The Confederate Cherokees

Author : W. Craig Gaines
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 1992-04-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0807127957

Get Book

The Confederate Cherokees by W. Craig Gaines Pdf

Although many Indian nations fought in the Civil War, historians have given little attention to the role Native Americans played in the conflict. Indian nations did, in fact, suffer a higher percentage of casualties than any Union or Confederate state, and the war almost destroyed the Cherokee Nation. In The Confederate Cherokees, W. Craig Gaines provides an absorbing account of the Cherokees' involvement in the early years of the Civil War, focusing in particular on the actions of one group, John Drew's Regiment of Mounted Rifles.As the war began, The Cherokees were torn by internal political dissension and a simmering thirty-year-old blood feud. Entry into the war on the Confederate side did little to resolve these intratribal tensions. One faction, loyal to Chief John Ross, formed a regiment led by John Drew, Ross's nephew by marriage. Another regiment was formed by Ross's rival, Stand Watie. The Watie regiment was largely por-Confederate, whereas many of Drew's soldiers, though fighting for the Confederate cause, were secretly members of a pro-Union, antislavery society known as the Keetoowahs. They had little sympathy for the southern whites, who had driven them from their ancestral homelands in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Drew's regiment nonetheless earned a degree of infamy during the Battle of Pea Ridge, in Arkansas, for scalping Union soldiers.Gaines writes not only about the actions of Drew's regiment but about military events in the Indian Territory in general. United action was almost impossible because of continuing factionalism within the tribes and the desertion of many Indians to the Union forces. Desertion was so high that Drew's regiment was effectively disbanded by mid-1862, and the soldiers did not complete their one-year enlistment. Drew's regiment bears the distinction of being the only Confederate regiment to lose almost its entire membership through desertion to the Union ranks.Gaines's solidly researched, ground-breaking history of this ill-fated band of Cherokees will be of interest to Civil War buffs and students of Native American history alike.

Author : Clarissa W. Confer
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2012-03-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780806184661

Get Book

The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War by Clarissa W. Confer Pdf

No one questions the horrific impact of the Civil War on America, but few realize its effect on American Indians. Residents of Indian Territory found the war especially devastating. Their homeland was beset not only by regular army operations but also by guerillas and bushwhackers. Complicating the situation even further, Cherokee men fought for the Union as well as the Confederacy and created their own “brothers’ war.” This book offers a broad overview of the war as it affected the Cherokees—a social history of a people plunged into crisis. The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War shows how the Cherokee people, who had only just begun to recover from the ordeal of removal, faced an equally devastating upheaval in the Civil War. Clarissa W. Confer illustrates how the Cherokee Nation, with its sovereign status and distinct culture, had a wartime experience unlike that of any other group of people—and suffered perhaps the greatest losses of land, population, and sovereignty. Confer examines decision-making and leadership within the tribe, campaigns and soldiering among participants on both sides, and elements of civilian life and reconstruction. She reveals how a centuries-old culture informed the Cherokees’ choices, with influences as varied as matrilineal descent, clan affiliations, economic distribution, and decentralized government combining to distinguish the Native reaction to the war. The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War recalls a people enduring years of hardship while also struggling for their future as the white man’s war encroached on the physical and political integrity of their nation.

Author : Frank Cunningham
Publisher : Pickle Partners Publishing
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2016-01-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9781786257765

Get Book

General Stand Watie’s Confederate Indians by Frank Cunningham Pdf

This is the story of Stand Watie, the only Indian to attain the rank of general in the Confederate Army. An aristocratic, prosperous slaveholding planter and leader of the Cherokee mixed bloods, Watie was recruited in Indian Territory by Albert Pike to fight the Union forces on the western front. He organized the First Cherokee Rifles on July 29, 1861, and was commissioned a colonel. In 1864, after battling at Wilson’s Creek and Pea Ridge, he became brigadier general. Watie was the last Confederate general to lay down his arms in surrender, two months after Appomattox. “Frank Cunningham tells with all its gusto, hard riding, triumph, and heartbreak, the story of Stand Watie’s Cherokee Brigade that fought mightily in Missouri, Arkansas, and the present Oklahoma, under Generals Sterling Price, Thomas C. Hindman, Kirby Smith, and other commanders of the Trans-Mississippi Department, and when no superior officer was available, then pell mell and uncompromisingly on its own.”—North Carolina Historical Review “A graphic and authentic account of General Stand Watie and his Indian troops....[It] fills a long-neglected gap in the Civil War annals.”—Civil War History

Author : Mabel Washbourne Anderson
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 96 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 1931
Category : Cherokee Indians
ISBN : UVA:X001244145

Get Book

The Life of General Stand Watie by Mabel Washbourne Anderson Pdf

Watie was the highest ranked Native American in the Confederate army and renowned for his leardership in the Battle of Pea Ridge and other battles. He also was the last Confederate general to surrender, three months after Lee at Appomattox. After the Civil War, Watie served as the chief of the Southern Cherokees until his death in 1871. This edition is much enlarged over the first printing of 1915, with new material on Watie's death and tributes to him and biographies of other prominent Cherokees, including John Rollins Ridge (Yellow Bird), poet and writer who moved to California and wrote a book on bandit Joaquin Murieta. The author was the granddaughter of John Ridge, the Treaty Party leader, and the grand-niece of Watie. In her research she consulted with a number of veterans who had served under him.

