Plains Tribes

 Though perhaps not all of it lay in the “Great American Desert" invoked by contemporary American explorers and maps, the western half of early eighteenth-century present-day Oklahoma still hosted few people. Most numerous were likely the aforementioned nomadic bands of Comanches and Kiowas who had migrated from the west over the previous few decades. Though their impact on the region would grow through the 1800s, already they occasionally clashed with the Osages, Apaches, and others.
Meanwhile, the Wichitas’ long dismal retreat from the Osages southward toward Texas continued.
Modern-day place names such as their large namesake city in southern Kansas, the Wichita Mountains near Lawton in southwest Oklahoma, and the city of Wichita Falls across Red River in north Texas indicate the tribes’ path.

George Catlin’s early-1830s depiction of a Comanche Village, Women Dressing Robes and Drying Meat as they no doubt would have appeared just a few years before as well, in the 1820s.

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The Chickasaws 

The power of this tribe, too, far exceeded its small numbers. The Chickasaws included at most forty-five hundred men, women, and children during the time of their southeastern residence and interaction with Europeans and white and black Americans. Like the Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, the Chickasaws spoke a Muskhogean language. Their homeland included western Kentucky and Tennessee, northern Mississippi, and northwestern Alabama.

The Chickasaws were at least as closely related to the Choctaws as the Seminoles were to the Creeks. The Chickasaws and Choctaws formed a single tribe until sometime prior to Spaniard Hernando DeSoto’s 1540 discovery of them. The tribe’s very name probably means “they left as a tribe not a very great while ago.“ But the Chickasaws possessed a much keener commitment to the art of war than the Choctaws, and they were feared by the latter (despite the Choctaws’ numerical superiority), other tribes in their region, and even eventually Europe’s most powerful nations.

As Britain and France competed for control of North America-and in particular the lower Mississippi River and Valley and the Gulf ports to the south-in the early 1700s, the French cultivated the Choctaws as native allies, and the British did the same with the Chickasaws. So troublesome did the Chickasaws become to French efforts in the region, their governor of Louisiana declared in 1735 that the tribe’s “entire destruction … becomes every day more necessary to our interests and I am going to exert all diligence to accomplish it.”

From 1720 to 1763 several French armies marched into Chickasaw country from southern Louisiana and Mississippi to conquer the tribe. Choctaws, white militia, and black slaves supported the armies. All these efforts failed, and the tribe remained unvanquished when France surrendered its claims on the continent to the victorious British after losing the Seven Years War-including its North American theater, the French and Indian War-to them.

Horatio Cushman in his 1899 chronicle History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians, noted how, contrary to the Chickasaws’ long conflict with the French European powers, “neither the Choctaws nor Chickasaws ever engaged in war against the American people, but always stood as their faithful allies.’

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The Seminoles

This tribe originated in the early 1700s from Yamasee and Lower Creeks who migrated into northern and central Spanish Florida following their defeat by the South Carolinians in the Yamasee War. Military confrontations with white settlers as well as dwindling game for food perpetuated this exodus throughout the eighteenth century. The emigrants grew increasingly autonomous from the Lower Creeks. Gradually, they took on the name “Seminole,” meaning “wild” “runaways,” or “separatists,” which reflected their watershed departure.

Later in the 1700s, the Seminoles welcomed black slaves escaping Spanish masters into their company. Though apparently retaining their servile status, these descendants of Africa lived in communities near the Seminole villages, grew into a significant component of the tribe, and received treatment as virtual equals. Following the American defeat of the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, more Creeks headed to Florida to join the Seminoles. This time, Upper-not LowerCreeks, pro-British “Red Stick” veterans of the War of 1812, comprised the majority of the migrants.

The war refugees ballooned the Seminole population from thirty-five hundred to six thousand. By 1815 these disparate companies comprised a formidable though still small nation. Their resistance to removal from their Florida homelands, however, casts a large legacy in American history books. Hunting on lands in that state as well as southern Georgia and Alabama, they centered their communities in Florida and lived as town-dwellers. Unlike the other southeastern tribes, they eschewed farming.

The Seminoles’ initial significant conflict as a tribe with the United States occurred in 1817 to 1818 with the first of a series of “Seminole Wars.” White Georgian slave owners, whose major (and Constitutionally protected) financial capital in the economic system of the time consisted of their black slaves, complained to the U.S. government about runaways among these folk living with the Seminoles. General Andrew Jackson, in the latest of a long series of battles (violent as well as non-violent) with Natives, led an American army into Florida to retrieve the escapees, burning down a Seminole town in the process.

