Trail of Broken Promises

By Caleb Pirtle III

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9780984208371

Book preview

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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 Towns, the harbingers of peace and good will, and the Red Towns, whose warriors never minded lifting the hatchet and did so every chance they got. They would gather in the chokofa, the town square, or perhaps in a forest, fast awhile, drink strong medicine, hang a few charms and sacred objects on themselves, then ride out hell bent for leather to raid the Choctaws to the west or the Cherokees to the north.   

War was important to the Creeks. It was the only way they had to gain recognition, to win personal distinction within the tribe.   

They sought scalps.   

They sought glory.   

They would chase down the men among their enemies and kill them without fear or compassion.   But they always brought the women and children home to be adopted into the Creek nation.   

The warriors also had a habit of annexing tribes that chose to surrender rather than die. That’s how the Alabamas, the Koasatis, the Hitchitees, and the Tuskegees wound up as Creeks in the first place.   

Reluctantly, even the White Towns rode out to shed blood. They didn’t like it, but they never got a promotion without it.

The Creeks worked together in a large garden, the Chiefs right alongside the lesser members, joking and singing and raising beans, corn, squash, melons, and pumpkins. The Lower Towns, with a wetter climate, produced rise. Men worked or they were fined.   They worked diligently or they were chased out of town.   

That was law.   

And when the fields gave out, the Creeks merely abandoned them and moved on, dragging their towns along behind them. The crops played a critical role in the tribe’s way of life, other than just keeping the hungry fed.   

When a man chose a girl to be his wife, he promptly moved into her house. But the marriage wasn’t fully consummated until after the harvest of the corn, giving her a few more months to be friendly with as many men as she liked.   Once that corn was in, however, she had to be faithful, or her husband’s clan would promptly cut off their hair, her ears, and sometimes her nose.   And the woman’s lover wound up in much the same shape as she.   

The man, alas, could take as many wives as he wanted, provided the other spouses consented, and they almost always did.

By the 1790s, the Creeks looked around and realized that white men were running rampant over their Georgian lands. As one state commissioner explained, They [the Georgians] are like a river, so very full that its banks cannot contain it.   

He wanted to purchase a great chunk of ground between the Oconee and Ocmulgee rivers.   He met with the Creeks and, with a reverent tone in his voice, appealed to their compassion. He said, No red man would refuse a white man something to eat, if he came hungry to his cabin; and yet a refusal of this land will be like a denial of bread to many hungry families, who want to raise corn on it to feed themselves.

The Creeks refused.   

Their lands were their lives, too important to lose, sell, or give away.   

The white men looked down in anger.   

And they called the Creeks savage.

Chapter 3:   Keepers of the Swamplands

TO THE SOUTH, down toward the great waters, down amidst the saw grass swamps and mangrove thickets, there roamed a scattered band of isolated Indians that the Creeks called Seminole, meaning wild or people who camp at a distance.   

Theirs was a foreboding world that few dared to enter, and even fewer ever found their way back out again. The Seminoles had no identity.   They merely misplaced themselves in a river of grass where the land was mostly sea.

They had their war villages and their villages of peace, but mostly they were exiles, fighting to hold on to their last outpost east of the big water that was known as the Mississippi. For a time, the Seminoles united themselves with the Lower Towns of the Creeks, even partaking of the glorious Green Corn Dance as though it were a communion of the soul.

Upon the sacred square they spread soil from the earth where no one had ever walked before. And every fire in town was doused, every floor swept and scrubbed, a way to rid the tribes of the old year and make ready for the new one.   

For amongst the Creeks and Seminoles, the new year’s came down in the steaming heat of summer.   The religious white drink – the liquid of purification – was brewed black in the kettles. Each family walked forward to secure fresh fire from the sacred flames in the square, and for eight days, the people danced and fasted and drank medicine and played ball as they gave thanks to the gods for the gift of corn, the gift of life in bad times, as well as in good ones.   

Everyone was expected to attend the celebration. Those who could not reach the sacred square in time gathered a bundle of green corn, slashed it, then rubbed the juice over their faces and hands. If an escaped or wanted criminal could make it to the festival, he was immediately forgiven for his sins and his crime overlooked, if not forgotten.

War and a treacherous land had taken their toll on the Seminoles. The Spanish came, then the British, and finally the Spanish returned.   Once the tribe had numbered 25,000.   But by 1763, when they again heard the guns of Spain, only 83 fled from St. Augustine, 80 escaped from Southern Florida, and 108 slipped out of the port at Pensacola.

There were no more. They buried themselves deep in an untrammeled forest, sheltered, but not safe from the rattlesnakes and cottonmouths and malaria and dengue fever that lurked behind the cypress and tangled vines. In Congress, Virginia’s John Randolph turned to a colleague and remarked, If I were given the choice of emigrating to Florida or to hell, sir, why then, sir, I should choose hell.

