Monthly Archives: May 2009

Understanding the Numbers

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They called it The Great War, and they were right about that. They called it The War to End All Wars, and about that … they were wrong.

Laurence Stallings, a U.S. Marine who lost a leg in the Belleau Wood fighting in 1918, got straight to it with his pictoral history The First World War, published in 1933, six full years before the horror would erupt again and plunge the globe back into even worse carnage.

In the book, Stallings selected photographs — mostly from the Western Front in France and Flanders — that run the gamut from sad to patriotic to poignant to appalling. The idea, he said in the preface, was that someone would eventually make sense out of the chaos, but he really held out little hope for that: The title was deliberately chosen to suggest there would be a Second World War. Near the back are photographs of four world leaders: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Kemal Pasha. That alone showed Stallings’ prescience and fears for the future.

The names, the faces, that show up in Stallings’ book and others are memorable for being published. But countless men exist only in battalion photos hanging in Legion halls or in faded black-and-white portraits stuck among the personal effects of great-grandparents. Some — many — simply disappeared as if they’d never lived, their bodies lying under markers in vast cemeteries around France and Flanders or so completely obliterated that they have no known burial place.

The statistics Stallings cites are of their time and necessarily incomplete in a country-by-country breakdown of casualties. But still … ten million known dead soldiers from all sides of the conflict. It somehow becomes necessary to put those into perspective. The numbers are simply too large to make much sense of.

Take one country: Canada. The population when the war broke out in 1914 was between seven and eight million. More than 600,000 men were enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force over the next five years; more than 65,000 of them would be killed and more than 170,000 wounded. Today, with Canada’s population hovering around 33 million, that would mean an army of 2.5 million, with 250,000 dead and 700,000 wounded. Would Canada — would any country — be prepared to make that kind of sacrifice again?

But the numbers are still too large.

Take one battle: On the first day at the Somme offensive, July 1, 1916, British Field Marshal Douglas Haig sent 750,000 troops over the top straight into massed German machine-guns, artillery and barbed wire. That morning, 20,000 of those men were killed, another 40,000 were wounded or missing. Leading from the rear, Haig didn’t call off the attempt to break through the German trenches until mid-November. It was the death of a generation.

But it’s still too many to understand.

Take one battalion: The Newfoundland Regiment, from England’s oldest and poorest overseas colony. Of the 801 men from The Rock who left their trenches at Beaumont-Hamel just after nine the first morning of the Somme, only 69 returned to answer the roll. The dead numbered 255. Another 386 were wounded and 91 were missing. It devastated every city and outport fishing hamlet on the island, stripping it in one morning of its best. It has been said that the island, now Canada’s tenth province, never really recovered.

Even that is too hard to take in or verify.

Take one squad of men. At Verdun, where hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers were slaughtered, there is a carefully preserved area with just the muzzles of rifles and rusted bayonets sticking out of the dirt. Underneath are the bodies of a squad of French poilus, entombed by a shellburst. No one knows if they suffocated or were killed by concussion because no one dug them out. And no one knows who it is that’s buried in the Trench of Bayonets, obedient to the order “Ils ne passeront pas”, but they lie they still, an eerie legacy.

And now we’re closer to the reality.

Take one man: Maj. Talbot Papineau of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. The brilliant son of an American mother and a French-Canadian father, an early Rhodes Scholar, the great-grandson of the Quebecois rebel Louis-Joseph Papineau, he left a safe staff appointment in the rear to rejoin his men in the field. On Oct. 30, 1917, in the blood and mud of Passchendaele, Papineau turned to a brother officer and said: “You know, Hughie, this is suicide.” Moments later, he was blown apart by a shellburst as he led his men over the top, and his body was never officially found. An entire future, a great might-have-been, was snuffed out in an instant.

And that’s finally what those numbers mean: A family back home grieving for the reality of one man’s promise unfulfilled, multiplied 10 million times.

