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General Stand Watie's Confederate Indians

by
Frank Cunningham

The Author and the Book

Frank Cunningham (whose dates are said to have been 1911‑1972) was a writer with the most dubious and murky credentials; a one-paragraph capsule biography of him is to be found repeated verbatim in various places online, but none of it is confirmed by anyone else, and — I spent a fair amount of time on it — most of it is false, or so vague as to be unverifiable, or in the nature of fantasy; or finally, when true, on the edges of fraud, like for example his involvement in the late 1950s with Sequoia University, which for many years enjoyed an iffy reputation as a diploma mill, and in 1986, according to the U. S. Government's Office of Personnel Management ("Guidance for Adjudicating Bogus Educational Credentials", Attachment 2), eventually made it to an official FBI short list of bogus educational institutions. He does not appear to have earned the unspecified doctorate claimed in that capsule, nor to have received legitimate awards for any of his books, and as a 20c author, he certainly was not a major-general commanding Confederate armies in the Far West! I haven't been able to trace this outrageous capsule biography to its source, but strongly suspect that it's the "About the Author" listed in the Table of Contents below as appearing on p241: pulled from the 1998 reprint precisely because it is, for the most part, nonsense. I haven't seen the original edition of Cunningham's book, however, so that's the merest speculation on my part.

Other than his involvement with Sequoia University and the books he published, his true identity and career have remained a complete blank to me. If you have good information, I'll be glad to hear from you, of course.

That said, it's not because someone has a penchant for mythomania that they can't write a decent book, and Cunningham wrote several books, at least one of them published by a fairly reputable publisher. In addition to the book before you, which is his best-known work, Cunningham's published books include:

Sky Master: The Story of Donald Douglas (an American aviation engineer) (Philadelphia, Dorrance & Company, 1943)

Big Dan: The Story of a Color­ful Railroader (Salt Lake City, Deseret News Press, 1946)

Knight of the Confederacy: Gen. Turner Ashby (San Antonio, Naylor Co., 1960)

and, co-authored with Pat Barham:

Operation Nightmare: The Story of America's Betrayal in Korea and the United Nations (Los Angeles, Sequoia University Press, 1953).

And sure enough, General Stand Watie's Confederate Indians is a decent book. Not topnotch, but firmly useful. A scholar­ly or at least an impartial treatment would have been welcome, as well as a clearer narrative thread — disentangling who is on what side sometimes takes concentration — but we'll take what we can get: collecting the scattered accounts of native American military service to the Confederacy, Cunningham recounts a story rarely acknowledged or told, with a wealth of detail and context, and gives us a good feel for the politics navigated by the native tribes caught in the maelstrom of the Civil War, with Stand Watie at the center of it all, if somewhat one-dimensionally. Cunningham's obvious "Lost Cause" bias, his novelistic style, and his uncritical reliance on secondary sources cloud the value of his book, but do not wipe it out.

 p. v  Contents

[The chapters bear no titles. The page numbers of the print edition, given in the right-hand column, are the links to the corresponding webpages.]

As elsewhere onsite, I haven't found it useful to reproduce the index; as for the section "About the Author", it's missing in the 1998 reprint: the book's pagination stops at p239, the last page of that index.

Illustrations

The print edition does not include a table of illustrations; the one below is mine. The numbers are not page numbers, but their sequential numbers in the "Section of Illustrations"; they link to their placement in this Web edition, of course, which is at whatever point in the text I felt most appropriate.

The sources of the illustrations are given at the beginning of the book, as follows; for convenience, I've also added the sources to the illustration captions.

(p. vi) Picture Credits From the National Archives: Sterling Price, E. Kirby-Smith, John Sappington Marmaduke, Stand Watie, Benjamin McCulloch, S. B. Maxey, Albert Pike, Franz Sigel, James Blunt, Frances J. Herron, Confederate Generals in Mexico. From Library of Congress: William Steele, James M. McIntosh, William Y. Slack, Earl VanDorn, M. Jeff Thompson, Jo O. Shelby, William Clarke Quantrill, William L. Cabell, R. M. Gano and Douglas H. Cooper. From Oklahoma Historical Society: Stand Watie, Tandy Walker, Samuel Garland, John Jumper, Samuel Checote, Black Dog and Wife, George Washington Grayson, Winchester Colbert, Captain George Washington, W. P. Adair, E. C. Boudinot, Southern Cherokee Commission in 1866, Nannie Watie, Jacqueline Watie, Saladin Watie, Watie children, John Ross, Opothleyoholo and Rose Cottage. From T. L. Ballenger: Sarah Watie (copied from The Life of General Stand Watie by Mabel Washbourne Anderson) and Colonel William A. Phillips (copied from A History of Oklahoma by Joseph Bradfield Thoburn and Isaac M. Holcomb).

Technical Details

Edition and Copyright

The edition I transcribed was a 1998 reprint (ISBN 0‑8061‑3035‑0) of the original, with two sections deleted: "About the Author", and the original Foreword: the latter was replaced by a new foreword by Brad Agnew, which is new material © 1998 and therefore, of course, I cannot reproduce it. (For an idea of the original foreword, see the Acknowledgments and my note there.)

The original edition was published in 1959 by The Naylor Company, San Antonio, TX. The copyright was not renewed in 1986 or 1987 as required by United States law at the time, and the book therefore rose into the public domain on January 1, 1988: details here on the copyright law involved.

Illustrations

The 44 illustrations in my copy of the book — 43 black-and‑white photos and 1 crude drawing, all in the public domain — pose something of a problem. They are generally of poor quality, having been reproduced from poor sources, and in turn not improved by the reprinting. I was tempted to omit them altogether; but while some depict well-known people for whom a wide range of better photographs can easily be found, others are valuable portraits of subjects who were rarely photographed.

So my solution, for each photograph, was to track down the best version of the same identical photo that I could find online: often I not only found better scans (some in color) but discovered that what was printed in Cunningham's book was cropped from the original, sometimes very significantly, in which case I use an uncropped or less cropped version. Those illustrations for which I could not find better copies, I regret­fully scanned.

I reproduce both classes of photos without any particular indication or source; most of my "sources" are themselves unsourced on the websites where I found them. A few, and among them the best, I found at the Oklahoma Historical Society's Gateway to Oklahoma History and at the Library of Congress.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine.)

This transcription has been minutely proofread. I run a first proofreading pass immediately after entering each section; then a second proofreading, detailed and meant to be final: in the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe them to be completely errorfree; red backgrounds would mean that the section had not received that second final proofreading. The header bar at the top of each webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The print edition was well proofread; the inevitable errors, I fixed, marking the correction each time with a dotted underscore like this; or with one of theseº if in linked text. Similarly, underscored measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles. (I haven't converted bushels, which are problematic: conversion into metric varies depending on the specific crop being measured.) Finally, a number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a printed edition in front of you.

Pagination and Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is indicated in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line p57 ): it's hardly fair to give you "pp53‑56" as a reference and not tell you where p56 ends. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. (If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.)

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is a detail of "The Last Great Raid", a painting by Clyde Heron (1922‑1999), showing Stand Watie, two of his staff, and the "Cherokee Brave" flag. The painting itself is under copyright, but is used in the design of the cover of the 1998 reprint of the book.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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