Grant Foreman • The Five Civilized Tribes

Permitted by the terms of the agreement⁠1 between the two tribes, the Chickasaw Indians settled throughout the Choctaw Nation rather than go to the more remote western district purchased of the Choctaw where they would be subjected to depredations by the wild prairie Indians. The treaty gave them equal privileges with the Choctaw except in the national funds. The latter changed their constitution to admit the Chickasaw to their council as one district, so that in the common government they were represented by one chief and ten councillors. It was believed by the United States officials that as their language was similar and they had somewhat intermarried, they could be amalgamated as one tribe; but in this folly, as in the fatuous hope of uniting the Creek and Seminole tribes, the Government was to be disillusioned after causing irreparable harm and delay to the progress of both tribes.

In 1841 the Chickasaw held their first election of councillors since their emigration and at the October session of that year participated for the first time in the joint council which then consisted of forty members from the four districts. November 10, 1842 a new constitution was adopted which among other things defined the boundaries of the new Chickasaw as well as the other districts into which the Choctaw-Chickasaw country was divided.⁠2 Judges in the Choctaw Nation were nominated by the chief of the district and received a small compensation. Trial by jury was guaranteed in all capital cases. Singularly there was no law to enforce the payment of debts⁠3 but as p52 credits were extended with knowledge of this situation debts were seldom incurred and those few usually paid. Their laws were generally respected and punishment followed a violation. Acts of violence were rare and every individual felt safe in his own property. Travelers passed through the Choctaw Nation with every feeling of security.

That year witnessed continued improvement and progress of these people. The Choctaw on Red River owned and operated eight or ten gins and shipped between seven and eight hundred bales of cotton; there were also a number of sawmills and gristmills in operation; many of the Indians had built comfortable houses and were preparing their farms with every indication of substantial farmers; many of the women spun, wove and contributed much to the clothing of their families. The industry of the Choctaw women was indicated by the report of Rev. Cyrus Byington for 1842; in his mission neighborhood, Stockbridge, near Eagletown, there were thirteen looms, and in nine families they had made 2,227 yards of cloth; two families had made 1,250 yards; "there were 35 yards of linsey. Mr. Calvin H. Howell a son-in‑law of the late Major Pitchlyn,º has a cotton gin. He ginned 64 bales of cotton last winter. The Messrs. Harris have a horse mill and at this time are erecting a water mill. There are two flocks of sheep owned by my neighbor."⁠4 Stocks of cattle, hogs, and horses were p53 owned by them, and little feed was required, the range, both summer and winter, being abundant. However, the price of cotton fell so low in 1842 many of the Choctaw farmers around Fort Towson planted their land largely to corn to supply a contract for 20,000 bushels of that grain needed at the garrison where a portion of the First Dragoons were to be located.

The Indian Superintendent reported that trade was carried on in numerous suitable places in the Choctaw Nation but the most extensive trading was done at Doaksville, within a mile of Fort Towson. There were five stores at the place, three of which were owned in part by the Choctaw and the other two⁠5 by white men. The extent and assortment of goods carried was ample for the Indians, who required sugar, coffee, and other luxuries the same as the white people. Doaksville was an orderly and prosperous village, boasting, besides the stores mentioned, a resident physician and a good tavern, blacksmith shop, wagon maker and wheelwright. A church had been erected, in which there was preaching once or twice on Sunday, by the missionaries living in the neighborhood. A temperance society included a large portion of the most respectable Choctaw and Chickasaw, as well as white people.

The Rev. William H. Goode visited this place in November, 1844, and described it:⁠6

"Doaksville I found to be a flourishing town, the largest in all the Indian country. It is mainly surrounded by large cotton plantations, owned by Choctaws and Chickasaws, mostly half-breeds, and worked by slaves. It is a brisk, neat-looking place, with a good church, an excellent public house, quite a number of stores, mechanics' shops, etc., and all the marks of thrift and prosperity. It commands a p54 fine view of the garrison buildings at Fort Towson, a mile distant, and is within a few miles of Red River and the Texas line."

On the site of this once flourishing village, now entirely erased from the map, stands one log house said to have been the home of Colonel Folsom.

