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previous: Chapter 2 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 4

 p31  Chapter 3

With the frenzied abolitionists whipping up an emotional malice against the Southerners supporting States Rights and refusing to bow before the outcries of fanatics, the boiling political kettle spilled over into far remote Indian Territory, the land of the Five Civilized Nations; the Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw.

The Superintendent of Indian Affairs at Fort Smith, Arkansas, Elias Rector, was a Southerner and Douglas H. Cooper, a hard-drinking Mississippian, a Franklin Pierce appointee, was the Choctaw and Chickasaw agent. Others working openly for Secession were John Crawford, Cherokee agent; William Quesenbury, Creek agent; Samuel M. Rutherford, Seminole agent; and Matthew Leeper, Wichita agent.

 p32  These agents of the Washington government felt secure in that the rather inaccessible nature of the Indian Territory would cloak their activities in behalf of the South. Troops had been withdrawn from the Indian frontier and in May 1860, several of the forts were abandoned and others weakened.

The strategists of the South realized that if war were to come, the Secessionists could make good use of the Indian Territory as a storehouse for provisions, a highway to and from Texas, a base for raids into Federal territory and also a possible jumping off place for capturing Colorado. There was some Rebel sympathy in that state as well as an anti-Washington feeling which could be utilized as many citizens were angry because they felt Washington had exposed their state to attack by the wild Plains Indians.

On January 5, 1861 a caucus of Southern senators adopted resolutions advising immediate secession. On the very same day the Chickasaw Legislature suggested that an intertribal conference be held so that the Civilized Nations could arrive at some mutual action in respect to the impending split between the North and the South. Governor Cyrus Harris, of the Chickasaw Nation, sent out a plan to other tribes and the Creek chiefs named a conference for February 17.

Before this date came about, on February 7 the Choctaw Nation had come out for the slave states, saying their (the Choctaws) "natural affection, education, institutions and interests" bound them "in every way to the destiny" of their "neighbors and brethren of the Southern states." The Choctaws had 5,000 Negro slaves.

Bluntly Stand Watie's long time foe, Chief Ross of the Cherokees, replied that the quarrel between the states was of no concern to the Indians.

The Creeks still felt that the split in the Union could be of some import to their nation. The Creek Legislature was composed of two houses, the House of Kings and the House of Warriors and the rulings of the Nation — legislative, judicial and executive — were enforced by a company of light horse.

On February 9, Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, became president of the Confederacy and Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, became vice president, with the president to serve six years and not to be eligible for re-election. And just eight days later, leaders of the Indian Territory met in their conference as the Creeks had  p33 proposed, and decided to follow the course set by John Ross, to remain neutral at least for the time being. But, apparently sensing the action to be taken, the pro-Confederate leaders of the Choctaw and the Chickasaw Nations "went fishing."

In less than a month the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States had authorized President Davis to send a special agent to the Indian tribes west of Arkansas.

Davis appointed Albert Pike, a New Englander by birth, who had lived in Arkansas for many years and had been a Captain in the war with Mexico. In this war Pike had recruited his own company of Arkansas cavalry, equipped at his own expense. At the battle of Buena Vista, Pike had given his horse to a military engineer whose mount had been shot out from under him. After the end of the War between the States, Pike's son, Yvon, on going to Washington College (now Washington and Lee University), as a student, met the same man his father had aided at Buena Vista — Robert E. Lee, the college's president!⁠a

Albert Pike had won renown in Arkansas both as a writer — he is known as Arkansas' first great author — and as a lawyer. He was well versed in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish and Sanskrit, as well as the Indian languages.⁠b His admission to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States was in 1849, at the same time as the admission of Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin.⁠c He was active in the Democratic American Party, the so‑called "Know-Nothings" — which upheld States Rights and had as an objective pla­cing the government of the country in the hands of Americans only, part of its platform being, "All offices, civil and military, should be given to native-born Americans, in preference to foreign born."

Despite his Northern birth, Albert Pike was an ardent Secessionist, edited the Arkansas Advocate, and wrote:

Whether the Indian leaders of the Civilized Nations were ardent readers of Pike's poetry is not recorded, but the mixed-breed plantation type Indians were his good friends and he often hunted with them. This association resulted in Pike being named their lawyer, representing them in Washington. In 1859 he secured for the Choctaws an award by the United States Senate of $2,981,247.

