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previous: Chapter 1 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 3

 p9  Chapter 2

Originally, the Cherokees had been the allies of the British. They had sided with the English in early Colonial struggles, fought a Border war in the South around 1760, but sued for peace after fourteen of their villages burned.

G. E. E. Lindquist in The Red Man in the United States, wrote:

Edward Everett Dale discussed in Oklahoma — a Guide to the Sooner State the fact that the Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes were alertly cognizant of the favorable geographic position of their lands — east of the Mississippi — and they were adept at playing nation against nation in an effort to hold a balance of power. This involved France, England and Spain as well as Florida, Louisiana, the Carolinas and Georgia.

Scotch families had emigrated following the uprising of 1745 and in the Revolution many of these people had remained "true to the old flag." When the Continental Army triumphed, a large number of the Loyalists fled into the Cherokee country and the unmarried men soon were husbands of the Cherokee women, frequently Christians as the Moravian Church had been in the Cherokee country since 1740. It was the white blood — so often of the best Scotch families — which was to produce the aristocratic mixed-bloods who were to play the most prominent roles in coming Cherokee history.

After General Pickens had subdued their Tory tendencies, the Cherokees acknowledged the sovereignty of the United States by the Treaty of Hopewell, signed November 28, 1785.

On March 30, 1802 the United States guaranteed the Cherokees the possession of all lands not ceded by them, recognized their right of self-government and gave the Cherokees the power to throw out all intruders on their lands. Certainly the Cherokees, now with their independence assured, could want no more from the United States.

There was soon to be a tragic complication. Only some three weeks later, on April 24, the United States, completely ignoring the agreement with the Cherokees, entered into one with Georgia saying, "the Indians' lands within the state of Georgia shall be given up as soon as could be done peacefully and on reasonable terms."

Such was the double-cross. In a sense, both the Indians and Georgia were double-crossed in that Georgia had ceded valuable  p11 lands in return for the assurance from the United States that the Indians would move.

Fifteen years later, in 1817, the Indians had made little effort toward departing and Georgia was getting impatient. The Lower Cherokees, the farmers, paid no heed to the suggestions from Georgia that they move, but the Upper Cherokees, the hunters, traded their lands for western hunting grounds.

Still, that deflection left in possession of the Cherokees and the Creeks an area amounting to one-fourth the present state of Georgia.

Both the tribes had laws forbidding any individual to sell land as such sales must be by the tribe. Little difficulty was encountered in enforcing this law as there were few lawbreakers. Violators were promptly executed. The Creeks and the Cherokees also had the death penalty for anyone who married a Negro.

Every possible pressure was exerted on the two tribes and, in 1826, on January 24, Creek Chief William McIntosh sold all the Georgia and part of the Alabama lands for $400,000. That he was the Chief made no exception to the law. He was put to death. But a short time later the Creeks had to give in to Georgia, which invoked the theory of nullification to block Federal control of state matters.

New Echota, the Cherokee capital, was established in 1819 and soon prospered in the fertile Georgia lands. Sequoyah, in 1821, after six years' work completed his form of written language for the Cherokees — it had eighty-four characters corresponding to Cherokee sounds. The year before, the Cherokees formulated a civilized government with a paid legislature and a code of laws. At that time they were still skeptical of Sequoyah's project, but, once he had shown them how he could communicate with his six-year-old daughter by means of it, the National Council became enthusiastic. In 1827 the Indians drew up a Constitution and took the name Cherokee Nation.

Any self-respecting Nation needed a means of propaganda and in 1828 the National Council established a news­paper, the Cherokee Phoenix. For editor, the Council named Stand Watie's brother, Elias Boudinot, who had been teaching school. Setting a pace for news­paper salaries, the Cherokees paid their editor $300 a year; the first issue of the Phoenix was February 21 and a brilliant career in Cherokee annals commenced.

 p12  Elias, born in 1802, was given an Indian name meaning stag or male deer, and he became known as Buck Watie. When he was educated at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, by a Philadelphia philanthropist, Elias Boudinot, Buck Watie took his benefactor's name. In Connecticut he fell in love with Harriet Gold, a daughter of one of the town's leading families, and married her.

