THE Cherokee,
Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes were the only Indian tribes who
played an active part in the Civil War. In the years leading up to the Civil
War
very few of the Indians of
these tribes showed any interest in the question of slavery, and only a
small number owned slaves. Slavery was not looked at in the
same light as among the whites slave owners, for in many instances the slaves
acted as if
they were on an equal footing with their masters. But the tribes named above
occupied valuable territory, and the Confederate authorities lost no time in
sending agents among them to win them over. When the Confederate agents
first approached the full-blooded leaders of the Cherokee and Creek tribes
on the subject of
ending their relations with the United States, those leaders moved
cautiously and had always wished to remain neutral.
Vocal and quite visible among those who took a decided stand against
organizing the Indians
to oppose the Federal Government was Hopoeithelyohola, the old chief of the
Creek tribe. The Confederate agents had succeeded in winning over ex-Chief
McIntosh, by appointing him colonel, but as many as two-thirds of the people
preferred to be guided by the advice of their valuable old chief,
Hopoeithleyohola.
In the fall of 1861, Colonel
Douglas H.
Cooper, commanding the department of Indian operations under authority from the
Confederate Government, made several attempts to have a conference
with the old chief for the purpose of making a peaceful settlement of the
problems that were dividing the nation in half. Finding
Hopoeithleyhola unmoving in his loyalty to the United States, Colonel Cooper
determined to force him into submission, destroy his power, or drive him out of
the country, and immediately began collecting forces, composed mostly of white
troops, to attack him. In November and December of 1861, the battles of Chusto
Talasah and Chustenhlah were fought, and the loyal Indians were finally
defeated and forced to retreat into Kansas in midwinter.
In the
springtime of 1862 the United States Government deployed an expedition of five
regiments, with one thousand men in each regiment, under Colonel
William Weer, 10th Kansas Infantry, into the Indian Territory
to drive out the Confederate forces of Pike and Cooper, and to bring back the
refugee Indians to their homes. After a short action at Locust Grove
on July 2nd, near Grand Saline, Cherokee Nation, Colonel Weer's cavalry
captured Colonel
Clarkson and part of his regiment of Missourians. On the 16th of July Captain
Greeno, 6th Kansas Cavalry, captured Tahlequah, the captain of the Cherokee
Nation, and on the 19th of July Colonel Jewell, 6th Kansas Cavalry, captured
Fort Gibson, the most important point in the Indian Territory.
The Confederate forces were now driven out of all
of the Indian country north of the Arkansas River, and the loyal Indians of
the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole nations were organized, by authority of the
United States Government, into three regiments, each fully a thousand strong,
for the defense of their country. The colonel and part of the field and line
officers of each regiment were white officers. Most of the captains were Indian.
William A. Phillips, of Kansas, who was active in organizing these Indian
regiments,
commanded the Indian brigade from its organization to the close of the war. He
took part with his Indian troops in the action at Locust Grove, C. N., and in
the battles of Newtonia, Mo., Maysville, Ark., Prairie Grove, Ark., Honey
Springs, C. N., Perryville, C. N., besides many other minor engagements.
In all the operations in which they participated they
showed themselves as able troops.
On the Confederate
side, General
Albert Pike and Colonel Douglas H. Cooper, in the fall and winter
of 1861, organized three regiments of Indians from the Choctaw, Chickasaw,
Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole nations or tribes, for service in the Indian
Territory. These regiments, under General Pike, participated in the battle of
Pea Ridge, Ark., on the 7th and 8th of March, 1862. In the five tribes named a
battalion and parts of four regiments were raised for the Confederate service,
somewhere near 3500 men.
