion for a new distrust. Proposals were made to the Creeks,[91] to the Choctaws,[92] and to the Chickasaws to allot their lands in severalty, notwithstanding the fact that one of the inducements offered by President Jackson to get them originally to remove had been, that they should be permitted to hold their land, as they had always held it, in common, forever. The Creeks now replied to the proposals of the Indian Office that they had had experience with individual reservations in their old eastern homes and had good reason to be prejudiced against them. The Indians, one and all, met the proposals with a downright refusal but they did not forget that they had been made, particularly when there came additional cause for apprehension.

The cause for apprehension came with the presidential campaign of 1860 and from a passage in Seward's Chicago speech,[93] "The National Idea; Its Perils and Triumphs," expressive of opinions, false to the national trust but favorable to expansion in the direction of the Indian territory, most inopportune, to say the least, and foolish. Seward probably spoke in the enthusiasm of a heated moment; for the obnoxious sentiment, "The Indian territory, also, south of Kansas, must be vacated by the Indians," was very different in its tenor from equally strong expressions in his great Senate speech[94] on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, February 17, 1854. It soon proved, however, easy of quotation by the secessionists in their arguments with the Indians, it being offered by them as incontestable proof that the designs of the incoming administration were, in the highest degree, inimical to Indian treaty rights. At the time of its utterance, the Indians were intensely excited. The poor things had had so many and such bitter experiences with the bad faith of the white people that it took very little to arouse their suspicion. They had been told to contract their domain or to move on so often that they had become quite super-sensitive on the subject of land cessions and removals. Seward's speech was but another instance of idle words proving exceedingly fateful.

Two facts thus far omitted from the general survey and reserved for special emphasis may now be remarked upon. They will show conclusively that there were personal and economic reasons why the Indians, some of them at least, were drawn irresistibly towards the South. The patronage of the Indian Office has always been more or less of a local thing. Communities adjoining Indian reservations usually consider, and with just cause because of long-established practice, that all positions in the field service, as for example, agencies and traderships, are the perquisites, so to speak, of the locality. It was certainly true before the war that Texas and Arkansas had some such understanding as to Indian Territory, for only southerners held office there and, from among the southerners, Texans and Arkansans received the preference always. It happened too that the higher officials in Washington were almost invariably southern men.

The granting of licenses to traders rested with the superintendent and everything goes to show that, in the fifties and sixties, applications for license were scrutinized very closely by the southern superintendents with a view to letting no objectionable person, from the standpoint of southern rights, get into the territory. The Holy See itself could never have been more vigilant in protecting colonial domains against the introduction of heresy. The same vigilance was exercised in the hiring of agency employees, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and the like. Having full discretionary power in the premises, the superintendents could easily interpret the law to suit themselves. They could also evade it in their own interests and frequently did so. One notorious case[95] of this sort came up in connection with Superintendent Drew, who gave permits to his friends to "peddle" in the Indian country without requiring of them the necessary preliminary of a bond. Traders once in the country had tremendous influence with the Indians, especially with those of a certain class whom ordinarily the missionaries could not reach. Then, as before and since, Indian traders were not men of the highest moral character by any means. Too often, on the contrary, they were of degraded character, thoroughly unscrupulous, proverbial for their defiance of the law, general illiteracy, and corrupt business practices. It stands to reason that such men, if they had themselves been selected with an eye single to the cause of a particular section and knew that solicitude in its interests would mean great latitude to themselves and favorable reports of themselves to the department at Washington, would spare no efforts and hesitate at no means to make it their first concern, provided, of course, that it did not interfere with their own monetary schemes.

To cap the climax, the last and greatest circumstance to be noted, if only because of the great weight it carried with the Indians when it was brought into the argument by the secessionists, is that practically all of the Indian money held in trust for the individual tribes by the United States government was invested in southern stocks;[96] in Florida 7's, in Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, Missouri, Virginia, and Tennessee 6's, in North Carolina and Tennessee 5's, and the like. To tell the truth, only the merest minimum of it was secured by northern bonds. The southerners asserted for the Indians' benefit, that all these securities would be forfeited[97] by the war. Sufficient is the fact, that the position of the Indians[98] was unquestionably difficult. With so much to draw them southward, our only wonder is, that so many of them stayed with the North.