Under Editor Boudinot, the Phoenix was printed with parallel columns in Cherokee and English and became known throughout not only the South but the Eastern literary world.

Stand Watie's brothers, besides Elias, were John, Thomas and Charles; and his sisters, Nancy, Mary and Elizabeth. His uncle Major Ridge, was a brother of Stand Watie's father. He married the Cherokee maiden, Princess Sehoya, was appointed a Major in the United States Army by General Andrew Jackson, and for many years was speaker of the Cherokee Council.

In early manhood, Stand Watie had a close friendship with Sheriff Charles Hicks. When a notorious desperado murdered Hicks, Deputy Sheriff Watie hunted down the slayer and killed him.

For December 20, 1828 to December 22, 1830, the Georgia authorities passed a series of laws designed to force the Cherokees out of the state. Some measures were these: Cherokee laws, usages, legislative assemblies and court were abolished; Cherokees were declared unacceptable for making contracts with white men and if the Cherokees put in action their death law for private land sales, the Georgia authorities would treat this as murder; Georgia laws and jurisdiction were extended over all inhabitants of the Cherokee Nation; Cherokee improvements and gold mines were confiscated; and white men were forbidden to enter Cherokee country without a license from the Georgia governor and the taking of an oath of allegiance to Georgia.

If all this were not capable of disrupting the Cherokee Nation, Georgia ordered the Cherokee lands surveyed for a distribution by lottery among Georgia citizens!

Chief John Ross and the other Cherokee leaders felt under no compulsion to obey these drastic demands made on their independent Nation. They appealed to President John Quincy Adams, but, as he was going out of office, he relayed the supplication to incoming President Andrew Jackson. Chief Ross, told  p13  that Jackson said the Cherokees must submit or move, said he would sell for $20,000,000, which was more money than Napoleon wanted for the Louisiana Territory!

Finally the Cherokees got several of their cases before the United States Supreme Court, lost the first one and then in March 1832, the Court apparently reversed itself, holding that "all acts of the Georgia legislature with respect to the Cherokees were unconstitutional and in violation of the treaties and laws of the United States . . ."

It was then that Andrew Jackson is alleged to have said: "John Marshall has made his decision — now let him enforce it!"

In 1832, when Elias Boudinot went to the East on a lecture tour, Stand Watie, who had become well-known in the Nation as clerk of the National Supreme Court in 1829, was put in charge of the Phoenix. The Cherokees were becoming hotly involved in an intra-Nation controversy over the question of whether they should accede to the Georgia demands. From the East, Elias wrote Stand not to write anything controversial regarding the national political election — involving Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson — as Boudinot did not wish the Cherokees entangled in more politics.

Nevertheless, Chief John Ross displaced Elias Boudinot as editor and Elijah Hicks headed the Phoenix. Watie and Boudinot, who favored selling the land and leaving Georgia, could not allow their means of possible political control to slip out of their hands, and, with the aid of Georgia authorities seized the Phoenix and put its editorial policy back behind emigration.

The feeling over emigration was extremely bitter and many of the Cherokees did not agree with the so‑called Treaty Party headed by Stand Watie, Elias Boudinot and Major Ridge. These men, themselves, would have preferred to stay in Georgia, but they realized that removal was inevitable as those in Georgia who demanded the Cherokee lands had the power in Washington to thwart the Cherokee Nation. The Treaty Party men were the mixed-breeds, often actually more Southern than Indian, and equally as prosperous as many of the white planters who lived adjoining the Cherokee Nation. Cherokees owned valuable land, trading posts and ferries. Major Ridge was wealthy and his son, John Ridge, had erected a schoolhouse at his own expense on the land where stood "Running Waters," his home.

 p14  Chief John Ross and his full-bloods also had prospered, but they had no feeling for Southern white life in the sense of kinship. They were for the Cherokee Nation as a political entity come hell and high water. Equally as much for the continuation of the Cherokee Nation, the Treaty Party contended that to defy the United States Government would, in the end, mean the total oblivion of the Nation. It was far better, they maintained, to move the Nation, than to lose the Nation!

