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previous: Chapter 12 This webpage reproduces a chapter of General Stand Watie's Confederate Indians by Frank Cunningham published by The Naylor Company San Antonio, Texas 1959 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 14

 p181  Chapter 13

When the winter weather began raging, destitute Indians in the area of Watie's headquarters sent in appeals for help and General Watie, saddling up a special command, himself escorted the Confederate Indian refugees across the Red River to Texas without the loss of a life.

Despite the Rebel money — inflated by this time until prices were fantastic — coming in from the Confederate Government, and the supplies being run past Yankee lines and river gunboats by Thomas F. Anderson and Reverend E. L. Compere, a chaplain in Stand Watie's Brigade, the problem of keeping the Indian refugees fed was mounting.

General Watie would anxiously await the return of Anderson from every foray for supplies into Yankee-held lands. Anderson, Watie's adjutant and close friend, of no Indian blood, was  p182 full of wit and humor, and always considered Mrs. Watie as his "Aunt Sallie."

The Cherokees, using every possible means to obtain money so as to buy supplies, were even transporting cotton to Mexico. This was carried on as a legitimate business and not as a wartime cotton speculation. Cotton bales were routed from Paris, Lamar County, Texas to Matamoros, Mexico.

At his winter headquarters at Boggy Depot, Choctaw Nation, General Watie was intensely lonesome for his "Dear Sallie" and in January he asked her to come up from Texas as he could obtain a house so that the Waties would not be dependent on friends for their domicile. Sarah, though, could not leave Texas and General Watie's desire to be with his wife remained unquenched.

Colonel William A. Phillips, Third Indian Home Guard (Kansas Infantry), harassed but ever fighting back at Watie's raiders, briefly replaced as Commander of the Indian troops at Fort Gibson, had perplexing difficulties not originating with the Secessionists.

From Fort Gibson on January 16, 1865, he wrote Major General Francis J. Herron:

On February 16 from Fort Gibson Colonel Phillips was still irate over supply conditions and wrote Major General Canby at New Orleans:

At the same time, Phillips continued to protest the questionable activities of Captain Vittum with contraband cattle.

Evidence to support the charges of corruption by Federal officers, contended by Colonel Phillips, was given in a letter written March 22 by John Ross, the "exiled" Cherokee Chief and Evans Jones and Daniel H. Ross, Union Cherokee delegates, at Washington. This correspondence to Lieutenant General U. S.   p185 Grant, commanding armies of the United States, stated:

Efforts of Colonel Phillips to remedy the situation that distressed both himself and Chief Ross were, in the main, stymied by higher-ranking officers who reported that there were no Indian or Federal Courts in the Territory in which to bring charges against the accused.

General Maxey worked arduously for the military welfare of the Indian Territory for he had contended the year previously, "If the Indian Territory gives way, the granary of the Trans-Mississippi, the breadstuffs, and beef of this and the Arkansas army, are gone, and the left of Holmes' army is turned, and with it not only the meat and bread, but the salt and iron of what is left of the Trans-Mississippi Department."

Under instruction of Kirby-Smith, P. B. Leeds, Acting Assistant Adjutant General, on February 14 issued Special Order No. 40, stating:

That Stand Watie's surging horsemen were most feared by the Yankees is evidenced time and time again in the Northern reports. Even in early 1865 there was no diminution of alarm  p186 in Yankee-held territory when word spread that Watie was on the warpath. Major General Blunt at his headquarters in Paola, Kansas, on February 14, wrote Major General Dodge, commanding the Department of Missouri:

At the start of 1865, the situation with the Confederate Indians took a strange turn. The Plains Indians, who had made alliances with General Pike back in 1861 at the beginning of the war actually had done practically nothing to help the Confederacy. But with Watie's command fighting a desperate holding action — with their horses almost worn out and with the men sometimes riding night and day on raids — the Plains Indians suddenly wanted to don Confederate gray.