The Plundered

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A number of summers ago, when I was still stationed in Spain, I packed up my daughter, and a tent and all the necessary gear, and did a long looping camping tour of the southern part of Spain, down through the Extremadura, and to the rock of Gib al Tarik, and a long leisurely drive along the Golden Coast – I had driven from Sevilla, past the sherry-manufacturies around Jerez La Frontera (on a Sunday, so they were closed, although the Harvey’s people should have given me a freebie on general principals, I had sipped enough of their stuff, over the years), made a pit stop at the Rota naval base for laundry and groceries. I had driven into Gibraltar, done a tour of the historic gun galleries, seen the famous Gibraltar apes, and then waited in the long customs line to come back into Spain. We had even stopped at the Most Disgusting Public Loo on the face of the earth, at a gas station outside of San Roque, before following the road signs along the coastal road towards Malaga and Motril, and our turn-off, the road that climbed steadily higher into the mountains, the tall mountains that guarded the fortress city of Granada, and the fragile fairy-tale pavilions of the Alhambra.

The road followed the coastline, for the most part, sweeping through towns like Estepona and Marbella as the main thoroughfare, always the dark blue Mediterranean on the right, running wide of the open beaches, hugging the headlands, with new condos and little towns shaded by palm and olive trees, splashed with the brilliant colors of bougainvillea, interspersed with the sage-green scrublands. The traffic was light enough along the coastal road, and I began to notice a certain trend in place names; Torre de Calahonda, Torremolinos, Torre del Mar, Torrenueva – and to notice that most of the tall headlands, rearing up to the left of the road, were topped by a (usually) ruinous stone watchtower. Forever and brokenly looking out to the sea, and a danger that might come from there, a danger of such permanence as to justify the building of many strong towers, to guard the little towns, and the inlets where fisher-folk would beach their boats and mend their nets.

This rich and lovely coast was scourged for centuries by corsairs who swept in from the sea, peacetime and wartime all alike, savage raiders with swords and torches and chains, who came to burn and pillage – not just the portable riches of gold, or silver, but those human folk who had a cold, hard cash value along the Barbary Coast, in the slave markets of Algiers and Sale. It was a scourge of such magnitude that came close to emptying out the coastal districts all along the Spanish, French and Italian coasts, and even reached insolently into Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and Iceland. The raiders from the port of Sale (present-day Morocco) grew fabulously wealthy form their expertise in capturing and trafficking in captured Christians from all across coastal villages in Western Europe, and from ships, crews taken in the Mediterranean and the coastal Atlantic waters. This desperate state of affairs lasted into the early 19th century, until the power and reach of the Barbary slave-raiders was decisively broken. For three hundred years, though, families all along this coast and elsewhere must have risen up from bed every morning knowing that by the end of the day they and or their loved ones might very well be in chains, on their way to the slave markets across the water, free no longer, but a market commodity. All of this was outlined in a recent history of the Sale corsairs, the so called ‘Salley Rovers’ – White Gold, by Giles Milton.

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This kind of life-knowledge is out of living memory along that golden    Spanish coast, but it is within nearly touchable distance in Texas and other parts of the American West, where my own parent’s generation, as children in the Twenties and Thirties would have known elderly men and women who remembered the frontier – not out of movies, or from television, but as children themselves, first-hand and with that particular vividness of sight that children have, all that adventure, and danger, privation and beauty, the triumph of building a successful life and community out of nothing more than homesteaded land and hard work.

There was no chain of watchtowers in the harsh and open borderlands, watching over far-scattered settlements and little towns, and lonely ranches in a country never entirely at peace, but not absolutely at war. The southwestern tribes, Comanche, Apache and their allies roamed as they wished, a wild and free life, hunting what they wanted, raiding when they felt like it, and could get away with it. Sometimes, it was just a coarse game, to frighten the settlers, to watch a settler family run for the shelter of their rickety cabin, fumbling for a weapon with shaking hands, children sheltering behind their parents like chicks. But all too often, for all too many homesteading and ranching families, it ended with the cabin looted and burned, the adults and small children butchered in the cruelest fashion, stripped and scalped.

