23. McKenney, Memoirs, 112–13. Emphasis in original.
24. James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, October, 13, 1823, in W. Edwin Hemphill, ed., The Papers of John C. Calhoun (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1975), VII, 309–10.
25. The war leader Mushulatubbe apparently always kept a portrait of Andrew Jackson on a wall in his home. See James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 117. A detailed account of Chief Pushmataha’s confrontation with Tecumseh is included in Lewis, Chief Pushmataha: American Patriot, 62–68.
26. Greg O’Brien has an excellent discussion of the process by which traders entered the Choctaw world in chapter 5 (“Trading for Power”) of Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age; see especially 88–92. For an estimate of the size of the mixed-heritage population and for Durant, see Samuel J. Wells, “The Role of Mixed-Bloods in Mississippi Choctaw History,” in After Removal: The Choctaw in Mississippi, ed. Samuel J. Wells and Roseanna Tubby (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 49, 47. For a description of the onset of cattle raising in the 1820s, see James Taylor Carson, “Native Americans, the Market Revolution and Culture Change: The Choctaw Cattle Economy, 1690–1830,” Agricultural History, v. 71, n.1 (1997), 1–18.
27. See Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 82; Carson’s larger discussion of traders and their new business interests is on pp. 80–83.
28. Andrew Jackson to John McKee, April 22, 1819, ASP, v. II, 229. The Choctaws had made one minor land sale to the United States in 1816. See Treaty of October 24, 1816, 7 Stat 152.
29. See Ruth Tenison West, “Pushmataha’s Travels,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, v. 37, n. 2 (1959), 162–74. See also Daniel Usner, American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Cultural Histories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 99, 107, 108. The historian James Taylor Carson has noted that some chiefs may have been interested in moving west to avoid the Christian missionaries who were gaining influence in the tribe. See Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 89.
30. In General Council of the Choctaw Nation, August 12, 1819, in ASP, v. II, 230.
31. For an overview of Jackson’s relations with American Indians by a modern admirer, see Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Penguin, 2001).
32. There are a variety of spellings of these leaders’ (and their district’s) names. See Peter James Hudson, “A Story of Choctaw Chiefs,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, v. 17, n. 1 (1939), 7.
33. Andrew Jackson to Choctaw Chiefs, October 10, 1820, ASP, v. II, 231, 236, 236–37.
34. Ibid., 234.
35. Ibid., 240–41.
36. See Treaty with the Choctaws, October 18, 1820, 7 Stat, 210; ibid., 243.
37. Ibid., 243.
38. NWR, March 17, 1821; March 8, 1823.
39. Ibid., April 17, 1824. For extended discussions of the Georgia situation, see ibid., November 30, 1822; December 21, 1822; and May 21, 1823.
40. Ibid., April 17, 1824.
41. Statement of the Choctaw delegation, November 8, 1824, U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Documents Relating to the Negotiation of Ratified and Unratified Treaties with Various Tribes of Indians, Reel 1 (hereafter cited as Documents).
42. See Clara Sue Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 93, for a discussion of the delegation. McDonald transcribed letters from tribal leaders to relatives back home. See Mooshulatubbee to Peter Pitchlynn, October 10, 1824, Peter Pitchlynn Papers, University of Oklahoma.
43. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, November 6, 1824, Pitchlynn Papers, Gilcrease Museum.
44. Good general descriptions of the 1824 negotiations are in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 127–32; and Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries, 92–96. The delegation’s refusal to discuss Mississippi land sales is in its letter to the secretary of war, November 12, 1824, Documents, Reel 1. Pushmataha’s comment is quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 128.
45. David Folsom and James McDonald to Calhoun, November 20, 1824, ASP, cited in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 128. Documents, Reel 1.
46. Choctaw delegation to Calhoun, November 22, 1824. Documents, Reel 1. McKenney’s pleas to McDonald are described in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 129.
47. See Choctaw Delegation to Calhoun, January 3, 1825, Documents, Reel 1; and Article Seven, Treaty of January 20, 1825; 7 Stat 234.
48. On war claims, see James McDonald to Calhoun, January 20, 1825, Letters Received, Office of Indian Affairs, Reel 169 (hereafter cited as LR-OIA). McDonald wrote in part, “The Choctaws have for a long while been waiting for their pay: it was due them ten years ago. . . .”
49. The Creeks soon learned that William McIntosh, the leader who negotiated the Indian Springs treaty, had been bribed.
50. The Creek treaty was signed in February 1825 but later repudiated by federal authorities. William McIntosh, the Creek leader who negotiated the agreement, was executed by his fellow tribesmen on April 30, 1825. See Andrew K. Frank, Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 95–98. The legal historian Stuart Banner emphasizes the long-standing and widespread public support for removal in the early nineteenth century in How the Indians Lost Their Land: Land and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), chapter 6.
