As the deadline for removal approached, many officers and officials in Cherokee country feared bloodshed and saw Ross as the best person to prevent it. The removal commissioner Nathaniel Smith, who had known Ross for twenty-seven years, echoed Colonel Lindsay’s appraisal that he was “an honest man and a slave to his people.” Georgia governor George Gilmer hoped that once Ross and the Cherokee delegation lost all hope of delaying the treaty and returned home, they might be induced to help convince the Cherokees that their interest and safety required moving West and would “undertake to effect their voluntary removal in their own way.”118
About nine hundred Cherokees had migrated west in the spring of 1834. Measles and cholera killed eighty-one people before they reached Arkansas. The members of the Treaty Party began their migration early in 1837. A group of about 600 went first; Major Ridge, Stand Watie, and 466 people departed in early March, and another 365 set out in October. The third detachment suffered from bad weather and sickness, and fifteen people, mostly children, died en route.119 Pointing to the emigration of the first six hundred, Lumpkin invoked the efficacy of the same divide-and-conquer tactics that had secured the treaty. “This policy of making prudent advances to the wealthy and intelligent has gone far to remove all opposition to the treaty among the most influential class,” he wrote to the commissioner of Indian affairs. “The great body of the intelligent, who have been numbered with the opponents of the treaty have become recipients under the treaty, and consequently their tone and temper in relation to that instrument have been wholly changed.”120 Major Ridge rebuilt his home and estate on Honey Creek in the northeastern part of the new Cherokee lands, near the border of Arkansas and Missouri and near where the relocated Senecas lived. He and John formed a partnership in late 1837 and opened a large general store. There would be plenty of displaced Cherokees to supply once the exodus from the East got under way.121
Back in Georgia, the deadline for voluntary removal expired in May 1838. On May 10 General Winfield Scott issued an address to the Cherokee people, informing then that time was just about up and that he had been sent “with a powerful army” to compel their removal in accordance with the treaty. He and his soldiers intended “to execute our painful duty in mercy.” As federal troops began rounding up the Cherokees and placing them in stockades ready for relocation, Scott sent Secretary of War Poinsett encouraging reports of progress. Things were moving ahead with little interference from whites “and with all practicable kindness & mercy on the part of the troops.” In Scott’s mind, removal was inevitable, the Treaty of New Echota simply its instrument: “The decree of Fate,” he wrote, “more than the paper called a Treaty, requires that it should be completed without delay.”122
Huddled in internment camps, the Cherokees would succumb to removal but they would not accept the Treaty of New Echota. Scott reported that many of them “obstinately refused to receive clothing & blankets, both of which were much needed—fearing to do anything which might be construed into an acknowledgment of the treaty.”123 In late July, the Cherokee National Committee and Council met at Aquohee Camp in eastern Tennessee and passed a series of resolutions necessitated by the fact that “the whole population of the Cherokee Nation have been captured by order of the President of the United States, in order to [effect] their transportation from the land of their fathers to the west of the river Mississippi, in execution of the alleged stipulations of an instrument purporting to be a treaty made at New Echota in 1835 but against the validity of which the Cherokees have earnestly protested.” They authorized Ross and other leaders to work with General Scott and direct “the whole business of the emigration of our people”; they reasserted their rights of sovereignty and self-government as recognized in their treaties with the United States, and they denounced the Treaty of New Echota and called on the United States to renegotiate it in good faith with the proper representatives of the Cherokee people. They were being removed by fraud and force but they were emigrating “in their national capacity” and had not given up their claims to their homeland, their institutions, or their pre-Echota treaty rights. Ross assumed the role of Superintendent of Removal and Subsistence. Scott was happy to work with the Cherokee leadership—despite his upbeat reports, like many other US officers and officials he regarded Ross’s assistance as important to stave off bloodshed.124