As they did in many other places, from the time the United States purchased Florida from Spain in 1819, American settlers began swarming onto the tribe’s land, settling it, and then urging the U.S. government to remove the resident tribes. In 1823 the powers in Washington gained the Seminoles’ agreement to the Treaty of Tampa, which required the tribe’s move south to the swampy inland Everglades region east of Tampa.

Even this did not work, because the Indians accused whites of harassment and the whites accused the Seminoles of theft, property destruction, and violence. The whites demanded the tribe’s relocation to Indian Territory. The Seminoles’ toughness, geography, history, leadership, and sense of place and other cultural traditions would generate a less than cordial response from them toward federal soldiers’ efforts to force them west.

An early 1800s Seminole village in Florida, prior to the tribe’s wars with the United States and the exile of most of them to Indian Territory.

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The Choctaws

Probably the most populous tribe on the entire continent in the nineteenth century, the talented and powerful Choctaws excelled as farmers, hunters, and diplomats alike. Like some other southeastern tribes such as the Cherokees, the Choctaws increasingly adapted the practices and institutions of Western Christendom, partly to forestall their removal from their ancestral homelands. Around twenty-two thousand Choctaws spread from the middle of the Mississippi River Valley southward to the Gulf of Mexico at the beginning of the 1800s. They traded and conversed effectively with the European powers who frequented the Gulf ports of the area.

The Choctaws organized their country into three regions, each governed by a principal chief, similar to a nation’s president. One chief, Pushmataha, gained renown as a statesman, commercial visionary, and warrior. As shrewd and eloquent as he was rugged and brave, he proved to be the match of American leaders such as James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and John Calhoun, as well as other tribal leaders such as the Shawnee Tecumseh. He sparred with all of them over matters of supreme importance to both the Choctaws and the United States. A national Choctaw council composed of other leaders from throughout the tribe, similar to a Congress, also carried authority.

The Choctaws-notably Pushmataha-demonstrated their hunting prowess and physical vigor with journeys as far west as present-day Oklahoma, hundreds of miles from their Mississippi homeland. Two developments winnowed out the game population of the Gulf States and forced these long and dangerous treks. One was the multiplying American population in the South, the other the burgeoning fur trade with Europe. In present-day Oklahoma, the Choctaw hunters not only slew great hauls of game, they clashed with Osages, Caddos, and other tribes residing in the area, as well as American merchants who traded with them.

Like the other southeastern “civilized” tribes, the Choctaw advances in Western culture failed to prevent growing pressure from the American people and their government for the tribe’s removal to the west. To the Natives’ surprise, they would face new chapters of oppression even after they made those treks.

PushmatahaFather of the Choctaws (c. 1764-1824) “A little cloud was once seen in the northern sky. It came before a rushing wind, and covered the Choctaw country with darkness. Out of it flew an angry fire. It struck a large oak, and scattered its limbs and its trunk all along the ground, and from that spot sprung forth a warrior fully armed for war. And that man was Pushmataha.”

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Creek Civil War Centered by the 1810s in the Alabama River Valley, the Upper Creeks were led by the determined Opothleyahola. Though not engulfed in the Yamasee War of a century before, they held conservative, traditionalist beliefs with little interest in assimilating into American culture or embracing American institutions. To the east in Georgia along the Chattahoochee, Ocmulgee, and Flint Rivers, lived the Lower Creeks, who had their own strong leader, William McIntosh. Ironically, though desperate foes of the English and proto-Americans in the Yamasee War, they now possessed a more “progressive" philosophy and favored adoption of most American ways, including education, commerce, technology, and the Christian faith.The philosophical divide between the Upper and Lower Creeks exploded into violent civil war in the Red Stick War (1813-14).

Influenced by the great Shawnee chief and war captain Tecumseh, Opothleyahola simultaneously led the Upper Creeks (Red Sticks, for their red war clubs and their shamans’ supposed magical red sticks) into a disastrous alliance with the British during America’s second war with Britain, the War of 1812. The Lower Creeks, meanwhile, sided with the American colonists. This conflict, incited by atrocities such as the Upper Creek massacre of nearly 250 white settlers and Lower Creek men, women, and children at Fort Mims, near Mobile, Alabama, culminated in the Upper Creeks’ bloody defeat at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. The victorious American forces in that famous fight included General and future President Andrew Jackson, future “Father of Texas” Sam Houston, the Cherokees, the Choctaws, and most of the Lower Creeks.

