Ahh, you know a lot more about it than I do. One of my school roommates was a Cherokee from Tahlequah—ironically, he looked totally white, which I guess is not that unusual. His family’s ancestors were with the part of the Cherokee Nation that broke away and supported the Union—the Nation itself was allied with the Confederacy, as I understand it.
” Tahlequah—ironically, he looked totally white, which I guess is not that unusual. His family’s ancestors were with the part of the Cherokee Nation that broke away and supported the Union—the Nation itself was allied with the Confederacy, as I understand it.”
That’s me...if I get a nosebleed, my Indian blood is gone! lol Had my DNA done, and I have more African and Mexican in me than Cherokee....go figure! And LOTS of Irish. lol
My group were of the Ridge Party, stayed with the South because they were promised sovereignty of their own states and knew they couldn’t trust the Union. The South was as bad as the Union to use and lie to the Indians.
It’s all an amazing story. Amazing men. Rich, cultured, well educated.
This is a snip of what they dealt with after the war.
Stand and Sally Watie, finding their home and mill burned to the ground by Federals during the war, returned to financial ruin. Watie used the last of his resources in 1867 to help finance nephew Cornelius Boudinot in a joint venture of an Indian Territory tobacco factory. It was likely near this location that Saladin wrote to his father. Only another year would pass before Saladin was claimed by a sudden, unexplained illness at age twenty-one.
The Boudinot Tabacco Factory was located just inside Indian Territory near Siloam Springs, Arkansas and proved popular and lucrative to local businesses. Noticing the success of the enterprise and the temptation of revenue and reprisal, the government acted upon a law they had just imposed for a federal excise tax on tobacco and distilled spirits which did not exempt Indian Territory.
Watie refused to pay what he considered an illegitimate tax against a sovereign state and in violation of the treaty made only a year before which held Cherokee or other tribes were not subject such tax. Boudinot, having been involved in writing the language of the treaty, knew the congress and the government had acted outside the agreement.
Nevertheless, federal officers confiscated and closed the factory, seized the assets to pay the back tax and forced Watie into bankruptcy. Boudinot filed suit against the government, but typically the case was long delayed. This became a landmark decision, setting precedent that a law passed by Congress could supersede provisions of even a recent treaty.
It was said that excellent grades of tobacco had been produced at the Boudinot factory and merchants who had engaged in selling it were disappointed because of the loss of revenue from the product. The white growers in Missouri also took their objections to the government to restrain the Cherokees’ competition. Boudinot lost his case in federal court and filed before the U.S. Supreme Court. Fifteen years later, the United States Court of Claims was ordered to give Boudinot restitution for damages; too late for Watie to regain his loss. No such tobacco enterprise was attempted again in Indian Territory.
Stand Watie spent his final years leading his nation, farming and trying to restore his land and continue the education of their children. Somehow he managed to send them away to school to make up for the years of war halting their lessons. Son Solon, who often was called by his Cherokee name, Watica, wrote from school to his father. “I feel proud to think that I have a papa that take the last dollars he has to send me school.” Solon died of pneumonia while attending classes in Cane Hill, Arkansas in 1869.
Weeks before his death in 1871, Watie wrote to daughter Jacqueline from their home on the Grand River. “You can’t imagine how lonely I am up here at our old place without any of my dear children being with me. I would be so happy to have you here, but you must go to school.”
There may never have been a bullet molded that could kill the old General, as the legend said. Instead, in their attempt to break him, the powers who were in control of his destiny allowed him to grow poor and old and sick with his grief as his children fell around him.
Cornelius, who had been admitted to the bar in 1856 at age twenty one, went home to Arkansas after the tobacco factory was closed and resumed practice of the law. Eventually in Fort Smith, he was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States. He published several newspapers including ‘The Arkansian’, a weekly published at Fayetteville “in the interest of democracy”. He also maintained a ranch in the Cherokee Nation near his kin, while he spent much time in Washington D.C.
More land losses were the rule rather than the exception during the ‘reconstruction’ years after the war.
CHAPTER 16 - Beginning Again
The South rebuilds after the Civil War