One plausible reason for the change in attitude of some of the Plains Indians resulted from Colonel J. M. Chivington's raid on the Cheyenne and Arapaho. These Indians, though known Confederate sympathizers were in their camp, had denied any participation in the mail and stage raids of the past summer. Nevertheless, on November 29, 1864 Chivington, with nine hundred volunteers out of Denver, who had crossed winter plains, struck without warning the Indian encampment at Sand Creek, forty miles below Fort Lyon. Hundreds of Indian men, women and children were either killed outright or driven into the wintry plains to die of exposure.

If this were an example of the pious North "marching to make men free," then the half-wild and wild survivors of the massacre wanted none of it!

First hint of this new support came in January when news arrived at Boggy Point from the headquarters of the Osage Battalion at Camp Dorn that the Comanches and Kiowas of the Plains wanted to take the warpath against the Federals in the spring and summer, and the Osages, in poor uniforms, but good  p187 spirits, were hoping in the words of their adjutant, "to give Kansas hell in the summer."

Alert Northern spies had Union officers in the Indian lands trying to forestall any movement to the Confederacy. O-hop-ey-a-ne, Second Chief of the Comanches, reported to Tuckabatche Micco, Principal Chief of the Creeks, an Indian meeting held at Cherokee Town, around the first of 1865, in which the Creeks were visited by the Prairie Indians, the Comanches, Kiowas and Arapahoes. These Indians wished to meet the chiefs of the Confederate Indians, exclaiming they were anxious to see "you all."

The Plains Indians leaders at the Cherokee Town meeting told of several councils at which efforts were made to make the Prairie Indians take the warpath against the South. The Second Chief of the Comanches also stated the Prairie Indians had been assembled at a council by white Northern officers. The Yankees had large amounts of goods and presents for the Indians as well as a number of guns with ammunition. The Union officers told the Indians they could have all the goods and guns if they would make war on the South. Instructions were given by the officers to kill all the men and boys and take the women and children prisoners. Next, they were to drive off the cattle and horses. When they returned from their expedition, though, they must give up the white women and girls. But the Indian women could remain theirs. Mules and horses and cattle the Yankees would buy from them.

When the Union spokesman concluded speaking, the Comanche Chief answered that he had friends and brothers in the South and he would not make war on them. The Yankee Captain replied that if the Comanche Chief refused to fight the South, he would not be given the guns. That he would do without the guns and with his bow and arrows still kill buffalo and live on the Prairie, was the final answer of the Comanche leader.

Jesse Chisholm, the Cherokee Indian trader — who could speak fourteen different languages⁠a and who was helpful in winning Indians over to Pike — was interpreter at this Council and advised the Indians not to listen to the "Northern men's bad talk."

The Comanche's Second Chief ended up his message with the assurance there was a perfect estrangement between the Prairie  p188 Indians at the Council and the North. These Indians could be counted as true friends to the Secesh.

Shortly after receiving this information, which was forwarded to him by the Creek leader who was at Council on Washita River, Stand Watie, on March 19, wrote Creek Chief Tuckabatchee Micco. General Watie explained that he had received a letter from the Confederate States Agent for the Reserve Indians saying the Prairie Indians wanted to meet delegates from the Confederate Indian Nations. General Watie told how he had notified General Maxey, who sent Major Vore to the designated place, but the Prairie Indians had departed. Watie went on to state that on May 15 there was to be held a General Council of all the Indian Tribes friendly with the Confederate States to adopt plans for united and more vigorous prosecution of the conflict. With concentrated action the Rebel Indians would conquer and win peace with honor.

Before the conference, which was held at Camp Napoleon, there was another change in command. General Maxey was succeeded on March 1 by the heavy-drinking and heavy-fighting and beloved by his Indians, Douglas H. Cooper. There was no denying that Maxey had done as well as could be expected, but the Indian soldiers had two idols, their own Stand Watie and their former agent Douglas Cooper. General Cooper, who before succeeding Maxey, had seen Jefferson Davis in Richmond, ever since General Pike's resignation and his temporary elevation to the top command, desired to have full control of the Indian Territory troops and, for all practical purposes, be ex-officio Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Civilized Nations.