51. Choctaw delegation to Congress, February 18, 1825, reprinted in McKenney, Memoirs, 120–22.
52. James McDonald to Thomas L. McKenney, April 25, 1826; LR-OIA, Reel 169.
53. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 27, 1826, LR-OIA, Reel 16. (There are two letters from McDonald to McKenney dated on this date. The first focused on education; the second on tribal politics.) See also Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 89.
54. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, March 3, 1827, Pitchlynn Papers, Gilcrease Museum.
55. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, May 5, 1827, Pitchlynn Papers, Gilcrease Museum. Pitchlynn’s relation to Mushulatubbe is mentioned in Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 124.
56. George Harkin to Peter Pitchlynn, December 12, 1827, Pitchlynn Papers, Gilcrease Museum.
57. Rowena McClinton, ed., The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), v. 1, 21, 31–32, 38.
58. Stephen Warren, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795–1830 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 49–59, 64.
59. Thomas L. McKenney, “Statement shewing the number of Indian schools, where established, by whom, the number of teachers, the number of pupils, and the amount annually allowed and paid to each by the government, with remarks as to their condition,” Department of War, Office of Indian Affairs, December 2, 1825. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library.
60. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 27, 1825, LR-OIA, Reel 169.
61. Historians have been to quick to characterize these divisions as racial, with “mixed bloods” favoring one agenda and “full bloods” favoring another. The historian James Taylor Carson has argued effectively that all the major political groups within the tribe contained people with a variety of racial backgrounds. See Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 87–88.
62. See Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries, 112. See also Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 97–102. The Choctaw constitution, like the Cherokee constitution of 1828, also empowered men at the expense of traditional female clan elders. This subject, which deserves far more study, is discussed in Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), as well as in an insightful study of one family, Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
63. For more on the shifts in Cherokee political culture (and their nat
ional significance), see Cynthia Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 101–24; and Cynthia Cumfer, “Local Origins of National Indian Policy: Cherokee and Tennessean Ideas About Sovereignty and Nationhood, 1790–1811,” Journal of the Early Republic, v. 23, n. 1 (Spring, 2003), 21–46.
64. See Mary Elizabeth Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, 1830–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 14–15.
65. NWR, October 28, 1828; Garrison, The Legal Ideology of Removal, 104–05.
66. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 116.
67. NWR, May 15, 1830, 216.
68. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, March 21, 1830, Peter Pitchlynn Papers, Gilcrease Museum.
69. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, March 22, 1830, LR-OIA Reel 169.
70. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, November 2, 1830, Pitchlynn Papers, Gilcrease Museum.
71. See H. S. Halbert, “The Story of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek,” Mississippi Historical Society Publications, v. 4 (1902), 385. This account identifies the speaker as “Killihota.” Could that have been McDonald’s Choctaw name?
72. For a description of the proceedings, see Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 120–25. Grant Foreman also described these tribal divisions in his classic Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), 22–30.
73. Cyrus Kingsbury to Jeremiah Evarts, October 11, 1830, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Correspondence, Microfilm A467, Lamont Library, Harvard University, Reel 758, 3–32. The 1830 treaty is at: 7 Stat 333; Section 14 outlined the provisions for the distribution of land in Mississippi. I am grateful to Dawn Peterson for bringing Kingsbury’s letter to my attention.
74. Ibid.
75. National Gazette, August 14, 1830, reprinting a speech delivered by McDonald on July 5. Thanks to Jeff Giambrone for bringing this document to my attention. The issue of relations among states, tribes, and the federal government during this period is discussed from an original, comparative perspective in Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
76. James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, November 9, 1824, LR-OIA, Reel 169.
77. The hidden irony in McDonald’s appeal to Calhoun was that his complaint arose from the theft of one of his mother’s slaves. The young lawyer was arguing for recognition in state court so that he could defend his “right” to his human property. His appeal also carried the hidden request that the state of Mississippi treat Indians the same as white people in matters of the law; this was no small demand in the era of removal.
78. Andrew Jackson, “First Annual Message to Congress,” December 8, 1829, in Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, 47–48.
79. John Ross, George Lowrey, Major Ridge, and Elijah Hicks to John C. Calhoun, February 11, 1824, in The Papers of Chief John Ross, ed. Gary Moulton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), 65.
80. Quoted in NWR, December 19, 1829; March 14, 1829.
81. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, Pitchlynn Papers, University of Oklahoma.
82. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, July 1, 1828, Pitchlynn Papers, University of Oklahoma. In this letter McDonald also confessed that he “deserved the disgusting appellation” of a “drunkard.”
83. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, January 17, 1829, Pitchlynn Papers, Gilcrease Museum.
84. The state’s action was reported in NWR, February 13, 1830, 410.
85. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, March 28, 1831, Peter Pitchlynn Papers, Western Heritage Collection, University of Oklahoma.
86. James McDonald to Alexander McKee, March 30, 1831, Peter Pitchlynn Papers, Western Heritage Collection, University of Oklahoma.
