The Wild Frontier (32 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
The tenor of the removal changed after most of the Cherokee failed to leave by the date required by their treaty. James Mooney said, “It may well exceed in weight of grief and pathos any other passage in American history.”
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Nearly 17,000 Cherokee were gathered into stockades and brought in groups of about 5,000 to the river to embark. There were 2 physicians for each group.
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The next party was also in the charge of Lieutenant Deas and left Ross’s Landing under guard on June 6, 1838. Deas determined that there were 489 in the group. He issued tenting material to protect the Cherokee from the weather. Fort Coffee was reached on June 19. Grant Foreman noted, “There had been no death in the party since their departure from Ross’s Landing.”
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Exactly one week after the party under Deas left, a second party, of 875 Cherokee, left Chattanooga under Lieutenant R. H. K. Whitley, whose assistants included 2 physicians and a hospital attendant. The results were dramatically different even though the conditions of the 2 journeys would appear on the surface to be about the same. Only 602 reached their destination. There were 273 deaths.
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Why the June 6 expedition should have no deaths and the June 13 party 273 is not known.
On October 11, 1838, a group of 650 to 700 left, led by Deas. These were treaty-faction Cherokee who refused to go with the Cherokee Nation group under Ross. They arrived in Oklahoma without incident on January 7, 1839.
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The Cherokee Nation asked General Scott to permit the Cherokee to
remove themselves in the fall after “the sickly season” had ended. Scott agreed.
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On July 19, 1838, the
Army and Navy Chronicle
reported that there were 9,250 Cherokee in the stockades, with another 1,500 on the way there.
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There were now about 13,000 Cherokee gathered for removal, including their slaves.
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On October 1, 1,103 Indians started under John Benge and on October 4 an additional group of 748 started under Elijah Hicks. By the 16th, it was apparent that the Hicks party did not have enough clothing. They reached their new home on January 4, 1839.
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There were 114 deaths.
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Nine more Cherokee Nation parties left through October and 4 in November.
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A party conducted by John Hicks left on November 4.
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Cherokee leaving on October 5 included a Cherokee minister, the Reverend Jesse Bushyhead. He wrote that his party had been detained a month by ice in the Mississippi, and they did not reach Oklahoma until February 23. There were 32 deaths while they were on the road.
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The leaders of some of the other journeys gave reports of additional deaths: the Reverend Evan Jones reported 38; another Cherokee minister, the Reverend Stephen Foreman, 71; Mose Daniel’s party, 48; James Brown, 34 “deaths and other causes”; John Drew, 55. These additional deaths total at least 269.
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There was some consolation in the quality of their new land. George Catlin described it as
a fine tract of country; and having advanced somewhat in the arts and agriculture before they started, [the Cherokees] are now found to be mostly living well, cultivating their fields of corn and other crops, which they raise with great success.
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Edward H. Spicer even reported that “by 1887, the Cherokees … were on the way to political and economic development comparable to that of other Americans.”
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S
EVERAL TROUBLING
questions are raised by the Trails of Tears. What are some relevant numbers? How many deaths were there? Were these deaths atrocities?
A Presidential Commission on Indian Reservation Economies in 1984 made its Report and Recommendations to President Reagan. That report said that only about 100,000 Indians were resettled. It also said
that a problem with the act was that the Indians could not be removed far enough or fast enough to stay out of the path of advancing settlers.
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The 1860 Census (29 years after removal began) indicated there were 340,000 Indians then. Although about 30 percent were removed under the act, about 70 percent of the Indians in the country (all over the country, not just in the South) were
not
removed.
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Grant Foreman and others have made estimates of deaths by tribes. Those estimates vary widely. Edward H. Spicer reported 5,000 Choctaw deaths.
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Carl Waldman stated that approximately 3,500 Creeks “died of disease and exposure during and shortly after the ensuing removal.”
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Spicer said 2,000 Chickasaw failed to arrive in Oklahoma and “after arrival 3,500 more died.”