Opposition from Ross was not the only thing holding up removal; there were problems with the logistics and planning. The panic of 1837 had hamstrung the efforts of commissioners to settle claims, and periodic wavering on the part of the Van Buren administration perpetuated hopes that the deadline might be extended.125 Removal under the terms of the treaty involved more than simply herding people west. Article 8 stipulated that once the Cherokees reached their new homes the United States would support them with rations for one year or $33.33 each “if they prefer it.”126 The challenges of dealing with Cherokee claims, assessing the value of improvements, and trying to ascertain how many Cherokees preferred cash rather than subsistence caused headaches for the officials responsible for implementing removal under the terms of a treaty noted, according to Hon. Joseph L. Williams, for its ambiguity, verbiage, and complexity. “If Mr. Schermerhorn deliberately designed and contrived its precise structure, to involve difficulty and defy construction,” he wrote the secretary of war, “then is his ingenuity most complete and incontestable; but, if perspicuity was honestly his aim, then his folly and stupidity deserve to be patented.”127
John Ross managed to get Congress to increase the total allowed for removal to $6,647,067. Ross and his removal committee organized the people into thirteen detachments of about one thousand each and recorded every financial transaction associated with the process. The funds for removal had been estimated at $30 per person. The actual costs for those who had already migrated came closer to $60 each. Delayed by drought, fleeced by traders and turnpike keepers, and traveling through snow, the emigrants in Ross’s parties ran up expenses that exceeded $100 per person. The expenses exhausted the funds set aside for removal and cut into the funds provided for per capita distribution to the tune of about $500,000, approximately 10 percent of the total amount awarded by the treaty. Controversy over these costs raged for years: Ross campaigned to get more money from the government to help meet the costs; his opponents accused him of lining his own pockets.128
Ross had led his people in prayer as they began their march west. The hardships of the early migrants paled in comparison with the horrors and death toll experienced by those who underwent forced removal. John G. Burnett, a private in the Second Tennessee Volunteers, recalled that “men working in the fields were arrested and driven to the stockades. Women were dragged from their homes by soldiers whose language they could not understand. Children were separated from their parents and driven into the stockades.” He saw Cherokees driven at bayonet point and loaded into wagons “like cattle or sheep.” He watched them struggle through rain and snow and along “a trail of death,” saw twenty-two die in one night of pneumonia, and was on guard duty the night that Quatie, John Ross’s wife of twenty-five years, died. More than half a century later, he was still haunted by the memory of “six-hundred and forty-five wagons lumbering over the frozen ground with their Cargo of suffering humanity” and “the four-thousand silent graves that mark the trail.” In Burnett’s view, it was a national act of murder. “At this time,” he wrote in 1890, “we are too near the removal of the Cherokees for our young people to fully understand the enormity of the crime that was committed against a helpless race, truth is the facts are being concealed from the young people of today. School children of today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point to satisfy the white man’s greed for gold.” He expected future generations to condemn the act.129
John Ridge, however, blamed Ross for much of the suffering: “If Ross had told them the truth in time,” they would have had chance to sell off “their furniture, their horses, their cattle, hogs
, and sheep, and their growing corn.”130 Elijah Butler, the missionary who had gone to jail with Samuel Worcester, disagreed and charged “all the suffering and all the difficulties of the Cherokee people … to the accounts of Messrs. Ridge and Boudinot.”131
According to War Department statistics, 1838 was the high-water year for removal of eastern Indians to the west of the Mississippi: of the 73,860 people relocated in the eight years after the Indian Removal Act, 25,139 went in 1838.132 While Cherokees made their way along the Trail of Tears as a result of his work at New Echota, John Schermerhorn was busy closer to home in New York, negotiating another fraudulent removal treaty, this one at Buffalo Creek with the Senecas, although the government withdrew his commission before the treaty was completed in 1838. He also orchestrated the removal of Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians. Originally from New England, these Indians had built new Christian communities in Oneida country after the Revolution, only to be removed first to Indiana and then to Wisconsin. Schermerhorn tried to bully them into yet another removal to Kansas. As he had shown at New Echota, the Indians’ Christianity, “civilization,” and record of friendship with the United States counted for nothing: he saw all Indians as a race who could not live side by side with whites and who stood in the way of American progress.133 In his time as Indian commissioner, Schermerhorn participated in negotiations with twenty different tribes. In 1841 the Dutch Reformed Church appointed him missionary to establish a new congregation in Indiana. He died in 1851 at the age of sixty-five.134