87. Thomas McKenney wrote in his memoirs that McDonald killed himself after a white woman rejected his marriage proposal, but no other evidence exists to confirm that claim. McDonald battled alcoholism during his career, and this may have also been a factor. See McKenney, Memoirs, 116, 119. McDonald’s own letters reveal a man who struggled with the disease but who also enjoyed extended periods of sobriety. See James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, July 1, 1828, Pitchlynn Papers, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma.
88. Henry Vose to Peter Pitchlynn, September 31 [sic], 1831, Peter Pitchlynn Papers, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma.
89. Ibid.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Speech of William Potter Ross, delivered at Vinita, Indian Territory, September 11, 1874. William Potter Ross Collection, Oklahoma University, Box 1. See also Charles Bruc, The Republic of San Marino (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1880), 147–149.
2. Ibid.
3. “Biography of Hon. William P. Ross,” in William P. Ross, The Life and Times of Hon. William P. Ross (Fort Smith, Ark.: Weldon and Williams Printers, 1893), n.p.
4. For a brief survey of Ross’s life, see John Bartlett Meserve, “Chief William Potter Ross,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, v. 15, n. 1 (March 1937), 21–29.
5. “Biography of Hon. William P. Ross,”., n.p.
6. Ross was an early editor and one of the publishers of the Indian Journal, published in Muskogee, Creek Nation, beginning in 1876; an editor of the Weekly Chieftain, published in Vinita, from 1883 to 1884; and a founder of the Indian Arrow, also published in Vinita, beginning in 1888. See Daniel Littlefield and James Pairns, American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers and Periodicals (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), v. I, 189–91, 39–91, 76–77.
7. Treaty with the Choctaws, 1830, 7 Stat 333.
8. A minority of each relocated tribe had traveled to Indian Territory prior to the forced removals, but these “old settler” groups generally did not play a major role in the representation of these tribes to outsiders. The tribes relocated from northern states and territories followed a similar pattern, and many interacted with tribal leaders in Indian Territory. For a comprehensive review of their history, see John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
9. Tim Alan Garrison, The Legal Ideology of Removal (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 103–04.
10. William P. Ross to John Ross, April 3, 1838, Papers of Chief John Ross, ed. Gary E. Moulton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), v. I, 621.
11. Treaty of August 6, 1846, 9 Stat 871.
12. Article Five, Treaty of December 29, 1835, 7 Stat 478.
13. U.S. v. Rogers, 45 U.S. 567, 572, 573 (1846).
14. The Cherokees had been represented by several prominent Whig lawyers in their challenges to the state of Georgia before the U.S. Supreme Court prior to their removal, but they did not end the practice of seeking legal assistance once they were resettled in the West. John Ross secured the services of the Washington attorney Waddy Thompson during the negotiation of the 1846 treaty and contracted with his firm to pursue the tribe’s claims against the United States for damages suffered during removal. See John Ross to Waddy Thompson, June 2, 1846, Papers of Chief John Ross, v. II, 309.
15. See Grant Foreman, Advancing the Frontier, 1830–186 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1933), 131–38.
16. A. M. Gibson provides an overview of this situation in the opening pages of “An Indian Territory United Nations,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, v. 39, n. 4 (1962), 398–413.
17. Quoted in Foreman, Advancing the Frontier, 213. For descriptions of the council, see ibid., 205–14, and Boes, Exiles and Pioneers, 141–46.
18. Reverend William H. Goode quoted in Boes, Exiles and Pioneers, 145.
19. Cherokee Advocate, May 22, 1845. Gibson annotated and reprint
ed the entire Advocate coverage of the council in “An Indian Territory United Nations,” cited above.
20. Gibson, “An Indian Territory United Nations,” 405–6, 412.
21. Ibid., 411. The Creek leader’s reference to an Indian-run territorial government was also a clear retort to the missionary-sponsored proposals then circulating in Congress to create a U.S.-style territorial government across the region. That idea, which would have replaced tribal governments with a territorial regime regulated by Congress, had been roundly rejected by tribal leaders. See Gibson, Advancing the Frontier, ch. 13 (“Attempt to Form an Indian Confederacy”).
22. William Potter Ross and David Vann to John Ross, November 18, 1850, Papers of Chief John Ross, v. II, 342. For a brief summary of Ross’s service to the Cherokee Nation, see ibid., 735.
23. William McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 63.
24. Ibid., 130–31, 144.
25. William P. Ross, Thomas Pegg, Lewis Downing, and John Spears to John Ross, March 15, 1861; see McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears, 172–74.
26. Ibid., 187. It is also notable that the Cherokee treaty with the Confederates was negotiated in tandem with similar agreements involving the Osages, Shawnees, and Senecas, frequent participants in prewar intertribal councils. See Annie H. Abel, The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co, 1915), 237–38.
27. Commissioner Albert Pike claimed that he wrote the declaration. See Emmet Starr, Starr’s History of the Cherokee Indians (Fayetteville: Indian Heritage Association, 1967; originally published in 1922), 158.
28. William P. Ross to John Ross, January 11, 1864, Papers of Chief John Ross, v. II, 552.
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