Boanerges | May 31, 2009
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, [...]
Celia Hayes | May 26, 2009
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 [...]
Celia Hayes | May 23, 2009
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.
Boanerges | May 23, 2009
When James Chaney Palms showed up at the Essex Scottish Regiment’s recruiting office to volunteer for the Second World War, they say he was wearing riding boots.
It might have been expected from an irrepressible young man who was the offspring of a prominent and wealthy family, likeable, well-educated and, as they say, well set-up. He was eager to enlist, although as an infantryman, he wouldn’t spend any time on horseback.
The Windsor-based regiment, with a military tradition dating to the 18th century, had secretly started mobilizing Sept. 1, 1939, nine days before Canada declared war on Germany and its allies. Within 24 hours, Col. Art Pearson had 164 volunteers. In less than three weeks, enlistments totalled 27 officers and 812 other ranks, a full battalion for the Second Canadian Infantry Division.
Palms, called Jimmy by his friends, was deemed officer material, and he was duly commissioned as a lieutenant. It troubled absolutely no one that he wasn’t from Windsor, nor even the outlying areas of Essex and Kent counties.
In fact, he wasn’t even Canadian: He was from across the Detroit River, just one of many Americans who would train and serve with the Essex Scottish long before the U.S. entered the war.
Then there was Thomas H. Nichols, who lied about his age to enlist in Company A of the 2nd Massachussetts Volunteer Infantry on May 5, 1864, in Chesterfield, Mass.
One of the first of the Northern regiments raised during the Civil War, the 2nd Massachusetts became renowned for its discipline and reliability in every command in which it served, as part of Slocum’s 12th Corps in the Army of the Potomac and under Sherman during the March to the Sea.
Nichols, who apparently never rose above the rank of private soldier, would be with the regiment in the campaign through Georgia, and was therefore with the first Union soldiers to enter Atlanta, Sept. 2, 1864. He likely saw action in places like Bentonville and Peach Tree Creek and Kenesaw Mountain. The battles were terrible, the carnage endless on both sides.
Nichols wasn’t an American, and doubtless that troubled no one either. He was a farm boy from Pictou County, Nova Scotia, and just one of many from what would become Canada who fought in the Civil War.
* * *
The grave of James Chaney Palms isn’t visited very often on Memorial Day, but it is frequently decorated with flowers, as are all those cemeteries maintained so immaculately around the world by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
He lies in a place called Hautot-sur-mer, France, where the dead rest head-to-head, German army fashion, since it was the Wehrmacht that buried the nearly 1,000 who were killed in the Dieppe Raid on Aug. 19, 1942; it is, to my knowledge, the only such arrangement in any cemetery where Canada’s war dead are buried. His gravestone bears the traditional maple leaf of the Canadian Army, and under his name the inscription “OF U.S.A” appears above the name of his regiment.
Palms is with his comrades in the Essex Scottish, more than 100 of whom were killed that day in a frontal sea assault on a fortified coastal city. He died leading his men, a survivor told me, with scarcely a mark on his body, possibly from concussion, or possibly from a small shell fragment.
Nearby is Lieut. Percy Owen Lee — a Canadian, and like Palms, a volunteer, as were all the rest. Lee was my cousin, killed by a mortar blast when trying to find a way to get his platoon over the seawall, through the barbed wire and into the city. Two soldiers of the king, forever young, amid so many others.
Thomas H. Nichols, on the other hand, long outlived the horrors of the Civil War. He died in 1937, in a fishing village called Wheatley on the Ontario shore of Lake Erie, far from his Nova Scotia farm home, far from the southern battlefields he somehow survived, far from his brothers in arms.
He was proud of his service to the cause, however, and his grave marker bears a depiction of his veteran’s medal, a five-pointed star with “GAR” — Grand Army of the Republic — in the centre. Under his dates of birth and death is “Co. A 2nd MASS. VOL. INF”.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission doesn’t maintain that cemetery, but it is well-tended nonetheless. Next to his grave is a white wooden cross, erected by the local branch of the Royal Canadian Legion, which so honours every known area veteran of whatever conflict.
James Chaney Palms and Thomas H. Nichols stand for the tens of thousands of their countrymen over the last 175 years who fought in each other’s armed forces, whether officially, as in the Devil’s Brigade in the Second World War, or unofficially in regiments like the Essex Scottish or the Marines or the Air Cavalry or the 18th Battalion or … the list is endless.
Our countries owe each other so much in so many ways. On this Memorial Day, at least one Canadian will be remembering Jimmy Palms and his riding boots, and all those other fine boys who came north over the years to answer the call.
And I think I’ll pick some wildflowers — the Fleurs of the Forest — and spend a few moments with Thomas Nichols, who’s buried a couple of miles away from where I write this, to honour all those fine boys who heard the same call … and went south in answer.
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