II. INDIAN TERRITORY IN ITS RELATIONS WITH TEXAS AND ARKANSAS

For the participation of the southern Indians in the American Civil War, the states of Texas and Arkansas were more than measurably responsible. Indian Territory, or that part of the Indian country that was historically known as such, lay between them. Its southern frontage was along the Red River; and that stream, flowing with only slight sinuosity downward to its junction with the Mississippi, gave to Indian Territory a long diagonal, controlled, as far as situation went, entirely by Texas. Texas lay on the other side of the river and she lay also on almost the whole western border of Indian Territory.[99] She was, consequently, in possession of a rare opportunity, geographically, for exercising influence, should need for such ever arise. Running parallel with the Red River and northward about one hundred miles, was the Canadian. Between the two rivers were three huge Indian reservations, the most western was the Leased District of the Wichitas and allied bands, the middle one was the Chickasaw, and the eastern, the Choctaw.[100] The Indian occupants of these three reservations were, therefore, and sometimes to their sorrow, be it said, the very next door neighbors of the Texans. The Choctaws were, likewise, the next door neighbors of the Arkansans who joined them on the east; but the relations between Arkansans and Choctaws seem not to have been so close or so constant during the period before the war as were the relations between the Choctaws and the Texans on the one hand and the Cherokees and the Arkansans on the other.

The Cherokees dwelt, like the Choctaws, over against Arkansas but north of the Canadian River and in close proximity to Fort Smith, the headquarters of the Southern Superintendency.[101] Their territory was not so compactly placed as was the territory of the other tribes; and, in its various parts, it passes, necessarily, under various designations. There was the "Cherokee Outlet," a narrow tract south of Kansas that had no definite western limit. It was supposed to be a passage way to the hunting grounds of the great plains beyond. Then there was the "Cherokee Strip," the Kansas extension of the outlet, and for most of its extent originally and legally a part of it. The territorial organization of Kansas had made the two distinct. Finally, as respects the more insignificant portions of the Cherokee domain, there were the "Cherokee Neutral Lands," already sufficiently well commented upon. They were insignificant, not in point of acreage but of tribal authority operating within them. They lay in the southeastern corner of Kansas and constituted, against their will and against the law, her southeastern counties. They were separated, to their own discomfiture and disadvantage, from the Cherokee Nation proper by the reservation of the Quapaws, of the Senecas, and of the confederated Senecas and Shawnees. This Cherokee Nation lay, as has already been indicated, over against Arkansas and north of the northeastern section of the Choctaw country. The Arkansas River formed part of the boundary between the two tribal domains. So much then for the location of the really great tribes, but where were the lesser?

The Quapaws, the Senecas, and the confederated Senecas and Shawnees, the most insignificant of the lesser, occupied the extreme northeastern corner of Indian Territory and, therefore, bordered upon the southwestern corner of Missouri. The Creeks lived between the Arkansas River, inclusive of its Red Fork, and the Canadian River, having the Cherokees to the east and north of them, the Choctaws and Chickasaws to the south, and the Seminoles to the southwest, between the Canadian and its North Fork. The Indians of the Leased District have already been located.

In the years preceding the Civil War, the interest of Texas and of Arkansas in Indian Territory manifested itself, not in a covetous desire to dispossess the Indians of their lands, as was, unfortunately for national honor, the case in Kansas, but in an effort to keep the actual country true to the South, settled by slaveholders, Indian or white, as occasion required or opportunity offered. When sectional affairs became really tense after the formation of the Republican Party, they redoubled their energies in that direction, working always through the rich, influential, and intelligent half-breeds, some of whom had property interests and family connections in the states operating upon them.[102] The half-breeds were essentially a planter class, institutionally more truly so than were the inhabitants of the border slave states. It is therefore not surprising that, during the excitement following Abraham Lincoln's nomination and election, identically the same political agencies worked among them as among their white neighbors and events in Indian Territory kept perfect pace with events in adjoining states.

The first of these that showed strong sectional tendencies came in January, 1861, when the Chickasaws, quite on their own initiative apparently, met in a called session of their legislature to consider how best the great tribes might conduct themselves with reference to the serious political situation then shaping itself in the United States. There is some evidence that the Knights of the Golden Circle had been active among the Indians as they had been in Arkansas[103] during the course of the late presidential campaign. At all events, the red men knew full well of passing occurrences among their neighbors and they certainly knew how matters were progressing in Texas. There the State Rights Party was asserting itself in no doubtful terms. For the time being, however, the Chickasaws contented themselves with simply passing an act,[104] January 5, suggesting an inter-tribal conference and arranging for the executive appointment of a Chickasaw delegation to it. The authorities of the other tribes were duly notified[105] and to the Creek was given the privilege of naming time and place.