And the cruelest cut of all, to survivors of such raids in Texas and the borderlands, was that children of a certain age— not too young to be a burden, not too old to be un-malleable (aged about seven to twelve, usually) were carried away, and adopted into the tribes. Over months and years, such children adapted to that life so completely that even when they were ransomed back, and brought home, they never entirely fitted in to a life that seemed like a cage. They had been taken as children, returned as teenagers or adults, to an alien life, to parents and family they could no longer see as theirs. Some of them pined away after their return, like the most famous of them, Cynthia Ann Parker, others returned to their Indian families. For parents of these lost children, that must have been so cruel, to lose a much-loved child not just once, but to finally get them back, and then to discover that they were no longer yours, they had not been a slave, in captivity, but that they longed to be away, roving the open lands as free as a bird. Texas writer Scott Zesch wrote perceptively of that particular tragedy, of his great-great uncle Adolph Korn, kidnapped by Comanche Indians as a boy of ten or so, and eventually returned to his parents when he was in his teens – but in that time, he had been trained and treated as a warrior, and a man, and was never able to reenter the world he had been wrenched away from.

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That experience haunted me, when I was researching for the story which would eventually become the Adelsverein Trilogy; the tragedy of a child taken, then restored, but forever lost to his parents. I worked it into the final volume, The Harvesting, with the story of Willi Richter – patterned somewhat after the experiences of Adolph Korn, and another famous Texas ‘white’ Indian, Hermann Lehmann – but with something more of sympathy for those parents and relatives who had mourned the loss of a child, and then lost them yet again.

Celia Hayes is the author of The Adelsverein Trilogy, which follows the half-century long saga of a family of German immigrants on the Texas frontier, beginning in 1844. More about her other books and writing is at her website, www.celiahayes.com.

The Little Brother of Civil War – By Jack Shakely

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The Indian ball game traditionally played by the Five Civilized Tribes, most notably the Cherokees, Choctaws and Creeks, was so rough and tumble it became known as “The Little Brother of War”. This forerunner of modern lacrosse, with its three-feet long hickory sticks and balls as hard as rocks, had few rules, no substitutions and could last for hours. The furious game could cost a player an eye, some teeth and, occasionally, his life.

The War Between the States, to the surprise of most Americans, was bitterly played out in miniature in Indian Territory, what is now eastern Oklahoma, among these same Five Civilized Tribes. This Little Brother of Civil War was no less deadly or less protracted than the war east of the Mississippi and incredibly, on a percentage of population basis, the Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes suffered more casualties than either the Union or the Confederacy. Fully twenty-five percent of the entire Indian population in the Territory was killed, wounded or died from disease and starvation by the thousands in refugee camps.

I grew up in Oklahoma and like most students, then and now, remembered the Civil War in Indian Territory, if at all, primarily by the historically insignificant fact that Cherokee Chief Stand Watie was the last Confederate General to surrender, a full two months after Appomattox. I remember our history teacher telling us this with a touch of pride. The fact that the Union army by that time didn’t give a damn whether he surrendered or not was lost on us. The vastly more significant set of questions we should have been considering, and one that haunts the Indian Nations to this day, is why the Five Tribes would make the ruinous, and far from unanimous, decision to join the Confederacy in the first place and what they hoped to gain.

The exact number of Indians in the Civil War is impossible to ascertain, partly because of sloppy record-keeping, multiple enlisting, wholesale desertions and, at least on the Confederate side, wild exaggerations in official documents. Confederate colonels Douglass Cooper and Richard Gano, for example, consistently doubled the estimated number of men under their command in order to gain promotion to general, which both of them eventually secured. When Gano was confronted by his commander General William Steele as to why the troops he had in the field at the Battle of Honey Springs in 1863 appeared to be less than half those he claimed on paper, Gano reported that many of his Indian troops, including an entire Choctaw company, had defected to the Union. Federal army records of the Indian Home Guard make no mention of this Choctaw company, or any Choctaws at all, for that matter.