It is rather odd that in 1861 it was the mixed-blood element who fought the United States — Northern half — for the love of the South they had been forced to leave.

Benjamin F. Currey, Government Superintendent for the Cherokee removal, reported on a meeting held May 14, 1833, by the Cherokee Council to hear a review of the work of the Washington Cherokee delegation. Currey stated in his dispatch to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs:

Currey added his own observation, "Past experience has shown Ross and his party hold no pledge sacred."

This observation by the Government Superintendent most certainly lends support to the Watie-Ridge-Boudinot faction in its conflict with John Ross and his adherents.

On December 29, 1835, without the consent of Chief John Ross, the Treaty of New Echota was signed by the Treaty Party leaders and the Georgia Cherokee Nation lands were sold for $5,700,000. The Nation pledged that it would leave Georgia in not more than three years and re-establish itself in the Indian Territory that is now Oklahoma. When John Ridge — his father, and Chief Ross, then friends, had fought side by side leading a canoe attack against the Creeks at Tohopeka — signed the treaty, he said after he put down his pen, "John Ridge signed his death  p15 warrant when he signed that treaty and no one knew it better when he signed his name on that paper. John Ridge may not die tomorrow . . . but sooner or later he will have to yield his life as the penalty for signing."

It is significant to observe that it was Major Ridge, one of the staunch defenders of the rights of the Cherokees, who, in 1829, introduced into the council at New Echota, a measure decreeing death to any member who would sign a treaty agreeing to give up their country in the East. This measure was adopted.

Commented Grant Foreman in an article in Chronicles of Oklahoma:

Unfortunately for the leaders of the Treaty Party, brilliant and honorable as they were, the methods by which the government moved the last of the Cherokees only widened the rupture between the two factions. In the spring of 1838 General Winfield Scott, with 4,000 Federal and State troops and 4,000 volunteers came to New Echota to begin the removal. Fifteen thousand Cherokees signed, to no avail, a petition which said in part:

The unjust treatment given the Cherokees met with considerable opposition in Southern circles and General John Ellis Wool, of the United States troops, commented:

Even Major Ridge, the principal signer of the treaty, felt he should protest and he wrote the President:

General Dunlap, Tennessee troop commander, called out in case there was a Cherokee uprising, said his soldiers would never enforce the treaty at the point of the bayonet.

The last of the Cherokees, like cattle, were driven from their lands by the soldiers. One quarter of these civilized Indians — who had established their high culture in Georgia — died during or immediately after emigration. Some died of broken hearts as they loved their homes and their lands. The "trail of tears" made by the Cherokee stains a dismal page in Indian relations. Not realizing that the Treaty Party had acted unselfishly and solely in behalf of the Nation — for these men lost their homes as did the others — the bitter full-blooded aligned with Chief Ross, angry and unhappy in the alien new land awaited their time for revenge.

Stand Watie had married twice before the Cherokees left for the West. His wife Betsy died in childbirth, as did the child, late in March, 1836, and he afterwards married the former wife of Eli Hicks, Isabella, but they separated when Watie, with the Ridges emigrated by water to the Western lands in 1837.

In June, 1839, at Double Springs, the Ross faction held a secret council, put a commander over each hundred men of their Knights of Death, or secret police, and vowed to wipe out the leaders of the Treaty Party!

 p17  On the morning of June 22 a company of riders rode up to the Honey Creek home of John Ridge in the northwest section of the Nation, and over the cries of Sarah Northrup, his wife from Cornwall, Connecticut, dragged him from his bed. With twenty wounds in his body, Ridge died on the ground. Twelve-year-old John Rollin Ridge came to his mother and vowed he would have vengeance for his father's murder.