"Some of these tribes," said the commissioner of Indian affairs, have received patents for the lands they possess, describing the limits and conditions under which they held their country. These things are well calculated to inspire confidence, giving hopes that their present homes are permanent, creating thereby a general incitement to industry and the adoption of such laws and regulations as are calculated to give protection to a people in the incipient stage of civilization. The Choctaws have long since justly acquired for themselves, not only from the Government of the United States but from the citizens with whom they have intercourse, a name of honesty and fidelity at least not surpassed by any of our Indian tribes. They have by a steady attention to their own business since they emigrated to their present homes, greatly increased in wealth. They have not been unmindful, at the same time, of educating their rising generations; and they have by these means added to the general intelligence and standing of the Nation. . . . The wealth and intelligence of the nation is confined mainly to the two districts on Red River. The Choctaws may be considered as an agricultural and stock raising people; farms on Red River will compare with many in the states."⁠7

The missionaries were still laboring to regain the ground lost in the devastation of removal, but their efforts were embarrassed at this period by acrimonious discussion of slavery; some of the slave-owning members of the tribe were particularly bitter at the missionaries for their views on abolition. The years 1839 and 1840 had witnessed a recurrence of the fever epidemic of 1833 though in a milder form.⁠8 However, there were many deaths, a number of schools were closed, and the missionaries were constantly busy; Mr. Byington wrote that there were forty deaths in his neighborhood during the year 1839; p55 while he was preaching the funeral sermon for one of his flock he would hear the gun that announced the death of another.

When Rev. Cyrus Byington arrived in the new home of the Choctaw people early in the year 1835, he was placed in charge of the station of Stockbridge near Eagletown on the east side of Mountain Fork about four miles from Bethabara. Though his school was broken up by the migration of the people to the Blue River country, he was exceedingly busy ministering to the Indians in their illness; besides, he employed nearly two years in the translation of the Acts of the Apostles with the aid of an interpreter; he then started on the Book of Genesis,⁠9 but when he had reached the seventeenth chapter he was obliged to stop as his Choctaw interpreter quit to look after his farm. However, he finished it in April, 1839, and sent the manuscript to Boston for publication. Mr. Kingsbury's station was at Pine Ridge where a school was established and placed in his charge.

If one would know what privations these missionaries were willing to endure, consider the testimony of Mr. Hotchkin: "During the first nine years of Mrs. Hotchkin's missionary work she received only five dollars in cash. This was paid by Mr. Cushman for teaching his children two years at the station. This was the only money that passed through her hands for 9 years." When Miss Clough had been seven years with the Choctaw Indians the missionaries requested of their superiors at Boston permission for her to return to New England long enough to regain her wasted strength. After receiving $120.00 for a school year of toil her summer vacations had been spent in nursing the sick. Many teachers who had not died from the fatal miasma in that virgin country lifted their emaciated frames from sick beds to mount a horse or ox-cart or other conveyance that would carry them forever away from the fever-blighted home of the Choctaw; but some labored through every hardship as long as their lives were spared. The testimony of Mr. Hotchkin is pertinent again: "We have had some sickness this spring. Intermittent fever, pleuresy, scurvy, worms, bots, lice, vermin &c. But after we got through the old scurf and dirt, the little girls come out as bright as other children. To effect this change strong nerves are necessary."⁠10 Miss Anna Burnham, of advanced p56 age, for several years taught a little school on Red River, more than seven miles from any white habitation and there she lived alone in a little log house constructed by the Indians.

In spite of the inconvenience under which Mr. Wright toiled by reason of having to share his little home with other people in 1833, and his tremendous labor while, in the frailest health,⁠11 ministering day and night to the hundreds of afflicted who looked to him for succor, and his preaching engagements at three places, he resolutely carried forward his translations. In August, 1835, he completed and forwarded to Boston to be published his manuscript of Chahta Nolisso or spelling book; in September, 1837, he completed the translation of the Gospels and Epistles of John, but he was obliged to stop the work as he had no more funds to pay his interpreter. In July, 1839, he reported that as he had the health and opportunity to do so, he was engaged in his translations and had completed the Gospel of Matthew. By July of the next year he translated the Epistles of John and sent his manuscript to Mr. Worcester at Park Hill to be published. One of the difficulties under which he labored was illustrated by the fact that a box of books sent by water from Park Hill,⁠12 was two years in reaching Wheelock and then it was transported by way of New Orleans. As Mr. Joel Wood, the missionary at Boktuklo, had been compelled by sickness to leave, Mr. Wright was preaching at Wheelock, Red River, seven miles distant, Boktuklo, ten miles away, and "at the home of Colonel Garland who for more than two years had been confined to his bed by the fall of a tree upon his back."

