Trail of Broken Promises. Caleb Pirtle III
TRAIL OF
BROKEN PROMISES
Removal of the Five Civilized Tribes
to Oklahoma
Caleb Pirtle III
Copyright © 2011 by Caleb Pirtle III and Venture Galleries, LLC, 1220 Chateau Lane, Hideaway, Texas 75771. 214-564-1493
All rights reserved. No part of this book can be reproduced, stored in a retrieval program, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise except as may be expressly permitted by the actual copyright statutes or in writing by the publisher.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-9842-0837-1
Text: Caleb Pirtle III
Editing/Design: Linda Greer Pirtle
Cover Design: Jutta Medina
Photo Credits: Five Civilized Tribes Museum, Muskogee, Oklahoma,
Tsa-La-Gi Museum, Tahlequah, Oklahoma
Cover Art: “The Trail Where They Cried” told the grim story of the sorrow and death that stalked the journey west. Yet the faces were stoic. As one doctor reported: “No lamentations went up from the bereaved ones here. They were of the true Indian blood … there is a dignity in their grief which is sublime.”
Courtesy Tsa-La-Gi, Tahlequah, Oklahoma
Bud Breen, artist
New revised edition.
For Forrest B. Greer, who possessed the independent spirit of Oklahoma.
She never lost her independence, no matter how hard times became.
Oklahoma was her pride.
It was her homeland.
It made her strong.
Prologue
THE FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES – the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole – rose to power on the land of their fathers, atop great smoky mountains, deep within vast timbered forests, lost among the mangroves, palmettos, and rivers of grass.
They were strong and proud, hunters who had become farmers. Many fine plantations were firmly planted on the land they called home, and slaves picked their cotton in the fields.
They walked in the pathway of aristocracy.
Self-government guided their footsteps.
The ways of the savage had been pushed behind them, buried in the graves of their ancestors.
They prospered, but they became troubled, watching as the wagons of civilization rolled selfishly into the country that, they believed, God had given them. It was rich land. It gave forth gold, and the Indians listened as men fought and schemed, even killed, to take that priceless land – their birthright – from them.
White men had once offered the hand of friendship.
It became the hand of greed.
Treaties were passed and signed and ignored.
Promises were made and broken, sometimes just forgotten.
The white men took what they wanted, passing a law in 1830 that, they hoped, would drive the Five Civilized Tribes westward and out of their way.
The Indians were stunned. They were rooted deep in the soil that held the ashes of their fathers, the dreams of their children, the seeds of their harvest.
Yet a president was pointing them west toward a land that was foreign to them, out amongst the unknown, out where no one had a home or a hope – just simply a hate. The president had expected the Indians to hear and obey. He was wrong.
The road west may be leading them to a land of promise and prosperity, but the Indians – at least most of them – refused to go.
They would die first.
So many died along the way.
Part I: Vanguard to the West
The Great Spirit gave this island to his Red Children. He placed the white man on the other side of the Great Waters, but the white man was not satisfied with their own, but came over to take ours from us.
--Chief Tecumseh
Chapter 1: The Homes of Their Fathers
THE CHEROKEES LOOKED toward the west with diffident, somber eyes, darkened by the shadows of a sunset that had fallen beyond the edge of the earth. It was the land of lost souls, beckoning for the dead to journey back to the stars and fade forever into the night from whence they had come.
To the Cherokees, the east was the refuse of light and sun. They stared with doubt and dismay toward the land where the sun and the light disappeared. It was a fearful place, and they turned their backs to it.
The Cherokees had found peace in the fertile valleys where the earth was old, beneath the solemn, rugged face of Great Smoky Mountains forever veiled by a thin will-o-the-wisp haze that rose up from its hollows and touched the sky. And the Cherokees knew why: their Adawehis, their story tellers, had told them.
Selfishness had crept into the world, causing men to quarrel and fight. The Chiefs of two tribes counseled together, even smoked the pipe, then grew angry and battled for seven days and nights. The Great Spirit frowned, for men were forbidden to smoke the pipe until they had made peace. Men needed to be reminded of their obligations.
So, the Great Spirit reached down and turned the belligerent old men into gray-colored flowers, causing them to grow wherever friends and relatives had quarreled. He hung the smoke of the pipe across the mountains until all peopled learned to live together in peace.
The Cherokees prospered in the umbrage of their legacy, settled in the highlands of northern Georgia, central Tennessee, and among the misty peaks of the Carolinas. Buffalo, deer, and wild turkey ran within the thickets. And the countryside became a quilt-work of color, woven by the azaleas, rhododendron, mountain laurel, and magnolia.
The Cherokees had found peace in the land they called home. But they would fight to hold it, even if the smoke clung to the mountains forever.
Women spent their hours in the garden, slopping hogs, caring for the poultry, smoking venison, and tanning hides. The men prepared themselves for war. It was always near, as close as the thunder, and as deadly as the lightning that danced among the pines and hemlock.
As William Fyffe, a South Carolina plantation owner, wrote in 1761, “their greatest ambition is to distinguish themselves by military actions … Their young men are not regarded till they kill an enemy or take a prisoner. Those houses in which there’s the greatest number of scalps are most honoured. A scalp is as great a Trophy among them as a pair of colours among us.”
During the calm days, the Cherokee men fashioned bows, tomahawks, war clubs, and canoes. But when war stalked them, they painted their faces black, streaked with vermillion, and they adorned their hair with feathers.
It was a time, Fyffe recalled, when “there’s nothing heard but war songs and howlings.”
William Bartram, the American botanist who wandered at will through the Indian nations, wrote, “The Cherokees in their disposition and manner are grave and steady; dignified and circumspect in their deportment; rather slow and reserved in conversation; yet frank, cheerful and humane; tenacious of their liberties and natural rights of men; secret, deliberate and determined in their