General Maxey well could have recalled a letter he had received from S. A. Roberts shortly after he had assumed command of the Indian Territory, which read:

From his headquarters of the Department of Missouri at St. Louis on April 12, General Dodge instructed Blunt at Paola:

At the same time Dodge advised Brevet Brigadier General James H. Ford at Fort Riley, "If Colonel Blair is not strong enough [to fight Watie], you will have to move in that direction."

The next few days the Federal forces were constantly on the search for Watie and his raiders, but they never located him.

Yes, in late April of 1865 Stand Watie and General Cooper were carrying on their efforts against the evil Kansas abolitionists. "Give Kansas Hell!" The whoop and war cry, the shout and Rebel Yell came from aristocratic mixed-bloods dressed in patched Confederate gray, captured Federal blue, or else, as often General Watie dressed, in baggy old trousers with whatever coat he could find, and over this, when need be, a military cloak of mongrel classification. Indeed, the whoops and shouts resounded along the Plains from the half-wild Indians, who looked for omens of luck and restrained with impatience their Kansas assaults upon the Pins of the Indian long house culture.

But in shell-shattered Virginia towns and burned countrysides there was a strange quiet in the guns and a strange dismay in the hearts of the people. Jefferson Davis on April 5 had set up his government at Danville after his flight from Richmond, saying:

On April 9 General Robert E. Lee surrendered some 26,000 men to General U. S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. An American Indian wrote with his own hand the articles of Lee's surrender; this was Captain Ely Parker, a Seneca chief named Do‑ne-ho-ga‑wa, who was on Grant's personal staff.⁠b

Colonel John Mosby and his famous Rangers capitulated to Major General Winfield S. Hancock on April 17 and then on April 26 General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his army in North Carolina, an army that was slightly larger than that given up by General Lee.

Stand Watie, in the field, with his scanty forces overwhelmingly outnumbered still raided as a defensive measure and hoped that if General E. Kirby-Smith and the Army of the Trans-Mississippi would stand firm, then Watie could launch a common attack with his new Indian allies. Then, too, word had reached the Indian headquarters that their beloved white father, Jefferson Davis, was on his way to Texas.

True, Davis was on his way to lands still in Confederate control but on May 10 — the day after General Richard Taylor surrendered in Mississippi to Major General E. R. S. Canby — at Irwinsville, Georgia, Federal parties attempting to capture Davis and claim the $100,000 reward for his apprehension, became so confused they fired into each other, killing two and wounding four. Jefferson Davis and his party were seized.

A day later General M. Jeff Thompson surrendered his command of some 7,500 to General Dodge at Chalk Bluff, Arkansas.

And on May 13 the "last battle of the war" was fought, the battle of Palmetto Ranch, Resca Chica, Texas, near the mouth of the Rio Grande,⁠c when General James E. Slaughter, commanding 600 Confederate Second Texas Cavalry and light artillery, clashed with Colonel Barrett of the Thirty-fourth Indiana Infantry, assisted by four companies of the Sixty-second U. S. Colored Infantry.

The Federals were routed and Slaughter captured as many prisoners as he had Rebel troops!

Despite the Secesh victory, the news sweeping into Indian Territory headquarters looked foreboding.

On May 18, a few days before the Indians were to hold their  p191 large Camp Napoleon conference, Cooper advised Stand Watie:

Three days later General Cooper was advising Watie, "The best policy is to keep them [First Indian Brigade, Creeks and Seminoles] all employed in front scouting and driving out beef from the Arkansas River."

And on May 23 Watie instructed Colonel Tandy Walker, "I do not desire collision with the Federals, but they must keep out of the Choctaw country until the grand council otherwise determine."

The compact made and entered into between the Confederate Indian tribes and the Prairie tribes of Indians at Camp Napoleon, on Washita River, May 26, 1865, stated:

Disquieting rumors reached Texas concerning General Watie. Some were that he had been captured, others were that Stand Watie was being sought out by the Federals bent on sheer revenge. Quantrill, who had started out on a wild ride, his men disguised as Federal Cavalry, to assassinate Lincoln, had himself been shot in a skirmish after being trapped in a farmhouse fifty miles southwest of Louisville. Partially paralyzed he lay moaning in a Louisville hospital and was to die at the end of May.