Elias Boudinot and Reverend S. A. Worcester, with whom he had translated a number of gospels, had been working on a translation of St. John at the minister's house at Park Hill. Three men rode up and asked Boudinot if he would ride with them to help secure medicine. A short time later, a hired man heard Boudinot scream and Worcester and Delight Boudinot, his wife, found Elias among the tall grasses, stabbed in the back and his head bashed in with a hatchet. Alive, he died before he could speak to them. So in violence was killed the scholar­ly former editor of the Phoenix, the author of the novel in Cherokee, Poor Sarah, or the Indian Woman.

On that bloody morning it was poor Delight Boudinot, her new home half built, left with five children not of her bearing!

The assassins still had to reach Stand Watie and Major Ridge.

Carolyn Thomas Foreman relates in Park Hill how this warning was rushed to Watie:

Mrs. Foreman continued:

Watie sped to Fort Gibson, rounded up fifteen men and proceeded — in vain — to seek the assassins. As news of the murders spread, several hundred armed men gathered around Chief Ross' home to protect him should Watie attack.

According to some sources, Watie, knowing his brother was murdered, alone rode to the Boudinot home and entered the yard filled with hostile armed men. At the porch, he lifted the cloth off the dead man's face, then turned away, saying to the crowd, "I would give ten thousand dollars for the names of the men who did this!"

With contempt for his opponents, he rode through them to the road and not a hand was raised against him. Then, looking back at the body for a final time, he put spurs to his horse.

And what of seventy-year old Major Ridge? The Arkansas Gazette for August 21 tells the story in an account by John A. Bell and Stand Watie:

Believing there was a well-laid plot to kill all the Treaty Party and its associates, Stand Watie, to whom the Treaty people now looked for leader­ship, gathered a force at Old Fort Wayne near the Arkansas border, as civil war seemed imminent. Angered  p19 men milled back of the stockade where Captain Nathan Boone, son of Daniel Boone, had plotted early Indian boundary surveys. George Lowrey, acting Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, in the absence of Chief Ross, wrote Watie protesting the gathering of armed men and asked Watie to "break up without delay your present organization, return to your respective homes and contribute whatever may be in your power to the promotion of order and harmony among our people." Disregarding the Lowrey demand, the Watie faction remained mobilized — while Stand Watie sought help in Washington — until they felt the Ross men were impressed with their potential power.

Shortly after the assassination of the three Treaty Party leaders, the East and West Cherokees met at Takotokah on July 12 and chose Tahlequah, three miles to the southwest, as their capital, having signed the Act of Union. Tahlequah consisted of a council ground and a camping site and it was not until some four years later, in 1843, that the capital was graced with buildings; three large cabins in which the National Council, Senate and Treasury could meet.

Hatred between the mixed-bloods and the full-bloods limned nearly every face in the Cherokee Nation. Each side strove for favor with the Washington political circles. Around January 1840, Stand Watie and John Adair Bell, who was one of the signers of the Treaty of New Echota, on arriving in the nation's Capital, lost no time in putting their best foot forward.

Stand Watie quickly purchased an elegant green frock coat and John Bell picked out a mulberry one. Difference in color made no difference in price. The frock coats were about thirty dollars each. Over his green frock coat, Stand Watie wore a new cloth overcoat which had cost almost forty dollars, whereas Bell bought a slightly more expensive beaver overcoat. In addition, the two men donned fancy velvet vests and high grade pantaloons for, most certainly, the wealthy aristocrats of the Indian Territory would want their representatives to be in high styl. And there were no more fashionably attired men at the Globe Hotel than Stand Watie and John Bell. Although his companion had to return to the Indian Territory on March 16, Watie continued to stay in the capital until early in May when, after settling a hotel bill of over $300, he started back to his home.

Watie had other accounts to settle back in Indian Territory.  p20 Two years later Stand Watie walked into a grocery store on the Arkansas side of the Indian border­line. In the store was James Foreman, one of the alleged assassins of Major Ridge. Stand Watie killed Foreman, stood trial and was acquitted on a plea of self-defense.

