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Western Removals, 1800–1840

Iroquois Influence on the U.S. Constitution, 1789

Rhianna C. Rogers and Menoukha R. Case

Chronology

1142		August 31. Iroquois Confederacy’s body of law is adopted.
1490s		Columbus brings back reports of egalitarian indigenous cultures.
1500s		Montaigne and other writers cite sixteenth-century Iroquois visitors to Europe as pointing out injustices of class inequality, something Europeans had taken as natural.
1754		The 1754 Albany Congress, or “The Conference of Albany,” held between June 19 and July 11, 1754, illustrates Haudenosaunee/Iroquois influence on colonial U.S. government.
1775		When the 1775 Continental Congress debates independence, Haudenosaunee/Iroquois chiefs are formally invited.
1787		John Rutledge, a Constitutional Convention member and the drafting committee chair, uses the Iroquois Confederacy’s structure to argue that political power works best with joint rule.
1788		June 21. New Hampshire becomes the last necessary state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
1988		October. The Haudenosaunee contribution is officially recognized as the 100th U.S. Congress passes a resolution that acknowledges “the historical debt which this Republic of the United States of America owes to the Iroquois Confederacy and other Indian Nations for their demonstration of enlightened, democratic principles of government and their example of a free association of independent Indian Nations” (H.R. Res. 311, 100th Cong. 1988).

Approaches to History

European thinking has had a major impact on mainstream American understanding of Native Peoples in general, and United States and Native history in particular. Therefore, understanding of Iroquoian influences on the United States government is extremely limited. Yet, the Haudenosaunees, the Native name for the Iroquois, played a profound historical role in European liberation from monarchy, culminating in creation of the U.S. Constitution and its associated governmental systems. Their influence has continued to shape American history.

Although the U.S. Congress acknowledged the influence of the Haudenosaunee Constitution on the U.S. Constitution in 1988, for the better part of U.S. history very few outside of Indian country, academia, and the federal government were aware of the Haudenosaunees’ influence on the development of American governmental systems. In fact, much foundational work in the field of American government has, consciously or unconsciously, excluded references to Haudenosaunee contributions (Payne 1996, 605–06). Noted scholars and respected Native American leaders have argued for the revision of current historical narratives to include a broader spectrum of non-European influences on the development of the U.S. government (Deloria, ed. 1992, 1–12). Despite ongoing conversations, this knowledge still remains obscured from public consciousness. Seneca scholar John Mohawk suggests people seek clues as to why this is still the case within the development of Euro-American worldviews expressed in histories, media, and ideologies of the American Indian:

Historians have been powerfully influenced by the ideas and attitudes the West has constructed to explain who the Indian was/is in relation to the European. Most of the history has been created to tell a story, not of the Indian, but of the European … There has been a strong tendency among historians to examine the record and, where the evidence is inconsistent with the story they wish to tell, to construct motives, to omit inconvenient facts, and to draw conclusions based more on their constructions than on the available evidence. (quoted in Deloria, ed. 1992, 44, 47)

Due to Western history’s reliance on written words, oral histories long remained outliers within mainstream historical discourse, but awareness of them is growing. J. Frederick Fausz notes in his article “Patterns of Anglo-Indian aggression and accommodation along the mid-Atlantic coast, 1584–1634”: “Since 1975 a virtual revolution in scholarship has transformed and informed the interpretation of Anglo-Indian relations in colonial North America … The historian’s unflagging fascination with the origins and evolution of English colonial institutions and societies produced two mature ‘schools,’ or broad overviews, for interpreting the period. But while both the England-focused Frontier school increased our knowledge of Whites in the colonial era, each approach ignored or distorted the considerable contributions of Native Americans who had strongly influenced London policy-makers and New World frontiersmen alike over the centuries” (quoted in Deloria, ed.1992, 62). Such gaps and distortions can be addressed through studying the period and process through Haudenosaunee eyes. Therefore, several sections below contain oral histories; please refer to them as you read.

Through Their Own Eyes: The Haudenosaunee/ Iroquois Confederacy

By the time Europeans made contact with the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois, their Confederacy was a long established, sophisticated political and social system that united the territories of six nations in a symbolic longhouse that stretched across what is now the state of New York.

From its inception, political activity within the Confederacy reflected a true democracy of multiple local councils with assigned representatives to the Confederacy’s council. However, proceedings and the policies at which the Confederacy arrived were recorded in non-Western ways. Unlike Western political documents, Haudenosaunee/Iroquois political narratives are rich with folktales, origin stories, legends, and rituals. Many of the Confederacy’s foundational narratives were recorded in wampum and conveyed orally from person to person as a way to encourage camaraderie, teach morals, impart wisdom and respect, and promote proper societal behaviors.

In 1988, the United States passed a resolution to recognize the influence of the Iroquois on the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights. This scene depicts Hiawatha speaking during the founding of the “League of Iroquois tribes” or “Confederation of Five Nations” c. 1570. (Fototeca Gilardi/Getty Images)

The Haudenosaunee people’s principal governing authority is the Grand Council of Chiefs appointed by the Clan Mothers, which operates under the tenets of the Great Law of Peace. Each nation has its own representative governments to govern daily activities; the Grand Council oversees issues that apply to the Confederacy as a whole. The Grand Council is composed of members of the Six Nations. As Bruce Johansen states, “[The Grand Council’s] decision-making process somewhat resemble[s] that of a two-house congress in one body, with the ‘older brothers’ and ‘younger brothers’ each comprising a side of the house. [The Onondaga occupy] an executive role, with a veto that could be overridden by the older and younger brothers in concert” (1982, 23). In essence, each tribe retains autonomy to deal with its internal affairs; simultaneously, the Grand Council deals with the problems that may affect all the nations within the Confederacy, meeting to discuss matters of common concern, such as war, peace, and making treaties. Though the Grand Council cannot interfere with each tribe’s internal affairs, unity for mutual defense, represented by a bundle of five arrows tied together, is central to the unbroken strength that such unity implies.

Sidebar 1: Wampum and Oral History

Wampum belts are composed of long cylindrical beads made from quahog clamshell (purple) and Atlantic whelk (white). The Europeans called this wampum, from wampumpeag, an Alogonquin word. Kanatiyosh (1991) explains that the Iroquois used them as memory aids. For example, if a problem arose, a tribe would introduce it to the Confederacy for consideration. The Council would reach a decision and report to the Onondaga Council leader; if he agreed, the decision became unanimous and would be recorded in a wampum belt.

The Hiawatha Belt, consisting of four squares with a tree in the middle, represents the unity of the original Five Nations. The first square represents the Mohawk Nation; the second the Oneida Nation; the central heart or the tree represents the Onondaga Nation; the square left of the tree represents the Cayuga Nation; and the last square represents the Seneca Nation. White lines leading away from the Seneca and Mohawk Nations represent paths welcoming new tribes who agree to follow the Great Law of Peace.

Each of the Nations has a special role, with responsibilities particular to their situations. As Barbara Barnes (1984) recounts in Tuscarora oral history:

The “Twenty-Second Wampum” illustrates that after all of the Chiefs have debated, there is one Onondaga Chief, Hononwiretonh, whose duty it is to sit and listen to all of the debate; the matter is then turned over to him for final approval, if all are in consensus. If he refuses to sanction the solution, then no other chief has the authority to pass the legislation. Hononwiretonh is not allowed to refuse sanctioning the matter unless there is a strong basis for his refusal. As can be seen, the Great Law provides for numerous checks and balances of power and depends on consensus of all fifty chiefs for its decision making. (quoted in Kanatiyosh 1991)

The Haudenosaunee/Iroquois Confederacy is a direct reflection of the integration of oral traditions, morals, culture, and religion in government. Unlike European systems of government, which attempt to make a distinction between laws and culture, the Haudenosaunee system encompasses a holistic approach to life and society. (See “The Haudenosaunee Confederacy: Natural Law, Clan Mothers & Elders” in Sidebar 2.) As the Haudenosaunees describe it, “What makes [the Confederacy] stand out as unique to other systems around the world is its blending of law and values” (Haudenosaunee Confederacy 2014c).

Settlers and Indians: Crafting a Nation

As described in the Chronology, democracy was not an entirely new idea to the colonists, since shocked and amazed stories about egalitarian Native cultures had been drifting across the ocean to Europe since Columbus’s time. As the British settled into the hills of New England and the southern east coast, actions such as convening the Albany Congress indicated their respect for Haudenosaunee agency and power (see “Colonial Era Haudenosaunee Figures” in Biographies of Notable Figures):

The founding fathers of the United States had ample opportunity to study and learn from the Haudenosaunee. During the 1730s and 1740s English allegiance with the Haudenosaunee was essential if the English hoped to prevent the French from encroaching on the territory. During this time colonists intermingled with the Haudenosaunee in an attempt to build trust and establish treaties that would ensure their alliance. (Haudenosaunee Confederacy 2014c)

Sidebar 2: The Haudenosaunee Confederacy: Natural Law, Clan Mothers & Elders

For the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois, “law, society and nature are equal partners and each plays an important role” (Haudenosaunee Confederacy 2014a). Since they are intertwined, concepts about nature affect political decisions, wisdom, faith keeping, and customs. Thus, governance is based on the principle of mutual reciprocity, a respect and alignment between human law and natural law expressed in all decisions and behaviors. As such, each individual plays a unique role in the ultimate fulfillment of collective spiritual and political goals. This moral integration is exemplified through religious ceremonies enumerated under the Haudenosaunee Constitution’s Articles 99–104, which state, “freedom of religion is also simultaneously protected by allowing each Nation to keep its own rituals” (Ibid.). This clause is a strong indication of spirituality’s integral nature in Haudenosaunee life and politics.

The Great Law proposes that all life is interconnected spiritually, environmentally, and communally. In essence, the system cannot work well if all aspects are not kept in balance autonomously, and that includes resource and gender balance. Haudenosaunee administration relies heavily on women in matrilineal political positions, known as Clan Mothers, who appoint male delegates to speak for each clan. The Great Law bans bloodshed and ensures peace as a way of life. Peace is reliant on equity, and the Clan Mothers are also responsible for the equitable distribution of corn.

The original Five Nations were divided into elders (Mohawk, Onondaga, and Seneca) and youngers (Oneida and Cayuga). Despite the deference owed to elders, all Council decisions had to be unanimous. A sixth tribe, the Tuscaroras, migrated to the area in approximately 1714. They are known as Iroquois (externally) and Haudenosaunees (internally). Today, the Six tribal nations of the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee Confederacy is still a matriarchy, still defends natural law, and still holds Council.

The settlers also turned to the Haudenosaunees to find inspiration for the American Revolution, using Native Americans as their model for freedom. (See “Colonial American Figures” in Biographies of Notable Figures.) As exemplified by their dressing as Mohawks during the Boston Tea Party, the colonists “adopted the Indian as their symbol … Popular engravings showed colonists—portrayed as Indians—being oppressed by British … [They declared they] could live without England, surviving on ‘Indian corn’ ” (Hurst Thomas 2000, xxvii, 11–3, 199). The Haudenosaunee/Iroquois Confederacy’s influence on the United States goes beyond inspiration to key aspects of governance. As the Chronology describes, it is well documented that the Haudenosaunee Great Law served as a blueprint for the U.S. democracy, the Constitution, and American governmental structure (Johansen 1982; Payne 1996).

The 1789 U.S. Constitution arose from a long process of intercultural exchange marked by tenets that were at odds from the outset. American exposure to indigenous peoples began through quests for wealth, power, and cultural expansionism. The indigenous peoples’ impressively egalitarian lifestyle captured European imagination and initiated thirst for broader powers than monarchy and feudalism permitted. Still, American settlers resisted true egalitarianism, which would have required them to eschew the patriarchy and racialism that allowed them to accumulate the wealth for which they had ventured forth. To negotiate the quandary of how to gain power without giving it away to everyone, and having no other model of broader governance, they adapted a Haudenosaunee/Iroquois governmental structure designed for inclusiveness. Drafting and re-drafting the Constitution to accommodate vested interests culminated in a paradoxical document that, on the one hand, limited privilege to select groups and, on the other hand, carried egalitarian sensibilities that would lay the groundwork for the U.S. Constitution.

Ratification Struggles: Shifting Identity

There are key similarities between Haudenosaunee and U.S. governance structures. Parts of the U.S. Constitution contain word-for-word replication of concepts from the Great Law (Kanatiyosh 1991). Along with the very idea of freedom, the United States adopted the retention of rights by member units (Six Nations or U.S. states) and a tripartite separation of powers. For example, the Clan Mothers form a Council of Matrons, an executive branch that assigns many other roles and determines general policy. Village, tribal, and confederacy councils are legislative branches, implementing those general policies. A joint matrons’ council and men’s council oversees the judicial branch of governance. As the Haudenosaunees note, there are a variety of similarities between these documents:

Both models stress the importance of unity and peace and provide freedom to seek out one’s success. Similarities can also be seen in the symbols of each nation. While the Great Law features five arrows bound together as a symbol signifying the unity and strength of the five nations, the seal of the United States uses an eagle clutching a bundle of thirteen arrows signifying the thirteen original colonies.

The way the US Congress operates is also similar to the actions made by the Grand Council as outlined by the Peacemaker. Within [the] Grand Council meet the Chiefs of each nation which then divide into sections of Elder Brothers and Younger Brothers. This model is very similar to the US Constitution’s two-house congress. (Haudenosaunee Confederacy 2014c)

There are also clear differences between the Haudenosaunee and U.S. Constitutions. Three main differences are: (1) while both provide for freedom of religion, the Haudenosaunee constitution remains spirit-based, and the U.S. Constitution separates the spiritual from the secular; (2) the Haudenosaunee constitution is matriarchal, while the U.S. Constitution is patriarchal; and (3) assignment of roles by the Council of Matrons follows clan lines and, therefore, matrilineal bloodlines. The Haudenosaunee constitution states that “the body of our mother, the woman, [is] of great worth and honor … [S]he shall have the care of all that is planted by which life is sustained and supported and the power to breathe is fortified: and moreover that the warriors shall be her assistants” (Gunn Allen 1986); whereas the original U.S. Constitution followed patrilineal lines of power and only extended the right to govern to men. Interestingly enough, the Matron’s Council has economic power equivalent to redistributing taxes for sustaining the populace, and also carries responsibility similar to that of the U.S. role of commander in chief. Some could say, therefore, that the Iroquois Confederacy influenced not only the U.S. Constitution, but also early feminist movements to counter that constitution’s patriarchal nature (Gunn Allen 1992).

The ratification debate in which these differences were wrangled, and the document containing its outcome, known as the U.S. Constitution, register critical differences between European and Native worldviews. Perhaps it comes down to motivation. Seventeenth-century Puritan narratives about religious freedom notwithstanding, the majority of Europeans came to Turtle Island for opportunity rather than equality; they wanted to ameliorate the feudal system, to displace bloodline birthright with a broader category of “earned” wealth. But this wealth was established at the expense of unpaid labor (that of women and slaves) and land “redeemed” from the very “savages” whose constitutional model allowed the colonists to unite and fight England. The very idea of the kind of equality enjoyed by Native Americans had been unknown to them; they found it exhilarating and inspiring, but only partially adopted it. Thomas Jefferson, one of the “Founding Fathers” of the US, illustrates this:

Jefferson believed that freedom to exercise restraint on their leaders, and an egalitarian distribution of property secured for Indians in general a greater degree of happiness than that to be found among the superintended sheep at the bottom of European class structures. Jefferson thought enough of happiness to make its pursuit a natural right, along with life and liberty. In so doing, he dropped “property,” the third member of the natural rights trilogy generally used by followers of John Locke …

… To place “property” in the same trilogy with life and liberty … would have been a contradiction.… Jefferson composed some of his most trenchant rhetoric in opposition to the erection of a European-like aristocracy on American soil.… [He] often characterized Europe as a place from which to escape—a corrupt place, where wolves consumed sheep regularly, and any uncalled for bleating by the sheep was answered with a firm blow to the head. (Johansen 1982, 103)

Nevertheless, Jefferson built his Virginia estate on Cherokee land and acquired wealth through slavery. He was also known by some as one of “The Fathers of American Archaeology,” a reputation gained in part by measuring African and Native Americans’ skulls to prove Haudenosaunee inferiority. It is not surprising, therefore, that the U.S. Constitution holds an African to be three-fifths of a person and that the Declaration of Independence refers to “merciless Indian savages.”

Before the American Revolution, the term “American” referred only to indigenous peoples; afterwards, the settlers adopted it to express their own identity. The appropriation of “Indianness” in colonial times, therefore, is both hidden in and central to U.S. democracy. Its final expression in the Constitution is a fascinating register of what “Indianness” the colonists accepted and rejected, and why. As Gunn Allen states, “American colonial ideas of self-government came as much from the colonists’ observations of tribal governments as from their Protestant or Greco-Roman heritage. Neither … had the kind of pluralistic democracy that has been understood in the United States since Andrew Jackson, but the tribes, particularly the gynarchical tribal confederacies, did” (1992, 218). Greco-Roman tradition was carried on in oligarchic values, such as restriction of citizenship to white property-owning males over 21years old, and English patriarchal feudalism lingered both through those citizenship parameters and the retention of slavery. One of the most notable changes that the European-Americans made, as Gunn-Allen (1982) indicates, was to reject bloodline aristocracy and monarchy; Gunn purports that all other changes were adopted from Native Americans.

The Arc of U.S. History and Contemporary Questions

In sum, while the Haudenosaunees have encouraged a voice for everyone, the U.S. Constitution originally restricted representation. The seed of egalitarianism, however, has borne fruit. Phrases, words, and the very spirit of liberty embedded in the U.S. Constitution’s rhetoric have become effective tools in a continual quest for equality in America. Highlights from the history of suffrage offer an example:

• 1776: white male landowners can vote
• 1856: all white men can vote
• 1868: African men can vote
• 1920: White and African-American women can vote
• 1947: Native Americans can vote (Northern California Citizenship Project, 2004)

Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, Chief of the Onondaga Nation, has called the Haudenosaunee influence on the U.S. Constitution “an ember … from [Haudenosaunee] fire.” That ember ignited both suffrage and all kinds of struggles for rights. Still, the original rift is registered in ongoing debates about what, exactly, the American ethos is. What is the American concept of liberty and justice? Is individual liberty paramount, no matter the cost to lands, waters, and society? Just how should Americans apply the concept of “justice” to contemporary issues, from ecological degradation to human rights? For what purpose did Americans unite, and to what ends should U.S. collective taxes be distributed? Should Americans practice the values of equity and reciprocity, caring for all members of society, like the Haudenosaunee Matron Council does in distributing corn? Oren Lyons continues:

So we are now facing another situation. Can we get … this great light to come again? And that’s up to this generation … we’re elders, you and I now. I mean, we can say from our older position, “It looks like a lost cause.” But if you were to speak to the young man, the young person, the young woman, she’d say, “No. This is my life. I shall survive. You can’t tell me that it’s lost. That’s my determination.” She will say, and he will say that, and they are saying it.

So we can say, “Well, it looks bad from here.” And from there they say, “Well, it looks tough, but it isn’t lost.” And that’s the law that they were talking about from Gunyundiyo, when he said, “Don’t let it be your generation.” And the law prevails, what we call the Great Law, the common law, the natural law. (Lyons 1991)

Lyons’s words are reminders of another one of those tenets at odds from the outset: Indigenous constitutions accord rights to nature, while Western constitutions accord “natural rights” to human beings. Indigenous concepts of mutual reciprocity and natural law become ever more relevant as people face the ecological crisis that has developed under the dominance of Western law. Some might suggest that this is the time, when the ember is still lit, to broaden recognition of Native influences and look to indigenous peoples for insights moving forward.

Biographies

Pre-Contact Haudenosaunee Figures

Early Haudenosaunee figures must be addressed collectively to reflect the cultural norms of that time. The stories of Peacemaker, Hiawatha, Tadodaho, and Jigonsaseh are intertwined. That said, two of the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois oral tradition’s most notable figures are the Great Peacemaker (also known as Deganawida or Dekanawida) and the visionary Hiawatha. There is great debate about both men’s origins and their affiliated status within the Six Nations; however, it is universally believed, among Natives and non-Natives alike, that their interactions formed the foundations of the Great Law seen within the Six Nations today. Peacemaker is credited with spreading peace and unity through the Haudenosaunee peoples. He did so by introducing the Great Law of Peace, or Gayanesshagowa, and its three central principles (i.e., righteousness, justice, and health) across the five original nations (National Museum of the American Indian-Education Office 2009, 4). Hiawatha, who may have been either a pupil or contemporary of the Great Peacemaker, continued the unification of tribes and ultimately established the foundations for what would become the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Haudenosaunee traditions describe Hiawatha as residing with either the Onondagas or the Mohawks after having descended from his dwelling in the skies. The Haudenosaunees believe that Hiawatha taught their ancestors the principles that the Great Peacemaker brought with him. Both men helped establish the Confederacy’s core values: the art of good living; the value and strength of mutual friendship and goodwill; the end of cannibalism; the advantages of sedentary living; and the mutual cultivation of the environment.

Either during or shortly after Hiawatha and Peacekeeper’s mission of peace, the people of the Confederacy selected their first leader. They chose Tadodaho, a chief of the Onondagas, for his power, valor, and control over his people. His title, Grand Sachem of the League, was conferred upon him by a delegation of the Mohawks who, as tradition indicates, found him seated in a dark swamp with snakes in his hair, smoking his pipe among drinking vessels made of his enemies’ skulls. Tradition states that after the Mohawks announced their mission, they offered Tadodaho the position; it is said that Tadodaho arose and accepted the office, and some versions indicated that Hiawatha and/or Peacekeeper combed the snakes out of his hair, making him more compassionate and less evil toward others. This act transformed Tadodaho into a compassionate leader, which affirmed the Onondagas’ place as the “firekeepers” of the new Confederacy (Grinde Jr. & Johansen 2001, 89).

Additionally, Jigonsaseh (known as Peace Queen and Mother of Nations, among other titles), who is said to have been a contemporary of Hiawatha and Peacemaker, was also instrumental in the pacifying of Tadodaho. She helped to cofound the Peace Confederacy, unite the Nations, and establish a strong female role within the Haudenosaunee political system (Johansen & Mann 2000, 176–77).