In the welter of conflicting stories and news, Mrs. Watie had sent word to the General that she could not keep living without hearing from him. Stand Watie quickly replied that his silence was because of the confusion among the troops and his efforts to keep as much control as possible. He had furloughed many of them home to avoid any potential outbreak against the authorities.

Watie's communications set at rest some of the fears for her husband's safety which had so torn Sarah. Rumors were rife in Texas that General Watie was a fugitive with a price on his head and that he was being hunted down by General Blunt's "Feds" like an escaped criminal. Sarah had worried that, if this were true, turncoat Indians might seize the General, if the Yankee Pins had not beaten them to it!

Honest, prayer­ful Sarah Watie had abhorred the speculation in government properties by some pseudo-patriots. She held a bitter detestation for those who had flown the Confederate flag only as a means of participation in whatever financial looting possible. Rather than have General Watie a party to questionable schemes which would injure those who had followed and trusted him, Sarah unstintingly proclaimed she would live on nothing but bread and water.

There was, of course, no iota of reason for Sarah doubting the course Watie would take. Stand Watie's actions had ever put  p194 his people before himself and if there were men in Confederate gray or Union blue whose colors were cemented to the expediency of profit-at-any-cost, Watie had only contempt for such charlatans.

Yet Sarah's fears — phantom though they were — could not be criticized as life was disintegrating around her in Texas. Would General E. Kirby-Smith continue to hold out? Would Texas fight on against the Yankees? And who could suppress the marauders and bushwhackers who robbed and stole from the defenseless Texas Indian refugees as well as the Texans themselves? Had not Sarah lost her black horse and any day her mules might be the next prize for the blackguards?

Sarah Watie's devotion and admiration for her warrior-husband is evident in her letters which appear in Cherokee Cavaliers as is General Watie's concern for his wife and children in Texas. For them there was no autumn for love as Albert Pike wrote in his poem:

Autumn's shadow was deep over the Confederacy! One day before Stand Watie had written Sarah, May 27, that he had no conclusive news on Texas, the vast and mighty empire of Kirby-Smithdom saw the Stars and Bars come down. When Kirby-Smith had decided to surrender, angered Jo Shelby and some of his aides threatened to arrest Kirby-Smith and the commander relinquished his duties to General Simon Bolivar Buckner. But a mere change in command couldn't be the magic elixir through which defeat was transformed to victory. Thus it was that at New Orleans on May 26 General Buckner surrendered the Army of the Trans-Mississippi to Major General Peter J. Osterhaus, a long time war favorite with the midwest Germans, who had lost  p195 his first major battle at Wilson's Creek and whose infantry was overrun at Pea Ridge by Colonel Stand Watie.

News of the surrender of Kirby-Smith's army must have stunned the Indian leaders. Hadn't Kirby-Smith felt so confident he could hold out that he had issued a commission to Albert Pike so he could help in organizing the new Confederates allies, the Plains Indians? And hadn't General John Bankhead Magruder at Houston declared "I would rather be a Comanche Indian than bow the knees to the Yankees!"

Stand Watie still held the Choctaw Nation inviolate! The Southern flag was still the flag in power over much of the Indian Territory!

Out went the call to the leaders of the Confederate Indian nations to send their representatives to a Grand Council to be held at Cleata Yamaha, Choctaw Nation. Wild Indians had started on an expedition to attack trains on the Santa Fe Road, but they were recalled by the Confederate Indians so they could send other chiefs to the Grand Council.

From this council, on June 15, came these resolutions:

One by one the Indian Rebels surrendered their forces. General  p197 Stand Watie as Chief of the Cherokees held out, a noble vexillary with his Secesh flag still flying.

Stand Watie knew that his subordinate commanders in the Indian Territory had given up with dignity and with pride. Military leaders of the Indian Nations had halted operations as unconquered chieftains, relinquishing their warfare against the hated abolitionists only because there was none left to fight alongside them. That was as Watie had planned.

It was not as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in Hiawatha:

As the oppressive, hot June days drew toward their close, Stand Watie rode his horse into Doaksville to meet with Lieutenant Colonel A. C. Matthews, United States Volunteers, and W. H. Vance, adjutant, United States Volunteers, commissioners appointed by Major General Herron.