At the earnest solicitation of the Indians Mr. and Mrs. Wright took some Choctaw children in their household to teach them, but they had not the means nor room to care for many. In 1841 Mrs. Wright wrote to the Mission Board begging them to raise their meager annual allowance of $450.00 to the sum of $600.00, so that with the additional $150.00 annually they would be able to receive in their p57 home and educate for at least five years a number of Choctaw orphan girls. In May, 1842, at the urgent request of some of the influential half-breed members of the tribe, they had commenced a boarding school composed of several orphans and those children whose parents were able to pay the meager actual expense of board; they had begun on a small scale and with additions in May there were sixteen in attendance, but there was no room to care for others who desired to enter. However, they later managed to take a few more and by September they had twenty-five.

The Choctaw people became dissatisfied with the expenditure of their school funds in Kentucky; the students returning from there, disappointed their people as they had acquired no knowledge of agriculture or other practical subjects. In 1840 the chiefs notified Superintendent Armstrong that they would send no more boys to the Choctaw Academy in that state, and that they proposed to use funds expended there in the construction of an advanced school for boys in their own country. However, they were prevailed upon to send them again the following year by the promise to appoint Peter P. Pitchlynn as superintendent of the school. In the winter Pitchlynn went to the Kentucky school armed with a commission from his tribe to investigate the condition of the students; after spending fifty days there, he received from the Indian department an appointment as superintendent of the school which he accepted with the condition that it was only temporary pending the opening of a school in the Choctaw Nation.⁠13

In the summer, however, the Choctaw chiefs, James Fletcher, James Gardner, and Johnson McKenney, informed Armstrong that they had definitely determined not to send any more boys to Kentucky, as they intended soon to have a school in their own country where mechanical arts and agriculture would be taught. And at the October session of the General Council of the Choctaw Nation a resolution to that effect was adopted. They resolved at the same time that at the next meeting of the council a committee consisting of two from each district, with the agent, be appointed to select a site for a girl's school. This resolution, bearing the signatures of Johnson McKenney, James Fletcher and Isaac Folsom, Chiefs, and Sloan Love Speaker, was sent to the p58 commissioner of Indian affairs.⁠14 The progressive members of the tribe were becoming keenly interested in the subject of their schools, and before the council adjourned, a committee was appointed to select immediately a site for the boys' school.

The movement of many of the members of the tribe from the dense settlements in which they first lived for some years, and the occupation of more remote parts of their domain was in part responsible for the necessity of setting up new schools and discarding others in sections abandoned in part by the settlers. In planning for the future it was decided to abandon the three district schools taught by Wilson, Potts, and Rind August 1, 1843, and send the pupils from those schools to the new schools that was to be called Spencer Academy.

While the construction of their first boys' academy was under way, a general awakening by the leading men of the tribe to the importance of education was manifest. Their plans took larger form and it was proposed to appropriate for school purposes the annuity of $18,000 derived from the sale of their lands to the Chickasaw. A large portion of the tribe was opposed to this use of the per capita payments they had been spending upon themselves, but in spite of stout opposition, in November, 1842, the Choctaw council decided to carry this plan into effect, and enacted legislation⁠15 which became the basis of their excellent school system. With these funds and the further sum of $8.500 provided by treaty for school purposes, they made provision for a number of schools to be operated by the Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist missionary societies. Spencer Academy, the boys' school, was then in course of construction. The next to be inaugurated under the new legislation was at Wheelock in Apuckshunnubbee District, where a school was already in operation on a small scale under the direction of Mr. Wright.⁠16

p59 Education of Indian youth in far distant states was not always a blessing; they were usually sent while quite young and kept away for five to ten years; by this time they had forgotten how their people lived at home and on their return found their own condition so changed in these strange surroundings that it became intolerable. In 1842 two of the Choctaw young men who had recently returned from the academy in Kentucky committed suicide — one because he found his relations in extreme poverty, and the other because the affections of his father were estranged from him, his mother having died during his absence.⁠17

Mr. Wright's enlarged school at Wheelock, authorized by the Choctaw council, went into operation on Monday, the first day of May, 1843.⁠18 There were, at the beginning of the school, fifty-two pupils, forty-eight girls and four small boys. Thirty-four of the girls were boarded at the school and the others found quarters with some of the employes of the school. So great was the desire of members of the tribe for admission of their girls to the school, that, to avoid the appearance of favoritism, at first seven girls were selected from each of the three clans, Ahepotukla, Olilefeia, and Oklahoneli, and three from the Urihesahe. The list was made from twice the number of applications and only one was taken from a family.⁠19