Colonial-Era Haudenosaunee Figures

In 1744, envoys from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia met in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with delegates, or sachems, from the Six Nations. During their discussions, the Iroquois leader Canassatego advocated the American colonies’ federal union, exhorting the colonists: “Our wise forefathers established a union and amity between the [original] Five Nations. This has made us formidable. This has given us great weight and authority with our neighboring Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy and by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken you will acquire much strength and power; therefore, whatever befalls you, do not fall out with one another” (Ibid). One Haudenosaunee account states, “Canassatego, the then Chief of the Onondaga, impress[ed] upon the colonists the importance of [the settlers also] forming a union of all the colonies. Canassatego expressed the difficulty [the Nations] had faced in dealing with each separate colony and how forming one union could repair the problem. The Haudenosaunee did not want to cement a union [with the settlers] until the colonies were united” (Haudenosaunee Confederacy 2014c).

Colonial British-American Figures

Among the Founding Fathers, Franklin may best illustrate the influence the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois had on newly formed American mindset. As the Haudenosaunees tell it,

In 1744 Benjamin Franklin ran a successful printing company in Pennsylvania running newspapers, money, and legal documents. It was during this period he began to become immersed in the treaty councils which were brought to him by Conrad Weiser, a man who had gained the respect of the Haudenosaunee and had even been adopted into the Mohawk nation. The treaty council proceedings were of high interest in Europe making them a profitable venture for Franklin. (Haudenosaunee Confederacy, 2014c)

The colonists’ need for alliance with the Haudenosaunee to further their revolution thus initiated consideration of the very idea of uniting states. For this reason, “the colonists’ ideals were beginning to diverge from those of Europe and Franklin began to look at a new system of government” (Ibid.).

Franklin also became the historian of this process:

Franklin, who owned a thriving printing business in Philadelphia, started printing small books containing proceedings of Indian treaty councils in 1736 … the books, the first distinctive forms of indigenous American literature, sold quite well, and he continued publishing such accounts until 1762. [Based on his interests in Native teachings,] in 1754, Franklin carried the Iroquois concept of unity to the critical Albany Congress, where he presented his plan of union loosely patterned after the Iroquois Confederation. An aging Mohawk sachem called Hendrick had received a special invitation from the acting governor of New York, James DeLancey, to attend the Albany Congress and provide information on the Iroquois government’s structure. After Hendrick spoke at the Albany Congress, DeLancey responded, “I hope that by this present Union, we shall grow up to a great height and be as powerful and famous as you were of old.” (Feathers & Feathers, 2007)

During the debates over the plan for the newly formed union, Franklin noted the Iroquois Confederacy’s strength and stressed the fact that the Nations maintained internal sovereignty, managing their own affairs quite effectively, without interference from the Grand Council. The Haudenosaunees supported this narrative, stating:

Following the Albany Congress Franklin drew up a plan that had all the British American colonies federated under a single legislature with a president-general who would be appointed by the Crown, a very similar model to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Like the confederacy all states had to agree on a course of action before it could be implemented. Unfortunately at the time the colonies were not ready to unite and the crown disapproved of the freedom it provided and the plan failed. (Haudenosaunee Confederacy 2014c)

The Albany Congress–1794, a mural located in the U.S. Capitol building, depicts some of the meeting’s delegates (from left to right, excluding the blacksmith and farmer): William Franklin and his father Benjamin (Pennsylvania); Governor Thomas Hutchinson (Massachusetts); Governor William Delancey (New York); Sir William Johnson (Massachusetts); and Colonel Benjamin Tasker (Maryland). The blacksmith, on the left, symbolizes the importance of ironworking in the mid-eighteenth century, and the farmer with his scythe, on the right, represents the growth of agriculture in the colonies. Significantly, there are no Natives portrayed in this painting, though Franklin discussed them in his writing. Some might argue that this omission further perpetuates the dismissal of Native contributions to the formation of the United States and its Constitution.

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

Oral History of Hiawatha’s Speech

You (Mohawks) who are sitting under the shadow of The Great Tree whose roots sink deep into the earth, and whose branches spread wide around, shall be the First Nation, nearest the rising of the sun, because you are warlike and mighty. You (Oneidas) who recline your bodies against The Everlasting Stone, emblem of wisdom, that cannot be moved, shall be the second nation, because you always give wise counsel. You (Onondagas) who have your habitation at the foot of The Great Hills, and are overshadowed by their crags, shall be the third nation, because you are all greatly gifted in speech. You (Cayugas) the people who live in The Open Country, and possess much wisdom, shall be the fourth nation, because you understand better the art of raising corn and beans, and making houses. You (Senecas) whose dwelling is in The Dark Forest nearer the setting sun, and whose home is everywhere, shall be the fifth nation, because of your superior cunning in hunting. Unite, you five nations, and have one common interest, and no foe shall disturb or subdue you. You, the people, who are as the feeble bushes, and you, who are a fishing people (addressing some who had come from the Delawares, and from the sea-shore), may place yourselves under our protection, and we will defend you. And you of the South and West may do the same—we will protect. We earnestly desire the alliance and friendship of you all. Brothers, if we unite in this great bond, the Great Spirit will smile upon us, and we shall be free, prosperous, and happy. But if we remain as we are we shall be subject to his frown. We shall be enslaved, ruined, perhaps annihilated. We may perish under the war-storm, and our names be no longer remembered by good men, nor repeated in the dance and song. Brothers, these are the words of Hi-a-wat-ha. I have said it. I am done.

Tradition continues that Hiawatha then ascended into the heavens in a mysterious canoe and vanished. The five original Nations established the Confederacy the following day.

Source: Henry R. Schoolcraft. Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, Volume 3. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Company, 1853, 317.

A Congressional Resolution Affirming Haudenosaunee Influence on the United States Constitution

In 1988, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution acknowledging that the ideas and principles expressed by the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations influenced the men who had developed the U.S. Constitution, nearly 200 years earlier.

Resolution, 311, 100th Congress, 1988

To acknowledge the contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations to the development of the United States Constitution and to reaffirm the continuing government-to-government relationship between Indian tribes and the United States established in the Constitution.

Whereas, the original framers of the constitution, including, most notably, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, are known to have greatly admired the concepts of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy;

Whereas, the Confederation of the original Thirteen colonies into one republic was influenced by the political system developed by the Iroquois Confederacy as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the Constitution itself . . Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That—

1. the Congress, on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the signing of the United States Constitution, acknowledges the contribution made by the Iroquois Confederacy and other Indian Nations to the formation and development of the United States;
2. the Congress also hereby reaffirms the constitutionally recognized government-to-government relationship with Indian tribes which has been the cornerstone of this Nation’s official Indian policy;
3. the Congress specifically acknowledges and reaffirms the trust responsibility and obligation of the United States Government to Indian tribes, including Alaska Natives, for their preservation, protection, and enhancement, including the provision of health, education, social, and economic assistance programs as necessary, and including the duty to assist tribes in their performance of governmental responsibility to provide for the social and economic well-being of their members and to preserve tribal cultural identity and heritage; and
4. The Congress also acknowledges the need to exercise the utmost good faith in upholding its treaties with the various tribes, as the tribes understood them to be, and the duty of a great Nation to uphold its legal and moral obligations for the benefit of all its citizens so that they and their posterity may also continue to enjoy the rights they have enshrined in the United States Constitution for time immemorial.

Source: H.R. Res. 311, 100th Cong. 1988.

Further Reading

Deloria, Vine, ed. Exiled in the Land of the Free. Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1992.

Feathers, Cynthia and Susan Feathers. “Franklin and the Iroquois Foundations of the Constitution.” The Pennsylvania Gazette, 2007. http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0107/gaz09.html

Feathers, Cynthia and Susan Feathers. Two Tracts: Information to Those Who Would Remove to America, and Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America. J. Stockdale, 1784. http://mith.umd.edu/eada/html/display.php?docs=franklin_bagatelle3.xml

Grindle Jr., Donald A. and Bruce E. Johansen. “Perceptions of America’s Native Democracies: The Societies Colonial Americans Observed,” in Native American Voices, 3rd ed. Edited by Susan Lobo, Steven Talbot, and Traci L. Morris.; 62–69, 2010. http://faculty.ithaca.edu/kbhansen/docs/namindians/grindejohansen.pdf

Gunn Allen, Paula. “Who Is Your Mother?: Red Roots of White Feminism,” 1986. http://spot.colorado.edu/~wehr/491R9.TXT

Haudenosaunee Confederacy. “About the Haudenosaunee Confederacy,” 2014a, internal links http://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/aboutus.html

Johansen, Bruce E. “Native American Political Systems and the Evolution of Democracy: An Annotated Bibliography.” The Six Nations: The Oldest Living Participatory Government on Earth, 1997. http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/NAPSnEoD.html

Johansen, Bruce E. Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois, and the Rationale for the American Revolution. Boston: Harvard Common Press, 1982. http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FFchp2.html

Johansen, Bruce E. “Native American Ideas of Governance and U.S. Constitution,” 2009. http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/publication/2009/06/20090617110824wrybakcuh0.5986096.html#ixzz3Zv0CWsZQ

Johansen, Bruce Elliott, and Barbara Alice Mann, eds. Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000.

Kanatiyosh. “The Structure of the Great Law of Peace,” Me and U, Mother Earth and Us: A Haudenosaunee Perspective, 1999. http://tuscaroras.com/graydeer/influenc/page2.htm

Lyon, Oren. “Oren Lyons—The Faithkeeper: Interview with Bill Moyers.” In Bill Moyers, A World of Ideas, Public Affairs Television, July 3, 1991. Transcript. http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/OL070391.html

Murphy, Gerald. Haudenosaunee Constitution. Portland State University, 2001. http://www.iroquoisdemocracy.pdx.edu/html/greatlaw.html

Payne, Samuel B., Jr. “The Iroquois League, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution.” Special issue: “Indians and Others in Early America,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53 (3]): 605–620, 1996. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~rrath/hist460/IroqInf-Payne.pdf

Wallace, Paul A.W. and Ka-Hon-Hes. White Roots of Peace: The Iroquois Book of Life. Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1994.

American Indian Health Services, 1802–1924

Alexis Kopkowski

Chronology

1802		Smallpox, a contagious disease, reaches epidemic levels for many American Indians. Originating in the central United States, it continued to spread along the Missouri River to the Pacific Northwest. It is estimated that as many as 80 percent of the total population of some tribes was lost to the disease.
1802		Army physicians provide a limited number of smallpox vaccines to a small number of American Indians who are considered to be frontier Indians. These American Indians lived near Army forts where the physicians were located.
1810		Smallpox spreads to the Great Lakes and northern plains.
1819		An appropriation of $10,000 by Congress is made for American Indians living east of the Mississippi River to be taught “the habits and arts of civilization.” Missionaries also perform some very basic nursing and health care to American Indians.
1820–1830		Through a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases known as the “Marshall Trilogy,” the United States’ trust relationship with American Indians is established and solidified legally.
1832		Congress appropriates $12,000 to provide American Indians with smallpox vaccines.
1831		In the latter part of the year, a smallpox outbreak greatly impacts the Pawnee tribes of the United States.
1836		Health services and physicians are provided to both the Ottawa and Chippewa tribes by the federal government.
1837–1838		The smallpox epidemic reaches its height as it continues to decimate the American Indian population, and it once again follows along the Missouri River.
1849		The Department of War is no longer the agency in charge on Indian Affairs. The department that would then oversee Indian matters is the Department of Interior.
1880		An increase in government responsibility and American Indian health care occurs as the federal government then operates four hospitals that employ 77 physicians. The hospital’s sole purpose is to provide health care to American Indians. These hospitals almost exclusively serve American Indian boarding school students. Funding for the hospitals and physicians is made possible through education funds. It is then further emphasized that the health of American Indian students is important to educators and policymakers alike.
1908		The Chief Medical Supervisor position is created and marks the beginning of professional medical supervision of American Indian health.
1911		Congress appropriates $40,000, which is earmarked for American Indian health services through an appropriation act. The appropriation explicitly calls for “the relief of distress and prevention of diseases” for American Indians.
1911		Three health outcomes that negatively impact American Indians are acknowledged. The contagious diseases trachoma and tuberculosis, as well as infant mortality, are all declared to be national health tragedies by the Indian Medical Service.
1912		President William Howard Taft delivers a message to Congress, calling for more funding. He notes that the conditions for American Indians are “very unsatisfactory.” At the time, the death rate for American Indians is more double that of the general U.S. population. Taft also calls for an increase in the salary of physicians who are employed by the government to care for American Indians, as their salary is half of what the majority of government employees make at the time.
1913		Dental services are added to the provision of American Indian health care. Five travelling dentists are employed to visit and deliver dental care to Indian boarding schools and American Indian reservations.
1919		The House Committee on Indian Affairs recommends that the provision of Indian health care be taken out of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and transferred to the United States Public Health Service (USPHS).
1921		Congress passes the Snyder Act (42 Stat. 208) on November 2, 1921. This act continues federal authority over many American Indian services. It is one of the first times that the provision of health care to American Indians by the federal government is made explicit. The act calls for the “relief of distress and conservation of health of Indians.” It is the first authorization for the Indian Health Service (IHS). Adequate funding, healthcare staffing, and training are never achieved, and thus the health outcomes for American Indians during this time period remained poor. This leads to the health outcomes of American Indians to remain poor.
1924		A medical division is established and housed in the Office of Indian Affairs. The new division becomes responsible for the administration of the growing number of federal programs and funds that are appropriated for improving and maintaining the health of American Indians. Overall, the health status of American Indians remains poor as epidemics continue to impact American Indian populations, and tribes look to the division to provide for health care in the form of medicines and physicians on their reservations.

The Development of Health Care for American Indians and Alaskan Natives

The development, deployment, and administration of health care for federally recognized American Indians and Alaskan Natives underwent many different iterations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a common misconception held by the American public that American Indians and Alaska Natives enjoy “free” health care. Healthcare services and provisions provided for the American Indian and Alaskan Native populations by the federal government are essentially by contract fulfillment by the federal government. The provision of health care and services is both a moral and a legal obligation that the United States government must fulfill. Historically, the provision and organization of American Indian health care have been heavily influenced by the federal American Indian policy era of the time.

As found in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution (adopted in 1789), treaties, numerous court cases, executive orders, and legislation, the health care of American Indians and Alaskan Natives has been upheld as a responsibility of the United States government through the acknowledgement of a special government-to-government relationship between two sovereign nations (Rainie, Jorgensen, Cornell, and Arsenault 2015). In essence, the federal Indian Health Service (IHS) is America’s first prepaid health plan, paid by the cession of millions of acres of American Indian land. Many treaties explicitly stated that in exchange for land, services such as education and health care would be provided to the American Indians and Alaskan Natives by the federal government. It must be recognized that American Indians and Alaskan Natives—America’s original peoples—hold a unique position that has been shaped and influenced by their legal, social, and cultural standing. Large populations of American Indians and Alaskan Natives are entitled to services provided by the federal government. These services are available to members of federally recognized tribes, or sovereign Indian nations. Unfortunately, both historically and currently the provision of Indian health care has been largely missing from Congressional and political debate.

Sidebar 1: Timeline of Federal American Indian Policy Eras

1492–1600s: Doctrine of Discovery

The Pope issues a series of papal bulls (laws), which enforce the belief that the European, Christian explorers held dominion and power over any non-Christians and the land they occupied.

1600s–1871: Treaty-Making Era

This era pre-dates the United States and overlaps the reservation- and removal-policy eras because the U.S. government continued to make treaties with tribal nations throughout those eras. A treaty is an official agreement made between sovereigns. The United States can only enter into treaties with other nations. The U.S. Constitution declares that treaties, as well as the Constitution, are the “supreme law of the land.”

1830–1850: Indian-Removal Era

Congress is advised by President Andrew Jackson to remove American Indians who lived on the east coast and in the southeast and northeast of the United States and to relocate them to west of the Mississippi River to allow for the expansion of the United States. In turn, Congress passes the federal Indian Removal Act.

1850–1880s: Reservation Era

The reservation system is created to further relocate American Indians. It is deemed necessary when gold is discovered in many areas of the United States, and the non-American Indian population of the United States continues to increase rapidly.

1887–1930s: Allotment and Assimilation Era

Tribal land holdings are broken up as a way to assimilate American Indians. The goal is to decrease tribal sovereignty, “civilize” the American Indian population, and assimilate American Indians into the mainstream culture.

1930s–1945: Indian-Reorganization Era

Allotment was unsuccessful, and in response the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), a return to American Indian self-governance, is passed.

1945–1961: Termination and Relocation Era

The federal government begins to terminate the trust relationship it has with tribal nations. American Indians are also relocated to many urban areas, including San Francisco, California; Phoenix, Arizona; Chicago, Illinois; and St. Louis, Missouri.

1960s–Present: Indian Self-Determination Era

Following the civil rights era, the U.S. government officially begins to recognize the importance of sovereignty and self-determination. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act and the Indian Child Welfare Act are passed.

Originally, the federal government did not view the provision of health services to American Indians as part of the federal trust responsibility. The earliest episodes of healthcare delivery occurred when it was necessary to protect soldiers from nearby epidemics by inoculating American Indians who lived near the army bases. The Department of War was the first federal agency that was charged with American Indian health, beginning in the 1800s. At the time, this also reflected the nature of the relationship between the federal government and American Indians and Alaskan Natives, which was one of military confinement.

During the 1800s, many of the major health problems that plagued the United States were contagious diseases. Historically, the government was involved minimally in health care. However, as the connection between sanitation and the spread of disease became clearer, the government took on a larger role and interest in the overall prevention of the spread of disease. Following this trend, greater attention was also paid to American Indians and health during this time. As contagious diseases impacted American Indian populations who were living near army posts, army physicians began to administer vaccines (smallpox for the majority) in the hopes of containing the diseases. At this time, limited health care was provided sporadically as a stopgap emergency, and the idea of continued health care and/or prevention was not a policy or a stance that the government was taking.

In 1824, the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA), housed within the Department of War, distributed to American Indian populations the funds received from Congress that were to be used for basic health care and vaccine provisions. The contagious disease smallpox continued to ravage American Indian communities. As the population continued to be impacted in great numbers, Congress finally provided funding for vaccines to be administered in larger quantities. In 1832, the goal of the funding was to “provide the means of extending the benefits of vaccination, as a preventative of smallpox, to the Indian tribes” (Rife and Dellapenna 2009, 2). This appropriation was named the Indian Vaccination Act, and the Secretary of War at the time, William Cass, oversaw the program in its entirety. This congressional funding marked the first time that Congress mandated direct healthcare services be provided to American Indian populations. While these vaccines no doubt made an impact in stopping the spread of the newly introduced, highly contagious disease, it did not end the epidemic, and the American Indian population continued to suffer. “No disease which has been introduced among the tribes, has exercised so fatal an influence upon them as smallpox” (Jones and Jones 2009, 76).

What might appear on the surface to be an altruistic act of the federal government was actually a way for the government to promote and leverage President Jackson’s Indian-removal program. This program called for the removal of tribes from east of the Mississippi River to west of the river. One way in which tribes who resisted moving would be forced to do so was through the withholding of these vaccines (Rife and Dellapenna 2009). It was in 1832 as well that federal treaty obligations for the provision of American Indian health care were first honored. During that year, the federal government promised health care to a small band of Winnebago Indians as contract fulfillment of their ceded land rights. At the end of 1841, contract physicians as well as the U.S. Army had vaccinated somewhere between 38,000 and 55,000 American Indians (Rife and Dellapenna 2009). These numbers, however, only represent a small percentage of the overall American Indian population of the time.

In 1849, the Department of the Interior was created to oversee the nation’s resources. As a result, the health care for American Indians and Alaskan Natives was transferred along with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) from the Department of War to the Department of the Interior. This transfer also coincided with the end of military control over American Indians and Alaskan Natives within the organizational entity of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (Bergman et al. 1999). American Indians were being moved to reservations during this time, often against their will. Moving to the reservation meant that many American Indians then had an increased risk of disease, due to the poor living conditions present on the reservations. The OIA was ill-equipped to manage the health care of reservation-dwelling American Indians, and this did not change during the OIA’s tenure in administering American Indian health care.

During the 1850s, health care, mainly in the form of vaccines, was also provided to a small population of American Indians located in the territories of Washington and Oregon because it was a part of their treaties with the federal government. The acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs was Charles E. Mix in 1858. His job involved responding to the myriad of requests from army officers and Indian agents who requested services at military outposts. OIA contract physicians who were given instruction on-site were charged with vaccinating American Indians as well as treating any American Indians who may have been ill at the time, free of charge.

In 1881, George Bushnell, who was placed in charge of Sioux (Lakota) prisoners of war, noted that the tribal members who were not confined to permanent dwellings were less prone to disease epidemics and illnesses than those who were (Dejong 2010). This introduction of “civilized” housing also led to a tuberculosis epidemic in the Red Lake Chippewa tribe. Traditionally, the Chippewas lived in clean housing and moved frequently. However, with the implementation of federal policy, they were moved to small and dark log houses with poor ventilation and light, which led to the stagnation of the air. These houses became breeding grounds for many contagious diseases (Dejong 2010). In 1910, Congress appropriated funds to create a tuberculosis sanitarium to help the Red Lake tribe, while a similar tuberculosis epidemic also occurred on the Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota at the same time.

The OIA’s policies regarding healthcare delivery reflected the thought and policies of the time. It was thought that assimilation of American Indians and Alaskan Natives was the best policy, and healthcare services were often provided off-reservation. This practice was detrimental to many patients who did not wish to be removed from their community. The OIA built the first modern Indian hospital in 1884. It was located in the Oklahoma territory. In 1885, more hospitals were built for the Menominee and Osage Reservations.

As Indian boarding schools became the new policy, many hospitals were built to serve the students. Boarding schools that were established off-reservation were considered by the federal government to be successful tools of assimilation as American Indian children were educated away from their homes and families and could then be “civilized” as their Native traditions were not allowed to be followed in the schools. The Indian school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, had many of its students die or become infected from tuberculosis during its first year of operation. General Richard Pratt, who was head of the school, went on to request “healthy children” for subsequent years. Carlisle Indian School Hospital was then established. The hospital provided health care to the boarding school students and also served as a training facility for American Indian women to become nurses (Dejong 2010).