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Spicer said the Trails of Tears deaths “recorded in their [Cherokee] history” is 4,000.
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Even when John Ross got permission from the government for the Cherokee to manage their own removal, the deaths continued. Out of 3,916 in the first 4 detachments, 573, or 14.6 percent, died.
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These estimates total 18,000 deaths.
Foreman would appear to have made the most diligent investigation concerning the number of deaths. He noted that there was no way to assess the number of Cherokee deaths. He said in language that could apply to all the removed tribes,
On the march there were many deaths, a few desertions and accessions and occasional exchanges from one party to another where some by sickness were obliged to drop out of the way and join those coming after; so that an accurate statement of the number removed and of those who perished on the way became impossible.
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The figures Foreman used in
Indian Removal
, taken for the most part from journals of eyewitnesses, give a far different picture than other writers. The deaths he reported on the Trails of Tears (not all the deaths he mentioned are referred to above) include 25 Choctaw deaths, 166 Seminole, 297 Creek, 556 Chickasaw, and 802 Cherokee, for a total of 1,846. (The Choctaw estimate of 25 deaths must be contrasted with his statements about the Leflore expedition, where 1,000 left and only 88 nearly starved Choctaw arrived. It seems unlikely all of the remaining 912 survived.) These specific estimates by Foreman, of course, are minimal estimates, because when the journal of the military officer stated that “many,” “several,” or “a number” died, a quantity cannot be determined.
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The difference in estimates between 18,000 and 1,846 is
clearly too wide. We do not know exactly how many Indians died on the Trails of Tears, but of course it was far too many and constituted a national tragedy.
Were the deaths in the Trails of Tears atrocities? An atrocity occurs only if the injury is intentional, and such injuries were not committed here by army personnel. The conduct of President Jackson would not appear to amount to intentional injury either, but it can be argued he did intend it.
The evidence that could lead one to believe he did intend the deaths consists of the fact that after the Creek War, Jackson was determined to eliminate all potential enemies of his country from the southern frontier.
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But there are also indications that Jackson did not intend the many deaths. He stated in his 1829 first inaugural address that he desired a just, humane, and considerate policy toward the Indians. Robert Remini asserted that “no one these days seriously indicts Jackson as a mad racist intent upon genocide.”
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Remini concluded that
some men, like Jackson, meant removal as a humanitarian means of preserving Native American life and culture in a place where they would not constitute a threat to the safety of the Union and a bother to the greed, arrogance, and racism of whites.
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Grant Foreman concluded his book on the removals on a cautiously optimistic note:
The rehabilitation of these five Indian nations, their readjustment to their new surroundings, the recovery of their national spirit and enterprise, the building of their farms and homes, their governments and schools upon the raw frontier, bringing into being a higher civilization of Indians, this was an achievement unique in our history, that compares favorably with the best traditions of white frontier civilization.
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No more will be said about the sorrowful Trails of Tears. Atrocities, of course, continued throughout the country.
I
N
1832, army captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville and his men established a trading post on the Green River in Wyoming. Helen Hunt Jackson told how one of his trappers discovered that his traps had
been stolen, and he vowed to kill the first Indian he saw. He saw 2 Root Digger Indians fishing, killed one, and threw his body in the stream. Shortly after that, a party of trappers was about to cross a stream, saw unarmed Root Diggers on the opposite bank, and killed 25 of them. The survivors were chased, lassoed, and dragged until they were dead. Later on, the same group of trappers found that some of their horses had been stolen by the Riccaree Indians. They told them that unless all the horses were returned, 2 innocent Indians who had wandered into the trappers’ camp would be burned to death. Two horses were released, and the Indians who had them fled. The 2 prisoners were burned.