The Author's Notes:

3 In October, 1846, William Armstrong, Acting Superintendent, reported from the Choctaw Agency: "Their national council, which is now in session, has before it a proposition to pass laws for the collection of debts, which heretofore has not been done, though their courts frequently try the right of property in cases of some magnitude. At this time a suit is pending in one of them involving an estate valued at $20,000. These courts are regularly organized, with judges and juries, and the suits are conducted on both sides by professional advocates, of which there are a large number. . . . The three districts of the Choctaw nation are sub-divided into sixty companies, each headed by a captain, living in the midst of, and personally acquainted with, his people and their condition" (House Executive Document No. 4, Twenty-ninth Congress, second session, 268).

4 Report of commissioner of Indian affairs for 1842, Report No. 69. The Natchitoches Herald in 1841 published an interesting account of the progress of these people. The Choctaw planters on Red River had seven cotton gins with a prospect for more, the paper said, and would produce and ship down the river 1,000 bales of cotton that year and twice as many the next. There were eight or ten blacksmith shops. On Boggy River Col. David Folsom "has an excellent salt works which supplies even Texas planters with a large quantity of salt." In the Choctaw Nation were to be seen "comfortable frame and log dwellings; the matrons sewing, spinning, and weaving, and around them large plantations, yielding corn, oats, pumpkins potatoes, and a great variety of vegetables. There have been lately erected several splendid mansions, entirely by native mechanics, and they are now filled and adorned with all fashionable furniture" (Copied in New York Tribune, February 26, 1842).

5 Doak and Tims was one firm; the other was Berthelet, Heald and Company, the "company" being the Choctaw Indian Robert M. Jones. Mr. Joseph R. Berthelet was appointed postmaster there in 1847. In 1849 the adjutant at Fort Towson reported that mills recently erected in the vicinity made excellent flour that was available to the post in any quantity required (Commissary to Gibson, November 27, 1848, QMG).

8 Armstrong reported that much of this sickness was attributable to the fact that there were few wells among the Indians, who procured their drinking water in the summer from stagnant pools where streams had ceased to flow (Report of commissioner of Indian affairs 1838, p73).

9 Rev. Mr. Byington compiled a Choctaw-English dictionary and a Choctaw-English almanac (Transcript of Byington manuscripts Oklahoma Historical Society).

10 E. Hotchkin to David Green, May, 1840, Missionary Records, Vol. LXII, No. 370.

11 Mr. Wright had been so feeble ever since he came west that he said he could perform no manual labor "or even do so much as to cut a stick of wood" (Harriett B. Wright to D. Green, ibid.). Mrs. Wright was also in feeble health.

12 Park Hill was in the Cherokee Nation about five miles south of Tahlequah. Of the twenty-five or thirty homes, stores and churches that made up this community, only two or three remain. See the map of the place in Grant Foreman, Advancing the Frontier.

13 Pitchlynn to commissioner of Indian affairs, March 2, 15, and 29, 1841, OIA, "School File" p850.

14 Armstrong to Crawford, July 15 and October 14, 1841, ibid., A 1048 and 1108.

16 Pitchlynn to Armstrong, December 12, 1842 in report of commissioner of Indian affairs for 1843, school report 69. Pitchlynn said also he was directed to request that by virtue of the terms of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, ten Choctaw youths be educated at Jefferson College, Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania; ten at Ohio University at Athens; ten at Asbury University, Greencastle, Indiana, and ten at some other school to be selected by the Indian department. In his letter Pitchlynn stated that the school that was later to be called Spencer Academy was at first named Noincoaiga. The secretary complied to the extent of sending ten to Asbury and ten to Lafayette College at Easton, Pennsylvania (Crawford to Armstrong, May 8, 1843, in report of commissioner of Indian affairs for 1843).

17 Wilson to Armstrong, August 30, 1842, report of commissioner of Indian affairs for 1842, report No. 72.

[ Choctaw ]

p51 Chapter three
Signs of Improvement

The Author's Notes:

[ Choctaw ]

p51 Chapter three Signs of Improvement

The Author's Notes:

p51 Chapter three
Signs of Improvement