Indian Territory in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  Indian Territory in the American Civil War was shaped not by distant generals but by the people who already lived there. The land that would one day become Oklahoma was home to thousands of Native Americans who had been forcibly removed from their ancestral homes in the southeastern United States under the Indian Removal Act of 1830. By the time the first guns fired in 1861, these communities faced a second upheaval: a war that forced every tribe to choose a side.

  At least 7,860 Native Americans from the Indian Territory fought for the Confederacy. Others took up arms for the Union. Neighbors became enemies. Towns burned. Supply trains were ambushed on the Texas Road. And the last Confederate general to formally surrender was not a Virginian or a Carolinian but a Cherokee leader named Stand Watie, who laid down his arms at Doaksville on the 23rd of June 1865.

  Why did most tribal leaders side with the Confederacy? What happened to the thousands of men, women, and children who tried to stay loyal to the Union? And what did the tribes gain, or lose, when the fighting finally ended? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Forced Choices

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  When Confederate officers arrived in June and July 1861 to negotiate with the tribes, they found communities already abandoned by the United States. The U.S. government had pulled all its soldiers from the Indian Territory before the war began, leaving the region exposed to pressure from Texas and Arkansas, both of which had already joined the Confederacy. Confederate forces moved quickly, taking possession of the U.S. army forts in the area.

  The Confederacy had practical reasons to court the tribes. The territory could serve as a food source if a Union naval blockade cut off Southern supplies. It offered a corridor connecting Confederate Texas to western territories. And it placed a buffer between Union-held Kansas to the north and Confederate Texas to the south.

  Leaders from each of the Five Civilized Tribes, acting without the full consensus of their councils, agreed to be annexed by the Confederacy. In exchange, the Confederacy offered protection and recognition of existing tribal lands. The nations that signed treaties of alliance included not only the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole but also the Comanche, Osage, Quapaw, Seneca-Cayuga, and Shawnee.

  Not everyone agreed. The Creek Principal Chief Opothleyahola refused to allow Creek lands to be annexed and rallied those who supported the Union. With thousands of followers, he led his people north toward Kansas, fighting Confederate forces along the way. On the 26th of December 1861, Confederate troops attacked his camp at Chustenalah and drove Opothleyahola and his people into Kansas during a snowstorm.

• 3. The Logistical Trap

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  Opothleyahola reached Kansas, and the Union welcomed his followers by organizing three volunteer regiments called the Indian Home Guard. But the Union army was not ready for what came next. It had abandoned its forts in the territory early in the war and now found itself unable to take them back.

  The territory was largely undeveloped compared to its neighbors. Roads were sparse and primitive. No railroads yet existed there. Pro-Union Indians who had stayed behind had already fled north, driven out by raids from pro-Confederate Indians, so the land offered little in the way of food or forage for an invading force.

  In 1862, Union General James G. Blunt ordered Colonel William Weer to lead what became known as the Indian Expedition. Meer's force numbered more than 5,000 men, including five white regiments, two Indian regiments, and two artillery battalions. It departed from Baxter Springs, Kansas. The main goal was to escort Indian refugees back to their homes. A secondary goal was to hold the territory for the Union.

  The expedition won an early fight at the Battle of Locust Grove on July 3, and one detachment pressed on to Fort Gibson, causing the Confederates there to withdraw. Then things fell apart. The Union supply train failed to arrive. Food, forage, and ammunition ran low. Weer began drinking heavily and could not decide on a course of action. His men eventually mutinied, placing Colonel Frederick Salomon in command and ending the expedition. The territory remained out of reach.

• 4. Honey Springs and the Turning Point

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  Honey Springs Depot had been the site of frequent skirmishes before General James G. Blunt chose it as the place to fight the largest Confederate force in the territory. On the 17th of July 1863, Blunt advanced with 3,000 men, including Native Americans and African-American former slaves. Facing him was General Douglas H. Cooper commanding a force estimated between 3,000 and 6,000 men, composed primarily of Native Americans.