William DuVal, an agent for the tribe, would even journey into the strange river of grass, then write:   I suffered much from drinking water alive with insects, from mosquitoes, intolerable hot weather . . . I have never seen a more wretched tract . . . No settlement can ever be made in this region, and there is no land in it worth cultivation . . . the most miserable and gloomy prospect I ever beheld.

But it was home and it was good enough for the Seminoles. They only hungered for a place to rest, a chance for survival.   

But the white men sought them out.   And the white men called them savage.

Uprooted, carved from a red cedar stump, symbolizes the Five Civilized Tribes that were torn away from their homes and transplanted in Eastern Oklahoma. Willard Stone, the artist, fashioned the carving from a stump, he said, because the tribes had been pulled away from the ground of their birth.

Five Civilized Tribes Museum

Muskogee, Oklahoma

Willard Stone, Artist

Chapter 4: Hunters of the Southern Woodlands

THE CHOCTAWS, their story tellers told them, came from the west, marching behind priests who carried the sacred book wrapped in animal skins. They sang in unknown tongues and trekked a desolate land, meeting no one and nothing until a terrible sickness gripped them.   

The priests died, all but one, all but the bearer of the sacred book.   

The Choctaws burned their dead but kept the ashes, then trudged on, coming at last to Nane-wy-yah, the stooping hill.   They all lay down to die, all but one, the bearer to the sacred book.   

The Nane-wy-yah opened up, and the last priest entered, then vanished.   

The years swept past, and finally the Great Spirit took the ashes of the dead and, from them, created two boys and two girls. They were suckled by a panther until they grew strong and tall and were ready to leave.   

The bearer of the sacred book appeared to them, giving them bows and arrows and an earthen pot.   He stretched his arms and said, I give you these hunting grounds for your home. When you leave them, you die.

The Choctaws had no thoughts of ever leaving them. They were quite pleased with the Mississippi and Alabama dirt beneath their feet. The soil was rich and fertile, so they spent their days clearing fields, plowing with a bent stick or a piece of flint or maybe the shoulder bone of the bison, and growing beans, corn, pumpkins, and melons. They raised enough to satisfy their own needs, then peddled the rest to neighboring tribes who had more land but less success with the art and patience of farming.

Buffalo grazed the grasslands, Wild turkey and deer hid away in the forests.   Squirrels chattered from treetops, and the beaver bridged the rivers.   The Choctaw became a hunter without equal, moving quietly through the woodlands and canebrakes with a blowgun, a bow and arrow, and later a rifle, which gave him dominion over all the beasts of the field, including man.   

A missionary, H. B. Cushman, wrote:

The Choctaw hunter generally hunted alone and on foot; and when he killed his game, unless small, he left it where it had fallen, and turning his footsteps homeward, traveled in a straight line, here and there breaking a twig leaving its top in the direction he had come, as a guide to his wife . . . As soon as he arrived, he informed her of his success and merely pointed in the direction in which the game lay.   At once she mounted a pony and started in the direction indicated; and guided by the broken twigs, she soon arrived at the spot, picked up and fastened the dead animal to the saddle, mounted and soon went home again; then soon dressed and prepared a portion for her hunter lord’s meal, while he sat and smoked his pipe in meditative silence.   No animal adapted for food was ever killed in wanton sport by an Indian hunter.

The Choctaws seldom sought war.   

They never ran from it.   

In fact, Bernard Romans, who traveled among them in 1770, wrote:

They are the swiftest of foot of any savages in America, and very expert in tracking a flying enemy, who very seldom escapes. . . They almost always brought [their captives] home to shew them, and then dispatched them with a bullet or hatchet; after which the body being cut into many parts, and all the hairy pieces of skin converted into scalps, the remainder is buried, and the above trophies carried home, where the women dance with them till tired.

The women had every right to dance.   

The women – at least some of the – were quick to march into the specter of war right along with their husbands. As the Frenchman, Bossu, witnessed, They keep by their sides in combat holding a quiver of arrows and encourage them by crying out continually that they must not fear their enemies but die like true men.   

Many battlefield women trudged home as battlefield widows. All they had left was his medicine bag, the one filled with the ashes of bird bones and weeds, the one he carried to protect him in time of war and dying.

The dead, wrapped in skins and bark, were laid upon a platform, along with food and drink, a change of clothes, and the body of a dog killed specifically to provide the deceased with a companion on his cold journey into the night.   A fire burned to keep them warm.   

Months later, the bone picker – the honored one – came to tear away the rotting flesh with long fingernails, to scrape the bones and leave them clean for burial, to silence the singing and the howling of the bereaved.

The Choctaws practiced strange customs. They flattened the heads of their infants, from crown to eyebrows, with small bags of sand.