Series:

The Civilization of the American Indian

2 total works

Cover of The Indians of the Southwest
With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 the United States became responsible for the administration of some 125,000 Indians in addition to those already within the national boundaries. The new tribes included many peoples known only to traders and trappers who had ventured into the trackless stretches of the West. This book considers the hundred-year record of federal relations with these Indians.

The first two decades of United States control are seen as a period of large-scale humanitarian purpose, flawed in many cases by racial prejudice, official corruption, or outright cruelty and abuse. New policies, under Ulysses S. Grant, and an awakening of public conscience in the 1870s and 1880s brought a second major period, characterized by the system of reservations.

Later chapters of the book deal with twentieth-century changes, particularly with agents, schools, and medical services, all carefully analyzed by the author, who was a member of the Meriam Commission in 1926-27. The record reveals in realistic detail the problems of the government and the tenacity of the tribes in resisting white settlement and retaining their own culture and way of life.

Cover of Cherokee Cavaliers
The two hundred letters which from the colorful mosaic of this story of the Cherokee tell for the first time, in the Indian's own words, of more than forty years in the history of the old Cherokee Nation. These letters, found in three great trunks in Oklahoma by Edward Everett Dale, and here brought together, in collaboration with Gaston Litton, in sequence and with the necessary annotation to make a connected story, are the correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot family, the minority leaders in the Nation.

The Cherokees, by the first decade of the nineteenth century, had made great progress in civilization. They had a constitutional form of government under which they were to live for three-quarters of a century in a tiny independent republic within the confines of the United States. Not a few were well educated. They had their own written language as evolved by Sequoyah and many had large plantations, cultivated by numerous slaves, and lived in beautiful homes as Southern planters, in the full tradition of the Southern cavalier.

From the time of President Jefferson, however, they had been under urgent pressure to leave their traditional homes in the deep south and seek new ones in the great unoccupied lands of the Louisiana Purchase. In 1835 the minority group, headed by the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot family, signed at New Echota, Georgia, a treaty which provided that the entire tribe should remove to lands in Indian Territory already occupied by the Cherokees West. This group was henceforth known as the ""Treaty Party.""

The treaty and the enforced removal three years later divided the Cherokee into two hostile factions and paved the way for thirty years of political turmoil and bloody strife within the Nation. In these letters, which center around the figure of the last Confederate General to surrender his sword - brigadier General Stand Watie - is told the story of the removal, the establishment of a new nation in the West, the divided loyalties of the tribe during the Civil War, and the tragic difficulties of the reconstruction. The picture is not alone that of life within the Nation. E. C. Boudinot, the Cherokee delegate to the Confederate congress, writes of war-torn Richmond during the Civil War. John Rollin Ridge, the poet and journalist, and several others who followed the Gold Rush to California tell of the mining camps during the days of forty-nine. General Albert Pike's official correspondence with General Watie is revealed.

As only personal letters can reveal, here in intimacy are the lives and thoughts, the loves and hates, the philosophies and ambitions of these proud cavaliers of Cherokee blood. This book will be a revelation to those who have thought of this branch of Indian race as barbarous or semi-civilized.