So it was that on June 23, Brigadier General Stand Watie endured the hardest ride of his life. No Yankee guns were aimed at him and no sabers slashed close to his body. Unlike his truculent raids that had lashed the defiant Federal forts and snaking supply lines, this slow ride held no element of danger.

And the ending was written long before!

Yes, the end of the trail was written, mayhaps, back on July 4, 1863, when the wearied Confederates turned back from Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg, when hungry Vicksburg fell and Helena didn't.

Try as Stand Watie did — with raid and torch, with charge and countercharge — there was a path from which even the vicissitudes and caprices of fate would not let him escape.

His had been a bold dream — a dream that shimmered with  p198 courage and valor. So bold the dream — so brave the dreamer!

And on June 23 in the old Choctaw capital the dreamer awakened and his days of glory were phantoms brought by the stroke of the surrender pen as if it were some evil Merlin's wand.

The last Confederate General to surrender his forces, General Stand Watie, with the full respect of his courteous victors, turned his horse back toward his headquarters.

Gone was the dream.

Somehow the Confederate flag that rippled in the wind over the virescent summer lands assumed a spectral-like quality there under the heavy June sun.

Stand Watie could see in the distance the burned homes of his beloved land with their monuments to the efforts of the Southern Cherokees. Stark against the horizon the lonely chimneys stood like giant gravestones in some gargantuan burying ground.

He had led his people — to this only?

General Stand Watie knew that though he had lost his fight, a hard struggle was thundering and pressing upon him. No shouts of Pins against Rebel Cherokees! No death cry of plunging mounts with minie balls through their lungs! No Stars and Bars above a Rebel Yell as the Secesh charged!

His new army to command was one of the sick, the maimed and the broken-spirited along the Red River; the wives and the children of the fighters, grown gaunt with fear and worry; the men of his old command who must survive with the Pins even as they had lived for years to kill the Pins.

Stand Watie, the military leader of the Civilized Indian Nations, the political leader of his people and the trusted cohort of even the half-wild Plains Indians, could never leave his land to the monuments of death. Even as he had led his people in war, he knew that somehow he must lead them in peace.

As the words of the beloved Father Abram Joseph Ryan were written for Robert E. Lee, they could have fitted the great patriot of the Cherokees:

---

Thayer's Notes:

a That Jesse Chisholm was an accomplished polyglot is certain. The precise number of his languages is another matter. This figure of 14 is seen thruout the Internet — a widely copied site asserts "Fluent in thirteen Native American languages and Spanish" (but surely English too? pushing the number up to fifteen), but nowhere do I find a list of the languages, his level of fluency in them — which, to be fair, is hard to quantify with polyglots — or the source of the information. The Texas Historical Association's online Handbook of Texas, in its entry on the man contents itself with the statement that he "learned a dozen or so languages". If anything more precise can be said, it might be found in the printed biographies of him, which I have not seen; for which see the quick bibliography at that Texas page.

b D. S. Freeman, Robert E. Lee, IV.140, where he is given the rank of Colonel, as elsewhere in that chapter; as does Cunningham himself, a few months later, p204.

c "Resca Chica" is not right. It isn't exactly a mistake by our author, but in his source, which he didn't check: an interview with a man named H. C. West, claiming to have been a Federal soldier in the engagement, printed in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, as reported in Southern Historical Society Papers, XXI.226; the date of the news­paper article is not specified but on the following page SHSP states the article was reprinted by other newspapers in May of 1893. SHSP goes on to point out that Mr. West's memory was clearly faulty since he speaks of Kirby Smith being present at the battle, which he was not. Alternatively, if the mistake is not due to West, the St. Louis reporter likely not conversant with Spanish may easily have misread their handwritten note as to the name of the place: Boca or Resaca Chica, Spanish for "little mouth" or "channel" — of the Rio Grande. At any rate, the battle of Palmetto Ranch (sometimes seen: Palmito) was fought halfway between Brownsville and the smaller mouth of the rather messy estuary of the Rio Grande.

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