Based on research for my historical novel The Confederate War Bonnet, I estimated that there were approximately 16,000 Indians in the conflict- 6,000 mostly Cherokees with some Creeks and Seminoles in the Federal Indian Home Guard, and some 10,000 Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole soldiers in the Confederacy. The Confederacy had about 100 Indian officers, including the only Indian General Stand Watie, who commanded Indian-only units. The Union Army had no Indian officers.

The Five Civilized Tribes (and that was what they called themselves) didn’t so much join the Confederacy as feel pushed into it, completely abandoned by the Union. It is true that the Federals withdrew from Ft. Smith in 1859 and Ft. Gibson the next year, leaving not a single Union soldier in Indian Territory. The Texas Confederates saw this as an excellent opportunity to create a buffer zone between themselves and Yankee Kansas, and immediately sent General Albert Pike, who had been Indian Commissioner before the war and was known and trusted by the Indians, into Indian Territory with gold, guns and promises. The rotund Pike was a masterful orator, a skill highly prized by the Indians, and lived up to his promises, at least in the early months of the war.

It is also true that many of the Indian leaders were still bitter, especially the Cherokees and Creeks who retained vivid recollections of The Removals of 1835-1838, and the humiliation of the Trail of Tears, and the Seminoles who had been at war for decades with the federal government to the point of near-extinction. The old chiefs were still fighting the last war in their minds when they entered this one. The Confederates were the enemy of their enemy, and therefore their friend.

So the Choctaws, quickly followed by the Chickasaws, joined the Confederacy. Cherokee chief John Ross tried to keep his nation neutral, but firebrand chief Stand Watie, who hated Ross, and Watie’s friends William Adair and John Drew joined the Confederate army as officers, taking more than half the Cherokee Nation with them. In an indication of how convoluted and divisive the war was, Drew and his men left the Confederacy a year later and joined the Union army.

Most of the Creeks, under the leadership of Chief Daniel McIntosh and his older brother Chilly, also joined the Confederacy. But it was a hasty decision, and far from unanimous. A significant portion of the Creek Nation, under the leadership of the aging chief Opathle Yohola, refused to join and fled to Kansas and the Union. In one of the many ironies of this tiny war, Opathle Yohola’s people were treated as renegades by the federal government and were virtually imprisoned in refugee camps on the Kansas border where, nearly naked and starving, thousands died.

The Civil War in Indian Territory was not a territorial war. Cities were not captured, nations not vanquished, at least in the conventional sense. Only two population centers in the area actually changed hands- Ft. Gibson went from Federal hands to Confederate in 1861, then back to Federal in 1863, and in the autumn of 1863 Ft. Smith fell to the Union, thus securing the Arkansas River as a major supply route for both those locations.

Most of the war was fought up and down what was known as the Texas Road, a mostly north-south cattle trail that cut through Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw lands from Kansas down through present-day Muskogee and McAlester to the Red River and beyond. The Confederate troops eventually concentrated in the southern part of the Choctaw Nation near the Texas border at Ft. Towson, Doaksville and Boggy Depot, and the Federals encamped at Ft. Riley, Kansas, Ft. Gibson and Ft. Smith. Like boxers, they would meet in the middle (which unfortunately was the ravaged and burnt-out Creek Nation), fight furiously and then retire to their corners to bury their dead and treat their wounded.

In battle after battle, the better-trained and more disciplined federal troops overwhelmed the Confederate Indians. The notoriously unreliable Mexican gunpowder used by the Rebel troops hampered the already poorly armed Indians. At Pea Ridge in 1862 and again at Honey Springs in 1863, the Confederate Indian soldiers, armed only with muskets, shotguns and tomahawks, were instructed to fight with whatever rifles they could pick up from the dead. Week after week Confederate Commander Sam Bell Maxey pleaded with Richmond for rifles, cannon and ammunition that, despite assurances to the contrary, never arrived.

The Battle of Honey Springs, also known as the Battle of Elk Creek, which occurred only weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, was the last major pitched battle in Indian Territory. It was a complete defeat of the Confederate army, with more than 1,500 Confederate Indian dead and wounded. The Federal troops, made up largely of the war-tested and heavily armed African-American Corp d’Afrique, suffered about 500 casualties.