What was the over-all picture of the Indian situation? The Southern Superintendency took in south Kansas and the whole of the Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. Within it were the five great slave holding tribes that had come from South of the Mason-Dixon line; the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws and Seminoles. Also in the Southern area were a few New York Indian families, as well as some groups of Wichitas, Quapaws, Caddoes, Shawnees and Senecas, as well as a few exiled Texas Indians.

Also in the geographic group were the Osages of Southern Kansas, the Black Dog tribe of which supported secession, and some of the wild Plains Indians, the Tonkasas tribe of the "half wild" Wichitas being Secessionists.

In the Central Agency were the Sacs and Foxes, Munsees, Delawares, Shawnees and a variety of small tribes, Weas, Peories, Kaskaskias, Piankeshaws, Potawatomies, Ottawas, the Miamies, Chippewas and the Kaws of north central Kansas.

Generally speaking, most of the tribes north of the thirty-seventh parallel were loyal. The Kansas Indians — except for the before mentioned Osages of the South — were in the Central Agency. This Agency's tribes were those which had come from free states and they stood by the Union. More than one-half of the adult male Delawares enlisted as volunteers and some were to die under Stand Watie's guns. The Quapaws of the detached bands were loyal as well as the Caddoes from the interior country.

Albert Pike went out in May 1861, on his diplomatic mission to negotiate treaties with the Indians and soon he had the  p35 unorganized tribes in the Indian Territory, under Agent Andrew J. Dorn, for the Confederacy.

But before he left, Pike had written a letter on May 11 saying:

News reached Fort Smith that Senator Lane of Kansas was raising soldiers to take the field on the western borders of Arkansas and Missouri and in May, Lieutenant Colonel J. R. Kannady, commander at Fort Smith, had a problem himself. Would the Cherokees across the border become alarmed at pro-Abolitionist Lane's activities and support the Secesh?

Chief John Ross was quick to assure Colonel Kannady that the Cherokees' treaties and relations with the United States were still being maintained, and he explained his position:

On May 25 the Chickasaw Legislature announced its support of the Confederacy and urged neighbors to form an alliance against 'the Lincoln hordes and Kansas robbers against whom [their Southern friends] a war which . . . will surpass the French  p36 Revolution in scenes of blood and that of San Domingo in atrocious horrors."

The Little Rock Times and Herald welcomed the support of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations in an editorial which said, ". . . these noble sons of the west, who armed with long rifles, Tomahawks and scalping knives, swear that nothing but the scalp of the Yankee will satisfy their vengeance."

Meanwhile Senator Lane of Kansas, who had led the "free state army" in the Kansas border war, was organizing moves to rally the loyal Indians in Federal lands as well as those in the Indian Territory who did not follow their leaders in pledging allegiance to Jefferson Davis. Senator Lane had discussed the loyal Indian problem with Abraham Lincoln, who opposed fighting the Southerners with wild Indians; however, later, when the Union refugees from the Five Nations approached him, Lincoln approved Indian-Federal Kansas councils in Leroy, Fort Scott and Humboldt.

By fall, Pike had made treaties of alliance with all of the Five Civilized Tribes except the Cherokee, held in line by Ross but ever liable to explode under the pressure for the Confederacy being applied by Stand Watie. Albert Pike wrote:

At Fort Wayne, Delaware District, Cherokee Nation, on July 29, Watie had organized his independent command, the First Cherokee Rifles and named Elias C. Boudinot, his nephew, a Major.

Indian Commissioner Pike had failed to sway Ross even though Pike had $100,000 to be used in obtaining Southern control of the Indian Territory. Prior to Pike's call, Ross had rejected all efforts by Brigadier General Ben McCulloch, Confederate Indian Territory commander, to win the Cherokee Nation.

Confederate difficulty in getting a treaty with the Creeks had been overcome. Old Chief Opothleyoholo (called by some Chief Hopoeithleyohola) had no confidence in the promises of the Confederacy. On the other side, the Rebel cause was espoused by Chilly and Daniel McIntosh, the sons of wealthy William McIntosh,  p37 Creek Chief in the days of the Georgia removal and Brigadier General under Andrew Jackson. The sons' animosity for the full-bloods was nurtured by the memory of how these Indians had "murdered" their father because of his part in supporting the Georgia removal.

Daniel, 22 years younger than Chilly, was an ordained Baptist minister and a handsome man with long hair curled at the ends, a moustache and a goatee, whose pride was in his Southern planter heritage. With a commission from the Confederacy, Daniel had flown the Dixie flag over the Creek Agency to the ebullient cheers of the regiment he had raised. Meanwhile Chilly had ridden westward under the same flag as an aide to Albert Pike in his quest of the wild Plains Indians.