There was also tension between American Indians who practiced traditional healing. Many tribal members relied upon these healing practices as cures for illnesses. Western medicine and the physicians of the time saw no benefit to such practices. It is not surprising then that when Western medicine was introduced to American Indian communities, it was often met with fear and misunderstanding. The tribal community did not trust many physicians who were charged with providing care to American Indians, and it would often be difficult to provide care. These fractures were exacerbated by the general distrust that remained at the time between American Indian populations and the federal government. A distrust that grew from the shared experience of American Indians who saw firsthand the negative effects of treaties being broken or dishonored, in addition to numerous failed governmental policies as well as forced removal.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the cultural gap continued and at times widened between American Indian healing culture and medicine and Western medicine. This gap was so wide that there was a ban on traditional healers at most federal hospitals and clinics that were established on reservations. The distrust of Native healing practices was also prevalent as American Indian physicians were largely educated in white-dominated medical schools where traditional healing and knowledge were not taught or practiced. Western doctors and scholars of the time wrote many disparaging articles that dismissed traditional healing and healers, known as “medicine men,” as quackery and quacks. It was also quite ironic that during this period, many medicines or cures marketed as “Indian cures” were popular among the general public.

Around two dozen treaties were ratified between American Indian tribes and the federal government that explicitly called for health services in exchange for land before the treaty-making period ended with the passage of the Indian Appropriation Act of 1871. While progress was made with the vaccine program, the congressional action regarding preventative medicine ceased until the latter part of the nineteenth century. The healthcare policy of the nation was moving toward a more institutionalized approach during this time as well, and American Indian healthcare services, and in particular, policy, mirrored the national example as large hospitals began to open, and the standards of practice for medical care were also established and enforced (Rife and Dellapenna 2009).

These calls for more resources and funding by many in Indian boarding schools and the OIA went largely unanswered as Congress was preoccupied at the time, breaking up the reservations in order to further advance the assimilation policies of the government. In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act, which divided up the reservation and allotted land to American Indians with the goal of the Indians becoming successful farmers. In 1892, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Thomas J. Morgan (1889–1893), called upon Congress, “in the name of humanity,” to provide funding for new hospitals at every agency and boarding school because their absence was “a great evil, which in [his] view amount[ed] to a national disgrace” (Rife and Dellapenna 2009, 5).

In 1908, a national tuberculosis expert, Dr. Joseph Murphy, was appointed to organize and head the newly created Indian Medical Service. This was not the first (and would not be the last) attempt to reorganize health services and delivery to American Indians and Alaskan Natives, though it did mark the beginning of permanent medical services for Indian country being established (Dejong 2010). These services continued to be administered by the Indian Service (which became the modern Bureau of Indian Affairs). Meanwhile, the OIA faced a lack of funding and an overall lack of resources and medicine, which made it difficult to improve the health of American Indians and Alaskan Natives (Dejong 2010). In 1912, the acting chief medical supervisor of the OIA, Robert G. Valentine (1909–1913), requested that Congress provide an additional $253,350 for the purpose of “increasing the efficiency of the medical and sanitary work among the Indians” (Rife and Dellapenna 2009, 6).

Valentine went on to cite studies that confirmed the terrible state of health for American Indians and Alaskan Natives as well as the large deficit of resources the OIA and its physicians were facing. Congress was not convinced of this study. In August of the same year, the United States Public health Service (USPHS) was commissioned to “conduct a thorough examination as to the prevalence of tuberculosis, trachoma, smallpox, and other infectious and contagious disease among the Indians of the United States” (Rife and Dellapenna 2009, 6). The survey was exhaustive, and 39,231 Indians were examined (Rife and Dellapenna 2009). It confirmed the previous OIA findings, and Congress responded with minimal annual increases in OIA funding.

The Spanish Influenza outbreaks of 1918 and 1919 were especially detrimental to American Indian and Alaskan Native populations. The USPHS sent ten of its Commission Corps officers to help stop the outbreak, and their interventions were successful. The House Committee on Indian Affairs then argued that the USPHS should take control over Indian health. The OIA and the U.S. Surgeon General objected to this transfer. In November of 1921, Congress responded to the needs of Indian health care with the passage of the Snyder Act (42 Stat. 208). The Snyder Act was a huge step toward meeting the needs of American Indian and Alaskan Native health care, and although the legislation allowed for the permanent appropriation of Indian health care, no standards were provided in order for progress toward healthcare services and administration to be measured. New hospitals were eventually built, and the number of hospitals expanded from four in 1877 to 73 in 1922. In 1922, there were a total of 200 physicians and 100 “field matrons,” whose purpose was to raise living standards in Indian homes, provide hygiene and sanitation instruction, and provide emergency nursing services (Rife and Dellapenna 2009).

Sidebar 2: The United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (USPHS)

The United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps is one of the seven branches of uniformed service in the United States. The USPHS was formed in 1798, after Congress created a Marine Hospital fund, which was created for the relief and care of seamen. The USPHS was officially recognized by Congress in 1889. The USPHS Corps officers’ duties were expanded to the prevention of infection diseases. The USPHS was originally open only to physicians, but it has now expanded to many other health professionals encompassing many disciplines. The primary mission of the Corps today is to protect and improve the health and safety of the nation. In order to fulfill this duty, USPHS officers also are deployed overseas to improve and maintain the health of American troops, and they also help to administer health care during natural disasters.

OIA then launched a nationwide anti-trachoma campaign. Although it was nationwide it was specifically targeted toward the American Indian and Alaskan Native populations. However, the campaign was ill-fated as risky medical procedures that involved the scraping of inner eyelids, or at times a procedure that involved the cutting of eyelid tissue, led to injury, infection, and permanent blindness and disability (Rife and Dellapenna 2009).

The OIA strived to become better organized in response to answering the American Indian and Alaskan Native health deficits of the time. Before that point, the OIA had been appointing individuals with little to no experience to be the administrators of its programs. This began with the army sergeants being charged with Indian health care in the 1800s, a pattern that continued into the twentieth century. The large majority of entry-level administrators of the time were American Indians and Alaskan Natives with little to no experience or education, who had risen up in the ranks of the OIA, with some even becoming department heads. These department heads, however, lacked the benefit of experience and training that was necessary to manage such a large program. Thus, when requests from physicians for more (or even adequate) supplies and medicine were made, these requests went up the chain of command, and ultimately untrained administrators who were more concerned with budgets than patients would decline to fulfill many of these requests (Rife and Dellapenna 2009).

In 1924, the secretary of the interior, Hubert Work (1923–1928), called for the appointment of a USPHS officer to serve as the chief medical supervisor as part of the newly formed division of Indian Health (established 1924). The chief medical supervisor’s position then had increased access to the commissioner. While this mandate seemed beneficial in theory, in practice the medical supervisor could only serve in an advisory role. The commissioner could then ignore the advice of the supervisor because the position was not legally bound to heed the supervisor’s advice (Rife and Dellapenna 2009).

Biographies

Dr. Carlos Montezuma (1865–1923)

Dr. Carlos Montezuma, or Wassaja, was a Yavapai (Mohave-Apache) physician, teacher, and author. He was born in Arizona in 1865. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1884. He attended medical school at Northwestern University’s Chicago Medical College in 1889 and received his medical license during the same year. Dr. Montezuma was not only the first American Indian to graduate from a university, but he was also the first American Indian to graduate from a medical school in the United States. Upon graduation, he became an Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) physician, and he served in mainly western posts. He also worked in the Carlisle Indian Hospital, located in Pennsylvania. During this time, he also taught courses in medicine in Chicago. He then began a private practice in 1896.

Among Dr. Montezuma’s many notable achievements, he was a founding member of the Society of American Indians (SAI), which was the first organization founded by American Indians to advance the American Indian population. He joined the Yavapai in their struggle to establish Fort McDowell Yavapai Reservation in late 1903. In 1905, he received national attention as he openly opposed the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) as well as the government policies regarding American Indians. He opposed assimilation policies and once called for the complete abolition of OIA in the newspaper Wassaja (his name, which is the Yavapai word for “signal”), which he also published and authored from 1916 to 1923. The newspaper continued to call for an end to the BIA and the OIA, and also served as a platform to promote the civil rights and advancement for American Indian peoples. Dr. Carlos Montezuma passed away on January 31, 1923, from tuberculosis. He was buried at the Fort McDowell Indian cemetery in Arizona. In the 1970s, there was a rediscovery of his legacy and his work. In 1996, the Fort McDowell Indian Reservation dedicated its new healthcare facility to Dr. Montezuma. Its official name is the Dr. Carlos Montezuma, Wassaja Memorial Center. The University of Illinois announced in 2015 that its newest residence hall would also be named in his honor.

Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman (1858–1939)

Dr. Eastman (Santee Sioux) or Ohiyesa was a pioneering American Indian physician and author. He was born on a reservation near Redwood Fall, Minnesota, in 1858 and because of the “Sioux Uprising of 1862,” he was separated from his father, brothers, and sister. He then lived the traditional nomadic life with his grandmother and uncle. He was first educated in a day school, where he was very unhappy and so badly did not want to have a traditional haircut that he attempted to run away. He received a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in 1886 and went on to earn his medical degree from Boston University in 1889. While studying back east, he made many connections with prominent and influential individuals and used those to secure his first position as a physician on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Dr. Eastman soon began working as a physician for the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA). He worked on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota in this capacity and then served the Crow Creek Reservation of South Dakota as a government-employed physician. He treated many of the survivors of the Wounded Knee massacre near Pine Ridge in January 1890. In 1893, he left his position at the PIA and he became politically active. He then gained widespread recognition for his work as an author, a poet, and an activist and reformer. In 1897, he served in Washington, D.C., as the legal representative and lobbyist for the Sioux tribe. During the 1920s, he served as a reservation inspector for the federal government. Like Dr. Montezuma, he also called for the end of the OIA. He was a cofounder of the Boy Scouts of America, and he succeeded his colleague, Dr. Montezuma, as president of the Society of American Indians (SAI). In his later years, he lived in what was described as a “primitive cabin” on the north shore of Lake Huron. He passed away on January 8, 1939, at the age of 80.

Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte (1865–1915)

Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte was the first American Indian woman physician. She was also the first Native, female physician to be employed by the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA). She was born Susan LaFlesche in 1865 on the Omaha Reservation in Omaha, Nebraska, to Chief Joseph La Flesche (Iron Eyes) and his wife, Mary (One Woman). Her desire to work in medicine began when as a young child she saw an older Native woman die because the local doctor, who was white, refused to give them care. She graduated from in 1889 from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, which she had attended on an OIA scholarship, and the Connecticut Indian Association, which made her the first person male or female to receive federal funding for her education. After only two years in a three-year program, she graduated at the top of her class. She completed an internship in Philadelphia and then returned home to Omaha to serve her tribe as an OIA physician. She helped to serve 1,200 Omaha Indian boarding school students. From 1891 to 1893, she served as a “medical missionary” for her tribe. For this position, she would often have to travel across the reservation in Omaha, where she would make house calls, while also seeing patients in her office.

In 1894, Dr. La Flesche entered private practice and married. In 1906, she led a group to Washington, D.C., where they called for the banning of alcohol on Indian reservations. While raising two sons, she saw and treated both Native and non-Native patients. She opened a hospital in the reservation town of Walthill, Nebraska, in 1913. Her entire career was dedicated to trying to improve the health conditions of the Omaha tribe. She corresponded frequently with the commissioner of Indian affairs to try to achieve that goal. She was very well received by many in her home state of Nebraska, and there were many newspaper articles promoting and describing her work. She passed away on September 18, 1915. The hospital she founded now houses a museum that is dedicated to both her life and the Nebraska Omaha and Winnebago tribal peoples.

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

Death from Smallpox

Fort Clark’s superintendent, Francis Chardon, recorded the death and despair of the Mandan Indians from smallpox in his journal in 1837. The following is an excerpt from his journal.

Consummation of the Government Policy of Removal. Prevalence of the Small-Pox amongst the Western Indians. 1837. M. Van Buren, President. The Summer of 1837 is rendered memorable in Indian history by the visitation of one of those calamities which have so much reduced the Indian population, viz: the ravages of the small-pox, which then swept through the Missouri valley. The disease was introduced among them from a steamboat, which ascended that river from the city of St. Louis, in July. On the 15th of that month the disease made its appearance in the village of the Mandans, great numbers of whom fell victims to it. Thence it spread rapidly over the entire country, and tribe after tribe was decimated by it.

The Mandans, among whom the pestilence commenced, are stated to have been reduced from an estimated population of 1600 souls to 125. The Minnetarees, or Gros Ventres, out of a population of 1000 persons, lost one-half their number. The Arickarees, numbering 3000, were reduced by this pestilence to 1500. The Crows, or Upsarokas, lost great numbers, and the survivors saved themselves by a rapid retreat to the mountains. The Assinaboins, a people roughly estimated at 9000, were swept off by hundreds. The Crees, living in the same region, and numbering 3000 souls, suffered in an equal degree. The disease appears at length to have exhausted its virulence on the Blackfeet and Bloods, a numerous and powerful genus of tribes. One thousand lodges are reported to have been desolated, and left standing, without a solitary inhabitant, on the tracts and prairies, once the residence of this proud and warlike race: a sad memorial of this dreadful scourge.

Visitors to these regions, during the year when this dread pestilence was raging there, represent the Indian country as being truly desolate. Women and children were met wandering about without protection, or seated near the graves of their husbands and parents, uttering pitiable lamentations. Howling dogs roamed about, seeking their masters. It is reported that some of the Indians, after recovering from the disease, when they saw how it had disfigured their faces, threw themselves into the Missouri river.

Language, however forcible, fails to give an idea of the reality. On every side was desolation, and wrecks of mortality everywhere presented themselves to the view. Prominent among these was the tenantless wigwam: no longer did the curling smoke from its roof betoken a welcome, and its closed door gave sad evidence of the silence and darkness that reigned within. The prairie wolf sent up its dismal howl, as it preyed upon the decaying carcasses; and the lonely traveler, as he rapidly passed through this scene of desolation and death, was frequently startled by the croaking of the raven, or the screams of the vulture and falcon, from trees or crags commanding a view of these funereal scenes.

Source: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, History of the Indian Tribes of the United States: Their Present Condition and Prospects, and a Sketch of Their Ancient Status, 1857. Report of smallpox in 1837, pp. 486–87.

Health of American Indian Children in Boarding Schools

During the boarding school era, the health needs of the students became a concern, especially as trachoma and tuberculosis ravaged the boarding schools. This report details the health status of one such boarding school in New Mexico.

I have the honor to submit annual report for the fiscal year 1909 on affairs of the Albuquerque Boarding School, nine day schools and the pueblos under my jurisdiction. The school is two miles north of the post office and outside of the city limits. The enrollment for the year was 359 and the average attendance 326. There were about two boys to one girl enrolled. The pupils came from the various pueblos under the control of the Albuquerque school, from the reservation and non-reservation Navahos, three from the Apache reservation and one Miami from Oklahoma.

The health of the pupils has been good. There were no deaths during the year. Trachoma and other eye troubles have been treated by the school physician with excellent results; 52 cases were satisfactorily operated on for trachoma. During the months of December, January and February the school was under strict quarantine against city and surrounding country owing to the the [sic] prevalence of scarlet fever in the city and country. The disease did not reach the school, but one case developed in the pueblo of Isleta. By placing this party and others who had been exposed under strict quarantine, the spreading of the disease was prevented at that place.

Source: United States. Office of Indian Affairs. Annual report of the commissioner of Indian affairs. Reports Concerning Indians in New Mexico. Albuquerque, N. Mex., August 12, 1909, p. 1.

The Congressional Authorization of Health Care for American Indians

The Snyder Act was signed into law in 1921, and for the first time, the basic authorization of health care to American Indians was delegated by Congress. It serves as the basis for broad American Indian healthcare policy. The full text of the act appears below.

Public Law 67–85 The Snyder Act 25 U.S.C. 13. November 2nd, 1921 Section 13.

Expenditure of appropriations by The Bureau of Indian Affairs, under the supervision of the Secretary of the Interior, shall direct, supervise, and expend such moneys as Congress may from time to time appropriate, for the benefit, care, and assistance of the Indians throughout the United States for the following purposes:

General support and civilization, including education. For relief of distress and conservation of health. For industrial assistance and advancement and general administration of Indian property. For extension, improvement, operation, and maintenance of existing Indian irrigation systems and for development of water supplies. For the enlargement, extension, improvement, and repair of the buildings and grounds of existing plants and projects. For the employment of inspectors, supervisors, superintendents, clerks, field matrons, farmers, physicians, Indian police, Indian judges, and other employees. For the suppression of traffic in intoxicating liquor and deleterious drugs. For the purchase of horse-drawn and motor-propelled passenger-carrying vehicles for official use. And for general and incidental expenses in connection with the administration of Indian affairs.

Notwithstanding any other provision of this section or any other law, postsecondary schools administered by the Secretary of the Interior for Indians, and which meet the definition of an ‘‘institution of higher education’’ under section 101 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 1001), shall be eligible to participate in and receive appropriated funds under any program authorized by the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 1001 et seq.) or any other applicable program for the benefit of institutions of higher education, community colleges, or postsecondary educational institutions.

Source: Indian Health Service. Public Law 67–85 The Snyder Act 25 U.S.C. 13. November 2nd, 1921 Section 13. https://www.ihs.gov/chs/documents/SNYDER_ACT.pdf

Further Reading

Bergman, Abraham B., David C. Grossman, Angela M. Erdrich, John G. Todd, and Ralph Forquera. “A political history of the Indian Health Service.” Milbank Quarterly 77, no. 4: 571–604, 1999.

Crawford, Dirom Grey. A History of the Indian Medical Service 1600–1913. Vol. 2. Thacker, 1914.

Dejong, David N. ‘If You Knew the Conditions’: A Chronicle of the Indian Medical Service and American Indian Health Care, 1908–1955. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.

“Indian Health Manual. Chapter 3-Indian Health Program.” Indian Health Service. Accessed October 20, 2015, https://www.ihs.gov/IHM/index.cfm?module=dsp_ihm_pc_p1c3

Jones, David S. and David S. Jones. Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality Since 1600. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Rainie, Stephanie, Miriam Jorgensen, Stephen Cornell, and Jaime Arsenault. “The changing landscape of health care provision to American Indian nations.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39, no. 1: 1–24, 2015.

Rife, James P. and Alan J. Dellapenna Jr. Caring and Curing: A History of the Indian Health Service. PHS COF, 2009.

Ross, Jeffrey Ian, ed. American Indians at Risk. ABC-CLIO, 2013.

Trahant, Mark N. “The Indian health paradox: Honoring a treaty right or raising real dollars?” Accessed October 20, 2015, http://nativecases.evergreen.edu/docs/trahant_indian_health%2012511.pdf

Seminole Wars, 1816–1858

Rhianna C. Rogers

Chronology

1513		By the time the Spaniards “discover” Florida (1513), perhaps, 200,000 ancestors of Seminoles live there in hundreds of tribes, all members of the Maskókî linguistic family.
1763–1783		With the help of the British government, which controls the Florida territory during this period, Creeks are able to establish a short-lived state known as the State of Muskogee.
1783–late 1780s		Colonial power in Florida goes back to the Spanish in 1783, and starting in the late 1780s, the United States began a systematic process of Indian removal.
1814–1818		The first Seminole War: General Andrew Jackson invades Florida to settle the “Indian problem,” and over several years, he burns Indian towns and captures Africans, whom the Seminoles had given refuge.
1832		The attempted removal process during the Second Seminole War, created by what some believe is the coerced signing of the Treaty of Payne’s Landing by a delegation of Seminole chiefs in 1832, leads to one of the bloodiest and expensive wars in U.S. history.
1835–1842		The Second Seminole War (1835–42) results from the United States government’s efforts to remove the Seminole Indians from Florida entirely and relocate them to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River, in present-day Oklahoma. The government spends more than $40 million in the forced removal of slightly more than 3,000 Maskókî men, women, and children from Florida to Oklahoma.
1837		Fought on Christmas Day, the Battle of Lake Okeechobee is one of the few large-scale confrontations between the U.S. Army and the Seminole Indians. Twenty-six of General (later President) Zachary Taylor’s men are killed, and 112 wounded, some mortally. Seminoles inflict more casualties than they receive, with 11 killed and 14 wounded.
1856–1858		The Third Seminole War is fought, with American military forces, again try to remove the remaining 5,000–6,000 Seminoles still occupying Florida. This war was a series of skirmishes and battles between Americans and Seminoles, that resulted in the removal of all but a few hundred Seminoles.
1861–1865		Seminole tribes in Florida are able to return to traditional hunting and trading practices before their struggles with the Americans. After the Civil War, the Seminoles experience better economic conditions, with America’s increasing demand for otter, deer, raccoon, and alligator hides.

Introduction

The nineteenth century was an age of rampant European colonial and imperialistic expansion in North America. The technological superiority of firearms, employed by Spanish, British and, eventually, American military forces, played an important role in the domination of most indigenous peoples. However, in what would eventually be the southeastern United States, certain Native groups were able to successfully resist repetitive European and American invasions and retain power and place in the region. The events examined here—commonly referred to as the First, Second, and Third Seminole Wars (1816–1858)—provide a few comparative examples of Seminole resistance to complete European and American cultural subjugation. Through the use of Native guerilla war tactics, acculturated political and military strategies, and the adoption of European weaponry, the Seminoles were able to redress the balance of power on the battlefield and ward off European and American expansionism into parts of their territory.

A Seminole village in the Everglades of Florida. The Seminole (a generic term used to describe several Florida Indian tribes) were a branch of the greater Creek confederation and one of the so-called Five Civilized Nations of the Old South. During the War of 1812, the Seminole tried to stay neutral, but raids against them during the Patriot War caused them to view the United States as their enemy and ally with the British. After the War of 1812 officially ended, the Seminole remained at war with the United States due to the U.S. failure to comply with Treaty of Ghent provisions to return Indian lands taken during the war. (North Wind Picture Archives)

Who Are the Seminoles?