Author : E. Stanly Godbold, Jr.,E. Stanly Godbold,Mattie U. Russell
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2002-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1572331615

Get Book

Confederate Colonel and Cherokee Chief by E. Stanly Godbold, Jr.,E. Stanly Godbold,Mattie U. Russell Pdf

Author : Gaston Litton
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : History
ISBN : 080612721X

Get Book

Cherokee Cavaliers by Gaston Litton Pdf

The 200 letters in this volume chronicle more than forty years of history in the old Cherokee Nation - from removal through the Civil War to Reconstruction - as recorded in the correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot families. The minority leaders in the Nation, they were better known as the "Treaty Party". In 1835 they agreed to removal of the Cherokee Nation westward to Indian Territory. As a consequence the family leaders were assassinated by the opposing faction under Chief John Ross. Here, arranged in sequence with annotation and chapter introductions by Edward Everett Dale and Gaston Litton, are the lives and thoughts of such proud cavaliers of Cherokee blood as John Rollin Ridge, who followed the Gold Rush to California; Stand Watie, Confederate general in the Civil War; and E. C. Boudinot, the Cherokee delegate to the Confederate Congress.

Author : Annie Heloise Abel
Publisher : e-artnow
Page : 291 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2022-01-04
Category : History
ISBN : EAN:4066338116987

Get Book

The American Indians in the Civil War by Annie Heloise Abel Pdf

The American Indian in the Civil War is one of the first historical accounts dealing with the participations of Native American in the American Civil War. Native Americans took active participation in the conflict. 28,693 Native Americans served during the war, mostly in the Confederate military. They participated in battles such as Pea Ridge, Second Manassas, Antietam, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and in Federal assaults on Petersburg. Contents The Battle of Pea Ridge, or Elkhorn and Its More Immediate Effects Lane's Brigade and the Inception of the Indian The Indian Refugees in Southern Kansas The Organization of the First Indian Expedition The March to Tahlequah and the Retrograde Movement of the "White Auxiliary" General Pike in Controversy With General Hindman Organization of the Arkansas and Red River Superintendency The Retirement of General Pike The Removal of the Refugees to the Sac and Fox Agency Negotiations With Union Indians Indian Territory in 1863, January to June Inclusive Indian Territory in 1863, July to December Inclusive Aspects, Chiefly Military, 1864-1865

Author : Patrick Neal Minges
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2004-06-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781135942076

Get Book

Slavery in the Cherokee Nation by Patrick Neal Minges Pdf

This work explores the dynamic issues of race and religion within the Cherokee Nation and to look at the role of secret societies in shaping these forces during the nineteenth century.

Author : Kenny Arthur Franks
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 1979
Category : Cherokee Indians
ISBN : UOM:39015005602092

Get Book

Stand Watie and the Agony of the Cherokee Nation by Kenny Arthur Franks Pdf

A biography of Stand Watie, a Cherokee leader and Confederate general.

Author : Theda Perdue,Ada Elizabeth Deer
Publisher : Infobase Publishing
Page : 135 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Cherokee Indians
ISBN : 9781438103686

Get Book

The Cherokees by Theda Perdue,Ada Elizabeth Deer Pdf

Discusses the history of the Cherokee Indians, including origins, contact with Europeans, and their struggle to survive into the twenty-first century.

Author : Celia E. Naylor
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2009-09-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0807877549

Get Book

African Cherokees in Indian Territory by Celia E. Naylor Pdf

Forcibly removed from their homes in the late 1830s, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians brought their African-descended slaves with them along the Trail of Tears and resettled in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. Celia E. Naylor vividly charts the experiences of enslaved and free African Cherokees from the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma's entry into the Union in 1907. Carefully extracting the voices of former slaves from interviews and mining a range of sources in Oklahoma, she creates an engaging narrative of the composite lives of African Cherokees. Naylor explores how slaves connected with Indian communities not only through Indian customs--language, clothing, and food--but also through bonds of kinship. Examining this intricate and emotionally charged history, Naylor demonstrates that the "red over black" relationship was no more benign than "white over black." She presents new angles to traditional understandings of slave resistance and counters previous romanticized ideas of slavery in the Cherokee Nation. She also challenges contemporary racial and cultural conceptions of African-descended people in the United States. Naylor reveals how black Cherokee identities evolved reflecting complex notions about race, culture, "blood," kinship, and nationality. Indeed, Cherokee freedpeople's struggle for recognition and equal rights that began in the nineteenth century continues even today in Oklahoma.