Cherokee Civil Wars
Things did not improve for the Cherokees after they arrived in Indian Territory. Under the Treaty of New Echota the US government was to provide rations for a year, but widespread fraud among officials and contractors resulted in insufficient rations of poor quality reaching the Cherokees.135 The treaty also stipulated that, after the costs of removal had been deducted from the $5 million owed the Cherokees for the sale of their eastern homeland, the remaining amount was to be divided on a per capita basis. Did that mean all the Cherokees, or only those who were forced west against their will, as John Ross argued? The chief of the western Cherokees, John Brown, and assistant chiefs John Rodgers and John Looney argued that their people were entitled to a share of the money because they were being asked to share their lands with the roughly fourteen thousand Cherokees who survived the Trail of Tears. In one of its last acts before removal, the Cherokee National Council had passed a resolution declaring that the government and constitution of the Cherokee Nation would be transferred intact to the West. The Old Settlers, as the three thousand or so western Cherokees were known, had their own government and had no intention of letting it become submerged in the newly imported government of the Cherokee majority. The two thousand Cherokees associated with the Treaty Party were also understandably nervous about a government dominated by Ross and the National Party. The several groups met at Takatoka in June 1839 to discuss how to rebuild the Cherokee government but at the end of the council some 100 to 150 National Party members met secretly and drew up a list of men they believed should suffer the death penalty for signing the Treaty of New Echota in violation of the Cherokee law that Major Ridge had supported and John Ridge had put into writing ten years before. Both Ridges, Elias Boudinot, Stand Watie, and others were named. Three men from the clan of each of the accused were asked to sit in judgment and, in each case, they condemned the accused to die. Numbered slips of paper were drawn from a hat; those who drew a paper marked with an X were designated the executioners.136
Early on the morning of June 22, 1839, two dozen men surrounded the home of John Ridge. Three of them entered the house, dragged Ridge from his bed and into the yard where they stabbed him twenty-three times, and then beat him to death in front of his screaming wife and children. Ridge’s twelve-year-old son, John Rollin, said later that the killing “darkened my mind with an eternal shadow”; he carried the image, and the desire for revenge, the rest of his life. Another group went to Elias Boudinot’s house and requested medicine from the nearby mission of Samuel Worcester. As Boudinot led them to the mission they stabbed him in the back with their bowie knives and split his skull with repeated tomahawk blows. Major Ridge was shot from his horse on his way “to visit a sick negro belonging to his family.” Someone—Samuel Worcester, or a Choctaw riding Worcester’s horse, or a carpenter sent by Delight Boudinot—got warning to Stand Watie, who fled to safety. Watie, who now became the recognized leader of the Treaty Party, blamed Ross and swore to avenge the killings. Ross’s son, Allen, claimed his father knew nothing about the killings. Delight Boudinot sent warning to Ross that Watie was after his life; Cherokees from the National Party mounted an armed guard around the chief’s house, and Ross asked Brigadier General Matthew Arbuckle, the US military commander of the area stationed at Fort Gibson, to intervene and prevent the spilling of innocent blood.137
