Trail of Broken Promises

Caleb Pirtle III

Description

It may have been the greatest injustice of all.

A nation was uprooted.

A nation was ripped apart from its ancestral lands with its peoples' feet pointed west. So many died along the way.

The Five Civilized Tribes – the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole – rose to power on the land of their fathers, atop great smoky mountains, deep within vast timbered forests, lost among the mangroves, palmettos, and rivers of grass.

They were strong and proud – hunters who had become farmers. Many fine plantations were firmly planted on the land they called home, and slaves picked their cotton in the fields. They had achieved self-government and prospered.

But civilization rolled selfishly into their nation.
Treaties were passed, signed, and ignored.
Promises were made and broken, sometimes just forgotten.

The removal of the tribes from their homeland in the Southeast to Indian Territory takes on a new dimension as author Caleb Pirtle relates to a culture that existed before the Europeans set foot on American soil.

The people suffered greatly from this exodus – driven like cattle herds across frozen ground and icy rivers, families separated, children and the old ones dying – as they struggled down a path that would forever be known as "The Trail Where They Cried."
They were victimized by America's "Indian Policy."

It was a grave mistake.

Trail of Broken Promises was written for the casual historian searching for an emotional overview of a dark era in America's past. Developed for the traveler, the book contains numerous photographs depicting the heritage and culture of the Five Civilized Tribes, as well as historical traces – homes, council houses, prisons, and forts – of their early days in Oklahoma.

Sujets

• Histoire
• United States
• History

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780984208371
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

TRAIL OF
BROKEN PROMISES
Removal of the Five Civilized Tribes
to Oklahoma
 
 
Caleb Pirtle III
 


Copyright © 2011 by Caleb Pirtle III and Venture Galleries, LLC, 1220 Chateau Lane, Hideaway, Texas 75771. 214-564-1493
Venturegalleries.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book can be reproduced, stored in a retrieval program, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise except as may be expressly permitted by the actual copyright statutes or in writing by the publisher.
Published in eBook format by Venture Galleries, LLC Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-0-9842-0837-1
Text: Caleb Pirtle III
Editing/Design: Linda Greer Pirtle
Cover Design: Jutta Medina
Photo Credits: Five Civilized Tribes Museum, Muskogee, Oklahoma, Tsa-La-Gi Museum, Tahlequah, Oklahoma
Cover Art: “The Trail Where They Cried” told the grim story of the sorrow and death that stalked the journey west. Yet the faces were stoic. As one doctor reported: “No lamentations went up from the bereaved ones here. They were of the true Indian blood … there is a dignity in their grief which is sublime.”
Courtesy Tsa-La-Gi, Tahlequah, Oklahoma
Bud Breen, artist
New revised edition.
 


For Forrest B. Greer, who possessed the independent spirit of Oklahoma.
She never lost her independence, no matter how hard times became.
Oklahoma was her pride.
It was her homeland.
It made her strong.
 