Unlike the Southern planter-type McIntosh, Chief Opothleyoholo was a blanket Indian who painted his face and could neither read nor write, but, although he opposed the alliance with the Confederacy, paradoxically owned many slaves and cultivated some two thousand acres of land. The eighty-year-old Creek Chief had a keen brain and kept all his business transactions as well as the business of the Creek Nation in his head. The Old Chief unalterably opposed the Confederate treaty and he fondly visioned, if fighting came, a force of full-blood Creeks and Negroes, fused with the support of white troops and free state Indians, promised him by the United States Indian Department.

The Confederate Government at Montgomery did not place all the matters of Indian affairs into the hands of the big-framed, scholar­ly, flowing-locked Pike. On May 13, 1861, the brave Texas Ranger, Benjamin McCulloch, who had accepted the surrender of Daniel E. Twiggs and the San Antonio armaments, was made a Brigadier General in the Confederate Provisional Army and assigned to command of the Indian Territory. McCulloch wanted to make his base in the Cherokee Nation, but unmoved, Ross felt this would be a violation of his neutrality, which he again proclaimed on May 17, and McCulloch established his headquarters at Fort Smith, given up by the Federals, in Western Arkansas.

Leroy Pope Walker, a native of Alabama, had been appointed Secretary of War for the Confederacy in February 1861, and he wrote a letter from Montgomery, on May 13, 1861, to Major Douglas H. Cooper, now in the Confederate service after his  p38 success­ful "propagandizing" of the Choctaw and the Chickasaw.

All the officers in Indian Territory were to cooperate with David Hubbard, the Confederate Superintendent of Indian Affairs, as the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States had created a Bureau of Indian Affairs to be attached to the War Department.

In the meantime Chief Ross had ordered raised 1,200 home Guards to keep out invaders — be they North or South — from the Cherokee Nation. Colonel John Drew was in command. McCulloch authorized Watie to raise a regiment to protect the northern border, but McCulloch, respecting Ross' stand instructed Watie "not to interfere with the neutrality of the [Cherokee] Nation."

In early August, Colonel Watie and a part of his independent command, aligned with Arkansas troops, were in the battle of Wilson's Creek or Oak Hill and John Benge, the first Cherokee to fall, was killed in action.

To lead up to Wilson's Creek, one must recall that General Nathaniel Lyon, a brave soldier but an undisguised and zealous Abolitionist, had advanced the Federal banner during the summer  p39 in Missouri. He had pushed aside all his opposition from St. Louis to Jefferson City, Boonville and Springfield in the contest for Missouri.

Jefferson City, the capital, fell without a fight and Governor Jackson and the pro-Confederate legislature had vanished with the state archives, but Lyon soon found out the Missourians had rallied at Boonville. There, the untrained soldiers under twenty-eight-year-old Colonel John Sappington Marmaduke, who had served with Albert Sidney Johnston in the Utah Expedition, were no match for the regulars far superior in numbers.

Governor Jackson and his government continued to fall back; a column of some 4,000 made up of state officials and Secessionist followers. But the retreating column gained allies. Wealthy Jo Shelby rode in with his troop of horses to lend a military air to the column. Then Senator James Rains marched in with 3,000 volunteers and three guns commanded by Hiram Bledsoe with his sweeping moustache and little goatee.

Jackson's army, without uniforms, flying the Confederate flag on its flanks and the Missouri flag at its center, stopped its march at Carthage to fight General Franz Sigel (ranked by some historians as a Colonel of at the time of the battle), who had taught at the German-American Institute in St. Louis, and his Germans, former members of a gymnastic society. In what was actually the first important encounter of arms in Missouri, gold-spectacled, straggly-bearded Sigel was defeated but his gray-clad (the color of the gymnastic uniforms) men made an orderly retreat to Springfield recently occupied by Lyon, who had hoped to overtake Jackson before he joined forces with Sterling Price and Benjamin McCulloch. Shortly after the Missouri "Patriots Army" victory at Carthage, this Rebel junction took place.

The Confederates conjured up plans to defeat Lyon. They whipped their forces into shape at Cowskin Prairie, near the Indian Territory boundary. Raw recruits were instructed to fire at the breeches button of their foes. The opportunity to strike back at Lyon came on August 10 at Wilson's Creek, or Oak Hill.