Although today the Seminoles consider themselves a distinct tribe and are recognized as such by the U.S. government, scholarship indicates that they are ancestrally descendants of the Lower Creek Indians (Mahon [1967] 1991, 3) and/or the Maskókî linguistic families. After European disease and colonization decimated Native populations in the Americas, many Southeastern Native groups began to relocate to different areas. As Seminole War scholar John Mahon explains, “the repopulation of Florida between the 1700s and 1800s was both a by-product of the struggle for empire among the European colonizing powers and an aspect of Creek colonization” ([1967] 1991, 3). Additionally, the modern Seminoles believe that they are also descendants of a complex combination of tribal peoples living within the Southeast region of what is now the United States:

The unique confluence of culture and circumstance which would become today’s Seminole Tribe of Florida can be traced back at least 12,000 years.… There is ample evidence that the Seminole people of today are cultural descendants of Native Americans who were living in the southeastern United States at least that long ago. By the time the Spaniards “discovered” Florida (1513), this large territory held, perhaps, 200,000 Seminole ancestors in hundreds of tribes, all members of the Maskókî linguistic family. (STOF 2015b)

As this passage suggests, the Seminoles in this region absorbed other local tribes, migrating Indians, as well as runaway slaves, to create a united people organized under a loose set of cultural laws, religious practices, and customs. Their will to survive and not be conquered by outsiders is one of the principle reasons for their resistance during the Seminoles’ warring period.

Factors That Led to the Seminole Wars

Although the Seminoles had been loosely organized by clans and tribal groups within the region for many years, the first systematic attempt to unite a large portion of this group happened under William Augustus Bowles, a British officer who lived and married within the Creeks, in the late 1780s to 1790s. The Lower Creeks, envisioning that they might one day combine forces with other tribes in the region to expel the white settlers in the southeastern portion of the European/American colonies, sought to settle Florida with as many Indians as possible (Mahon [1967] 1991, 3–4). With the help of the British government, which controlled the Florida territory from 1763 to 1783, Bowles and the Creeks were able to establish a short-lived state known as the State of Muskogee (Din 2012, 34). Although Bowles’s efforts were initially successful, the Muskogee state eventually fell as trust between the Creeks and British waned, and colonial power in Florida was transferred back to the Spanish from 1783 to 1821 (Mahon [1967] 1991, 8).

Starting in the late 1780s, the United States began a systematic process of Indian removal and forced assimilation of Native Peoples in order to further American expansion west and south. As such, the Seminoles were thrust into the midst of a new form of removal and conquest, one that was waged in political settings as well as on the battlefield. As a result, the Seminoles realized that their only recourse was to take up arms and pre-emptively prepare for the foreseeable militaristic conflicts forthcoming by the American colonists. These overall actions ultimately led to the Seminole Wars (1818–1858).

The Seminole War period is viewed as one of the longest, deadliest, and most expensive attempts by the U.S. government to remove an Indian culture from an occupied region. As will be seen in the sections below, the Seminoles showed that persistence, successful guerilla war tactics, and the will to fight for their lands were effective ways to ensure their culture’s survival and avoid complete removal from Florida (Weisman 1999, 59–61).

As one would assume, no war starts at the first day of battle. Arguably, the issues that led to the Seminole Wars were very much influenced by the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, and American military conflicts of 1813 and 1814, known as the Creek War. This conflict began as a civil war between different factions of the Upper Creeks, whose italwas, or towns, were located along the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers and in the vicinity of the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers in what is now Alabama. The war pitted a faction of Creeks known as the Red Sticks, a group resistant to European expansion and the loss of Native cultural autonomy, against Creeks who supported the newly formed Creek National Council, whom the Red Sticks perceived as allowing for American expansionism and the further decimation of Creek lands and wealth. Adding fuel to already fiery relations between Europeans in the region, the Creek War of 1813–1814 broke out shortly after the War of 1812, which increased American fears that Southern Native tribes would side with the British and help them win the war. As a result, Americans were quick to take up arms against the Red Stick Creeks and, with the help of loyalist Native groups, the Choctaws and Cherokees, the American forces successfully defeated the Creek uprising. Those Red Sticks who survived the war were forced to flee to Spanish Florida, which, as described before, was a heavily contested zone between the United States, Great Britain, and Spain. As described by the STOF:

When the Maskókî tribes in Alabama, whom English speakers erroneously called “Creeks,” rose up against the white settlers in the Creek War of 1813–14, the brutal repression and disastrous treaty forced upon them by General Andrew Jackson sent thousands of the most determined warriors and their families migrating southward to take refuge in Spanish Florida.… But Spain could not afford enough soldiers to patrol the long frontiers of Florida.… English war ships anchored off its Gulf coast and English agents encouraged the Seminoles, Creeks, and Mikisúkî to resist US settlement openly. (2015a)

The rising militaristic conflicts in this region were further perpetuated by the American opposition to the Seminole practice of granting runaway slaves asylum in territorial Florida. The Seminoles harbored a large number of African slaves who had escaped from plantations in the southern American colonies. These people, although considered sometimes to be property by the Seminoles, lived in their own villages, raised their own crops, and occasionally married into the Seminole clans. Moreover, they were well armed and allied themselves with the Indians to resist white incursion, frequently functioning as interpreters and mediators with the Americans and Europeans. The presence of large numbers of free slaves so near America’s southern border led to continuing conflict with white settlers in Georgia and planted more seeds for American resentment of the Seminole peoples.

The First Seminole War (ca. 1814–1819)

Following a clash in which several American soldiers and their families were killed, a punitive expedition under General Andrew Jackson, comprising regular army and volunteer units plus friendly Creek Indians, presumably those belong to the National Council, invaded Florida in 1816. As described by the STOF:

When the military and political opportunist, General Andrew Jackson, brazenly marched across Florida’s international boundaries to settle the “Indian problem,” he created an international furor. Over a period of several tumultuous years, he burned Indian towns, captured Africans, and hanged one Maskókî medicine man, Francis, as well as two Englishmen whom he suspected of inciting the Indians. (STOF 2015a)

This series of events, which occurred between 1814 and 1818, formed what is known as the First Seminole War.

Seminole chiefs are captured in Florida in 1816 by order of Major General Andrew Jackson. The First Seminole War began in 1816 when U.S. troops pursued enslaved African Americans who had run away to reside with the tribe. (North Wind Picture Archives)

The above propaganda piece, created in 1836, was one of many images created to during the Seminole warring period to further propagate American outrage against the Seminoles and their black compatriots. It was a very effective tactic, and at the culmination of the First Seminole War, the Americans destroyed many Seminole and Seminole Negro towns and temporarily seized the Spanish headquarters in Pensacola; however, the main body of Seminoles and their allies remained unscathed. Eventually Spain, realizing that it could not defend its interest in the region, was forced to cede Florida to the United States in 1821. This cession, along with the Treaty of Moultrie Creek in 1823, required the remaining Seminoles to leave northern Florida and move further south onto a reservation in central Florida.

The Second Seminole War (1835–1842)

The protracted struggle that historians call the Second Seminole War (1835–42) resulted from the U.S. government’s efforts to remove the Seminole Indians from Florida entirely and relocate them to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River, in present-day Oklahoma. Jackson, an ardent nationalist and southern slave owner, wanted to expand and secure the nation’s southwestern frontier as well as open the area for settlement and cotton development. The so-called Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles—were offered extended treaties that promised to pay for their holdings in the Southeast and provided land for tribes in the new Oklahoma Indian Territory. The Florida territorial legislature, as well as whites in southern states, wanted the Seminoles removed, bringing an end to the safe haven provided for escaped slaves and their descendants. The Seminoles, conversely, were overwhelmingly disinterested in leaving Florida. The seven-year conflict that ensued consisted of guerrilla military tactics in which the outnumbered and outgunned Seminoles struck the American military from concealment, inflicted heavy casualties, and then faded away into the vastness of the Florida wilderness. The propaganda associated with American military efforts in this war was prolific, as indicated by the image below.

Sidebar 1: The Role of the Black Seminole

At the end of the Revolutionary War period (in 1776), southern colonists were dependent on the use of slaves to produce agricultural goods (Trevelyan 1964, 540–44). Due to the continued mistreatment of slave populations in the South and the 1807 act to prohibit the importation of slaves to the US, starting in the post-Revolutionary era, many slaves began to escape their Southern oppressors by running to Spanish Florida, near the colony of St. Augustine. While there, slaves were adopted into Native culture by the Seminole peoples (Guinn 2002, 11). Seminole Negros (as they called themselves) created their own villages, adopted Seminole customs, and were given the ability to grow their own crops and dictate their own lives, futures, culture, and language (Ibid., 11–15).

The creation of the United States and the ratification of Florida’s statehood were the beginning of the end for both the Seminoles and the Seminole Negros. At the end of the Second Seminole War in 1842, and after a long resistance by both the Seminoles and the Seminole Negros, many of the Indian people, including the Black Seminoles, were forced to vacate their lands and move to Oklahoma along a path historians call the “Trail of Tears” (Guinn 2002, 4–7). Encountering miserable treatment upon reaching the Oklahoma territory, many of the Black Seminoles left and chose to escape through Texas into Mexico; many of the Black Seminoles lived in Mexico until the American Civil War in the 1860s. After the Civil War period, many Black Seminoles came back to America as a result of the U.S. government’s promise of lands in exchange for scouting the territories in and around Texas for hostile Indian groups (Ibid., 7–10). Although many Black Seminole scouts received high military medals of honor, the U.S. government failed to follow through with its promise of lands and eventually eliminated the Black Seminole scout troops in 1914. Today, descendants of the Black Seminoles can be found throughout the Southwest, Mexico, Florida, the Caribbean, and Texas.

The attempted removal process during the Second Seminole War, created by what some believe was the coerced signing of the Treaty of Payne’s Landing by a delegation of Seminole chiefs in 1832, led to one of the bloodiest and expensive wars in U.S. history. As described by the STOF, “the US government committed almost $40,000,000 to the forced removal of slightly more than 3,000 Maskókî men, women, and children from Florida to Oklahoma. This was the only Indian war in US history in which not only the US army but also the US navy and marine corps participated” (STOF 2015a).

The Third Seminole War (1855–1858)

After the unsuccessful attempt to remove all Natives in the Second Seminole War, American military forces, once again, attempted to dislodge the remaining 5,000–6,000 Seminoles still occupying Florida. This short-lived war, typically referred to as the Third Seminole War (1856–1858) or Billy Bowlegs’ War, consisted of a series of skirmishes and battles between Americans and Seminoles, which culminated in the removal of all but a few hundred Seminoles. This war began when American surveyors, led by Colonel William S. Harney, entered into Billy Bowlegs’ camp and destroyed his crops. Bowlegs and his followers, once again, employed the guerilla tactics that made them successful in the Second Seminole War against these U.S. military insurgents. However, the Seminoles would not win this war. At the end of 1858, only a handful of Seminoles remained free as Billy Bowlegs and his warriors surrendered to the United States and agreed to leave Florida for Oklahoma. The remainder, two organized bands and some Seminole families, stayed behind in remote parts of the Everglades and the Big Cyprus swamp areas, never to be conquered. These groups make up what remains as the STOF today.

The Aftermath (1858 and beyond)

At the end of the Third Seminole War in 1858, Seminole people were no longer extensively being hunted and killed by whites (West 1998, 4). With their newfound sense of security, Seminole tribes in Florida were able to return to traditional hunting and trading practices they were once accustomed to prior to their struggles with the Americans. After the Civil War (1861–1865), the Seminoles experienced an economic surge with America’s increasing demand for otter, deer, raccoon, and alligator hides (MacCauley [1884] 2000, 510–13, 523–24). As Buffalo Tiger and Harry Kersey state, “By the late 1870s Seminole men began an intensive commerce … these commodities were [in turn viewed as] very valuable” (2002, 10). Although the Seminole economy expanded for a short time, within a few years the commercial uses for furs decreased as it became illegal to hunt for them (Weisman 1999, 123–27). This led to a reduced income and financial stability for Seminoles.

Sidebar 2: The Battle of Lake Okeechobee (Second Seminole War)

A brief history of one of the major battles undertaken during the Second Seminole War, the Battle of Lake Okeechobee, illustrates the intense conflict between the Seminoles and the U.S. military. Fought on Christmas Day in 1837, the Battle of Lake Okeechobee was one of the few large-scale confrontations between the U.S. Army and the Seminole Indians during that war. Col. Zachary Taylor, later to become president of the United States, led a force of over 800 army regulars and Missouri Volunteers, plus some 30 Delaware and Shawnee Indian scouts, against approximately 350 Seminole warriors and their freemen/ex-slave allies.

The Seminoles had selected their defensive position well. It was a hardwood hammock (or “tree island”) with Lake Okeechobee to the rear (Mahon [1967] 1991, 227). A saw grass swamp fronted the hammock, and American troops had to advance in water that was waist-deep in places. The Indians had cleared saw grass and brush to provide a clear field of fire, and notched trees to steady their rifles. Taylor’s plan of battle called for a frontal assault on the Indian position with the Missouri Volunteers in the vanguard. They were to make initial contact, then fall back to support the regular infantry units that would press the assault.

The difficult terrain, a ferocious Indian resistance, and the disruption of command soon turned the battlefield into chaos (Kersey and Peterson 1997). The Missourians and regular units suffered extraordinary casualties, but they ultimately dislodged the Indians from the hammock. Altogether, 26 of Taylor’s men were killed outright, and 112 wounded, some mortally. As of the time, it was the second greatest loss of life suffered by United States forces in a single engagement of the war, surpassed only by the Dade Massacre of 1835, in which over 120 officers and men died. The withdrawing Seminoles inflicted more casualties than they received, suffering only 11 killed and 14 wounded (Mahon [1967] 1991, 228).

The continued meddling of the American government in Seminole affairs, which began with the draining of the Everglades in the 1880s by Hamilton Disston and the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund, forced the Seminoles to find other means to provide money to preserve their livelihood as well as adapt to their changing environment (Tebeau 1971, 278, 156–58). Starting in the 1890s, the U.S. government attempted to “help” the Seminoles by providing additional fee and trust lands for sedentary living, otherwise known as “reservations”; prior to this time, the Seminole Indians were semi-nomadic peoples, migrating to summer and winter villages with the change in seasons, wildlife, and vegetation. Although some Seminoles chose to move toward the reservation lands, establishing permanent residence in the Miami, Big Cypress, and Lake Okeechobee areas, the Mikasuki tribal groups choose not to live on the land grants, partially due to their contempt for the U.S. government. After the completion of the Seminole Wars in 1858 and the devastation of disease and death, the Mikasuki people made up two-thirds of the remaining 300 Seminoles living in Florida (Kersey and Tiger, 8–10). As a response, the U.S. government assigned all land grants and fee lands (reservations) to the Seminoles, intentionally excluding the Mikasuki. As Edwin C. McRenyolds stated, “Seminole [land grants] only extended to Seminole people … the citizens of the Mikasuki Nation were not deemed as an independent tribe, therefore no land grants would be given to them separately and they must share the lands granted to the Seminoles” (1957, 324–27). Infuriated by the denial of lands and their own tribal acknowledgment, the Mikasuki people became even more anti-American and ignored the federal government’s many attempts to involve itself in Seminole and Mikasuki affairs. As a result, the Mikasuki people were thrown into a period of turmoil, as they began efforts to establish themselves as a separate Seminole nation in order to provide monetary means to insure their survival and cultural preservation.

Despite these continued struggles, the Seminoles and, eventually, the Mikasuki found tourism as another marketable commodity to ensure their cultures’ survival. As a means to create alternative methods to acquire money and land in order to establish themselves as independent Mikasuki tribes, they began in the early 1900s, to delve into the use of ecotourism as a feasible commodity to fund their culture’s way of life. In the second half of the twentieth century, with Florida’s dramatic increase in population size, the movement of the Florida East Coast Railway into the Miami area in 1896, and America’s ever-increasing national and international visibility, an enhanced interest arose in establishing a history of Florida’s Seminole people (West 1998, xi). Visitors and permanent residents alike wanted to know about the mysterious, unconquered tribe known as the Seminole Indians.

With the tourist interests on the rise, the U.S. government finally established a Mikasuki reservation with the Executive Order of 1911 (Garbarino [1972] 2012, 13). Combining increased interest by Americans in the Seminole people, and the acceptance of the Mikasuki as an independent, yet affiliated, Seminole nation, tourism provided the Seminoles with the monies they needed to ensure their survival. As Tiger and Kersey state, “[The years prior to] World War I (1912–1914) commercial tourist attractions featuring ‘Indian villages’ opened in areas around Miami and Ocala [in order to met the public’s interest in Seminole culture]” (2002, 52). Although both American scholars and the Seminole tribes themselves originally considered tourism a condemned practice in the 1910s and 1920s, tourism became an acceptable means to maintain their traditional lifestyle starting in the 1930s (Carson 2000, 783). By establishing a connection between Seminoles’ cultural sustainability and their use of ecotourism, Patsy West’s book provides a unique glimpse into the Seminoles’ role as active participants, controlling their own destiny in spite of truly adverse odds.

Biographies

Early Colonial Seminole Leaders

There are many important figures who emerged during the Seminole warring periods, including Seminole leaders Cowkeeper, King Payne, Osceola, and Billy Bowlegs, and American military figures Thomas Jefferson, Brig. Gen. Thomas S. Jesup, and Lt. Levi N. Powell. A detailed account of every figure would be impossible, so a few are included here as a brief reference.

Colonial Seminole Figures

Cowkeeper (known in Mikasuki as Ahaya) was the first recorded chief of the Seminoles (1710–1783). By his mid-twenties, Cowkeeper had been chosen chief of his people, the Oconee in what was part of colonial, central Georgia. Cowkeeper was loyal to the British government, and when James Oglethorpe, the governor of Georgia in 1740, requested he fight with them against the Spain if Florida, the Seminoles were willing allies. In the 1750s, Cowkeeper moved his people south, into north central Florida, to a town he named Cuscowilla. It was these actions that led Cowkeeper to be considered the first to unite the Seminole people. Because of their allegiance to the British, many Seminole villages returned the runaway slaves to the British colonies. It was not until Cowkeeper’s death in the late 1770s and King Payne’s allegiance with the Spanish around 1783 that slaves were, once again, welcomed in all Seminole villages (Guinn 2002, 11; Blakney-Bailey 2002, 72). King Payne (birth unknown), Cowkeeper’s son, led the Seminoles as high chief until he was killed in 1812 in a surprise attack by the American Colonel Daniel Newnan. His brother, Bolek (Billy Bowlegs), took over as chief after his death.

Following the battle near Lake Okeechobee, the main body of about 2,000 Seminoles broke into two groups. One group headed south toward the Big Cypress Swamp, while the second, under the leadership of the medicine man Arpeika (Sam Jones), relocated eastward to a camp on the Loxahatchee River, about two miles upstream from where it enters the Atlantic Ocean at Jupiter Inlet.

During the Seminole Wars, Osceola and Billy Bowlegs emerged as major figures. Osceola (1804–1838) was born Billy Powell and was of mixed parentage (Creek, Scots-Irish, and English). Osceola migrated to Florida, with the other Red Stick refugees, after their defeat in the Creek Wars (1814). While in Florida, Osceola led a small band of Seminole Wars to resist European occupation during the Second Seminole War (1836). Between 1825 and 1849, he was the principal advisor for Micanopy, the chief of the Seminoles at the time. In September 1837, Osceola was captured when Americans raised a false flag of truce and took him into custody. He eventually died in prison in Fort Moultrie of an internal infection and malaria. Billy Bowlegs (1810–1859) was a chief within the Seminoles during the Second and Third Seminole Wars. He was one of the last leaders to resist Indian removal, but he was eventually forced to leave Florida and relocate to Oklahoma at the end of the Third Seminole War.

Colonial European/American Figures

As previously mentioned, a number of American military figures from this period played a major role in the Seminole wars. Since much has been written about them, a brief narrative of less-mentioned significant figures follows. On January 15, 1838, the Indians made contact with a naval detachment of 108 men led by Lt. Levi N. Powell, who was scouting the Okeechobee region. After a desperate skirmish in which he lost five men, the outnumbered Osceola withdrew (Buker 1975, 61–63). When the army commander in Florida, Brig. Gen. Thomas S. Jesup, learned of the Seminoles’ whereabouts, he moved rapidly to cut off their retreat before they could escape into the Everglades. Jesup commanded a force of 1,000 regulars plus 500 Alabama and Tennessee volunteers and was supported by several pieces of artillery. The Delaware Indian contingent that had been with Taylor’s command at Okeechobee served as scouts.

On January 24, 1838, Jesup’s force engaged a body of Indians defending their village. The Seminoles had taken a defensive position in a dense hammock bordering the river at approximately the same location as the earlier fight with Lt. Powell. A brief but fierce battle ensued, during which perhaps as many as 300 Seminole and black warriors withstood the charge of dismounted dragoons and infantry. A six-pound and twelve-pound canon ball blasted their position with shot and grapeshot while Congreve rockets whistled into the thick vegetation. Although Jesup described their position as “almost impregnable,” the Indians broke off the fight within an hour (Sprague [1848] 2010, 198). In some respects, the engagement could be considered a rear guard action, and although a large number of Seminoles surrendered at Loxahatchee, most moved away to the south to continue the war. Among the regulars and volunteers, seven men were killed, and 31 wounded, including their commander Gen. Jesup, who took a bullet that laid open his cheek beneath his left eye and shattered his reading glasses as he led a charge. The number of Seminole casualties was not recorded (Motte [1838] 1989, 193–95).

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

Second Seminole War Narratives

Most historical accounts of the Seminole Wars were written by European Americans and provided a very sensationalized, somewhat terrifying view of Native encounters, with American men, women, and children being brutally victimized by Seminole peoples. The Seminole point of view is sometimes portrayed in these documents, but many times they are presented from a very paternalistic perspective. It appears that they used these terms to portray themselves as caring for the good of the Seminoles. Whatever reason they may have had, it is a theme that runs through the primary documents. Below are a few primary sources that shed light on these perspectives of the war.

Second Seminole War Narratives: The Treaty of Moultrie Creek (1823)

Article 1

THE undersigned chiefs and warriors, for themselves and their tribes, have appealed to the humanity; and thrown themselves on, and have promised to continue under, the protection of the United States, and of no other nation, power, or sovereign; and, in consideration of the promises and stipulations hereinafter made, do cede and relinquish all claim or title which they may have to the whole territory of Florida, with the exception of such district of country as shall herein be allotted to them …

Article 3

The United States will take the Florida Indians under their care and patronage, and will afford them protection against all persons whatsoever; provided they conform to the laws of the United States, and refrain from making war, or giving any insult to any foreign nation, without having first obtained the permission and consent of the United States …

Article 5

For the purpose of facilitating the removal of the said tribes to the district of country allotted them, and, as a compensation for the losses sustained, or the inconveniences to which they may be exposed by said removal, the United States will furnish them with rations of corn, meat, and salt, for twelve months … The United States further agree to furnish a sum, not exceeding two thousand dollars, to be expended by their agent, to facilitate the transportation of the different tribes to the point of concentration designated …

Source: Charles J. Kappler. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Vol. II, Treaties. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904, 203–07.

