Chapter 3
The Birth and Growth of the Keetoowah Society
In the long run, it was the slavery issue that brought a new ethnic identity of the full-blood majority to organizational unity -- a unity in which the traditionalists and Christians shared a common definition of who was a true Cherokee and what those qualities were that should unify the Nation and inform its policies. When that time came, after 1855, the organizational strength and experience of the Northern Baptist Christians and the leadership abilities and charisma of the native Baptist preachers provided the guidance for the full-blood effort to drive the mixed bloods from their influential role in Cherokee affairs. Only then was it clear how powerful the revitalization of Cherokee religious life had become.
William Gerald McLoughlin
The Cherokees and Christianity, 1794-1870: Essays on Acculturation and Cultural Persistence
Once the Cherokee were in the "Indian Territory" of Oklahoma, the dissension that had led up to the removal of the nation continued with a vengeance. When Major Ridge, leader of the "Treaty Party," signed the Treaty of New Echota on December 29, 1835, he said, "I may yet die some day by the hand of some poor infatuated Indian, deluded by the counsels of Ross and his minions: ... I am resigned to my fate, whatever it may be."1 Less than six months after the arrival of the anti-removal Cherokee in Indian Territory, Ridge's prophecy came true. Elias Boudinot, Major Ridge, and his son John Ridge were ambushed by parties of armed Cherokee and executed for their participation in what was considered an act of treason.2 The only member of the "Treaty Party" to escape the assassination attempt was Stand Watie, brother of Elias Boudinot.3
Following these killings, a factional dispute ripped through the Cherokee Nation, with the killings on both sides being so great as to bring the nation to the brink of civil war.4 Chaney Richardson, an ex-slave from the Cherokee Nation, described the Cherokee "troubles" during this period:
My master and all the rest of the folks was Cherokees, and they'd been killing each other off in the feud ever since long before I was borned, and jest because old Master have a big farm and three-four families of Negroes them other Cherokees keep on pestering his stuff all the time. Us children was always afeared to go any place less'n some of the grown folks was along. We didn't know what we was afeared of, but we heard the Master and Mistress keep talking `bout "another Party Killing" and we stick pretty close to the place...When I was about 10 years old that feud got so bad the Indians was always talking about getting their horses and cattle killed and their slaves harmed. I was too little to know how bad it was until one morning my own mammy went off somewhere down the road to git some stuff to dye cloth and she didnt come back.5
The lawlessness was so great and the ability of government officials to stop the killings so weak that the ancient law of blood returned to the land and a reign of terror arose. John Candy, in a letter to Stand Watie reported that, "Murders in the country have been so frequent until the people care as little about hearing these things as they would hear of the death of a common dog."6 Sarah Watie also wrote in July of 1846 of the desperateness of the situation, "I am so perfectly sick of the world...Many times have I retired to myself and wept in bitterness of my heart over my troubles but it does not lessen them any. I don't think only that my best earthly friends have left me to self but I fear God himself has said let her alone; she is joined to her idol." 7
Though the dispute was largely between the progressives and the conservatives, the factionalism also broke down quite evenly among those "ardent and enterprising" Cherokee who owned ninety percent of the Cherokee Nation's slaves and those "ignorant and but slightly progressed in moral and intellectual improvement"8 who owned but few, if any, slaves.9 At the center of much of the "troubles" was a notorious gang by the name of the "Starr Boys" who engaged in a reign of terror throughout the Cherokee Nation. The "Starr Boys" targeted not only their enemies associated with John Ross, but also engaged in frequent slave-stealings and the random murder of African-American members of the Cherokee Nation.10 In the years 1845-1846, at least thirty-four politically related murders were carried out within the Cherokee Nation.11
As the post-removal "troubles" swept the Cherokee Nation, another problem began to assert itself among the slave-owning population. In 1842, a major slave uprising occurred within the Canadian District of the Cherokee Nation. The slaves of several large plantations fled their masters, joined with fugitives from the Mvskoke Nation, and attempted to reach a settlement of free blacks in Texas.12 The cause of the problem was seen to be "missionaries from Boston and other abolition centers [who] were devoting far more effort to inculcate among the slaves the doctrine of freedom than that of salvation."13 The Cherokee Council sent John Drew and a hundred Cherokee horsemen to capture and return the slaves. When the Cherokee horsemen caught up with them, the desperate and starving slaves were reportedly glad to see them. The militiamen cared for them "liberally" and returned them to their masters without punishment.14 As a result of this attempt, the Cherokee Council passed a fugitive slave act that severely punished anyone found guilty of aiding or participating in a slave escape.15
A few years later, another group of Cherokee slaves attempted to flee their masters and seek refuge among a group of Afro-Indians from the Mvskoke Nation and Seminole Nation led by Chief Wildcat. Chief Wildcat, the Negro Abraham, Luis Pacheco, and their band of renegades were to flee through Texas and form a free community just across the Rio Grande in Mexico.16 A posse of slave owners from the Indian Territory surrounded the Cherokee slaves and captured most of them before they reached Wildcat. Many of the fugitive slaves from the Cherokee Nation who escaped capture remained within the Indian Territory and settled among the Seminole and Upper Creek who had historically been receptive to runaway slaves.