George W. Pascal, who married the daughter of John Ridge, wrote a report on the trial of Stand Watie in which he said:

In a defense plea Alfred W. Arrington, a North Carolinian by birth, a distinguished Arkansas legislator, and who "occupies the very first place as orator in the state," said:

The testimony of James P. Miller described the fight which took place at England's grocery about three miles from Maysville:

Defense witnesses testified that they had heard Foreman say if he "ever met Watie he would put him out of the way" and that Foreman's general character was that of a "bad and dangerous man."

In the defense it was brought out that "his [Foreman's] taking the whip from Drumgoole and wrapping the lash around his hand were signs not to be misunderstood." Also Foreman had sent his half-brother for his guns and "a few minutes later and he would have caused Stand Watie to have been among the martyrs of the treaty party."

Stand Watie's lawyers continually brought out the ill-feeling between the two factions in the Cherokee Nation and traced its continuation from the days of the treaty-signing at New Echota.

David Walker, a defense lawyer, had been a member of the Legislature under the Territorial government and a Senator under the State government. In his argument he contended:

General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who was sent by the Secretary of War to Indian Territory, during the period of November 1841, to March 1842, to investigate the condition of the Indians recently emigrated there from the Southern states, encountered the Watie-Ross animosity. In A Traveler in Indian Territory he wrote:

Pierce Mason Butler was the Cherokee agent. A South Carolina governor and a Colonel in the famed Palmetto Regiment, he was killed at the battle of Churubusco in the Mexican War.

Diligently the Cherokees worked at improving their lot politically and the Inter-tribal Council, called by them in 1843, met at Tahlequah for four weeks and was attended by representatives of eighteen tribes.

In 1845 all houses on the public square were ordered moved and the main street laid out. A brick building was constructed to house the Cherokee Supreme Court, but it also provided a home for the Cherokee Advocate; however, a brick meeting place for the Supreme Court was no sign that the schism in the Nation had been removed.

That year the Ross faction killed Thomas Watie and James Starr. John Walker Candy, married to Stand Watie's sister, Mary Anne, wrote to Watie in Washington from Park Hill in April 1846 that murders were so numerous in the Cherokee land, news of the killings created as much interest as the death of a roving dog.

When Stand Watie returned from Washington he and Chief John Ross made their peace for the killings which had brought only misery to both factions.

Another angle on the Cherokee picture was given by Cherokee  p23 Agent Pierce Butler in his annual report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in which he stated:

Vengeance may be masked by a treaty, not destroyed. John Rollin Ridge, following the murder of his father, had been educated for ten years in New England and Arkansas. This education in no way erased the memory of that horrific morning back in 1839. As his formal education was complete, John Rollin Ridge returned home and was warned that Ross' man, David Kell, was gunning for him. Ridge shot first, killing Kell, and fled to Missouri where, in 1849, he wrote Stand Watie asking permission to make a raid into the Cherokee Nation. Ridge had enlisted a party of white men for the purpose of killing Chief John Ross!

As much as Stand Watie, who represented his people time and time again in the National Council, may have respected John Rollin Ridge's enterprise, he could not put his approval on this raid for murder.

With his plan to eliminate Chief Ross not favored by Watie, John Rollin Ridge traveled to California and two years later was writing for the San Francisco Golden Era and soon published a widely sold book, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta.⁠b In practically no time young Ridge — he was born in 1827 — became one of the leading literary figures in California.

In the meantime, in 1843, Stand Watie had married again. His new wife was Sarah Caroline Bell, sister of his good friend, John Adair Bell. Sarah had been born in 1820 in the Old Cherokee Nation east of the Mississippi.

As much as the Cherokees fought against going to the Indian  p24 Territory, they soon found it a good land to pioneer and the prosperity of Georgia was renewed. Over all this was a land of beauty, variety and contrast. There were the timbered mountains and spark-sprinkled lakes; there were cypress and pine; and there were also treeless level prairies with mesquite and sage brush.

With the Cherokees becoming well-established, the Cherokee news­paper was revived by the Council October 25, 1843, renamed the Cherokee Advocate and published its first edition — four pages of six columns — on September 26, 1844.

