Posted on 10/11/2021 7:37:47 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1843, the Cherokee nation in Oklahoma hanged Jacob West for an election-related murder.
The affair was part of the bloody factional conflict among Cherokee following the Trail of Tears expulsion from ancestral homelands in the American southeast. We’ve touched previously on this conflict in our post on Archilla Smith, the first man executed in the new Cherokee lands. Indeed, West’s victim was the man who prosecuted Archilla Smith, a fellow by the name of Isaac Bushyhead.*
Both that previous hanged man Smith and this date’s principal, Jacob West, were affiliated to the Ridge–Watie faction — Cherokee who had signed the controversial treaty acceding to removal. It’s a fair supposition that the growing U.S. would have ethnically cleansed the Cherokee in the east no matter what, but in the event, it was this treaty that supplied the legal basis for doing so. For obvious reasons, the faction aligned with it was not universally popular.
That’s especially so given their opposition by the Cherokee principal chief, John Ross — the nation’s great statesman in the mid-19th century who refused to sign off on removal. For several years in the early 1840s, recriminations between the Ridge-Watie and Ross factions boiled frequently over into violence.
No surprise, then, that we find in R. Michael Wilson’s Legal Executions in Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma Including the Indian Territory: A Comprehensive History a deadly attack....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
***That’s especially so given their opposition by the Cherokee principal chief, John Ross — the nation’s great statesman in the mid-19th century who refused to sign off on removal.***
From what I have read, Ross was kidnapped, and the Ridge–Watie faction sent their own delegates to sign off on the romoval to IT(Indian Territory)
This caused an internal civil war among the Cherokees.
During the War between the States, Stand Watie became a Confederate General leading the many of the tribes to join the Southern Cause.
Ross led the Pro-Union faction, known as “PIN” Indians. They were given a “carte Blanche” by the Union to kill any white man found in the Arkansas areas.
“Endeavor to persevere.”
L
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