 
Prologue
THE FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES – the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole – rose to power on the land of their fathers, atop great smoky mountains, deep within vast timbered forests, lost among the mangroves, palmettos, and rivers of grass.
They were strong and proud, hunters who had become farmers. Many fine plantations were firmly planted on the land they called home, and slaves picked their cotton in the fields.
They walked in the pathway of aristocracy.
Self-government guided their footsteps.
The ways of the savage had been pushed behind them, buried in the graves of their ancestors.
They prospered, but they became troubled, watching as the wagons of civilization rolled selfishly into the country that, they believed, God had given them. It was rich land. It gave forth gold, and the Indians listened as men fought and schemed, even killed, to take that priceless land – their birthright – from them.
White men had once offered the hand of friendship.
It became the hand of greed.
Treaties were passed and signed and ignored.
Promises were made and broken, sometimes just forgotten.
The white men took what they wanted, passing a law in 1830 that, they hoped, would drive the Five Civilized Tribes westward and out of their way.
The Indians were stunned. They were rooted deep in the soil that held the ashes of their fathers, the dreams of their children, the seeds of their harvest.
Yet a president was pointing them west toward a land that was foreign to them, out amongst the unknown, out where no one had a home or a hope – just simply a hate. The president had expected the Indians to hear and obey. He was wrong.
The road west may be leading them to a land of promise and prosperity, but the Indians – at least most of them – refused to go.
They would die first.
So many died along the way.
Part I: Vanguard to the West
The Great Spirit gave this island to his Red Children. He placed the white man on the other side of the Great Waters, but the white man was not satisfied with their own, but came over to take ours from us.
--Chief Tecumseh
Chapter 1: The Homes of Their Fathers
THE CHEROKEES LOOKED toward the west with diffident, somber eyes, darkened by the shadows of a sunset that had fallen beyond the edge of the earth. It was the land of lost souls, beckoning for the dead to journey back to the stars and fade forever into the night from whence they had come.
To the Cherokees, the east was the refuse of light and sun. They stared with doubt and dismay toward the land where the sun and the light disappeared. It was a fearful place, and they turned their backs to it.
The Cherokees had found peace in the fertile valleys where the earth was old, beneath the solemn, rugged face of Great Smoky Mountains forever veiled by a thin will-o-the-wisp haze that rose up from its hollows and touched the sky. And the Cherokees knew why: their Adawehis, their story tellers, had told them.
Selfishness had crept into the world, causing men to quarrel and fight. The Chiefs of two tribes counseled together, even smoked the pipe, then grew angry and battled for seven days and nights. The Great Spirit frowned, for men were forbidden to smoke the pipe until they had made peace. Men needed to be reminded of their obligations.
So, the Great Spirit reached down and turned the belligerent old men into gray-colored flowers, causing them to grow wherever friends and relatives had quarreled. He hung the smoke of the pipe across the mountains until all peopled learned to live together in peace.
The Cherokees prospered in the umbrage of their legacy, settled in the highlands of northern Georgia, central Tennessee, and among the misty peaks of the Carolinas. Buffalo, deer, and wild turkey ran within the thickets. And the countryside became a quilt-work of color, woven by the azaleas, rhododendron, mountain laurel, and magnolia.
The Cherokees had found peace in the land they called home. But they would fight to hold it, even if the smoke clung to the mountains forever.
Women spent their hours in the garden, slopping hogs, caring for the poultry, smoking venison, and tanning hides. The men prepared themselves for war. It was always near, as close as the thunder, and as deadly as the lightning that danced among the pines and hemlock.
As William Fyffe, a South Carolina plantation owner, wrote in 1761, “their greatest ambition is to distinguish themselves by military actions … Their young men are not regarded till they kill an enemy or take a prisoner. Those houses in which there’s the greatest number of scalps are most honoured. A scalp is as great a Trophy among them as a pair of colours among us.”
During the calm days, the Cherokee men fashioned bows, tomahawks, war clubs, and canoes. But when war stalked them, they painted their faces black, streaked with vermillion, and they adorned their hair with feathers.
It was a time, Fyffe recalled, when “there’s nothing heard but war songs and howlings.”
William Bartram, the American botanist who wandered at will through the Indian nations, wrote, “The Cherokees in their disposition and manner are grave and steady; dignified and circumspect in their deportment; rather slow and reserved in conversation; yet frank, cheerful and humane; tenacious of their liberties and natural rights of men; secret, deliberate and determined in their councils; honest, just and liberal, and are ready always to sacrifice every pleasure and gratification, even their blood, and life itself, to defend their territory and maintain their rights.”
Bartram also recognized that some of the younger women happened to be as fair and blooming as the ladies of Europe. He stumbled across a group of maidens who were wearing little or nothing at all as they picked strawberries.
Bartram always remembered them “disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool, flitting streams.” Otherwise, he found them dressed in skirts and short jackets, sometimes wearing moccasins.
The Cherokees built their homes with logs, stripping away the bark and plastering them with a mixture of clay and dried grass. Inside were cane seats, baskets, and buffalo hide chests, all placed upon rugs woven from hemp and designed with the images of birds, animals, and flowers.
To such dwellings the Cherokee men brought their wives after a simple marriage ceremony. The husband would give the bride a ham of venison, his pledge to keep the home filled with game from the hunt. And the bride would hand him an ear of corn, her assurance that she was ready to become a good housewife.
The vows were short; the dancing would go on for hours.
The Cherokees were proud and independent. As Fyffe wrote: “Every warrior is an orator.” And they called themselves “Ani-Yun-Wiya,” the real people, the principal people. But none could read and none could write.
So, the white man called them savage.



The sensitive wood sculpture of mother and child reflect the
peace and serenity of the Indians before white men came
to take away their cherished lands.
Five Civilized Tribes Museum
Muskogee, Oklahoma
Willard Stone, artist


Chapter 2: Out of the Fog
FOR A LONG time, the ancient Creeks wandered lost and blind in a great fog that wrapped itself like a gray flannel shroud around the earth. At least, that was the legend, the genesis of the clans that ruled the timbered countryside of Alabama and Georgia.
It had been a time of darkness, of separation.
Families were torn apart, husbands from wives, parents from children. And they searched and they groped. They could not see and they were alone.
Fear haunted their footsteps as they stumbled on in confusion. Hands reaching out touched other hands, and they all held on. They had found someone, and they all needed someone. Groups were formed. And the animals, crying in the fog, too frightened to be wild anymore, followed after those who chanced to cross their frantic, forgotten path.
A wind rose up out of the east and chased the fog away. The first group to fall into the light became the Wind Clan, and the other bands held on to the names of the animals who walked the darkness with them. Away from the fog marched the Bear, Beaver, Bird, Deer, Alligator, Raccoon, and Tiger Clans.
All agreed they would forever be as “people of one flesh,” always together, never apart, forming the confederacy of the Creek nation.
From them came the White T