The prospectus for the Advocate read in part:

But the Advocate missed by a month being the first paper in the new Cherokee Nation. Reverend Evans Jones — a strong pro-Ross man — published the Cherokee Messenger at the Cherokee Baptist Mission known sometimes merely as Baptist and more often as "Breadtown," for it was from the Mission that bread  p25 was distributed. Jones was to decry Stand Watie's influence until the Confederate Indian troops put him to a long awaited — by the Secesh faction — flight.

The Advocate was edited by William Potter Ross, an excellent writer, a Princeton graduate, and a nephew of Chief John Ross. The paper naturally tended to favor the anti-Watie faction in the Nation — so it was that Watie had both the Advocate and Messenger critical of him! The Advocate came out regularly until September 18, 1853, when it was suspended for lack of funds. Five years after the end of the War between the States the Advocate was resumed and it was published until 1906.

Even his success in the Golden Bear State could not erase John Rollin Ridge's love for his Cherokee Nation. In 1854 from Marysville, Ridge — who often was known in the literary world as Yellow Bird — wrote Stand Watie asking him to aid in the financing of an Indian news­paper to be published in Arkansas.

Ridge brought out that he wanted to write the history of the Cherokee Nation from the Indian point of view and not the white man's for the white man, Ridge contended, would make such a history too much of a justification of the white man's actions. Too, Ridge felt that with a news­paper he could record the memory of the relatives so that their deeds would remain for the world to know. Certainly, Ridge emphasized, it was unthinkable that men such as Watie and himself would allow the deeds of their people to be forgotten when they could — with their own paper — awaken readers at home and abroad to what they had to relate.

John Rollin Ridge was to continue his notable career in California journalism and not to become the publisher of a Cherokee news­paper. For although Stand Watie encouraged him in the project, he was expanding his own planting operations and could not assist financially. He was to acquire three places on the Spavinaw and around 1860 commenced construction of a substantial new home.

But Watie could discern sinister shadows creeping out from the East and North toward Indian Territory. Men had fought before in the Territory in the feuds between Watie's group and the Ross clan, but there was something far more ominous in these shadows as if the Arkansas River were to run with blood and spill out over the Indian plantation lands. Cherokees had watched the famed Second Cavalry canter down Tahlequah's Muskogee  p26 street in November 1855. Seven hundred fifty riders from Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis were on their way to Texas to fight in the Indian wars.

When some of the cavalrymen reined up in front of the National Hotel, built in 1848 by a Mormon Bishop and two followers run out of the East, the Cherokees welcomed them.

"Mind telling me who's in command?" queried a Cherokee political leader who had come out to watch the column.

Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, suh," came the reply from a young Lieutenant. "Our second-in‑command will join us in Texas. He's detained at Fort Leavenworth on a court-martial case — he's Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee."

The Cherokee looked questioningly toward a Captain talking to a Lieutenant.

"That's Captain E. Kirby-Smith," the young officer volunteered, "and he's talking to Lieutenant John B. Hood. Beg yore pardon, suh, but you look mighty like a Georgia man. I'm from Virginia myself."

The Cherokee smiled, looked around for any close-by Ross men, and then said, "Good, Lieutenant. I'm one of Stand Watie's men and we're on the South's side. Be kind enough, if it please you, to get whatever fellow officers you like and we'll step into the National. I've got a room there and I'll be much obliged if you'll allow me to treat you all to something to quench a long dry thirst, Lieutenant —," the speaker halted and fumbled for his words.

"Indeed, suh, I'm begging your pardon for having neglected to introduce myself. True hospitality like this could not be exceeded along the faraway banks of the mighty rolling James. I'm Lieutenant Stuart, suh. And since you're one of Stand Watie's friends, just call me what my other friends do, 'Jeb.' "

Stand Watie was not the only Cherokee leader worried by shaping developments. Old Chief John Ross questioned the effects of the conflicting political philosophies of the North and the South on the Indian Territory.

Fortune had been most kind to the old Chief who, though he headed the full-bloods, had a Scotch father and a quarter-blood mother! Actually John Ross, born in 1790, near Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, had far less Indian blood in him than Stand Watie! True, he had taken a Cherokee as his first wife, but, in  p27 1845, he had married Mary B. Stapler, a Delaware Quaker.