Men who had worked with the victims to dispossess the Cherokees were outraged at the murders. John Schermerhorn wrote a public tribute to John Ridge, defending his conduct in making the Treaty of New Echota. Ridge, Boudinot, and their friends “knew they were running a dreadful risk” in signing the treaty in defiance of a law Ridge himself had drawn up, but they “had counted the cost and deliberately made up their minds, if need be, to offer up their lives as a sacrifice … to save their country from a war of extermination and ruin.” Unlike Ross, said Schermerhorn, Ridge and his friends acted from pure and patriotic motives. At their last meeting, in New York the previous April, Ridge had told Schermerhorn: “I may yet some day die by the hand of some poor infatuated Indian, deluded by the counsels of Ross and his minions, but we have this to console us, we shall have suffered and died in a good cause.” In the hands of the architect of the Treaty of New Echota, Ridge and his associates became martyrs, not traitors, elevating Schermerhorn’s treaty from a sordid land grab to a noble cause.138 Governor Lumpkin likewise extolled the members of the Treaty Party as men of vision who had led their people to happiness and prosperity in the West, only to fall victim to “that most horrid, appalling, deepest of all mid-night crimes” (although the murders were carried out in daylight). “The best half of the intelligence, virtue and patriotism of the Cherokee people has been basely murdered, to gratify the revenge and ambition of John Ross,” he wrote. Suddenly concerned about the nation’s honor, Lumpkin thought it “a crying sin against the United States” that the murderers had not been punished “as justice and law demanded.”139
News of the murders produced predictions of “fatal consequences” and civil war within the Cherokee Nation.140 General Arbuckle compiled a list of those believed responsible for the killings and asked Ross to hand them over. He also advocated military intervention to settle the difficulties.141 Ross and his chiefs denied responsibility for the assassinations and asked why the Cherokees were being singled out for attention, when the law of retaliation still functioned in many tribes. Ross, who had requested that Arbuckle intervene with federal troops when his life was in danger, now protested against Arbuckle’s interference in Cherokee affairs and asked what right the United States had to deprive the Cherokee Nation of its sovereign right to exercise its legitimate authority over acts committed by one Cherokee against another. If it was true that Ridge and Boudinot “were killed by the orders of the constituted authorities of the nation, their lives were forfeited under an existing law of the nation,” a law Ridge himself had voted. The Ross party cited the terms of the Treaty of New Echota, the treaty they rejected, as evidence of their right to self-government and the United States’ obligation to keep peace with all the Cherokees, not just the minority.142
In 1839, various branches of the Cherokee Nation reassembled in Indian Territory. Several hundred Cherokees had settled in eastern Texas in the winter of 1819–20, welcomed by the Mexican government as a buffer against expanding American settlement. Their position became tenuous after Texas won its independence in 1836, and it grew increasingly perilous under Governor Mirabeau Lamar’s polici
es of ethnic cleansing. In July 1839 the Republic of Texas drove out the Cherokees; their chief Duwali or Bowles was killed at the Battle of Neches River, and the survivors fled to Indian Territory where they rejoined their relatives.143
That same month, nearly two thousand Cherokees—Old Settlers, eastern Cherokees, and Texas Cherokees—gathered in a meeting at the Illinois Camp Ground at Tahlequah. Declaring themselves a general convention of the Cherokee Nation, they drafted documents for a new government. The National Party adopted a resolution pardoning those who had carried out the executions and outlawing anyone who advocated vengeance on the executioners. Some Old Settlers signed an act of union with the National Party and the Tahlequah council ratified a new Constitution of the United Cherokee Nation and elected Ross principal chief. But most Old Settlers joined the Treaty Party in its opposition to Ross.144
At the same time as the Cherokees and other emigrant tribes wrestled with their internal schisms, they had to deal with the Indian peoples of the southern plains and prairies who regarded them as intruders. Tahlequah became the scene of multinational Indian councils where the Cherokees and their neighbors attempted to establish peaceful relations and bring peace and order to Indian Territory by the practiced methods of Indian diplomacy and alliance building. Four thousand Indians from twenty-two nations attended the grand council at Tahlequah in June 1843. Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Shawnee, Wyandot delegates reaching out to Osages, Iowas, Pawnees, and other western tribes employed the diplomatic traditions they had brought with them from the East, relying on “wampum, kinship, ritual, and council fires to help organize life in their new environment.” But the intertribal and intratribal divisions stemming from removal proved insurmountable.145
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