Growing up in western Tennessee, Mary Jane Warde learned about the Civil War through her father, a descendant of Tom Thorne, who served in the CSA’s 4th Tennessee Infantry. She later explored American Indian history—first as a doctoral student and later while working for the Oklahoma Historical Society. In her book When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territory, Warde brought her interests together. Histories of the Civil War have had a blind spot, Warde points out: “Either they don’t cover the Indian Territory at all or they cover it separated from the rest of the war.” She adds, “You can’t separate it.”
How did Indians get involved in the war?
Initially they had to decide what to do. They were connected to the United States by treaties, and each of the removal treaties for the Five Civilized Tribes [Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole] had promised to pay them a yearly amount of money for the land they had exchanged back East for new land here in Indian Territory. They needed that money because they did not have taxation in their nations and those annuity payments—as they were called—were what they used to finance their government and government operations, and also financed their school system—and school systems were important to them.
Why did some tribes choose to ally with the Confederacy?
When the federal government refused to pay their annuities in the spring of 1861, it created severe hardship. It was also a violation of their treaties. Also when the federal government pulled its troops out of the forts on the frontier, that left the Five Civilized Tribes exposed to threats from the Western tribes and non-Indians. They saw Indians pushed aside. They didn’t want to be in the war. But if they had to, they could see reasons for going with the Confederacy.
Can you describe the civil war within the Civil War in the Indian nations?
That became a real issue of course with the Muscogees—or Creeks, as we call them—with the resistance of Opothle Yahola (a Muscogee leader) to what the pro-Confederate faction of his nation wanted to do. He and a faction called the McIntosh had been enemies since the 1820s. His feeling—other than the fact that he detested the McIntoshes as they detested him— was that their nation had signed treaties with the United States and they had to stand by those treaties even if the United States didn’t. They had to honor what they had done. It wasn’t an issue so much for the Choctaws and the Chickasaws, and the Seminoles were on the outskirts to a certain extent. But of course the division became a major, major issue among the Cherokee as well as the Muscogee.
How did the Indian tribes participate in the war?
Opothle Yahola decided to head out to the frontier, and his followers went with him. There is some question about how many went—it’s been said it might have been as many as 7,000 people who followed him, wanting to get out of the war and have no part of it. They went toward Kansas. When he pulled out, that presented a threat to the Muscogee Nation and the Cherokee Nation and the Seminole Nation, particularly when some of their African slaves began to run away, thinking that they would achieve freedom if they followed Opothle Yahola. The danger of the slaves running away, and Opothle Yahola potentially coming back with his followers to make war on the nation, made him appear as a threat. Then the remaining Muscogee decided they would go against Opothle Yahola and try to either kill him or at least disperse his followers. And that’s how the other Indian nations got drawn in. The Muscogee, first, some of the Seminoles, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws and then the Cherokee and the Cherokee Nation became divided too over that whole issue. They were pulled in protecting their own interests. It wasn’t what they could or couldn’t do for the Confederacy; they were all protecting their own interests.
What was the Indian Home Guard?
The Indian Home Guard was created in the late summer–early autumn of 1862 because there was the need for manpower on the Kansas border that would be Unionist, to try to depress any threat from Cherokee Colonel Stand Watie or any other Confederate allied fighters. But also those men who went North with Opothle Yahola, whether they were Muscogee or white or Indian slaves who had run away, they wanted to go back and punish the people who had run them out.
Can you describe the impact on the Indian Territory during the war?
The impact was enormous—even for tribes that were far out on the frontier, maybe spending part of their time in Colorado or western Kansas, or in the Texas panhandle. But for the nations in the eastern Indian Territory, they couldn’t get away from it. Particularly in the Cherokee Nation and the Muscogee Nation, you were at risk when you were in your home because raiders from both sides came so frequently and took whatever they wanted, and sometimes they were even taking it from their own people. Then the others decided they had better get out while they could and either went north into Kansas and tried to escape the war there, or many went down to the Red River Valley in 1863.
What happened after the war?
The federal government treated all Indians, regardless of their loyalty or disloyalty, the same. The bottom line was that the Five Civilized Tribes lost so much of their land base as a result of the war, and it didn’t matter whether they stayed loyal to the Union or went with the Confederacy. It was a good excuse to take their land, and that’s what the federal government did. So you have property loss individually during the war, loss of life and this enormous loss of land at the end of the war as punishment to the Five Civilized Tribes for having alliances with the Confederacy. Then of course you have the diseases that swept across, as well as the famine—generally the population saw hard times.
You weave in a lot of family stories. How do these stories survive?
I was fortunate to have come across George Washington Grayson [a Creek leader], because he wrote an autobiography about 1912 and recorded his Civil War experiences. You just don’t find autobiographies written by Indian people that much. I also got to spend time with Indian people and hear their oral history—that is their history, what they hand down. We are fortunate in Oklahoma to have the Indian Pioneer History, a Federal Writers project that was done in 1937-38. In Oklahoma we have a lot of documentation that was saved that way.
Why do you feel this history is important?
What frustrates those of us who live out here—and I know a lot of reenactors and Sons of Confederate Veterans—we get frustrated because we see a new book and we think this looks good. Then we open it and realize the maps stop at Little Rock—and there’s nothing much covered west of Little Rock. Yet there’s so much that happened out here that had long-term consequences.
Originally published in the April 2015 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.