The New York Tribune, September 5, 1844, wrote up the Ross wedding which had been at Hartwell's Washington House in Philadelphia:

His "wild home," as the New York newspaperman put it, is fully described in Park Hill:

Rose Cottage, at Park Hill, some four miles south of Tahlequah, was two-stories with four massive, tall white columns supporting the center porch. His hundred slaves looked on as Chief Ross and his youthful bride went riding in a fine coach topped by a black lad in livery. The house servants marvelled at the $10,000 worth of furniture in Rose Cottage which had been shipped from the East.

Chief John Ross was handsomely and safely ensconced in beauti­ful Rose Cottage supported by the Keetoowah, the secret society of the Pins with 2,000 members. Ross knew that the Keetoowah was sponsored by Northern abolitionists who urged the Indians to remain true to their customs and their gods — as long as they also were true to the North and abolition! The Pins were identified by crossed pins which they wore on their coat lapels or calico shirts. Chief John Ross' cognition was that Stand Watie's Knights of the Golden Circle looked at these men with their Pin insignia and intuitively measured them — for their graves!

Chief Ross in his mansion at Park Hill, entrapped in the conflicting currents of Pin and mixed-blood, of States Rights and Federal Power, of the disturbing influence of the "horse Indians" on the great plains to the West, knew not where to turn. As the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nations, his answer could well hold the destiny of his people.

At his large new house on the Spavinaw, Stand Watie, too, was reaping the fortunes of his ability. His home was not the mansion owned by Chief Ross, but it was the showplace of the mixed-bloods who often thronged his home as welcome guests. Stand Watie and Sarah had five children; three boys, Saladin, going on fifteen or so; Cumiskey, around eleven; and the youngest son, Watica; and two young daughters, Minnehaha Josephine, and Jacqueline. Minnehaha, the elder, could read the Bible fluently and quote Latin.

Gyrated in the political maelstrom, Chief Ross groped for a  p29  way to secure himself and his Cherokee Nation from being sucked under. Contrastingly, Stand Watie groped for nothing. In what was a malevolent whirlpool to Ross, Stand Watie perceived as a new road to freedom — freedom from the domination of the Cherokee Nation by the Pins and freedom for the South from the oppressive threats of the Black Republicans and Kansan abolitionist cut-throats!

Stand Watie's confounded Pin enemies had watched him live through the crimson, feuding years unscratched, and they had come to avow that no bullet ever fired by them could kill Stand Watie!

As far as Watie was concerned, the Yankees could sustain the same thesis!

---

Thayer's Notes:

a Butler is quoted somewhat differently by Grant Foreman in The Five Civilized Tribes, p389 f.

b The book, written by Ridge under the pen name Yellow Bird, — a historical novel taken by very many subsequent writers to be straightforward history about the career of a real person — is online in a 2005 reprint by Three Rocks Research. If, as often with the continued shrinkage of the Web, that page disappears, I have a copy: drop me a line.

Ridge's book appeared as well in both pirated and paraphrased versions and legitimate reprints with translations, further adapted, into French and Spanish.

For example, the most commonly available version of Ridge's work, bearing the very similar title Life and adventures of the celebrated bandit Joaquin Murrieta • His exploits in the state of California, published in 1925, is not Ridge's at all, but a translation of Vida y aventuras del más célebre bandido sonorense Joaquín Murrieta by Mexican journalist Ireneo Paz — who in fact merely retouched one of the later pirated versions of Ridge's book, translated it into Spanish, and published it as his own work in 1904. This commonly available book is thus an English back-translation of a Spanish translation and adaptation of a second-generation piracy. The full details of all this hanky-panky are very nicely sorted out in the Three Rocks Research reprint, Introduction, pp. xxix‑xxxvi.

What with all these piracies, Ridge eventually got very little fame or financial reward; when Frank Cunningham our author then goes on to assert that Ridge "became one of the leading literary figures in California", that's quite a reach.

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