In 1846, due to the outstanding leadership of Cherokee Chief John Ross, the factional disputes were lessened to the point where a sense of placidity began to emerge within the nation. To the amazement of all, enemies John Ross and Stand Watie stood and shook hands at the signing of the Treaty of 1846. They pledged themselves to peace, harmony, and the general welfare of the reunited Cherokee Nation. In the period of prosperity following the Treaty of 1846, the Cherokee Nation began to reclaim its lost status and struggled to remove itself from the cruel legacy of forced displacement.17 At the same time that many were meeting with success, prosperity and making great strides in education, political and social autonomy, the gap between the rich and the poor -- the assimilated and the traditionalists -- began to widen and the economic chasm began to reflect the cultural one. As this split widened, it laid the foundations for the coming struggle over the issue of slavery.
1 Major Ridge quoted in Morris Waddell, A Political History of the Cherokee Nation, 1838-1907 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1938), 18. 2 Worcester to Green, June 26, 1839, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions [microform]. (Woodbridge, Connecticut: Research Publications, 1982); Grant Foreman, "The Murder of Elias Boudinot," The Chronicles of Oklahoma XII (No. 1, March, 1939): 19-24. See Elizabeth Watts in Appendix B: Section II: Paragraph 6 - Section III: Paragraph I. 3 Major Ridge would certainly have known what would be his fate for the relinquishing of Cherokee land for it was he who had drawn up the articles of treason while a member of the National Council in 1829. In 1806, Ridge had assassinated then Chief Doublehead for his participation in the ceding of Cherokee lands to the United States. The son of Doublehead was reputed to have been a member of the Ross party and to have participated in execution of Ridge. 4 Grant Foreman, The Five Civilized Tribes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934), 333-334. See also Gerard Alexander Reed, The Ross-Watie Conflict Factionalism in the Cherokee Nation, 1839-1865 (Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1967). 5 Works Progress Administration, Oklahoma Writers Project, Interview with Chaney Richardson (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office), 257-259. 6 John Candy to Stand Watie, in Edward E. Dale and Gaston Litton, ed., Cherokee Cavaliers: Forty Years of Cherokee History as told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot Family (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1940), 32. 7 Sarah Watie to Stand Watie, in Dale and Litton, 45-46. 8 Federal agent George Butler quoted in Henry R. Schoolcraft, "Moral, Political, and Industrial Condition of the Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Cherokees" Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge), Collected and prepared under the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Published by Authority of Congress, (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1857), Vol. 6, 531. 9 Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990), 87-88; Michael Roethler, "Negro Slavery among the Cherokee Indians, 1540-1866" (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1964), 167-171. 10 Wardell, 60-66; T. Lindsey Baker and Julie Baker, The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 408-409. 11 Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 121. 12 Betty Robertson in Baker and Baker, 356; Alvin Rucker, "The Story of a Slave Uprising in Oklahoma" Daily Oklahoman, Oct. 30, 1932; Carolyn Thomas Foreman, "Early History of Webber's Falls," Chronicles of Oklahoma 29 (Winter 1951-52): 459-460; Daniel Littlefield and Lonnie Underhill, "Slave `Revolt' in the Cherokee Nation 1842," American Indian Quarterly 3 (1977): 121-133. 13 Rucker, "Slave Uprising." 14 Roethler, 185. 15 Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society 1540-1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 87. 16 Laurence Foster, Negro-Indian Relations in the Southeast (Philadelphia, n.p. 1935), 45. 17 ,Daniel F. Littlefield, The Cherokee Freedmen: from Emancipation to American Citizenship. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), 5-7; Roethler, 165-170.