The Inter-tribal Council assembled at the Creek Agency,[106] February 17, but comparatively few delegates were in attendance. William P. Ross, a graduate[107] of Princeton and a nephew of John Ross, the principal chief of the Cherokees, went as the head of the Cherokee delegation. It was he who reported the scanty attendance,[108] saying that there were no Chickasaws present, no Choctaws, but only Creeks, Seminoles, and Cherokees. Why it happened so can not now be exactly determined but to it may undoubtedly be ascribed the outcome; for the council did nothing that was not perfectly compatible with existing friendly relations between the great tribes and the United States government. John Ross, in instructing his delegates, had strictly enjoined caution and discretion[109]. William P. Ross and his associates seem to have managed to secure the observance of both. Perchance it was Chief Ross's[110] known aversion to an interference in matters that did not concern the Indians, except very indirectly, and the consciousness that his influence in the council would be immense, probably all-powerful, that caused the Chickasaws to draw back from a thing they had themselves so ill-advisedly planned. It is, however, just possible that, between the time of issuing the call and of assembling the council, they crossed on their own responsibility the boundary of indecision and resolved, as most certainly had the Choctaws, that their sympathies and their interests were with the South. It might well be supposed that in this perilous hour their thoughts would have travelled back some thirty years and they would have remembered what havoc the same state-rights doctrine, now presented so earnestly for their acceptance, although it scarcely fitted their case, had then wrought in their concerns. Strangely enough none of the tribes seems to have charged the gross injustice of the thirties exclusively to the account of the South. On the contrary, they one and all charged it against the federal government, against the states as a whole, and so, rightly or wrongly, the nation had to pay for the inconsistency of Jackson's procedure, a procedure that could so illogically recognize the supremacy of federal law in one matter and the supremacy of state law in another matter that was precisely its parallel.

The decision of the Choctaws had found expression in a series of resolutions under date of February 7. They are worthy of being quoted entire.

February 7, 1861.

RESOLUTIONS _expressing the feelings and sentiments of the General Council of the Choctaw Nation in reference to the political disagreement existing between the Northern and Southern States of the American Union._

_Resolved by the General Council of the Choctaw Nation assembled_, That we view with deep regret and great solicitude the present unhappy political disagreement between the Northern and Southern States of the American Union, tending to a permanent dissolution of the Union and the disturbance of the various important relations existing with that Government by treaty stipulations and international laws, and portending much injury to the Choctaw government and people.

_Resolved further_, That we must express the earnest desire and ready hope entertained by the entire Choctaw people, that any and all political disturbances agitating and dividing the people of the various States may be honorably and speedily adjusted; and the example and blessing, and fostering care of their General Government, and the many and friendly social ties existing with their people, continue for the enlightenment in moral and good government and prosperity in the material concerns of life to our whole population.

_Resolved further_, That in the event a permanent dissolution of the American Union takes place, our many relations with the General Government must cease, and we shall be left to follow the natural affections, education, institutions, and interests of our people, which indissolubly bind us in every way to the destiny of our neighbors and brethren of the Southern States upon whom we are confident we can rely for the preservation of our rights of life, liberty, and property, and the continuance of many acts of friendship, general counsel, and material support.

_Resolved further_, That we desire to assure our immediate neighbors, the people of Arkansas and Texas, of our determination to observe the amicable relations in every way so long existing between us, and the firm reliance we have, amid any disturbance with other States, the rights and feelings so sacred to us will remain respected by them and be protected from the encroachments of others.

_Resolved further_, That his excellency the principal chief be requested to inclose, with an appropriate communication from himself, a copy of these resolutions to the governors of the Southern States, with the request that they be laid before the State convention of each State, as many as have assembled at the date of their reception, and that in such as have not they be published in the newspapers of the State.

_Resolved_, That these resolutions take effect and be in force from and after their passage.

Approved February 7, 1861.[111]

These resolutions of the Choctaw Council are in the highest degree interesting in the matter both of their substance and of their time of issue. The information is not forthcoming as to how the Choctaws received the invitation of the Chickasaw legislature to attend an inter-tribal council; but, later on, in April, 1861, the Choctaw delegation in Washington, made up of P. P. Pitchlynn, Samuel Garland, Israel Folsom, and Peter Folsom, assured the Commissioner of Indian Affairs that the Choctaw Nation intended to remain neutral,[112] which assurance was interpreted to mean simply that the Choctaws would be inactive spectators of events, expressing no opinion, in word or deed, one way or the other. The Chickasaw delegation gave the same assurance and at about the same time and place. Now what is to be concluded? Is it to be supposed that the Act of January 5, 1861 in no wise reflected the sentiments of a tribe as a whole and similarly the Resolutions of February 7, 1861, or that the tribal delegations were, in April, utterly ignorant of the real attitude of their respective constituents? The answer is to be found in the following most interesting and instructive letter, written by S. Orlando Lee to Commissioner Dole from Huntingdon, Long Island, March 15, 1862:[113]

Thinking you and the government would like to hear something about the state of affairs among the Choctaws last summer and the influences which induced them to take their present position I will write you what I know. I was a missionary teacher at Spencer Academy for two years and refer you to Hon. Walter Lowrie Gen. Sec. of the Pres. Board of Foreign Missions for information as to my character &c. I left Spencer June 13th & the nation June 24th but have heard directly from there twice since, the last time as late as Sept 6th. So that I can speak of occurrences as late as that.