Accounts of the Dade Massacre (1835)

Among the many historical notes located on the Florida Historical Society Quarterly site is the account of the 1835 Dade Massacre by Albert Hubbard Roberts, compiled 91 years after it had happened in 1927. A section of these accounts is included here, but the entire account can be seen using the citation in this chapter:

One who would write again of the Dade massacre, ninety-one years after its occurrence, must forego the expectation of discovering any great wealth of original data, and content himself in the main with the assembling of facts already published, and the elimination of more or less doubtful detail that has crept into former narratives, in an effort to bring into stronger relief a more or less neglected story of the American soldier’s courage and fidelity unto death …

Resistance on the part of Seminole Indians to their prospective removal from Florida to a western reservation, under the treaties of Payne’s Landing and Fort Gibson, having made it evident that a show of military strength on the part of the Federal government would be necessary to enforcement as construed by the administration of Andrew Jackson, and the military forces in the peninsular of Florida during 1835 being limited to seven companies with perhaps two hundred and fifty men in all available for service, six additional companies were ordered to Fort Brooke, on Tampa Bay; the first detachment, Company B, 4th Infantry, thirty nine strong, under Brevet Major Francis L. Dade, arriving on the government transport Motto from Key West December 21st, 1835 …

The most detailed and authentic account of the battle is from Ransome Clark, a private of Company B, 2nd Artillery, who escaped from the breastworks about nine o’clock in the evening of the massacre. He was the only survivor who witnessed the entire battle …

In his narrative of the battle and the subsequent massacre of the survivors, Clark states that he heard a rifle shot in the direction of the advanced guard, followed by a musket shot from that quarter, and before he had time to think of their meaning a volley was poured upon the column from the front and all along the left flank. Half the command went down at the first fire and several other volleys had been fired before he could see an enemy, then only their heads and arms from out the long grass and from behind the pine trees. Major Dade and Captain Frazer were killed by the first volley, and Lieutenant Mudge mortally wounded; Lieutenant Henderson had one arm broken, while both of Lieutenant Keais’s arms were broken. Only Captain Gardiner, Lieutenant Basinger, and Dr. Gatlin were untouched. Lieutenant Henderson, though wounded, managed to load and fire his gun repeatedly, cheering the men until he was shot down toward the close of the second attack; but … he [soon] died …

The slaughter of the wounded, which justifies the appellation “massacre” to what up to this time had been a legitimate ambuscade, skillfully planned and daringly executed, was committed, not by the Seminoles, whose better nature was manifested in their hour of victory, but by forty or fifty negroes who galloped up on horseback, and with vile derision began to despatch the wounded with axes and knives.

Source: Roberts, Albert Hubbard. “The Dade Massacre.” Florida Historical Society Quarterly, v. 53, January 1927, 123–38.

In many regards, it is due to the Seminoles’ tireless resistance to annihilation that they have been able to survive for so long.

See also: Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, 1830

Further Reading

Buker, George E. Swamp Sailors: Riverine Warfare in the Everglades, 1835–1842. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1975.

Carson, James Taylor. “Conquest of Progress! Old Questions and New Problems in the Ethnohistory of the Native Southeast.” Ethnohistory, 47(3): 777–790, 2000.

Din, Gilbert C. War on the Gulf Coast: The Spanish Fight against William Augustus Bowles. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012.

Garbarino, Merwyn S. Big Cypress: A Changing Seminole Community. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Reprint, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, (1972) 2012.

Guinn, Jeff. Our Land Before We Die: The Proud Story of the Seminole Negro. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 2002.

Hudson, Charles M. The Southeastern Indians. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1987.

MacCauley, Clay. The Seminole Indians of Florida. Reprint, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, (1884) 2000.

Mahon, John K. History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842. Reprint, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, (1967) 1991.

Motte, Jacob Rhett. Journey into Wilderness: An Army Surgeon’s Account of Life in Camp and Field during the Creek and Seminole Wars, 1836–1838. Facsimile edition, R.J. Ferry, University of Florida Press, (1838) 1989.

Potter, Woodburne. The War in Florida: Being an Exposition of its Causes, and an Accurate Account of the Campaigns of Generals Clinch, Gaines, and Scott. Reprint, Baltimore: Nabu Press, (1836) 2001.

Seminole Tribe of Florida Tribal Historic Preservation Office “Who are the Seminole People?: A Brief History.” Stofthpo.com. Last modified January 1, 2015. http://www.stofthpo.com/History-Seminole-Tribe-FL-Tribal-Historic-Preservation-Office.html.

Steele, Willard S. The Battle of Okeechobee. Miami: Archaeological and Historical Conservancy, 1987.

Tiger, Buffalo, and Harry Kersey. Buffalo Tiger: A Life in the Everglades. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Weisman, Brent Richards. Unconquered People: Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Indians. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.

West, Patsy. The Enduring Seminoles: From Alligator Wrestling to Ecotourism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.

Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, 1830

K.D. Motes

Chronology

1776		Future U.S. president Thomas Jefferson suggests relocating Native Peoples living east of the Mississippi River to the West.
1785		Treaty of Hopewell becomes first international agreement between the United States and the Cherokee Nation.
1786		Treaty of Hopewell becomes first international agreement between the United States and the Choctaw Nation.
1786		Treaty of Hopewell becomes first international agreement between the United States and the Chickasaw Nation.
1803		French Louisiana—the Great Plains portion of North America bounded by the Mississippi River to the east, the Rocky Mountains to the west, Spanish territory to the south, and British territory to the north—purchased from Napoleon by the United States for $15 million.
1805		U.S. government coerces Choctaw chiefs into signing Treaty of Mount Dexter, ceding over four million acres to the United States.
1813–14		Choctaw fighters under Pushmataha and Moshulatubbee assist General Andrew Jackson in putting down the “Red Stick Rebellion” against U.S. encroachment among a portion of the Muscogee Creek towns.
1815		Choctaw fighters under Pushmataha and Moshulatubbee assist General Andrew Jackson in successful defense of New Orleans against massive British invasion in final major battle of the War of 1812.
1816		U.S. government coerces Choctaw chiefs into signing Treaty of Fort St. Stephens, ceding 10,000 acres.
1820		U.S. government coerces Choctaw chiefs into signing Treaty of Doak’s Stand, ceding over five million acres for lands in Arkansas Territory (soon to be Indian Territory, west of Arkansas).
1825		President James Monroe approves of Secretary of War John C. Calhoun’s plans for “Indian removal” and requests the creation of “Indian Territory” out of the western half of the Arkansas Territory created in 1819.
1825		U.S. government coerces Choctaw chiefs into signing Treaty of Washington City, ceding two million acres of newly acquired Arkansas lands back to United States.
1825		U.S. government obtains Treaty of Indian Springs from unauthorized group of Muscogee Creeks led by William McIntosh, a Muscogee tribal citizen who is later executed by the Muscogee Creek government for agreeing to a treasonous land sale.
1828		Indian-fighting U.S. general Andrew Jackson elected president of the United States.
1829		U.S. president Andrew Jackson calls for the “removal” of all Amerindian peoples from east of the Mississippi River to the Plains.
1830		U.S. president Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act.
1830		U.S. government coerces Choctaw chiefs into signing Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, ceding the entire remainder (over five million acres) of Choctaw lands in Mississippi to the United States.
1831		Survivors of unorganized group of Choctaws who left before being removed by the U.S. government arrive in soon-to-be Indian Territory (western Arkansas).
1831		Cherokee Nation v. Georgia: Cherokee Nation sues state of Georgia regarding “extension” of Georgia laws over Cherokees in Cherokee lands. U.S. Supreme Court rules that because Cherokees are neither U.S. citizens nor a properly foreign nation, they do not have standing to bring suit in federal court system.
1832		First officially organized removal group of Choctaws to travel the Trail of Tears arrives in Indian Territory.
1832		U.S. government forces Muscogee Creeks to sign Treaty of Cusseta, which cedes remainder of Muscogee homeland to the United States and requires Muscogees to relocate to the West.
1832		U.S. government forces Chickasaws to sign Treaty of Pototoc Creek, ceding remainder of Chickasaw lands to the United States and requiring Chickasaws to relocate to the West.
1832		U.S. government forces Seminoles to sign Treaty of Payne’s Landing, ceding lands to the United States and requiring Seminoles to relocate to the West.
1832		Worcester v. Georgia: In response to Cherokee Nation suit against Georgia on behalf of U.S. citizen Samuel Worcester, a missionary imprisoned by Georgia for violating a Georgia law barring Americans from residing in Cherokee lands (despite Cherokee protests that Georgia had no authority over them), the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Georgia did not have any authority over Cherokees, that Removal was unconstitutional, and that only the federal government could interact with Amerindian tribal nations in a state-to-state manner.
1833		Second organized group of Choctaws removed on the Trail of Tears arrives in West.
1833		Third organized group of Choctaws removed on the Trail of Tears arrives in Indian Territory.
1834		Many Muscogee Creeks relocate to Indian Territory along the Trail of Tears ahead of the official removal process.
1835		U.S. government forces unauthorized Cherokees (“Treaty Party”) to sign Treaty of New Echota, ceding Cherokee lands to the United States and requiring Cherokees to relocate to the West.
1837		Major Chickasaw emigration on the Trail of Tears begins.
1838–39		Approximately 16,000 Cherokees are marched from homeland to the West at gunpoint.
1858		U.S. war against Seminoles in Florida ends; known remaining Seminoles forcibly relocated to Indian Territory.
1861–65		U.S. Civil War ravages Indian Territory and divides tribal nations.
1907		Oklahoma becomes forty-sixth U.S. state, making removed Amerindians of the Five Tribes (Cherokees, Choctaws, Muscogee Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles) citizens of Oklahoma, and thus U.S. citizens.

Removing Indigenous People from Their Land in the United States, 1801–1858

At least from the presidential administration of Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826; in office 1801–1809), the goal of “removing” all indigenous peoples from the southern states east of the Mississippi River was clearly a policy objective of the U.S. government and an aspiration of the commercial interests that held sway over it. Jeffersonian republicanism was intended only for men of European descent and culture, although Jefferson hoped that some day some Amerindian individuals might qualify for its benefits as well. It was Jefferson who suggested the means by which Amerindian exile from the South could be achieved without resorting to military force. At the time, the potential outcome of war between Amerindians of the South and the United States was not yet a foregone conclusion, and it is possible that an aggressive war to expel the tribes during Jefferson’s presidency would have aroused an indigenous alliance of peoples so massive that it might have overwhelmed U.S. forces.

Following the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson encouraged federally sponsored traders in Amerindian lands to enmesh as many indigenous individuals as possible in nets of debt to Americans and European trading houses licensed by the U.S. government. When enough indigenous individuals had been lured into trade based on debt and had become dependent upon European and American goods, they would enter a downward spiral that would eventually lead them to pay with the only “collateral” they possessed: their lands. Although the removal of indigenous peoples from the South did not occur until the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1767–1845; in office 1829–1837) two decades later, Jefferson’s debt process had laid the groundwork shortly after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France.

Native Americans travel through a snowstorm in a forced migration known as the Trail of Tears to land set aside by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. These forced removals were a form of ethnic cleansing. (North Wind Picture Archives)

To ensure that trade dependence turned out as planned, traders took advantage of Amerindian views of reciprocity and extended to indigenous young men lines of credit so exorbitant that some tallied greater debt than could ever possibly be repaid by the proceeds of a lifetime of individual participation in the deerskin trade, just as lenders encouraged them to. Overcharging indigenous men for goods or otherwise “cooking the books” in order to maximize their debts was not uncommon, nor was creating debtors out of thin air and assigning to them invented debts, essentially making them economically real in the doing. Once debts reached levels far beyond the ability of debtors to repay, traders demanded immediate payment.

The U.S. government would then intercede on behalf of the trading houses, offering to pay off individual Amerindian debts in return for cessions of communally held tribal lands, which were increasingly coveted by American land speculators and would-be cotton planters in the South. When tribal leaders resisted such arrangements, federal officials repeatedly threatened the use of military force and the establishment of forts within their homelands, which would be used to subdue them. Jefferson’s scheme worked just as he had planned: the federal government forced tribal nations to cede bit after bit of their domains, claiming all along to be doing the tribes a favor by brokering land for debt. Participation in the market by some individual tribal members, in the end, gave the federal government a means to separate the southern Amerindians from their lands collectively, without the cost of conquest. Based on racist stereotyping, it was easy for many Americans to believe that Amerindian individuals were just irresponsible debtors being brought to account rather than people caught in a multi-generational trap designed from the beginning to alienate their lands. Although some indigenous individuals chose to take part in the market by trading on credit, tribal governments did not choose to leave their lands or freely agree to do so for that trade, which took place outside traditional tribal channels. Federal and state officials, however, made it known that the United States intended to take indigenous lands in the South one way or another, as officials made clear first to Choctaws in 1830.

Jefferson’s idea to drive all Amerindians west of the Mississippi became likely, rather than just possible, by the 1820s. President James Monroe (1758–1831; in office 1817–1825) in 1825 called for the creation of a new land to which to move Eastern Amerindian peoples, to be called Indian Territory, out of the western half of the Arkansas Territory created in 1819. Although his successor, John Quincy Adams (1767–1848; in office 1825–1829), refused to enforce a Muscogee Creek treaty of 1825, in which unrecognized negotiators agreed to cede tribal homelands—apparently because he did not believe the negotiations had been conducted appropriately by U.S. representatives—neither Adams nor other prominent figures who may have opposed blunt coercion, fraudulence, and outright theft to obtain indigenous lands were willing to become champions of Amerindians (who were neither Caucasians nor citizens) because to do so would anger a large number of U.S. citizens and potential voters. The few U.S. politicians and other prominent figures who did express a desire to defend Amerindian interests, such as Congressman Davy Crockett of Tennessee (1786–1836) and the Christian missionary Jeremiah Evarts (1781–1831), did not hold enough political power to protect those interests against General Andrew Jackson, who followed Adams as U.S. president and was elected on a platform calling for the complete “removal” of Amerindians from the southern United States.

In his first annual message to Congress in 1829, Jackson called on Congress to grant him the power to assign lands west of the Mississippi to be traded to Amerindians for their lands in the East, and thus to negotiate final removal treaties with the indigenous nations of the South. Doing so would allow him to open their lands to speculation investments and Euro-American settlement, both of which benefitted him as well as his most powerful supporters. Within months, following debates in Congress that were at times emotional and rancorous, an act to do exactly that passed the Senate (28–19), narrowly passed the House (102–97), and arrived at his desk. On May 28, 1830, President Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act. He immediately wielded his new authority against his closest Amerindian allies: Chief Pushmataha (1760s–1824), Chief Moshulatubbee (1770s–1838), and the Choctaw Nation, because of the large Southern tribal nations, Choctaws lived closest to the lands to which they would be “removed,” and based on past relationships Jackson believed that they were least likely to resist removal with a military response.

Jackson’s desire manifested in the controversial Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830. American negotiators under Jackson’s orders presented Choctaws with an ultimatum: Relocate to the West, or remain in Mississippi to face competition from Euro-American cattlemen and cotton planters as well as life under Mississippi law as second-class citizens with fewer rights and privileges than held by the Euro-American population. After offering free liquor through contracted vendors, Secretary of War John Eaton (1790–1856) and Colonel John Coffee (1772–1833), the U.S. negotiators, explained to the Choctaws present that they must cede all of their lands in Mississippi and move west immediately. When Choctaws unanimously balked at this demand, Eaton threatened, telling them that refusal would bring President Jackson himself, leading the U.S. army into their lands to build forts, take control of all of their hunting grounds, and subjugate the Choctaw people as enemies of the United States—after which they would be removed beyond the Mississippi River just the same.

Still, Choctaws refused to accede, and most of the 6,000 present left the treaty grounds, effectively refusing removal by popular vote. A few Choctaw leaders remained at the meeting and continued to argue and negotiate, however. Eventually, these few signed the treaty without the consent or foreknowledge of their people, but under threat of military invasion and subjugation by the U.S. military nonetheless. Despite the opposition of the majority of Choctaws, ultimately they had little alternative but to abide by the terms of the treaty. Betraying his recent military allies, Jackson would give no quarter; his agents claimed that the president had no power to prevent the state of Mississippi from extending its laws over Choctaws. This, of course, was a specious claim, as the Jackson administration did, in fact, assert federal authority and even threatened federal military action to compel a more established and populous state—South Carolina—to enforce a federal tariff on imports, almost immediately after this claim of federal weakness to Choctaw delegates. Regardless, and despite the excruciating burden of exile from their ancient homeland, some Choctaws came to understand that the West might offer a chance to continue to live as Choctaws under Choctaw leadership within a Choctaw society, in contrast to the subjugation that Mississippi promised. Choctaws had no intention of living as “non-whites” under Euro-American authority in a slave state of the plantation South.

By this treaty, the United States claimed possession of over ten million acres of Choctaw land (the entire remainder of the Choctaw homeland). The official relocation of Choctaws actually consisted of three separate treks from Mississippi to the “Indian Territory” west of Arkansas in 1831–32, 1832–33, and 1833. The first of three planned group “removals” was not scheduled to begin until 1831, but approximately 400 Choctaws began gathering near Chief Greenwood Leflore’s (1800–1865) home in late November 1830 to leave early. By doing so, they could settle the choicest lands in the new western nation. The following year, Choctaws gathered for the first official group departure, and nearly 4,000 began their forced 555-mile march west in October 1831. Led by private parties contracted by the federal government, they met with misery along the Trail on Which They Wept, also referred to as the Trail of Tears. The phrase appears to have originated when a Choctaw on the march from Mississippi coined it, or one very similar, to a U.S. newspaper reporter. Large officially organized groups followed in 1832 and 1833 and the winter of 1833, led more efficiently by the U.S. military than the contractors had led the first group, but not without significant suffering and death nevertheless.

Thus, the bulk of the Choctaw people, uprooted from their ancient homeland, settled on land traded to them by the United States without the permission of the Amerindian peoples who already lived and hunted on it. This led to numerous conflicts between Choctaws and Kiowas, Comanches, and Osages, whose hunting grounds they suddenly occupied. Conditions threatened to tear the Choctaw Nation asunder. Disease, hunger, droughts, and floods blighted the first decade of residence in the West. Yet, by the late 1830s, the Choctaw Nation began to coalesce and reconstruct itself in the new land, as it had after previous calamities such as the intra-tribal violence of the mid-eighteenth century, sometimes referred to as the “Choctaw Civil War.” Stories about the horrors of the Trail of Tears became a core component of Choctaw identity and history for all future Choctaws, and form a significant part of the oral tradition that Choctaws even today continue to pass through the generations. The same is true for all of the indigenous nations of the South who faced removal. Nearly every Choctaw family in modern Oklahoma has stories of death and survival on the Trail of Tears and afterward in Indian Territory. Families in all of the indigenous nations who walked those paths do.

If Choctaws provided the least martial resistance to removal, it was Seminoles who provided the opposite. The Seminoles were an amalgamation of members of bands from various tribal groups, including Muscogee Creeks, Choctaws, and Alabamas, who had broken off from their parent peoples to establish themselves as a collection of autonomous communities in Florida. Already confined officially to a reservation in central Florida, in 1832 the United States imposed upon the Seminoles the Treaty of Payne’s Landing, which ceded Seminole lands in Florida to the United States and required Seminoles to “remove” themselves from their lands to Muscogee Creek lands in the West and to become “Creeks.” When Seminoles staunchly resisted exile, the United States initiated the “Second Seminole War” to compel them to go. Although the United States had managed to forcibly relocate nearly 3,000 Seminoles to Indian Territory by 1842, and had killed an additional 700 in conflicts, a few hundred Seminoles remained deep in the Florida swamps and continued to fight against U.S. invasion through the Second Seminole War and into a Third Seminole War in the 1850s. By 1860, most remaining Seminoles had left for Indian Territory. In the twentieth century, they would become the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.

In the wake of losing millions of acres to the United States as punishment for the Red Stick Rebellion, the Muscogees of Georgia and Alabama in 1818 systematized their laws and introduced the crime of selling any tribal lands without the approval of the National Council, with the penalty for that offense set as death. William McIntosh (1778–1825), who served as a speaker for the Lower Towns of the Muscogee Creek Nation, broke this law by signing the Treaty of Indian Springs with the United States in 1825. This “treaty,” which McIntosh did not hold the authority to sign on behalf of anyone, ceded all Muscogee lands in Georgia and roughly two-thirds of their lands in Alabama in exchange for lands in Indian Territory and other considerations. Agents for the Muscogee National Council later executed McIntosh as punishment for this capital crime. Nevertheless, a few hundred Muscogees emigrated beyond the Mississippi River to escape Anglo-American encroachments in the late 1820s through the early 1830s, as did small groups from the other southeastern tribal nations. The majority, however, had no interest in relocating and no intent to do so, just as had been the case among Choctaws and Seminoles.

To force the issue, the federal government coerced Muscogees into signing the Treaty of Cusseta in 1832, which ceded all remaining Muscogee lands east of the Mississippi River to the United States and exiled Muscogees to Indian Territory. More individuals and privately organized groups left for the West in 1834, and the majority of some 20,000 Muscogee Creeks had been “escorted” to Indian Territory by the U.S. military by the end of organized marches in 1837. Between the first emigration in 1827 and the end of the “removal” process in 1837, more than 23,000 Muscogees were transplanted from the South to the West on their Trail of Tears, with another 3,000 to 4,000 dead along the way.

The U.S. government did not set aside land in Indian Territory to trade to Chickasaws in exchange for their lands east of the Mississippi River. Chickasaw negotiators instead aimed for a financial settlement from the federal government rather than land in exchange for moving to the West, compelling Chickasaw leaders to pay the Choctaw Nation in exchange for the right to live on a portion of Choctaw land in Indian Territory. The 1837 Chickasaw Treaty of Doaksville established a Chickasaw district under Chickasaw leadership within the lands of the Choctaw Nation that existed until the Chickasaw Nation purchased the land outright and established its own separate nation and constitutional government in 1856. The Trail of Tears carried over 4,000 Chickasaws to that district beginning in 1837, most over at least some of the roads, trails, and rivers that Choctaws, Seminoles, and Muscogees had already trekked. Upon arriving in Indian Territory, Chickasaws discovered harsh conditions already being suffered by their neighbors from the South: drought, disease, hunger, chaos, and violence. As it had been for Choctaws, Seminoles, and Muscogees, the cost in lives and cultural knowledge to the Chickasaws still affects citizens of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma today.