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After the 1832 defeat of 275 Illinois militiamen by 40 Sac and Fox
*
warriors in the skirmish known as Stillman’s Run, Black Hawk terrorized the frontier in the Black Hawk War. With 40 braves, mostly Potawatomi, he attacked the Davis farm at Indian Creek in Illinois. Fifteen were murdered and mutilated. Two girls, Rachel and Sylvia Hall, saw the Indians dancing, brandishing their parents’ scalps. The sisters were captured, but later ransomed for horses. The Illinois frontier was disrupted by Stillman’s Run and the Indian Creek Massacre. Settlers fled their homes, farming stopped, mining stopped. The Galena, Illinois, newspaper was quoted by Alan Axelrod as calling for a “war of extermination” against the Indians.
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A party of 29 Illinois militia finally caught up with 11 marauding warriors and killed them all. Militia colonel William S. Hamilton came on the scene an hour later with friendly Sioux, Menominees, and Winnebagos and turned them on the dead bodies. The Indians hacked them to bits.
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Black Hawk then went to Canada. When he returned in 1830, he found settlers occupying land in violation of the Treaty of 1804. They had appropriated Indian cornfields and plowed new fields among Indian graves.
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Moreover, half his warriors were gone, and his back was to the Mississippi River. Before he could cross, the steamboat
Warrior
, with a detachment of soldiers and a six-pound cannon, arrived. Black Hawk raised the white flag, but soldiers fired on the warriors. His men sought cover and returned fire.
Warrior
went downstream to refuel. The next
morning, 1,300 volunteers and regulars stormed toward the Indians. The Indians tried to surrender, but the troops, according to Robert M. Utley and Wilcomb E. Washburn, “inflamed by weeks of panic,” clubbed, stabbed, and shot them for 8 hours. The steamboat returned with its cannon, adding to the slaughter. One witness said the Mississippi was “perceptibly tinged with the blood of the Indians.” The soldiers took 39 prisoners. Although 239 Sac and Fox warriors got across to the west bank of the Mississippi, hostile Sioux scalped or took all of them prisoner.
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When Black Hawk surrendered, he delivered a farewell speech to his tribe saying that “Black Hawk tried to save you, and avenge your wrongs. He drank the blood of some of the whites.”
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After his death in 1838, grave robbers raided his tomb and displayed his head in a traveling carnival—a double atrocity.
About the same time, George Catlin visited the grave of Omaha chief Black Bird, which was on top of a bluff overlooking the Missouri River. Black Bird had requested that he be buried astride his favorite war horse, and he was. Catlin dug into the burial mound, found the skull of the horse, then the chief’s skull, secreted it, and took it away and put it “with others which I have collected in my route.”
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T
HE SEMINOLE
Wars in Florida (1816-58) seemed never to end. In 1837, commanding general Thomas Sidney Jesup decided to import 33 bloodhounds from Cuba to track down the Indians. The American public raised an outcry because of what they had heard bloodhounds did to runaway slaves. No bloodhound atrocities happened, however. The hounds had been trained to follow the scent of blacks; Indians smelled different from them and they wouldn’t trail them. However, when bloodhounds did enter the Florida swamps where the Indians were, the Indians trained them to attack the soldiers.
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General Jesup decided he needed to deal with the Indian leadership. That same year he invited a young Seminole chief named Osceola to attend a peace council. When Osceola arrived, he and his people were arrested. Osceola was struck on the head and imprisoned in Fort Moultrie, near Charleston, South Carolina, where he died in 1838. The post surgeon, Dr. Frederick E. Weedon, displayed his remains there in a medical museum until it was destroyed in a fire.
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There was a truce in Florida in 1839, but a Seminole band led by Chekika killed several of the soldiers of Colonel William Harney in a night attack. The next year, his band did the same thing in the upper
Keys, killing 7. Harney with 90 soldiers killed Chekika and hanged his men.
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The Seminoles remained a problem. Colonel William J. Worth was sent to Florida in 1841. He methodically destroyed the Seminole shelters and crops. In doing so, he also captured the leading chief and 5 other leaders of the resistance. He sent word to all hostile Seminoles that the captives would be hanged unless they surrendered. They surrendered.
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