On the Southern side, besides such Generals as Ben McCulloch and Sterling Price; the former fifty years old with his white hair reaching his shoulders, hero of the Mexican War, one time California sheriff at Sacramento, and who, the eastern press reported was ready to kidnap Lincoln; the latter, who had assumed  p40 command of all the Missouri troops after the victory of Jackson's state militia at Carthage; were along with Stand Watie and his men (there were an estimated nearly one thousand Cherokees and Choctaws in the battle), Jo Shelby and his cavalry, and Coleman Younger. Coleman later was to gain a name along with his brother, James, when they fought under the guerrilla banner of Charles Quantrill, who, at Wilson's Creek, was commanding a group of Indian Territory mixed-bloods.

Gen. Ben McCulloch, up from Texas to command the Indian Territory at war's start. National Archives	Gen. Sterling Price, (CSA), "Old Pap," Commander of the Missouri Patriots Army. [center, seated] National Archives [A larger version can be found here.]

And on the Northern side was a fellow named Wild Bill Hickock walking around in his high-heeled boots and fresh from the wars in Kansas.

The battle of Wilson's Creek was fought — Missourians against Missourians in the center, Arkansas (commanded by General N. Bartlett Pearce), Texans, Louisianans (Louis Hébert'sº Pelican Rifles) combatting the Kansans, Iowans and Germans on the flanks.

The Southern army, described by one officer as with "not a tent, not a blanket, nor any clothes, except the few we had on our backs, and four‑fifths barefooted," after heavy fighting broke up Sigel's command, captured all his artillery except one piece, and the Rebels combined their forces against General Lyon. The Secesh pressed so hard that Lyon said, "I fear the day is lost," and a short time later fell instantly killed.

With crowded ambulances — casualties at Wilson's Creek totalled 23 per cent of all engaged — the defeated Federals fell back some nine miles to Springfield and that evening General McCulloch sent Major Samuel Sturgis, who had assumed the Union command on Lyon's death, the body of General Lyon, forgotten in retreat.

Under the command of Sigel the Federals left Springfield and moved — to the sorrow of Union families who had come in for protection — to Rolla, 175 miles to the southeast.

And the partially decomposed body of General Lyon, the surgeons failing to preserve it by injecting arsenic, was left behind at Springfield, no farewell shots being fired for the fallen leader who had been the summer-hero of the Union campaign. A lugubrious Union woman, Mrs. John Phelps, a Congressman's wife, learning Lyon's body was unburied, had it put in a coffin which was placed in her outdoor cellar and covered with straw. Later, fearing Confederate soldiers would molest the remains,  p41 she had the coffin buried under cover of night. To complete the story, though, it must be stated that several weeks later doleful relatives of General Lyon were allowed back of the Confederate lines and the body was taken East where, with high honors and ceremonies, it was reinterred in Connecticut.

Wilson's Creek had freed Southwest Missouri from Federal control. Southern sympathizers felt that all of the state could be swept clean of the lunatic abolitionists; however, McCulloch and Pearce took their Confederate forces — Watie and his Indians included — back to Arkansas, a move later admitted by McCulloch as "a great mistake." Sterling Price and his State army were left to continue the fight in Missouri.

Daniel O'Flaherty commented on Wilson's Creek in General Jo Shelby — Undefeated Rebel:

---

Thayer's Notes:

a This is not true. In Freeman's exhaustive biography, Robert E. Lee, which of course covers Lee's Mexican War career in detail, the battle of Buena Vista (February 23, 1847) is mentioned only four times, in passing, and nothing is said about Lee being present; on the contrary, the same biography (Vol. I, pp222 f.) puts Lee on February 21 on a ship just off Lobos Island in the Gulf of Mexico, some 550 km from the battleground of Buena Vista; he was in the neighborhood, mostly relaxing, until March 3, when the fleet heads south, with Lee.

b After the war Pike, a Freemason of long standing, studied Sanskrit and wrote a book, Indo-Aryan Deities And Worship as contained in the Rig-Veda (1872), in which he says (p. vi):

Despite his own honest confession as to his amateur acquaintance with Sanskrit, the 1930 reprint of his book in a limited edition of 800 copies by the Masonic Temple of Washington, DC is introduced by a five-paragraph notice in which we read that "he wrote and compiled many books and among them translations from the Sanskrit, which language he mastered late in life." (Amusingly, the same blurb concludes by stating that "It is not probable that another edition will ever be published.")

c The text as printed has "Hannibal E. Hamlin", an error. Lincoln's vice-president is meant, Hannibal Hamlin (no middle name); not his son Hannibal Emery Hamlin, born in 1859.

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