In response to passage of the Indian Removal Act, Cherokee Chief John Ross (1790–1866) sought an alternative to negotiating a predetermined treaty with the United States, the path down which the federal government pushed Choctaws. An educated and adroit leader, Chief Ross pursued support from individual members of the U.S. Congress, prominent American ministers and journalists, and. most famously, the federal courts of the United States, to maintain Cherokee lands and sovereignty. Despite a Supreme Court decision prohibiting “Indian Removal,” an unelected and unrepresentative group of Cherokees signed the Treaty of New Echota, which the United States then used as the legal basis for Removal. In 1838, claiming authority from that treaty, the U.S. military gathered over 17,000 citizens of the Cherokee Nation into stockades and then marched them at gunpoint to Indian Territory, over 1,000 miles to the west. Over 4,000 Cherokees, or roughly 20 to 25 percent of the Cherokee population who walked the Trail, died along the way. As with the other indigenous nations of the South, the majority of those who died were the elderly who carried cultural knowledge unknown to younger people, and the very young, who represented the future of the people.

Sidebar 1: The Cherokee Cases

In June 1830, Cherokee Chief John Ross and former U.S. Attorney General William Wirt (1772–1834) petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for an injunction to prevent Georgia from dissolving the Cherokee government and extending state laws over the Cherokees. The Cherokees argued that, as a foreign nation in treaty relationship with the United States, they were not under the authority of the state of Georgia because only the federal government possessed such authority since the Indian Intercourse Act of 1790. Georgia argued that the Cherokees were not, in fact, a foreign nation, due to their government differing from Euro-American norms. The Court asserted in Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia (1831) that the Cherokees were, indeed, a nation—but a “domestic dependent nation”—thus assigning them a status with no standing to be heard by the Court, and dismissing their case.

The Cherokees tried again with Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the case of a Congregational missionary arrested along with several others for violating a Georgia statute prohibiting Euro-American men from living on Amerindian lands within Georgia without a license to do so. Worcester was convicted and sentenced to four years of hard labor in a penitentiary. As a U.S. citizen with legal standing, and defended by lawyers hired by the Cherokees, his case reached the Supreme Court, which found itself with the opportunity to rule on the very issue previously presented: whether Georgia had the power to extend its laws over Cherokee country.

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Marshall (1755–1835) vacated Worcester’s conviction on the grounds that Georgia’s law was unconstitutional, and asserted that the Cherokees retained sovereignty over their lands, which could not be undone by the laws of the state of Georgia. The ruling invalidated the Indian Removal Act, defining that law as unconstitutional as well. Although this decision would later become a cornerstone of indigenous sovereignty in U.S. law, at the time the ruling achieved nothing because President Jackson and Georgia continued ahead with the process of Indian Removal, flaunting the Court’s ruling and carrying out a process that clearly was unconstitutional.

Politicians and government agents called this policy of ethnic cleansing by the euphemism “Indian Removal,” but most people now know it by another name: “the Trail of Tears.” The Trail of Tears is not really one path from one specific location to another, but rather a collective label for the many varied routes along which Southern Amerindians marched and rode steamboats toward an area on the Plains west of Arkansas called Indian Territory (and later Oklahoma) by the federal government. The label “Trail of Tears” itself reflects the emotional, physical, and cultural traumas suffered by those tribal nations as a result of this government-directed expulsion from their indigenous homelands to lands hundreds or even 1,000 miles away from their traditional environmental contexts, the sacred places of their memories and experiences, and the buried bones of their honored ancestors.

Biography

Chief John Ross (1790–1866)

Cherokee Chief John Ross was born in Turkeytown, Cherokee Nation (now located in Alabama), in 1790 to Daniel Ross, a Scots immigrant trader, and Mollie McDonald, a Cherokee woman of Cherokee and Scots ancestry. Also known by his Cherokee name Koowisguwi (a rare migratory bird species), as a child Ross lived in a bilingual Cherokee household that took part in the cultural life of Cherokee society. He grew up in a traditional Cherokee environment and as a child and young man, showed a clear preference for traditional Cherokee clothing and style. As the son of a Scots immigrant who ran a store that served other bicultural families as well as traditionalist Cherokees, however, he was familiar also with the culture of the Euro-American civilization from which his father came. Ross also received a classical education both at home and at missionary-run schools in Tennessee populated largely by students of mixed Native and Euro-American ancestry.

Upon completion of his education in Tennessee, Ross received an appointment as a U.S. Indian agent, initially as an assistant to Return Meigs (1740–1823), the federal Indian agent to the Cherokees. By the age of 19, Ross had already proved himself a capable diplomat through his official dealings with a group of “western Cherokees” who had migrated from their homelands to Arkansas and were living there in 1809. Later, he served in a Cherokee regiment that fought in the War of 1812 alongside Americans, and then under the command of General Andrew Jackson in the suppression of the Red Stick Rebellion among some of the towns of the Muscogees, including fighting in the famous Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

Cherokees elected John Ross to the National Committee of the Cherokee National Council following the fight against Red Stick Muscogees in 1814. His inaugural mission in that capacity was to negotiate with the United States to establish permanent boundaries for the Cherokee Nation. Five years later, Ross was elected president of the Cherokee National Committee in 1819, and remained in that post until 1826. During his presidency, Ross helped establish a Cherokee capital in Georgia in 1825. He also lobbied U.S. politicians, newspapermen, and clergy to defend the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation and other Native nations, and to oppose any efforts to “remove” indigenous peoples from the South. Ross became assistant chief of the Cherokee Nation following his tenure as National Committee president. When the Cherokee Nation established a convention to create a national constitution in 1827, Ross served as a leading voice in representing the Chickamauga District. Under the new constitution he helped to draft, John Ross then became Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1828, remaining in that position until his death in 1866.

In addition to his professional political positions, John Ross was an astute businessman. He established a successful trading post and river-crossing ferry on the Tennessee River at Chattanooga in 1815, and as a member of the educated elite and one of the wealthiest men in his nation, Ross also participated in the U.S. economy through a number of different business ventures. He owned a farm of over 200 acres, worked by over 100 Black slaves. Although a small minority owned all of the slaves among Cherokees, and most typical Cherokees probably opposed chattel slavery, as in other tribal nations, it was an accepted practice among the economic and political elite. As in other Native nations of the South, the practice of slavery was generally of a different character than in the U.S. South as well, exhibiting less violence and restriction toward Black slaves than in U.S. society. Visitors to plantations in lands of the southeastern Amerindian nations, including to the plantation of John Ross, often commented that the slaves did as they wished and were treated more as family members than as draught animals by most Native owners. Nevertheless, the stolen labor of slaves produced extraordinary surplus value and thus personal wealth for slave owners, including Ross.

As principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, John Ross led his people through what has been the saddest and most trying era in Cherokee history. His administration began amidst increased efforts by the United States to push Cherokees and other Native Peoples beyond the Mississippi River. When a minority within the nation led by Major Ridge (1771–1839) and Stand Watie (1806–1871) entered talks with negotiators for the United States aimed at securing the relocation of Cherokees to the west, Chief Ross canceled a national election, and his council impeached Ridge, leading to a deep and enduring divide within the Cherokee polity between the minority, who were most open to removal and a Euro-American lifestyle, and those who valued tradition far more highly over much of the nineteenth century. Ross led the Cherokee Nation through the tumult created by the discovery of gold in Cherokee country in Georgia in 1828, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Cherokee cases before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1831 and 1832, internecine conflict between the Ross government and the renegade “Treaty Party” of which his own brother was a member, the suffering and death on the Trail of Tears, the difficult settlement and building of schools and towns in Indian Territory, and the destruction and chaos created by the U.S. Civil War. Much as Abraham Lincoln earned a revered place in U.S. history for holding the nation together through its most trying tests, Chief John Ross holds a similar place in the history of the Cherokee people.

See also: Black Hawk War, 1832; Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia, 1831; Indian Territory, 1834–1907; Seminole Wars, 1816–1858; Worcester v. Georgia, 1832

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

Indian Removal Act (1830)

Enacted on May 28, 1830, after one of the most contentious and bitter debates in Congress with the exception of the arguments over slavery, the Indian Removal Act proceeded to shift most of the nations of Indian tribes in the eastern United States to what was deemed “Indian country” in present-day Oklahoma. In the most notorious of the Indian removal efforts, President Andrew Jackson ordered the Cherokee Nation off its land in Georgia in 1833. Although the tribe fought against the order in the U.S. court system, it was eventually forced to comply.

An Act to provide for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That it shall and may be lawful for the President of the United States to cause so much of any territory belonging to the United States, west of the river Mississippi, not included in any state or organized territory, and to which the Indian title has been extinguished, as he may judge necessary, to be divided into a suitable number of districts, for the reception of such tribes or nations of Indians as may choose to exchange the lands where they now reside, and remove there; and to cause each of said districts to be so described by natural or artificial marks, as to be easily distinguished from every other.

And be it further enacted, That it shall and may be lawful for the President to exchange any or all of such districts, so to be laid off and described, with any tribe or nation of Indians now residing within the limits of any of the states or territories, and with which the United States have existing treaties, for the whole or any part or portion of the territory claimed and occupied by such tribe or nation, within the bounds of any one or more of the states or territories, where the land claimed and occupied by the Indians, is owned by the United States, or the United States are bound to the state within which it lies to extinguish the Indian claim thereto.

And be it further enacted, That in the making of any such exchange or exchanges, it shall and may be lawful for the President solemnly to assure the tribe or nation with which the exchange is made, that the United States will forever secure and guaranty to them, and their heirs or successors, the country so exchanged with them; and if they prefer it, that the United States will cause a patent or grant to be made and executed to them for the same: Provided always, That such lands shall revert to the United States, if the Indians become extinct, or abandon the same.

And be it further enacted, That if, upon any of the lands now occupied by the Indians, and to be exchanged for, there should be such improvements as add value to the land claimed by any individual or individuals of such tribes or nations, it shall and may be lawful for the President to cause such value to be ascertained by appraisement or otherwise, and to cause such ascertained value to be paid to the person or persons rightfully claiming such improvements. And upon the payment of such valuation, the improvements so valued and paid for, shall pass to the United States, and possession shall not afterwards be permitted to any of the same tribe.

And be it further enacted, That upon the making of any such exchange as is contemplated by this act, it shall and may be lawful for the President to cause such aid and assistance to be furnished to the emigrants as may be necessary and proper to enable them to remove to, and settle in, the country for which they may have exchanged; and also, to give them such aid and assistance as may be necessary for their support and subsistence for the first year after their removal.

And be it further enacted, That it shall and may be lawful for the President to cause such tribe or nation to be protected, at their new residence, against all interruption or disturbance from any other tribe or nation of Indians, or from any other person or persons whatever.

And be it further enacted, That it shall and may be lawful for the President to have the same superintendence and care over any tribe or nation in the country to which they may remove, as contemplated by this act, that he is now authorized to have over them at their present places of residence: Provided, That nothing in this act contained shall be construed as authorizing or directing the violation of any existing treaty between the United States and any of the Indian tribes.

And be it further enacted, That for the purpose of giving effect to the Provisions of this act, the sum of five hundred thousand dollars is hereby appropriated, to be paid out of any money in the treasury, not otherwise appropriated.

Source: Indian Removal Act. U.S. Statutes at Large 4 (1830): 411.

Further Reading

Akers, Donna. Living in the Land of Death: The Choctaw Nation, 1830–1860. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004.

Atkinson, James R. Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Removal. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003.

DeRosier, Arthur. The Removal of the Choctaw Indians. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981.

Green, Michael D. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Inskeep, Steve. Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.

Paige, Amanda L., Fuller L. Bumpers, and Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. Chickasaw Removal Ada, OK: Chickasaw Press, 2010.

Perdue, Theda and Michael Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.

Wallace, Anthony F.C. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Cherokee Cases, 1831–1832

Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia and Worcester v. State of Georgia

Selene Phillips

Chronology

1755		Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, John Marshall, is born.
1767		President Andrew Jackson is born.
1770–76		Between 1770 and 1776, Sequoyah, also known as George Gist or George Guess, is born.
1771		It is estimated that Cherokee leader Major Ridge is born.
1790		John Ross, who became the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, is born.
1798		Reverend Samuel Austin Worcester is born.
1801		John Marshall is appointed Chief Justice to the Supreme Court of the United States.
1802		John Ridge, the son of Major Ridge, is born.
1802–4		Estimated year that Cherokee editor Elias Boudinot is born.
1815		In the War of 1812, General Andrew Jackson defeats the Creek Indians and becomes a hero to settlers. Cherokee leaders fight with Jackson.
1821		Sequoyah completes his syllabary of 86 characters. The Cherokee quickly learn Sequoyah’s syllabary. In six months, 25 percent of the Cherokee Nation could read and write in Cherokee. In ten years, 90 percent could read and write.
1822		The Cherokee establish a Supreme Court at New Echota, which is today in Georgia.
1823		The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sends Worcester to convert Indians in the southeastern United States.
1824		Boudinot collaborates to translate and print the New Testament into Sequoyah’s Cherokee syllabary.
1825		New Town is established as the capital of the Cherokee Nation. The town’s name is changed to New Echota, in memory of the Tennessee town of Chota. Worcester is assigned to be a missionary to the Cherokee.
1827		The Cherokee adopt a national constitution, claiming sovereignty of their land. A printing office is established in New Echota, where Worcester arrives.
1828		Boudinot edits the first Native American newspaper. The Cherokee Phoenix prints its first issue with sections in Cherokee and English. Andrew Jackson is elected president of the United States.
1829		Jackson becomes the seventh president of the United States and announces his Indian-removal policy. The state of Georgia enacts laws over the Cherokee people.
1830		The Indian Removal Act passes the U.S. Congress. Georgia requires citizens to swear allegiance to Georgia. Missionaries, including Worcester, are arrested and imprisoned.
1831		Cherokee Nation v. The State of Georgia case goes before the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Marshall’s decision is that the Cherokee Nation is a domestic dependent nation and not a foreign nation. It is not allowed to present its case to the Court. However, Marshall instructs the Cherokee attorney in how to present a future case.
1832		Worcester v. The State of Georgia decision is handed down. The U.S. Supreme Court confirms Cherokee sovereignty. President Jackson ignores the decision, allowing Georgia to proceed with lotteries of Cherokee land. Boudinot resigns as the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix. Elijah Hicks replaces him.
1834		Georgia officials confiscate the press that printed the Cherokee Phoenix, and the last issue is printed on May 31. Worcester is forced from his house and moved to Tennessee. A Georgia citizen wins title to the press in a lottery.
1835		Under opposition of most Cherokee, including Principal Chief John Ross, the Treaty of New Echota, which agrees to removal, is negotiated and signed at Boudinot’s home. The action is done without tribal authority. The 20 to 30 signatories are later referred to as the Treaty Party. Signers include Major Ridge and John Ridge. The treaty exchanges southeastern land for Indian Territory, today known as Oklahoma, and $5 million. Most Cherokee disapprove. President Jackson survives an assassination attempt. John Marshall dies.
1836		By one vote, the U.S. Senate ratifies the unofficial New Echota Treaty. The Cherokee people have two years to move to the Indian Territory. Worcester and Boudinot move to Indian Territory.
1838		Organization of the forced removal of the Cherokee begins in May; however, the trek is delayed until October and November, during colder weather. General Winfield Scott is ordered to “remove the Cherokee by any means necessary.” The Trail of Tears displaces 15,000 to 17,000 Cherokee and kills at least 4,000.
1839		Treaty Party leaders Boudinot, Major Ridge, and his son John Ridge are assassinated by members of the National Party, the Ross faction, for treason and disregarding the Cherokee Constitution by signing the Treaty of New Echota.
1840		Sequoyah dies in San Fernando, Temaulipas, Mexico.
1844		The Cherokee Advocate, which is still published today, is the first newspaper in the western Indian Territory.
1845		Andrew Jackson dies.
1859		Samuel Austin Worcester dies.
1866		Principal Chief John Ross, known as the Moses of the Cherokee people, dies.

Two Early American Indian Cases That Went to the Supreme Court

The two cases involving the Cherokee Nation that reached the Supreme Court, Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia case and Worcester v. State of Georgia, have implications and significance for legally establishing tribal sovereignty in the American judicial system. The established principles of aboriginal sovereign rights, as outlined by Chief Justice John Marshall, have been applied in jurisdictions beyond the United States, including Canada.

It is significant to remember that at the time of these cases, 1831 and 1832, there had only been 55 years since the American revolution and the signing of the U.S. Constitution. The nation was in its infancy, and there were only 24 states in the Union in 1831. Not only did these cases provide the foundation for federal Indian law, but they also were pivotal for establishing the U.S. Supreme Court’s authority. The cases are studied as early examples of the Supreme Court’s judicial review power and as examples of executive versus judicial branches of government.

The people in the state of Georgia wanted the Cherokee people’s land, houses, and other property. Around 1815, a Cherokee boy playing in what is today upper Georgia brought home a yellow pebble, a gold nugget. The boy’s mother sold it to a white man, and within four years, a good portion of the Cherokee land had been taken from the Cherokee.

The frontiersman and self-promoter Andrew Jackson hated Indians, despite the fact that several Cherokee leaders aided him in the War of 1812 against the British. The Cherokee even organized their own regiment. The man who would become the seventh president of the United States had no intentions of standing in the way of Georgia’s attempts to take Cherokee land.

Background

The Cherokee called themselves Ani’-Yun’wiya, The Principal People. They occupied land that eventually became the states of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia in the United States, prior to European contact. When European settlers arrived, the Cherokee tried to live peacefully with them. Cherokee leaders even visited England.

Early in the 19th century, the Cherokee had an agrarian lifestyle, with horses, hogs, and sheep, and various crops, such as cotton, tobacco, wheat, apples and peaches. They manufactured cotton, woolen cloths, and blankets, and exported cotton to New Orleans. Many Cherokee had become prominent with plantations, sawmills, herds of cattle, and slaves. Their mechanical industries and established legal system, more efficient than some states, were without debt. The Cherokee had a supreme court, but the state of Georgia did not. The Cherokees’ increasing population adopted a national constitution on July 27, 1827, and made provisions for a bilingual newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix. By all standards considered significant at the time, the Cherokee were a civilized people, a standard they had worked hard to attain.

Despite all of the progress, the seeds for removing the Cherokee from their land had been planted. By 1815, a Cherokee reservation had been established in Arkansas. By 1819, the Cherokee population was estimated at 15,000. Some Cherokee, many a mixture of white and Cherokee and more financially fortunate, voluntarily moved west.

In 1821, Sequoyah created a syllabary, a written Cherokee language. Each symbol represented a sound in the Cherokee language. No one else had ever created an alphabet by themselves, and no other group of people had ever learned to read and write within such a short few months.

Thomas Jefferson advocated for Indian removal, the goal of which was to move all Indians west of the Mississippi River. The plan was to place Indians in western open land; however, the open land term was a misnomer, because other Indians already occupied the territory. Jefferson and others knew that removal would provide territory for white settlers. Although President James Monroe was not as favorable to removal, in an 1825 retiring message to Congress, he wrote, “The removal of the tribes from the territory from which they now occupy … would not only shield them from impending ruin, but promote their welfare and happiness … [If not,] their degradation and extermination will be inevitable” (Monroe 1825 Congress). Many politicians argued that removal would be good for the Cherokee.

John Ross was the Principal Chief of the Cherokee from 1828 until his death in 1866. Even though Cherokee leaders such as Sequoyah and John Ross aided Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812 against the British, Jackson abandoned his earlier policy of treating tribal nations as separate entities and made plans to move all tribes west of the Mississippi. He advocated a heated Congressional debate on Indian removal after becoming president. On May 30, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 passed. Although forced removal was not authorized, it was eventually allowed. Indian loyalty and assistance did not matter to President Jackson, and he colluded with the state of Georgia to further his own ambitions as well as those of the white settlers.

Cherokee Treaties

Most of the 49 treaties between the Cherokee Nation and European settlers ceded Cherokee land. The first, the 1791 Treaty of Holston, established boundaries between the Cherokee and the United States. Fourteen treaties were signed before the American Revolution, eight from the revolution until the U.S. Constitution, and 25 after the U.S. Constitution. Nine took place between 1814 and 1836.

The Cherokee phrase “Talking Leaves” comes from the 1785 Cherokee Treaty of Hopewell because the Cherokee said that when treaties no longer suited Americans, they would blow away like talking leaves. Legally, the Hopewell treaty established the Cherokees’ inherent ability for sovereignty to self-manage their internal affairs without interference from federal or state governments.

There were five Treaties of Tellico between 1794 and 1806. The 1798 Treaty of Tellico stated that whites had settled on Cherokee land because previous boundaries had not been marked. The Indians were told they needed to cede new lands in return for U.S. protection. This would guarantee the Cherokee that they could keep the remainder of their land “forever,” which only lasted 41 years.

The Treaty of the Cherokee Agency of 1817 acknowledged the division between two Cherokee groups, those who opposed and those who favored emigration.

The Cherokee Phoenix and Georgia State Laws

The Cherokee Council established a national newspaper in 1828. The types were cast under the guidance of missionary Reverend Samuel A. Worcester. The types set arrived in New Echota, Georgia, where the hand press and office were located in a log house. Worcester was associated with the American Board of Commissioners, ABCFM, which was created in 1810, and one of the first (and in its time the largest) American Christian missionary. The ABCFM fought against removal, specifically the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

The first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix was printed with sections in Cherokee and English and came off the printing press on February 21, 1828. The newspaper’s editor, Elias Boudinot, worked with Worcester. Besides the newspaper, the men published religious tracts such as Bible translations and hymns. Two white printers, Isaac N. Harris and John F. Wheeler, worked with a half-Cherokee apprentice, John Candy.

Georgia citizens looked for ways to thwart the Cherokees’ efforts to protect their land rights. In 1830, Georgia leaders enacted laws that made it illegal for a Cherokee or anyone with Indian blood, or a descendant of an Indian residing within the Indian country, to bear witness or be a party in any lawsuit against a white man as a defendant. A white man could kill an Indian, and no Indian witness could testify against him.

