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The Five Civilized Tribes
Cherokee · Chickasaw · Choctaw · Creek · Seminole

by
Grant Foreman
introduction by
John R. Swanton

The Author

Grant Foreman (1869‑1953) is the dean of writers of Native American and Oklahoma history, and was a champion of Native American identity and rights, devoting his life to the field; he was also a moving force in the Oklahoma Historical Society. His best-known works are Pioneer Days in the Early Southwest (1926); Indian Removal • The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (1932); and the book before you, The Five Civilized Tribes • Cherokee · Chickasaw · Choctaw · Creek · Seminole (1934). To these should be added his edition of the diary of Ethan Allen Hitchcock, which he titled A Traveler in Indian Territory (1930).

He was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1934; a good biographical sketch of him can be read in the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, and a more substantial biography appeared in the Chronicles of Oklahoma in 1953.

 (p9)  Contents

[The page numbers of the print edition, given in the right-hand column, are the links to the corresponding webpages.]

 (p11)  Illustrations

Technical Details

Edition and Copyright

The edition I transcribed was a 1988 reprint (ISBN 0‑8061‑0923‑8) of the original, which contains no new material.

The original edition was published in the United States by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1934, as Volume 8 of The Civilization of the American Indian Series. The copyright was not renewed in 1961 or 1962 as required by United States law at the time, and it therefore rose into the public domain on January 1, 1963. (Curiously, the copyrights on most or even all of Foreman's other books were renewed at the appropriate times, but not this one.) Details on the copyright law involved can be found here.

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.

Aside from that, the print edition was reasonably well proofread, except for inconsistencies in the citations given in the footnotes, where I usually standardized the outliers to the author's most frequent format. I fixed the errors, but marked 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, seemingly duplicated citations, 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 the 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 tuft of five golden eagle feathers, for the Five Civilized Tribes of course.

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