After their landmark pummeling at Horseshoe Bend, the Upper Creeks retreated to a more subtle rejection of American ways. But their anger and bitterness at those—and the Lower Creeks support of them-simmered, to flash into bloodshed again later. The United States government The Creeks voted in a death did more

penalty for any tribesman than simmer. who attempted to sell Creek They forced land to white settlers. the Creeks to cede twenty-two million acres of land in Alabama and Georgia and then pressured them to move west.

All this triggered long-term as well as shortterm consequences for the tribe. It turned the majority of Creeks so strongly against further land cessions, including an exchange for lands out west, that they determined to give up no more land to the Americans. They also voted in a death penalty for any tribesman who attempted to sell Creek land to white settlers. Sadly, opinions on the land issue were not unanimous within the tribe.

“Red Stick” Upper Creeks massacring white settlers, Lower Creeks, and militia in 1813 at Fort Mims, near Mobile, Alabama. Such bloodshed led to the Upper Creeks’ crushing defeat by the U. S. and its Indian allies at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814 

Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer's The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.

The Creeks 

The Cherokees were not the only tribe pressured into moving to the Southwest. To their west and south lay over twenty thousand members of the Muscogee Confederation of tribes. The powerful Creeks comprised the vast majority of this people, along with smaller numbers of Natchez, Alabamas, Koasatis, and Euchees. Historian Gaston Little recounted the fearsome reputation of the Creeks:

“The Creek men were tall and slender and their women were well-formed and beautiful. Bravery was a characteristic among the Creeks, whose warriors defeated in battle all the surrounding tribes. The Creeks were considered during colonial times to be the most powerful of the southern tribes”.

The Creeks and their related tribes lived across wide expanses of Alabama and southern Georgia. In addition to their martial vigor, they were accomplished farmers and possessed a sophisticated system of governance. On local matters the latter consisted of leaders who each governed a town. A two-house legislative body, meanwhile, governed the nation.

Big trouble loomed, however, both from within and without for the Creeks. Two major factions—the Upper Creeks and Lower Creeks, first so referenced by the English-comprised the Creek Confederation. These names evolved from the brutal Yamasee War of 1715 to 1717 in which the Creeks, Choctaws, and other Southeastern tribes fought a war of extermination with colonial South Carolina, seeking to expel the English from the region. Many of these Indians had earlier conspired with the English in an unholy slave trade involving Indians from weaker tribes. The tainted parties fell out with one another as the colonists grew stronger and wealthier and their Indian collaborators grew increasingly indebted to them. As described by anthropologist Jack M. Schultz, war ensued after English traders also began to enslave their Indian allies and families as payment for their debts.

During the Yamasee War, the Upper Creeks lived mainly to the west of the Chattahoochee River in present-day Alabama and refrained from fighting the Carolinians. The Lower Creeks lived along and to the east of the Chattahoochee and, along with the Yamasees, spearheaded the Indian effort. (Though appearing on maps west and east, respectively, the colonial perspective of the era, with communities narrowly strung along the Atlantic Coast, looked outward to the west from the east. Thus, the more remote western environs then appeared higher, or upper, on maps and the nearer regions lower.)

Creeks in a pre-removal Georgia village. Extended families or clans lived in clusters of cabins or teepees

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Osage-Cherokee War 

The arrival of white-dominated American civilization did not inaugurate encroachment upon and conquest of Indian lands in the American Southwestor elsewhere on the North American continent. Long before, the tribes themselves threatened, feuded with, stole from, conquered, enslaved, and slaughtered one another. Over a span of centuries, the Osages migrated all the way from the Ohio Valley to present-day Oklahoma, attacking and displacing other tribes as they went. In Oklahoma they violently forced two of the area’s earliest inhabitants—the Wichitas and Caddos—south, across Red River.

Claremore Mound, a few miles northwest of present Claremore, where a seven hundred-strong force of Cherokees and their allies decimated the population of an Osage village in the 1817 Battle of Claremore Mound. As so often was the case in the sanguinary Western wars, both between tribes and between Natives and whites, one side attacked when the other’s warriors were mostly absent and the women, children, and elderly men present. Far from settling conflicts, such horrors typically sparked reprisals or at least attempted reprisals. Most of the Osage dead and captured at Claremore Mound were women and children. Courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society.

Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer's The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.

The Cherokees 

The Cherokees stood as one of the largest and probably the most “Americanized" tribe on the continent. A few of their approximately twenty thousand members settled along the Arkansas River in present-day Arkansas as early as 1795. A tough chief named Duwali (or “The Bowl”) led this group. Gradually, more migrated into the area. By the end of the first decade of the 1800s, the federal government was actively inducing all Cherokees to move west. It did not, however, specify particular coordinates for the Cherokees’ new lands.