Other laws followed, making contracts between Indians and whites invalid unless there were two white witnesses. This canceled white men’s debts to Indians. Another law required all white men in Cherokee territory to take an oath of allegiance to Georgia. This intended to eliminate white missionaries, teachers, and educators who worked with the Cherokee people. Other laws forbade the Cherokee people to hold council, assemble for any public purpose, or dig for gold on their own land.

Representative Edward Everett said in a 1830 Washington speech, “They (white Georgia citizens) have but to cross the Cherokee line; they have but to choose the time and the place where the eye of a white man can rest upon them, and they may burn the dwelling, waste the farm, plunder the property, assault the person, murder the children of the Cherokee subject of Georgia, and through hundreds of the tribe may be looking on, there is not one of them that can be permitted to bear witness against the spoiler” (Mooney 1995, 118).

Cherokee gold miners were arrested on their own property, which was seized. Cherokee citizens were assaulted. To no avail, they appealed to President Jackson. Instead of helping, federal troops prevented all mining, except for those authorized by the state of Georgia.

Georgia officials knew that since Worcester was the Cherokee Phoenix printer, the paper could not be published without him. Specific laws were enforced to stop Worcester and to take the Cherokees’ land. Eventually, Worcester and Wheeler were arrested and imprisoned for being on Cherokee land. The Georgia Guard arrested Worcester at New Echota because he violated a Georgia law that no white person may live on Cherokee land without a state permit, although the Georgia governor was not issuing any permits. Worcester was also the New Echota postmaster, and after his arrest, he argued that position provided immunity from state prosecution. But President Jackson soon dismissed Worcester of his postmaster duties so Worcester could be persecuted.

Georgia officials knew what they were doing. Their goal was to take away the Cherokees’ source of finances and to suppress the Cherokee Phoenix. One way to stop the Cherokees’ source of income was to lobby the federal government to stop paying the Cherokee for ceded land that had been agreed upon in treaties. Taking the printing press would halt the Cherokee newspaper. This move also would squash the communication between the Cherokee people and their leaders, teachers, and chief. Instead of making the Cherokee payments to the nation as a whole, attempts were made to distribute funds to individual Cherokees. This would create more factions among the Cherokee people.

Chief John Ross went to Tennessee to escape persecution in his own nation, but he was arrested by the Georgia guard and taken across the state line to Georgia, where he was held without charge and later released without explanation. But the reason was clear. Since no Indian could bring a suit or testify against a white man, it was impossible for an Indian to defend himself or to resist seizure of his home. Resistance resulted in imprisonment. This was followed by mapping the territory into counties, which were surveyed into 40-acre land and gold lots distributed through a public lottery to white Georgia citizens.

After the Cherokee Phoenix printers and missionaries were arrested, some of the men who had agreed to take the oath were released. Worcester and Elizur Butler refused to take the oath in an attempt to help the Cherokee and to set precedent in a court case. The two were sentenced to a punishment of four years of hard labor. Since Worcester was a citizen of Vermont, he entered Cherokee territory with permission of the U.S. president and argued that due to treaties between the United States and the Cherokee, Georgia had no right to interfere. Of the eleven convicted missionaries, nine received clemency from the Georgia governor, provided they leave Georgia and never return. Worcester and Butler appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Cherokee Nation v. The State of Georgia

In January 1831, Chief John Ross, assisted by some of the nation’s best lawyers, sought an injunction to the United States Supreme Court against Georgia’s laws aimed at the Cherokee. With only two justices dissenting, the majority of the court dismissed the Cherokee Nation v. Georgia suit, stating that the Cherokee were not an independent or foreign nation, nor the type of nation entitled to sue or have a hearing in the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice John Marshall was also up against legislation intended to take some of the Court’s power away, so he had to be careful about the decisions he made. Although Marshall had sympathy for the Indians, he did not believe the Cherokee were a foreign nation. Instead, he called them a “domestic dependent nation.” This legal term would mean that the Cherokee would be recognized as a government that had a relationship with the United States and with inherent, limited sovereignty, similar to a state rather than a nation.

Marshall proceeded to provide instruction in the form of letters to the Cherokees’ lawyer, William Wirt. Marshall suggested that they find someone on Cherokee lands who had their rights curtailed by a Georgia court. The Supreme Court would hear such a case. This would open the door for the higher court to stop Georgia from extending laws over the Cherokee people. While the practice of a judge providing legal counsel or instructions on how to win a case would be unethical today, the Supreme Court was exempt from conflict-of-interest rules in 1831.

Worcester v. The State of Georgia

Worcester was the plaintiff in Worcester v. Georgia. On appeal to the Supreme Court on March 3, 1832, the Supreme Court decided in favor of Worcester and the Cherokee Nation in Worcester v. Georgia, thus ordering Worcester’s release from jail. The Supreme Court case confirmed that the federal government had a special relationship with tribal nations and recognized their sovereignty above state laws. Marshall wrote that Georgia’s laws were “repugnant to the laws and treaties of the United States.”

Georgia law made it a crime for non-Indians to be on Indian land without a Georgia license. The Supreme Court held this unconstitutional because the federal government has exclusive authority concerning such issues. It ruled that Worcester be freed, but Georgia did not immediately release him.

Sidebar 1: Supreme Court Landmark Cases Related to Cherokee v. The State of Georgia and Worcester v. The State of Georgia

Fletcher v. Peck (1810) was the first case where the Court determined that a state law was unconstitutional. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that public grants were contractual obligations that must be met. The case also established that Native Americans did not hold title to, or have full control of, their land. Most Georgia legislators were bribed to allow the sale of 30 million acres of land, known as the Yazoo lands, which became Alabama and Mississippi. After public disapproval, most of those politicians lost the next election. New legislators passed statues invalidating previous agreements. Plaintiff Robert Fletcher sued John Peck to have the Court decide the Constitutionality of an act that reversed the Yazoo Land Act of 1795. The Court affirmed that property rights established under an earlier law are constitutional. A law negating property rights under earlier law is unconstitutional and violates U.S. Constitution’s Contract Clause (Article I, Section 10).

Tassels v. Georgia (1830). The Cherokee Nation petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for an injunction against Georgia enacting laws in Cherokee territory. Georgia convicted Cherokee George “Corn” Tassels, who was illegally tried, convicted, and hanged for killing another Cherokee man. The Supreme Court granted a stay of execution and ordered Georgia to turn over Cherokee documents. Georgia did not comply and executed Tassels. This is the first case to support Cherokee sovereignty, thus extending sovereignty to other Native American tribes. It paved the way for Worcester v. Georgia, affirming that states have no jurisdiction in Native American territories.

It was rumored that President Jackson, upon hearing the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal said, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Although Jackson may have not have said these exact words, the sentiment was accurate. In private conversation, Jackson was quoted as saying that he “would not aid in carrying that judgment into effect” (Inskeep 2015, 258). He was also not immediately required to act on the decision, per the Constitution.

1835 Treaty of New Echota and Removal

An 1835 census estimated the Cherokee population in Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee at 16,542. Originally, some Cherokee were supposed to be allowed to remain and become citizens of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama. However, President Jackson disallowed this so all Cherokee people would be removed. When negotiations with the Cherokee failed, the U.S. delegation tried to bribe tribal leaders.

An appointed committee worked on a treaty that was signed on December 29, 1835. After Senate changes, it was ratified on May 23, 1836. In this treaty of New Echota, the Cherokee ceded their remaining territory east of the Mississippi for $5 million. Within two years, the United States was to pay for the Indians’ removal. Twenty Cherokee, including Major Ridge and Elias Boudinot, signed the treaty, although they were not official members of the Cherokee tribal General Council. Ridge and Boudinot did what they thought was best for the Cherokee people by accepting the inevitable and signing the treaty. The Reverend John Schermerhorn wrote to the Utica Observer in 1839 that the Treaty Party “Acted on purest principles of patriotism in negotiating the New Echota treaty; their objective was to save their country from a war of extermination and ruin, and to provide for them a quiet and peaceable home, which they had no longer, and could not obtain in the land of their fathers” (Foreman 1934, 296–97).

But other Cherokee citizens did not see the Treaty Party’s actions as benevolent. After Major Ridge, his son John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot moved west, the leaders of the Treaty Party were killed on June 22, 1839, after a contentious two-week General Council meeting and debate. The three were killed according to Cherokee law that made it treason and punishable by death to cede away lands except by the General Council.

Trail of Tears

Estimates vary, but it is believed that at least 4,000 Cherokee died as a result of removal. Many died along the route, and others died from starvation, exposure, chicken pox, whooping cough, and measles. Promises to the Cherokee and provisions from the treaty were not readily fulfilled. After arriving west, the issued cattle were in poor shape or worn out. An expected $800,000 payment for emigration expenses upon arrival was withheld. Education needs were unmet. The politics between various Cherokee factions and the Indians who already occupied the western territory compounded problems. The immigrants wanted to impose their laws on earlier settlers. This did not sit well with the older immigrants in what today is Arkansas and Oklahoma.

John Howard Payne was granted a passport to visit the Cherokee Nation for historical purposes. In 1840, he wrote that the Cherokee “look upon further silence as confimatory (sic) of their worst doubts; as mere craft and evasion. Hope deferred, which makes the civilized man sick, makes the less civilized ferocious. Under these circumstances, they do not feel secure in opining farms, in building houses, in establishing schools nor churches; for ere these are half finished, they may be captured again” (Foreman 1934, 320). The Cherokee wanted a new treaty and a grant for the new land. They believed they had been captured in an act of war simply because white settlers wanted their property. They had not been paid for their land east of the Mississippi and wanted assurance that what happened would not take place again.

Despite the hardships, the Cherokee people have survived. Today, there are three federally recognized bands of Cherokee. The headquarters for the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee are in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The Eastern Band of Cherokee headquarters is in Cherokee, North Carolina.

Biographies

Elias Boudinot (1802–1839)

Elias Boudinot edited the first Native American newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. He was also a fundraiser, a missionary, a politician, a national lecturer, a husband, a father, and, to some, a traitor. From a prominent Cherokee family, the youth known as Buck Watie changed his name to Elias Boudinot after a man who had been president of the American Bible Society and the Second Continental Congress. The two had met in New Jersey and become friends. Boudinot’s Cherokee name, Galagina, means “male deer” or “turkey.”

The six-year-old’s Christian education started at a Moravian missionary school. The Cherokee sought government aid for their youth to learn white culture. As was common at the time, Christian missionaries visited or lived with Indians to teach and convert them. In 1817, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, ABCFM, opened the Foreign Missions School in Cornwall, Connecticut, to educate Indian students. The following year, Cornelius selected Boudinot and other Cherokee youth to attend the Foreign Mission School. En route, Boudinot and his companions met Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe.

In 1820, Boudinot converted to Christianity. With others, he translated and printed the New Testament into the Cherokee language. Boudinot is credited with writing the “Religion exemplified in the life of poor Sarah,” which appeared in the Religious Intelligencer and later the Boston Recorder in 1820. The inspirational tract became known as Poor Sarah or The Indian Woman.

While in Connecticut, Boudinot met Harriet Ruggles Gold. Her physician father supported the Foreign Mission School, inviting students, including Boudinot, to their home. Boudinot’s letters courted Harriet after he returned to the Cherokee Nation due to illness. In 1824, miscegenation was alive and well in Cornwell. Boudinot’s cousin, John Ridge, created a racial controversy when he married a local woman, Sarah Bird Northrup. Harriet’s family and the Congregational Church initially opposed Harriet’s engagement to Boudinot. Protests resulted in the burning of Harriet’s effigy; however, she finally won her family over and was married at her home in 1826. The two Cherokee marriages forced the school to close after it became labeled a “breeding ground for mixed couples.” The Boudinot family had three girls and three boys. Upon an 1825 return to New Echota, the Cherokee National Council passed a law providing full Cherokee citizenship to those with a Cherokee father and white mother.

John Ridge, one of the Cherokees who supported removal in negotiation of the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. A few years after the 1830 Indian Removal Act, a major political split in the Cherokee National Council occurred between the Treaty Party, and those who continued to refuse removal to Indian Territory. The anti-removal group was part of the Trail of Tears in 1838. These political divisions continued in a civil war among the Cherokee in the West, where Boudinot and other Treaty Party members were assassinated in 1839. (Library of Congress)

The Cherokee General Council appointed 26-year-old Boudinot as editor of the national newspaper. He worked with fellow missionary and printer Reverend Samuel A. Worcester for over four years. On February 21, 1828, the first Cherokee Phoenix printed, “ ‘The laws and public documents of the Nation,’ and matters relating to the welfare and condition of the Cherokees as a people, will be faithfully published in English and Cherokee.” They used English to convince white readers of the Cherokee’s civilized and Christian nature to gain support for their fight with white Georgia settlers who were eager for Cherokee land.

This first issue confronted the major problem facing the Cherokee. Boudinot wrote, “In regard to the controversy with Georgia, and the present policy of the General Government, in removing, and concentrating the Indians, out of the limits of any state, which, by the way, appears to be gaining strength, we will invariably and faithfully state the feelings of the majority of our people.” Boudinot went on speaking tours to raise money and support for the newspaper and the Cherokee. As was the custom of the time, Boudinot exchanged his newspaper with approximately 100 other newspapers. Instead of a news service, which became a common practice, editors would print each other’s news reports. Boudinot had hoped other newspapers would spread the word about the Cherokees’ advancement and become sympathetic to the Cherokees’ fight against removal. Through 1832, Boudinot argued against the unlawful removal of the Cherokee. After the Supreme Court’s Worcester v. Georgia decision in favor of the Cherokee, Boudinot learned of President Jackson’s steadfast determination toward removal. Boudinot realized the futility of removal opposition. He resigned as editor, citing poor health, salary, and supplies; however, he left because he could no longer write against the inevitable act of removal.

Chief John Ross replaced Boudinot with Elijah Hicks, who agreed with Ross’s strong opposition to removal. In 1835, Boudinot and others signed the New Echota Treaty, ceding the Cherokee land east of the Mississippi River. This move was opposed by the General Council and Chief Ross, and it alienated most of the Cherokee people. The United States quickly ratified the unauthorized treaty and initiated removal procedures. The U.S. Army’s eviction of the Cherokee resulted in the Trail of Tears.

Boudinot’s wife, Harriet, died after a stillborn birth in 1836. Boudinot then moved his children to Indian Territory. Boudinot and cousins Major Ridge and his son John Ridge were killed by a Ross faction. The executions were a result of what many viewed as traitorous acts when they signed the 1835 New Echota Treaty that resulted in Cherokee removal.

The Gold family raised the Boudinot orphans in Connecticut. The couple’s son Elias Cornelius Boudinot returned to live with the Cherokee and became a lawyer.

Elias Boudinot is honored by the Native American Journalists Association’s Elias Boudinot Award “for furthering the cause of freedom of the press in Indian country.”

Reverend Samuel Austin Worcester (1798–1859)

Worcester was known as a missionary, prolific translator, printer, and plaintiff in the Worcester v. the State of Georgia case, which went to the United States Supreme Court in 1831. Worcester helped create a new type using the Cherokee syllabary. He raised money to build a printing press for the Cherokee people and for other material necessary to print a newspaper.

He was a seventh-generation pastor, born in 1798, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He moved to Vermont with his father, Reverend Leonard Worcester, who was a minister, philologist, and printer. Worcester graduated with honors from the University of Vermont at Burlington in 1819 and from Andover Theological Seminary in 1823. In 1825, he was ordained a Congregationalist minister and appointed to a Tennessee mission station. Worcester had expected to do mission work abroad. Instead, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent him and his wife, Ann Orr, to Brainerd, Tennessee, to convert the Cherokee.

Worcester used Sequoyah’s syllabary to translate the Bible into Cherokee and compiled the Cherokee almanac and other publications. The couple moved to New Echota, which by 1825 had become the headquarters of the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee Council had voted to publish a national newspaper, so Worcester supervised the typesetting and worked with Cherokee Phoenix editor Elias Boudinot. The two did not always agree, but each hoped that the newspaper would help to unite the Cherokee people, convince Americans how civilized the Cherokee were, and eventually prevent the forced removal of the Cherokee.

Georgia citizens were looking for ways to take the Cherokee Nation’s land. They knew that thwarting the efforts of a nationally published newspaper would help achieve their goal. In 1830, Georgia authorities enacted laws that required non-Indians to take an oath of allegiance to the state of Georgia. Other laws prevented non-Indians from being on Cherokee territory without a Georgia permit. These laws and others were directly intended to interfere with Worcester and other missionaries trying to help the Cherokee people. Despite the new statute, Worcester and others continued their work.

After living and working with the Cherokee for several years, Worcester was arrested in 1831 by Georgia authorities for refusing to take an oath to the state of Georgia. Worcester and 11 other missionaries were convicted and sentenced to four years of hard labor. Other missionaries accepted a pardon from the Georgia governor, but Worcester and Elizur Butler did not. Worcester and his colleagues with the American Board coordinated efforts with the Cherokee to fight the case. They initially hired former U.S. Attorney General William Wirt to defend Cherokee George Tassel for murder. That case was lost, but Chief Justice John Marshall provided instructions on how to present a winning case.

Wirt succeeded with Worcester’s appealed case, which ended with the 1831 Supreme Court ruling that Georgia statutes were a violation of, and repugnant to, the United States Constitution. The seminal case defined sovereignty and determined that the Cherokee Nation was a “domestic dependent nation” that did not have to adhere to state law. The decision is considered one of the major cases that establish legal precedent for Indian law today.

After his release from prison, Worcester returned to Brainerd for a couple of years. When the couple moved west to Indian Territory, an Arkansas steamer sank, losing Worcester’s manuscripts and personal belongings. Worcester set up another printing press, the first in the western Indian territory of Park Hill, the center of western Cherokee culture. Today, this is Oklahoma. The houses, church, school, and printing office that he helped build worked to distribute religious material. Worcester supervised the Cherokee Bible Society and headed the Cherokee Temperance Society.

In 1839, the year Boudinot was killed, Worcester’s wife, Ann, died. The couple had seven children. His daughter, Ann Eliza W. Robertson, became a Creek missionary and published work in the Creek language. He was remarried three years later to Erminia Nash.

Worcester’s New Echota home is the only original house left from the time the city was the Cherokee capital. It was built in 1828, the year the Cherokee Phoenix was first published. The Worcester family lived there until 1834, when it was taken in a land lottery. Georgia settlers destroyed the other New Echota property after the Cherokee were forcibly removed from their homes. For 20 years, Georgia citizens owned the home until 1952, when it was turned over to the state of Georgia. In 1954, the Georgia Historical Commission controlled it. In 1962, it was opened to the public, and today it is part of the Georgia State Parks and Historic Sites and the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

In an 1835 letter to his brother-in-law Samuel Chandler in New Hampshire, Worcester wrote, “We thank you for the kind & Sympathetic manner in which you refer to the trials which we were called to experience in consequence of the injustice of the state of Georgia. Our personal trials, however, in that affair, we regard as but a small thing; and would gladly endure them again, and far more than them, if by that means the honor and character of our country could be retrieved, and the people for whose good we have labored restored to their former prospects. But in this respect, as well as in every other, it becomes us quietly to submit to His appointments, who orders all events, by whatever inferior agents they may be brought about, and orders them all in infinite wisdom and goodness” (Shirk 1948, 471).

Worcester died in 1859 at Park Hill in the Cherokee Nation.

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

Legislation from an act passed by the state of Georgia on December 20, 1828.

This excerpt is from legislation that the State of Georgia passed in its effort to initiate removal of the Cherokee people from its land.

“It is hereby ordained that all the laws of Georgia are extended over the Cherokee country; that after the first day of June, 1830, all Indians then and at that time residing in said territory, shall be liable and subject to such laws and regulations as the legislature may hereafter prescribe; that all laws, usages, and customs made and established and enforced in the said territory, by the said Cherokee Indians, be, and the same are hereby, on and after the 1st day of June, 1830, declared null and void; and no Indian, or descendant of an Indian, residing within the Creek or Cherokee Nations of Indians, shall be deemed a competent witness or party to any suit in any court where a white man is a defendant.”

Source: J.W. Powell, 19th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Part I. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900, 221.

The Cherokee Nation v. The State of Georgia

These excerpts are from the decision written by Chief Justice John Marshall in which a motion for an injunction against the state of Georgia’s laws was denied.

“This bill is brought by the Cherokee Nation, praying an injunction to restrain the state of Georgia from the execution of certain laws of that state, which, as is alleged, go directly to annihilate the Cherokees as a political society, and to seize, for the use of Georgia, the lands of the nation which have been assured to them by the United States in solemn treaties repeatedly made and still in force.

“So much of the argument as was intended to prove the character of the Cherokees as a state, as a distinct political society, separated from others, capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself, has, in the opinion of a majority of the judges, been completely successful. They have been uniformly treated as a state from the settlement of our country. The numerous treaties made with them by the United States recognize them as a people capable of maintaining the relations of peace and war, of being responsible in their political character for any violation of their engagements, or for any aggression committed on the citizens of the United States by any individual of their community. Laws have been enacted in the spirit of these treaties. The acts of our government plainly recognize the Cherokee Nation as a state and the courts are bound by those acts.

A question of much more difficulty remains. “Do the Cherokees constitute a foreign state in the sense of the constitution?”

“The condition of the Indians in relation to the United States is perhaps unlike that of any other two people in existence.”

“Though the Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable, and, heretofore, unquestioned right to the lands they occupy, until that right shall be extinguished by a voluntary cession to our government; yet it may well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of the United States can, with strict accuracy, be denominated foreign nations. They may, more correctly, perhaps be denominated domestic dependent nations. They occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will, which must take effect in point of possession when their right of possession ceases. Meanwhile they are in a state of pupilage. Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.

They look to our government for protection; rely upon its kindness and its power; appeal to it for relief to their wants; and address the president as their great father. They and their country are considered by foreign nations, as well as by ourselves, as being so completely under the sovereignty and dominion of the United States, that any attempt to acquire their lands, or to form a political connexion (sic) with them would be considered by all as an invasion of our territory, and an act of hostility.”

“The condition of the Indians in relation to the United States is perhaps unlike that of any other two people in existence. In the general, nations not owing a common allegiance are foreign to each other. The term foreign nation is, with strict propriety, applicable by either to the other. But the relation of the Indians to the United States is marked by peculiar and cardinal distinctions which exist nowhere else.”

“The majority is of opinion that an Indian tribe or Nation within the United States is not a foreign state in the sense of the constitution, and cannot maintain an action in the Courts of the United States.”