Author : John Sedgwick
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
Page : 512 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2019-04-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9781501128691

Get Book

Blood Moon by John Sedgwick Pdf

An astonishing untold story from the nineteenth century—a “riveting…engrossing…‘American Epic’” (The Wall Street Journal) and necessary work of history that reads like Gone with the Wind for the Cherokee. “A vigorous, well-written book that distills a complex history to a clash between two men without oversimplifying” (Kirkus Reviews), Blood Moon is the story of the feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States through the infamous Trail of Tears and into the Civil War. Their enmity would lead to war, forced removal from their homeland, and the devastation of a once-proud nation. One of the men, known as The Ridge—short for He Who Walks on Mountaintops—is a fearsome warrior who speaks no English, but whose exploits on the battlefield are legendary. The other, John Ross, is descended from Scottish traders and looks like one: a pale, unimposing half-pint who wears modern clothes and speaks not a word of Cherokee. At first, the two men are friends and allies who negotiate with almost every American president from George Washington through Abraham Lincoln. But as the threat to their land and their people grows more dire, they break with each other on the subject of removal. In Blood Moon, John Sedgwick restores the Cherokee to their rightful place in American history in a dramatic saga that informs much of the country’s mythic past today. Fueled by meticulous research in contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts—and Sedgwick’s own extensive travels within Cherokee lands from the Southeast to Oklahoma—it is “a wild ride of a book—fascinating, chilling, and enlightening—that explains the removal of the Cherokee as one of the central dramas of our country” (Ian Frazier). Populated with heroes and scoundrels of all varieties, this is a richly evocative portrait of the Cherokee that is destined to become the defining book on this extraordinary people.

Author : Clint Crowe
Publisher : Casemate Publishers
Page : 411 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2017-07-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9781940669687

Get Book

Caught in the Maelstrom by Clint Crowe Pdf

The sad plight of the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole—during America’s Civil War is both fascinating and often overlooked in the literature. From 1861-1865, the Indians fought their own bloody civil war on lands surrounded by the Kansas Territory, Arkansas, and Texas. Clint Crowe’s magisterial Caught in the Maelstrom: The Indian Nations in the Civil War reveals the complexity and the importance of this war within a war, and explains how it affected the surrounding states in the Trans-Mississippi West and the course of the broader war engulfing the country. The onset of the Civil War exacerbated the divergent politics of the five tribes and resulted in the Choctaw and Chickasaw contributing men for the Confederacy and the Seminoles contributing men for the Union. The Creeks were divided between the Union and the Confederacy, while the internal war split apart the Cherokee nation mostly between those who followed Stand Watie, a brigadier general in the Confederate Army, and John Ross, who threw his majority support behind the Union cause. Throughout, Union and Confederate authorities played on divisions within the tribes to further their own strategic goals by enlisting men, signing treaties, encouraging bloodshed, and even using the hard hand of war to turn a profit. Crowe’s well-written study is grounded upon a plethora of archival resources, newspapers, diaries, letter collections, and other accounts. Caught in the Maelstrom examines every facet of this complex and fascinating story in a manner sure to please the most demanding reader.

Author : W. Dale Weeks
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2023-02-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9780806192581

Get Book

Cherokee Civil Warrior by W. Dale Weeks Pdf

For the Cherokee Nation, the Civil War was more than a contest between the Union and the Confederacy. It was yet another battle in the larger struggle against multiple white governments for land and tribal sovereignty. Cherokee Civil Warrior tells the story of Chief John Ross as he led the tribe in this struggle. The son of a Scottish father and mixed-blood Indian mother, John Ross served the Cherokee Nation in a public capacity for nearly fifty years, thirty-eight as its constitutionally elected principal chief. Historian W. Dale Weeks describes Ross’s efforts to protect the tribe’s interests amid systematic attacks on indigenous culture throughout the nineteenth century, from the forced removal policies of the 1830s to the exigencies of the Civil War era. At the outset of the Civil War, Ross called for all Cherokees, slaveholding and nonslaveholding, to remain neutral in a war they did not support—a position that became untenable when the United States withdrew its forces from Indian Territory. The vacated forts were quickly occupied by Confederate troops, who pressured the Cherokees to align with the South. Viewed from the Cherokee perspective, as Weeks does in this book, these events can be seen in their proper context, as part of the history of U.S. “Indian policy,” failed foreign relations, and the Anglo-American conquest of the American West. This approach also clarifies President Abraham Lincoln’s acknowledgment of the federal government’s abrogation of its treaty obligation and his commitment to restoring political relations with the Cherokees—a commitment abruptly ended when his successor Andrew Johnson instead sought to punish the Cherokees for their perceived disloyalty. Centering a Native point of view, this book recasts and expands what we know about John Ross, the Cherokee Nation, its commitment to maintaining its sovereignty, and the Civil War era in Indian Territory. Weeks also provides historical context for later developments, from the events of Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee to the struggle over tribal citizenship between the Cherokees and the descendants of their former slaves.

Author : Carolyn Johnston
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2003-10-06
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780817350567

Get Book

Cherokee Women In Crisis by Carolyn Johnston Pdf

"American Indian women have traditionally played vital roles in social hierarchies, including at the family, clan, and tribal levels. In the Cherokee Nation, specifically, women and men are considered equal contributors to the culture. With this study we learn that three key historical events in the 19th and early 20th centuries-removal, the Civil War, and allotment of their lands-forced a radical renegotiation of gender roles and relations in Cherokee society."--Back cover.