At least one additional delegation of Cherokees reconnoitered lands the government offered them in northern and western Arkansas Territory, and more Cherokees agreed to move west. In 1807 American traders in Nachitoches, Louisiana met Cherokees who reported living up Red River to the north, probably in present-day southwest Arkansas. And in 1808 the Osages started complaining about Cherokees hunting on their lands in northern Arkansas and the eastern part of present-day Oklahoma without permission.

Sibley and others had attempted to calm the fierce Osages as they cleared a wide and bloody swath in the wake of their southern migration from Missouri. This tribe of around 4,250 people that included 1,250 warriors raided, plundered, enslaved, and slaughtered their way through one Native group after another in present-day Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. They drove the Caddos, the Wichitas, and others before them (see Chapter 1). Tribes throughout the Southwest feared the Osages.

Soon the Osages did much more than complain about the Cherokees. This time, however, they had met their equal. The Cherokees who had come west were a smart and rugged lot, and they had no intention of being shoved out of lands for which they had departed their ancient homes and communities and traveled hundreds in some cases, over a thousand-miles to find. The Cherokees stood their ground and fought back against the Osages, with no less savagery than their opponents.

Plus, these Western Cherokee numbers continued to grow. By 1817 around two thousand lived in Arkansas, a few in present-day eastern Oklahoma. Spurred by federal government treaties that induced the struggling Osages to cede millions of acres of land they controlled in present-day Oklahoma (bounded roughly by the Verdigris River on the west, the present Kansas line on the north, Arkansas Territory on the east, and the Arkansas River on the south) to the U.S., as well as material compensation, the Cherokees’ western population swelled to six thousand by 1820.

John Jolly (?-1838) This shrewd, greathearted man led the Western Cherokees or Old Settlers wing of the tribe through some of their most momentous years. Known in Cherokee as Ahuludegi or Oolooteka, he entered the scroll of history as headman of Cayuga town on Hiwassee Island in present-day southeastern Tennessee upon his older brother Tahlonteeskee’s migration west to the Arkansas country in 1809 as a leader of the Old Settlers.

Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer's The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.

No-Win Situation

 If the Natives’ differences with white American culture and history caused problems for them, however, so did their herculean attempts to remedy that problem by acculturating themselves to the swelling United States. Large segments of several prominent southeastern Indian tribes attempted to master the ways of European and American culture, just as early American leaders such as George Washington encouraged them to do.

These five tribes—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles-gained the sobriquet of the “Five Civilized Tribes" due to their strong acceptance of most of the key tenets. of an American civilization that, by most objective measurements, was succeeding, growing, and thriving far beyond their own.

These tenets included its Christian religion, classical Western educational system, social culture, political institutions, and agrarian and other business practices. Famed Oklahoma historian Angie Debo cited the usefulness of the Five Civilized Tribes designation “to distinguish them from their wild neighbors of the plains.”

Historian Arrell M. Gibson contrasted the powerful impact of one tribe’s mounting mixed-blood population-birthed of enterprising white fathers (Scots, Scots-Irish, Irish, English, French, etc.) and Indian mothers—with full bloods who retained old ways and associations:

The mixed-bloods (among the tribes), more like their fathers than their mothers, came to adopt an advanced way of living. They developed vast estates, ranches, and businesses in the Cherokee Nation, and became slaveholders. The full bloods continued to live in log cabins, cultivated only a subsistence patch of food crops, raised horses, excelled in the old tribal crafts of hunting, fishing, a life close to nature, and now and then joined a war party for a raid on the encroaching American settlements.

But many of those American settlers, including Georgians furious over the federal government’s failure to uphold its end of the Compact of 1802, feared that the Cherokees were growing too “civilized.” Why? The Georgians envisioned a large permanent-and sovereign-Indian enclave in the northwest corner of the state. They also worried that Cherokee roads, tolls, and ferries operating beyond the constraints of Georgian laws and regulations would hamper commerce with other states. Also, the tribal chiefs’ reluctance to improve the nation’s roads angered Georgian leaders. Plus, as earlier mentioned, the federal government had assured the state of the soon departure of the Cherokees. Unfortunately, the tribe itself had no part in that agreement, so they had no intention of fulfilling it.

The Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles faced similar indifference or hostility to their efforts at “civilizing.” Whether practicing the old ways or the new, the realization grew among the tribes that they could not win if they remained east of the Mississippi River, no matter what course they pursued.

Arkansas Territory in its original form and with two sections split off to form Indian Territory.

Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer's The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.