“If it be true that the Cherokee Nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.

The motion for an injunction is denied.”

Source: Cherokee Nation v. The State of Georgia. 30 U.S. 1 (1831).

Worcester v. The State of Georgia

These excerpts are from the United States Supreme Court decision written by Chief Justice John Marshall, and established Cherokee tribal sovereignty.

“The treaty of Holston, negotiated with the Cherokees in July, 1791, explicitly recognizing the national character of the Cherokees, and their right or self-government, thus guaranteeing their lands; assuming the duty of protection, and of course pledging the faith of the United States for that protection, has been frequently renews, and is now in full force.”

“The Cherokee Nation, then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter but with the assent of the Cherokee themselves, or in conformity with treaties, and with the acts of Congress.”

“This treaty, thus explicitly recognizing the national character of the Cherokees, and their right to self-government, thus guarantying their lands; assuming the duty of protection, and of course, pledging the faith of the United States for that protection, has been frequently renewed and is now in full force.”

The whole intercourse between the United States and this nation is, by our Constitution and laws, vested in the government of the United States.

“The acts of Georgia are repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States.

They interfere forcibly with the relations established between the United States and the Cherokee Nation, the regulation of which, according to the settled principles of our Constitution, are committee exclusively to the government of the Union.”

“It is the opinion of this court that this judgment of the Superior Court for the County of Gwinnett, in the State of Georgia, condemning Samuel A. Worcester to hard labor in the penitentiary of the State of Georgia for four years, was pronounced by that court under color of a law which is void, as being repugnant to the Constitution, treaties, and laws of the United States and ought, therefore, to be reversed and annulled.”

Source: Worcester v. The State of Georgia. 31 U.S. 515 (1832).

See also: Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, 1830

Further Reading

Berutti, Ronals A. “The Cherokee Cases: The Fight to Save the Supreme Court and the Cherokee Indians.” American Indian Law Review. No. 1, 1992, 291–308.

Cherokee Nation v. The State of Georgia. 30 U.S. 1 (1831).

Ehle, John. Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. New York: Anchor Books, 1988.

Foreman, Grant. The Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934.

Frickey, Philip P. “Marshalling Past and Present Colonialism, Constitutionalism, and Interpretation in Federal Indian Law.” Harvard Law Review. Vol. 107, No. 2. December 1993.

Garrison, Tim Alan. The Legal Ideology of Removal. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002.

Hurley, John, “Aboriginal Rights, the Constitution and the Marshall Court,” Revue Juridique Themis. Summer 1983, Vol. 17. No. 3. 403–43.

Inskeep, Steve. Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.

Jahoda, Gloria. The Trail of Tears: The Story of the American Indian Removals, 1813–1855. New York: Wings Books. 1975.

Library of Congress, Twenty-first Congress. Sess. I. Ch. 148. 1830. 411–412. Accessed June 15, 2015. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=004/llsl004.db&recNum=458

Littlefield, Daniel. The Cherokee Freedmen: From Emancipation to American Citizenship. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978.

Monroe’s 1825 Message to Congress, Accessed June 15, 2015. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/indian_removal/monroe_1825message.cfm

Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. New York: Dover Publications, 1995.

Moore, Sidney L. Jr., and Leighton Moore. “Worcester v. Georgia: Civil Disobedience and the Cherokee Removal.” Georgia Bar Journal, Vol. 5, No. 3, December 1999, 10–17.

Norgren, Jill. “Lawyers and the Legal Business of the Cherokee Republic in Courts of the United States, 1829–1835.” Law and History Review 10, 1992, 253–314.

Perdue, Theda. “Rising From the Ashes: The Cherokee Phoenix As an Ethnohistorical Source.” Ethnohistory, Vol. 24, No. 3, Summer 1977.

Riley, Sam G. “The Cherokee Phoenix: The Short, Unhappy Life of the First American Indian Newspaper.” Journalism Quarterly. Winter 1976, 66–71.

Shirk, George H. “Some Letters from the Reverend Samuel A. Worcester at Park Hill,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, Oklahoma Historical Society. 26(4): 1948. 468–478. Accessed June 15, 2015.http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v026/v026p468.pdf

Strickland, Rennard and William M. Strickland. “A Tale of Two Marshalls: Reflections on Indian Law and Policy, The Cherokee Cases, and the Cruel Irony of Supreme Court Victories.” Oklahoma Law Review, Vol. 47, No. 1. Spring 1994, 111–126.

Swindler, William F. “Politics as Law: The Cherokee Cases.” American Indian Law Review. 3 1975. 7–20.

Worcester v. The State of Georgia. 31 U.S. 515 (1832).

Black Hawk War of 1832

Roger Carpenter

Chronology

1832		April 5. Black Hawk leads a contingent of Sauk, who attempt to resettle Saukenuk (present-day Rock Island, Illinois) despite the presence of white Americans,
1832		June 16. The Battle of Pecatonica (also called the Battle of Horseshoe Bend), a key turning point in the Black Hawk War, is fought.
1832		July 21. Battle of Wisconsin Heights, near present-day Sauk City, Wisconsin.
1832		August 1. The Battle of the Bad Axe begins, on the Mississippi River, near present-day De Soto, Wisconsin.

Black Hawk and the War of 1832

The Black Hawk War was the last Indian War fought in what had been the Northwest Territory (Old Northwest), and the last fought east of the Mississippi River. Named for the Sauk leader Black Hawk, the conflict lasted only a few months, beginning in May and ending in August of 1832. Black Hawk’s War took place in the context of American attempts to enforce the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and of internal conflict among the Sauk people themselves. In the wake of the war, with most Native People, at least in the minds of Americans, having become something of the past and therefore not a threat, Black Hawk became something of a celebrity., being taken to large cities in the east where large curious crowds greeted him. Working with a writer, he dictated one of the first Native American autobiographies.

Black Hawk is believed to have been born in 1767. As a young man, Black Hawk became a prominent war leader among this people, leading war parties against the Osages and Cherokees. Black Hawk appears to have been antagonistic toward the Americans. Much of this seems to have originated with an 1804 treaty the Sauk signed during a visit to St. Louis that required them to eventually yield their lands to the United States. The Sauk who signed the treaty claimed that they did not know the document’s contents. During the War of 1812, Black Hawk fought on the side of the British, twice assisting English troops in defeating Americans in the Old Northwest. Black Hawk’s attachment to the British was so strong that the faction of Sauk that he led came to be known as the “British band,” and they would frequently travel to Canada in order to avoid trading with the Americans.

The origins of the Black Hawk War had their origins three decades before it broke out. In 1803, the United States acquired St. Louis as part of the Louisiana Purchase. A detachment of American troops took possession of St. Louis from the Spanish in March, 1804. The Sauk were suspicious of the Americans, being familiar with the 1794 Northwest Indian War. The American Indian agent at St. Louis, Pierre Chouteau, had close ties to the Osages, the Sauks’ traditional enemies. In August, 1804, American troops at St. Louis intervened to stop a 300-man Sauk war party from attacking the Osages. In September, 1804, four Sauk warriors killed three Americans northwest of St. Louis, claiming that they had trespassed on their hunting grounds. The attack may have been an attempt by Sauks, who opposed peace with the United States, to provoke a conflict.

American settlers in the region were panicked. To forestall hostilities, two Sauk chiefs travelled to St. Louis to meet with the commander of the garrison and attempt to smooth things over. The Americans demanded that the murderers be turned over, but the chiefs noted that they had no power to coerce another Sauk person to do anything. However, the chiefs were apparently able to convince one warrior to surrender himself to the Americans. Unfamiliar with the American justice system, Sauk chiefs attempted to buy the young man’s freedom and a pardon for the other guilty parties by giving the Americans presents. They soon discovered that this traditional Sauk practice would not satisfy the Americans.

William Henry Harrison, the governor of the Indiana Territory, arrived to conduct talks with the chiefs in October. According to some accounts, Harrison kept the Sauk delegation drunk during the treaty negotiations. The treaty was signed in November 1804. The Sauk who signed the treaty later claimed that they had done it to save the life of the young Sauk warrior in U.S. custody, and that they had believed they had signed over a small portion of the tribe’s holdings, not most of the their lands as the United States later claimed.

The primary leaders of the two factions were Black Hawk, and a younger leader, Keokuk. Keokuk favored a policy of accommodation with the Americans, not because he agreed with US Indian policy or necessarily trusted the government, but because he saw resistance as futile and in the long run, disastrous to Sauk interests. Black Hawk represented an older and more traditionalist faction.

In 1829, the Sauk people left Saukenuk (near the site of present-day Rock Island, Illinois), their principal town, to go on their winter hunt in Iowa. When they returned in the spring, they discovered that their lodges had been overtaken by American settlers who were squatting there. The Sauks complained to the local Indian agent to no avail. Both the Americans and the Sauks lived in Saukenuk until the fall of 1829, when the Sauks again went on their winter hunt. Keokuk promised the Americans that his band, which constituted the majority of the Sauks, would remain west of the Mississippi in order to avoid conflict with the settlers.

Sidebar 1: 1804 Treaty between the Sauk and Fox and the United States

The 1804 Treaty that the Sauk and Fox representative signed in St. Louis contains several provisions. The first (and one that was common in Indian treaties of the time) was that the tribes placed themselves under the protection of the United States. The treaty also specified boundaries, requiring the Sauks to yield most of their lands east of the Mississippi, including the land that Saukenuk sat on. The Sauks were to receive a payment of $2,000, followed by an annual payment of $1,000, in the form of cash, livestock, and farming implements. Another provision required Sauk leaders to deliver up tribal members who attacked Americans. The American negotiators were aware—or should have been aware, based on their prior dealing with the Sauks—that tribal leaders actually had very limited authority in this regard. The United States also promised to remove settlers from Sauk lands after receiving a complaint from the tribe. It also reserved the right to take a two-mile-square block of Sauk land for a military post.

Black Hawk made no such promise, and his band did return in the spring of 1830 with a number of Kickapoos. After a tense spring and summer, Black Hawk led the British Band across the Mississippi for their winter hunt. When he returned the spring of 1831, Illinois Governor John Reynolds raised a militia force to remove Black Hawk and his followers. Rather than military action, however, the spring and summer saw a series of negotiations and threats. Keokuk met with American representatives as well as some of Black Hawk’s followers and convinced about 200 of them to cross over into Iowa with him. At first, Illinois gave Black Hawk three days to leave Saukenuk, then extended this term to three weeks. At one point, Black Hawk brought Sauk women into a conference to argue that they would be unable to harvest the corn they planted if forced to move. When Illinois called up volunteer units, Black Hawk, knowing that many of the militiamen were Indian-hating frontiersmen, took his followers west of the Mississippi.

In late 1831, Black Hawk made plans to return to Saukenuk. He was encouraged to do so in the belief that that the British would support him with arms and ammunition. In all likelihood, Black Hawk had been misinformed by some of his followers on this point. He also learned that he could count on the assistance of some Potawatomi and Winnebago who had their own grievances with the Americans.

In April 1832, Black Hawk led his band, which now numbered 1,100 (including 500 warriors), eastward into Illinois. During negotiations the previous year, the Americans had forbidden Black Hawk from returning to Saukenuk, so he led his followers to the community of Prophetstown, located along the Rock River. There, Black Hawk met with the Winnebago Prophet, who had encouraged him to join him. The Americans wanted the Winnebago Prophet to tell Black Hawk to return to the lands west of the Mississippi. Instead, the Prophet thought that as long as Black Hawk did not return to Saukenuk, and did not cause any trouble, the Americans would have no reason to want him to leave.

Alarmed by Black Hawk’s arrival, General Henry Atkinson led a force toward Prophetstown. Atkinson’s original mission was not to stop Black Hawk but to arrest some Fox Indians (allies of the Sauk) who had murdered some Menominee Indians. However, when Atkinson learned that Black Hawk was in Illinois, he quickly realized that the 220 regular army troops would not be sufficient, and he asked the state of Illinois to reinforce him with a militia. The state gave him 2,100 men.

In the meantime, Black Hawk learned that he did not have British support, nor were the majority of the Menominee and the Potawatomi going to support him. He also learned that General Atkinson’s force was marching up the Rock River toward Prophetstown. With little support, and greatly outnumbered, Black Hawk prepared to negotiate. He did not take into account, however, the ineptitude of the Illinois militiamen. General Atkinson placed the militia, under the command of Major Isiah Stillman, ahead of his regular troops. Black Hawk appointed three emissaries to meet with Major Stillman, while the same time he would have scouts watching the proceedings. When the scouts were spotted, the militia killed one of the three emissaries. The militia pursued the scouts, who fled toward Black Hawk’s camp. Black Hawk’s men set up a hasty ambush. The militia fled, believing that they were being attacked by over 1,000 Indians, but Black Hawk only had perhaps 40 warriors on the scene, and was surprised that what was supposed to be a peace parley inadvertently turned into a rout of the American forces.

With the defeat of the militia, Black Hawk took his people north to an area known as “the island,” where they could set up camp and hopefully avoid detection. While Black Hawk’s warriors did launch raids against the army and American settlements, other Native People who had their own disputes with settlers used the conflict as cover to launch attacks while avoiding blame for them.

In the wake of Stillman’s Run, the Americans reorganized. Most of the militia were dismissed, or left of their own accord. Atkinson raised a new militia force and secured 400 more regular army troops. He also began recruiting Native American allies, mostly Menominee and Dakotas, the traditional enemies of the Sauks, to augment his forces. Through May and into June, settlers fled to Chicago for refuge. Native People who were not part of the conflict also fled there, fearful that otherwise they would be taken for hostiles.

Black Hawk’s warriors continued attacks, and Atkinson had difficulty countering them. In mid-June, General Winfield Scott was appointed to replace Atkinson. However, he would not arrive until after the war ended. The Americans scored their first victory of the war when militia under Colonel Henry Dodge trapped a party of Kickapoos allied to Black Hawk near Pecatonica in the bend of an ox-bow lake. The ensuing Battle of Horseshoe Bend was short, but it was the first victory the Americans could claim.

For much of June and July, the Americans had difficulty finding Black Hawk and his followers, primarily because the Indians who served as their scouts often give them faulty intelligence. On July 21, learning that Black Hawk was attempting to move his band across the Mississippi, the Americans engaged the Sauks at what became known as the Battle of Wisconsin Heights, near present-day Sauk City, Wisconsin. Militia led by Colonel Dodge engaged Sauk and Kickapoo warriors, who fought a rearguard action in order to allow women and children to escape. The militia outnumbered Black Hawk’s 60 to 90 warriors by nearly ten to one. Black Hawk succeeded in buying time for the women and children to escape, but lost between 40 and 60 fighting men.

On August 1st and 2nd, the Black Hawk War came to an end with the Battle of the Bad Axe. Black hawk tried to convince his people to flee northward, but most of them decided to attempt a crossing of the Mississippi, despite the fact that the army and militia were only a few hours behind them. As they attempted to cross the river, the steamship Warrior blocked their path and fired on them. Black Hawk attempted to surrender, but the vessel continued to fire on the Sauks. The Warrior broke off the attack when it depleted its fuel and ammunition. Before sunrise on August 2nd, American troops and militia attacked the Sauks, pinning them against the river. In the meantime, the Warrior, having been resupplied, returned and fired on the Sauks, including women and children, who attempted to cross the Mississippi. Those who did make it across the river encountered Dakota warriors, who later give the Americans approximately 70 scalps and 22 prisoners. Out the roughly 500 Sauks when the battle began, 150 were killed, and over 70 were taken prisoner.

Black Hawk surrendered, was incarcerated at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis and then, oddly, became something of a celebrity in the United States. In what later became a fairly common practice by the United States to deter Native resistance, Black Hawk was taken east to visit large cities in the United States. He took a steamboat from St. Louis to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia). He was astonished by the National Road and the number of white Americans he saw. Black Hawk also noted that Americans in the east differed in their attitudes toward Native Americans, regarding them as novelties rather than sub-human. Like other Native leaders, Black Hawk traveled to Washington and met with the President (Andrew Jackson). He spent three days touring the city and was cheered by crowds wherever he went. After a month at Fort Monroe, Virginia, President Jackson ordered that Black Hawk and his companions be released and escorted back home. The government made sure that Black Hawk visited each major city, including Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia on his homeward route, in order to impress him with the power of the United States.

Depiction of fleeing bands of Sauk and Fox Indians caught and attacked by American troops, leading to the Battle of Bad Axe, the final conflict of the Black Hawk War. The Black Hawk War was a brief conflict led by Sauk leader Black Hawk, who tried to resettle on tribal lands that had been ceded in the disputed 1804 Treaty of St. Louis. (North Wind Picture Archives)

When Black Hawk returned west, he was placed in the custody of Keokuk, a move that the older man no doubt resented. Shortly after his arrival, Black asked a government interpreter, Antione LeClaire, to cooperate with him in writing his autobiography. It is one of the earliest Native American autobiographies, and it reads at times as if LeClaire took liberties with what Black Hawk told him.

Black Hawk passed away in 1838. A year after his death, a physician disinterred his remains, intending to put them on display in sideshows. The doctor removed all the flesh, intending to display the skeleton. When Black Hawk’s relatives found out, they sought help from the Iowa territorial governor. The governor ordered the recovery of Black Hawk’s remains and they were stored at the Historical Society building in Burlington, Iowa. Black Hawk’s family moved west, promising to return to recover the remains. They never did, and the old chief’s bones were destroyed when the Historical Society building burned to the ground in 1855.

Biographies of Notable Figures

Keokuk

Keokuk was believed to be born in 1790, making him approximately 13 years younger than Black Hawk, and was born into a clan that had no hereditary claim to tribal leadership. He is often portrayed as a rival of Black Hawk’s and as being sympathetic to the United States. The truth is a bit more complex. Keokuk did derive much of his powers within the Sauk nation due to the United States recognizing him, rather than more traditional Sauk leaders, as the leader of the nation. However, his cooperation with American authorities reflects a split within the Sauk nation. Those who wished to accommodate the United States did so because they saw it as a more reasonable, and realistic, option than resistance. While Keokuk did cooperate with the U.S. government, he also negotiated for realistic goals. He did manage to convince a number of Sauk people not to join Black Hawk in his war, and Black Hawk was placed under his supervision when he returned from his tour of eastern U.S. cities.

DOCUMENT EXCERPT WITH INTRODUCTION

The Battle of the Bad Axe was the last major action of the Black Hawk War. Black Hawk later recounted his perspective of the battle in his autobiography:

I told my people to cross if they could, and wished; that I intended going into the Chippewa country. Some commenced crossing, and such as had determined to follow them, remained; only three lodges going with me. Next morning, at daybreak, a young man overtook me, and said that all my party had determined to cross the Mississippi that a number had already got over safe, and that he had heard the white army last night within a few miles of them. I now began to fear that the whites would come up with my people and kill them before they could get across. I had determined to go and join the Chippewas; but reflecting that by this I could only save myself, I concluded to return, and die with my people, if the Great Spirit would not give us another victory. During our stay in the thicket, a party of whites came close by us, but passed on without discovering us.

Early in the morning a party of whites being in advance of the army, came upon our people, who were attempting to cross the Mississippi. They tried to give themselves up; the whites paid no attention to their entreaties, but commenced slaughtering them. In a little while the whole army arrived. Our braves, but few in number, finding that the enemy paid no regard to age or sex, and seeing that they were murdering helpless women and little children, determined to fight until they were killed. As many women as could, commenced swimming the Mississippi, with their children on their backs. A number of them were drowned, and some shot before they could reach the opposite shore …

… I found to my sorrow, that a large body of Sioux had pursued and killed a number of our women and children, who had got safely across the Mississippi. The whites ought not to have permitted such conduct, and none but cowards would ever have been guilty of such cruelty, a habit which has always been practiced on our nation by the Sioux.

The massacre, which terminated the war, lasted about two hours …

Source: Wilke, Franc B. Davenport, Past and Present. 1858. Davenport, IA: Luse, Lane & Co.

Joseph Dickson, an Illinois volunteer, commanded a unit during the Black Hawk War. This is his narrative of the Bad Axe River battle:

In the month of May, when on the first intelligence of hostilities by the Indians, I joined a mounted company of volunteers raised at Platteville. At the organization [of the company] I was elected orderly sargent, John H. Rountree, captain; and in that capacity I served one month, when in consequence of the absence of the captain, I was chosen to command the company and then served about one month. Then, by the order of Colonel Dodge, I took command of a spy company, and was in front of the army during the chases to Rock River, Fort Winnebago, and to the Wisconsin Heights; and at the Wisconsin Heights I with my spy company commenced the attack on a band of Indians who were kept in the rear of the retreating Indian army and chased them to the main body of Indians, when we were fired at several times, but without injury, and I returned to the advancing army without loss or injury to my command.

After the battle of the Wisconsin Heights, and the army was supplied with provisions, we again pursued the Indian trail, and I took the lead with my company and followed to the Bad Ax by command of General Atkinson. At the Battle of Bad Ax, I discovered, the evening before the battle, the trail of Black Hawk with a party of about forty Indians, to have left the main trail and gone up the river, which fact I reported to the Commanding General.

On the next morning, I with my command encountered and engaged a company of Indians at a place near to where I had the evening before discovered the trail of Black Hawk and his party. During the battle that ensued, my command killed fourteen Indians and after a short time, say half an hour’s engagement, General Dodge, with his command, and General Atkinson with his regular army, arrived at the place where I had engaged this party consisting of about forty Indians; and about the time of their arrival, we had killed and dispersed this band of Indians. The main body of the enemy had gone down the river after they entered the river bottom. I pursued with my command, passing General Henry with his command formed on the Mississippi Bottom; I crossed the slough, and engaged a squad of Indians, who were making preparations to cross the river; after which we were fired upon and returned the fire of several bands or squads of Indians, before the army arrived. After the battle was over, I was taken with others on board of a steamer which came along soon after, to Prairie du Chien, where I was properly cared for, and my wounds received suitable attention. Since which, I have spent a short period in Illinois, and the balance of the time to the present I have devoted myself to agricultural pursuits on my farm, four miles southwest of Platteville.

Source: Dickson, Joseph. Personal Narratives. Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, for the Years 1867, 1868, and 1869. Volume 5, 315, Madison, WI. 1868.

Further Reading

Hall, John W. Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Jung, Patrick J. The Black Hawk War of 1832. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.

Nichols, Roger L. Black Hawk and the Warrior’s Path. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1992.

Trask, Kerry A. Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2006.