  The battle turned on a mundane catastrophe for the Confederate side: wet gunpowder. Cooper's troops could not fire their weapons reliably. Rain hampered their movements. Their lines became disorganized and fell back. The Union carried the field.

  Just weeks before Honey Springs, at the First Battle of Cabin Creek on July 1-2, 1863, Colonel James Monroe Williams had led the Union escort against a Confederate attempt to disrupt a supply train on the Texas Road near present-day Big Cabin, Oklahoma. Despite high creek waters swelled by rain, Williams launched a counterattack and forced the Confederates to retreat. That battle was the first in which African-American troops fought alongside white soldiers on the same field.

• 5. Stand Watie's War

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  After Honey Springs, General Cooper retreated to Perryville, a supply depot halfway between Boggy Depot and Scullyville on the Texas Road. General Blunt followed, arriving on the 23rd of August 1863. Cooper and Stand Watie had already departed for Boggy Depot. Only a small rear guard under Brigadier General William Steele remained. Blunt attacked under cover of darkness, scattered the Confederates, captured what supplies his men could use, and then burned the town. Blunt then turned east and captured Fort Smith on the 1st of September 1863.

  With conventional Confederate forces pushed south, Stand Watie became the most consequential military figure in the territory. He operated in a way that maximized disruption with limited resources. His forces targeted supply trains and military installations, destroying only what had military value: houses and barns used as headquarters, storage facilities, and the supply trains that kept Union troops fed and armed.

  Watie's most striking success came in September 1864, when he ambushed the steamboat J.R. Williams. His plan for the Second Battle of Cabin Creek, which he presented to his superior General Samuel B. Maxey on the 5th of February 1864, was part of a wider design: a Confederate raid into central Kansas timed to coincide with General Sterling Price's planned attack on Missouri. Maxey approved the plan on the condition that operations begin by October 1.

  At the Battle of Middle Boggy on the 13th of February 1864, about 350 Union troops supported by two howitzers attacked a Confederate outpost guarded by roughly 90 soldiers. The Confederates held for about half an hour before retreating toward Fort Washita. The Union claimed 49 Confederate deaths and no Union losses. The encounter had no strategic effect on the war, but the mistreatment of civilians and the killing of wounded soldiers by Union troops strengthened Confederate resolve in the territory.

• 6. Aftermath and Reconstruction

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  Stand Watie surrendered his troops at Doaksville on the 23rd of June 1865. Two days later, at Fort Towson in Choctaw lands, he became officially the last Confederate general to surrender.

  The peace that followed was not kind to the tribes. As part of the Reconstruction Treaties, U.S. officials forced land concessions from the nations that had allied with the Confederacy. The treaties also required the Cherokee and other tribes to emancipate their enslaved people and grant them full rights as tribal members, including rights to annuities and land allocations. The Southern Cherokee had sought to have the U.S. government pay to relocate Cherokee Freedmen away from the tribe; that request was denied.

  Watie himself traveled to Washington, D.C. later in 1865, seeking recognition of a separate Southern Cherokee Nation. He had been elected principal chief of the pro-Confederacy Cherokee group in 1862. The U.S. government refused to recognize his claim; instead it named John Ross, who had gone into exile in 1862, as the rightful principal chief. Watie did not return home until May 1866.

  The conflict over Cherokee Freedmen did not end with the treaties. When American Indian lands were later divided among households under the Dawes Commission, citizenship became a flashpoint. The Dawes Rolls were recorded between 1902 and 1906. In the early twentieth century, the Cherokee Nation voted to exclude Freedmen from the tribe unless those individuals could also show direct descent from a Cherokee, not just from a Cherokee Freedman, listed on those rolls. The war had ended, but the questions it forced upon the tribes about identity, sovereignty, and loyalty continued to shape Cherokee life for generations.