At the close of Mr. Buchanan's administration nearly all the United States
Indian agents in the Indian Territory were secessionists,
and the moment the Southern States began passing laws of secession,
these men used their influence to get the five tribes committed to the
Confederate cause. Occupying territory south of the Arkansas River, and having
the secessionists of Arkansas on the east and those of Texas on the south for
neighbors, the Choctaws and Chickasaws expressed no opposition to the
plan. With the Cherokee, the most powerful and most civilized of the tribes of
the Indian Territory, it was different. Their chief,
John Ross,
was opposed to hasty action, and at first favored a neutral position, and in the
summer of 1861 issued
a proclamation, asking his people to observe a strictly neutral attitude
during the war between the United States States.{end JB text}
In June, 1861, Albert Pike, a
commissioner of the Confederate States, and General Ben. McCulloch, commanding
the Confederate forces in western Arkansas and the Department of Indian
Territory, visited Chief Ross with the view of having him make a treaty with the
Confederacy. But he declined to make a treaty, and in the conference expressed
himself as wishing to occupy, if possible, a neutral position during the war. A
majority of the Cherokees, nearly all of whom were full-blooded, were known as
Pin Indians, and were opposed to the South.
Commissioner
Pike went away to make treaties with the less civilized Indian tribes of the
plains, and in the mean time the battle of Wilson's Creek was fought, General
Lyon killed, and the Union army defeated and forced to fall back from
Springfield to Rolla.
Chief Ross now thought that the
South would probably succeed in establishing her independence, and expressed a
willingness to enter into a treaty with the Confederate authorities. On his
return from the West in September, 1861, Commissioner Pike, at the request of
Mr. Ross, went to Park Hill and made a treaty with the Cherokees. The treaties
made with each tribe provided that the troops it raised should be used for home
protection, and should not be taken out of the Indian Territory. Even before the
treaty with Commissioner Pike, Chief Ross had commenced to organize a regiment
made up almost completely of Pin Indians. John Drew, a stanch secessionist, was
commissioned colonel, and William P. Ross, lieutenant-colonel, of this regiment.
Colonel Stand Watie, the leader of the secession party, had also commenced to
raise a regiment of half-breeds for General McCulloch's division. As already
stated, there were two facing among the Creeks, one of which was led by
Hopoeithleyohola and the other by D. N. and Chitty McIntosh, who were sons of
General William McIntosh, killed in 1825 by Hopoeithleyhola and his followers in
Georgia, for making the treaty of Indian Springs. It is asserted by General Pike
and others that will Hopoeithleyohola it was not a question of loyalty or
disloyalty to the United States, but simply one of self-preservation; that when
he found the Confederate authorities had commissioned D. N. McIntosh as colonel
of a Creek regiment, and Chitty McIntosh as lieutenant-colonel of a battalion of
Creeks, he felt certain that the Indian troops thus being raised would be used
to persecute and destroy him and his followers. In November, 1861, he started
for Kansas, and was pursued and overtaken by the Confederate Creeks, Choctaws,
Chickasaws, Cherokee, and Texans under Colonel Douglas H. Cooper. A fight took
place in the night, and Colonel Drew's regiment of Cherokees, which had been
raised by Chief Ross, went over to Hopoeithleyohola, and fought with him in the
next day's desperate battle (known as the battle of Chusto Talasah), in which
five hundred of the Union Indians were reported by Colonel Cooper to have been
killed and wounded. The Confederate Indians of Colonel Stand Watie's regiment,
and those of Colonel Drew's regiment, who had returned to the Confederate
service under Pike and Cooper, also participated in the battle of Pea Ridge in
March, 1862, where they were charged with scalping and mutilating the Federal
dead on the field. General Pike, hearing of the scalping, called up the surgeon
and assistant-surgeon of his field-hospital for reports, and in their reports
they stated that they found one of the Federal dead who had been scalped.
General Pike then issued an order, denouncing the outrage in the strongest
language, and sent a copy of the order to General Curtis. General Pike claimed
that part of the Indians were in McCulloch's corps in the first day's battle;
and that the scalping was done at night in a quarter of the field not occupied
by the Indian troops under his immediate command. After Pea Ridge the operations
of the Confederate Indians under General Cooper and Colonel Stand Watie were
confined, with a few exceptions, to the Indian Territory. In connection with
troops from Texas, they participated in several engagements with the
Federal Indian brigade under Colonel Phillips, after he recaptured Fort Gibson
in the spring of 1863; and they made frequent efforts to capture Federal supply
trains from Fort Scott to Fort Gibson and Fort Smith, but were always
unsuccessful. They fought very well when they had an opportunity to take shelter
behind trees and logs, but could not easily be brought to face artillery, and a
single shell thrown at them was generally sufficient to demoralize them and put
them to flight.
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