In 1864 and 1865 the Little Brother of Civil War deteriorated into occasional raids and skirmishes, primarily by Stand Watie and his “700 Ragamuffins” against the Union troops holed up at Ft. Gibson. Watie’s plan was to destroy all the hay, corn and farm animals for twenty miles surrounding Ft. Gibson, which would eventually demoralize the Federal troops and chase them back to Kansas, leaving Watie in control of the Cherokee Nation and his beloved Tahlequah. But all Watie’s scorched earth efforts succeeded in doing was to prolong the conflict and further starve his own people.

Twice in 1864, just when it looked like the Civil War in Oklahoma was over, Watie scored significant and improbable victories. The first was in June when Confederate General Maxey heard from spies that the riverboat J.R. Williams was steaming up the Arkansas with clothing and food for the beleaguered soldiers at Ft. Gibson. Maxey asked (he had learned better than to command) Watie if he could capture the sternwheeler. The Federals by this time had so little fear of Confederate interference, they openly published riverboat arrivals and departures in the newspaper The Era. All Watie had to do was find out when the Williams would leave Ft. Smith and hide in wait when the boat took on wood for fuel.

They caught the boat at Pleasant Bluff, about twenty miles downriver from Ft. Gibson, just at daybreak, June 15. Watie only had two cannons, Parrott guns, but he made them count. The first shot blew the pilothouse to smithereens, and the frightened crew leaped overboard and swam to safety on the far shore, shaken but unharmed. When Watie’s men boarded the Williams, they were astonished to find literally thousands of pieces of tin ware- pots and bowls, plates and cups, knives and spoons. This booty proved too great a temptation for the ill-fed and unpaid soldiers and in a scene worthy of a Max Sennett comedy, they tied as many pans and bowls to their horses as they could and disappeared in a cacophony of kitchenware. Unperturbed, Watie and his officers trotted off to their camp in the hills, leaving Creek Captain George Grayson alone to raze the boat.

In September Watie and Texan General Gano struck the last, and most decisive blow against the Federal troops since 1861. In what became known as the Second Battle of Cabin Creek, just below present-day Tulsa, the Confederates overwhelmed a massive wagon train coming down from Ft. Scott with more than one million dollars in gold, thousands of uniforms and hundreds of mules. Although this was called a battle it was, like all conflicts in Indian Territory in the final years of the war, a raid, with very little loss of life on either side. Gano reported losing eight men, with 37 wounded. Gano’s Union counterpart, Colonel Henry Hopkins, reported seven dead and eight wounded.

All Cabin Creek really did was to infuriate the humiliated Union army, and it sent its best officer, Colonel William Phillips, back to Ft. Gibson with a thousand fresh troops and more arms and ammunition than at any time since the war broke out. Sensing defeat, General Gano took most of the gold and all of his men back to Texas. Maxey resigned and Watie reverted to his guerrilla tactics, never again to be a factor.

It was clear to all the Indians by 1865 that the Federal army had limitless resources in both men and arms, and that the Confederacy was crumbling around them. So in another stroke of irony, perhaps, the Choctaws and Chickasaws, who had been the first nations to abandon the Union, became the first to sue for peace. Considering their position as the vanquished, these two nations received relatively favorable peace terms and signed a treaty in August 1865. The Cherokees, back under the aging but still powerful John Ross, also signed a treaty in the fall of 1865, although it was not as forgiving. The Cherokees were forced to accept all African-American freedmen as members of the nation, a provision to which they reluctantly agreed and then repudiated 140 years later in 2007. The hapless Creeks and Seminoles, torn asunder by their own internal civil wars, never were able to speak with one voice and were forced to sign treaties in 1866 that nearly destroyed them as a people. The poor Seminoles were forced to give up all their land and move to a much smaller and less-desirable section of the Territory.

The Little Brother of Civil War was over, but the internal wounds created within the Cherokee, Creek and Seminole Nations took decades to heal. Some historians say they never did.

Jack Shakely is a fourth-generation Oklahoman of Muscogee/Creek descent and author of the historical novel The Confederate War Bonnet.