Early Years in Indian Territory
In 1835, Watie, his family, and many other Cherokee emigrated to Indian Territory (eastern present-day Oklahoma). They joined some Cherokee who had relocated as early as the 1820s and were known as the "Old Settlers".
Those Cherokee who remained on tribal lands in the East were rounded up and forcibly removed by the U.S. government in 1838. Their journey, on which they took their slaves, became known as the "Trail of Tears," as 4,000 people died.
After removal, members of the National Party targeted Treaty Party men for assassination; their giving up tribal lands was considered a "blood" or capital offense. Stand Watie, his brother Elias Boudinot, their uncle Major Ridge and cousin John Ridge, along with several other Treaty Party men, were attacked. Those four men named were all attacked on 22 June 1839; only Stand Watie survived. He arranged for his brother Elias' children to be sent for their safety and education to their mother's family in Connecticut; their mother Harriet had died in 1836 before the migration.
In 1842 Watie encountered James Foreman, whom he recognized as one of his uncle's assassins, and shot him dead. This was part of the post-Removal violence within the tribe, which was close to civil war for years. Ross partisans killed Stand's brother Thomas Watie in 1845. At least 34 politically related murders were committed among the Cherokee in 1845 and 1846.
In the 1850s Stand Watie was tried in Arkansas for the murder of Foreman; he was acquitted on the grounds of self defense. His nephew Elias Cornelius Boudinot, who had returned to the West and become a lawyer, defended him.
Watie, a slave holder, developed a successful plantation on Spavinaw Creek in the Indian Territory. He served on the Cherokee Council from 1845 to 1861, and part of the time served as Speaker.
Read more about this topic: Stand Watie
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early, years, indian and/or territory:
“Parents ... are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years.”
—Anthony Powell (b. 1905)
“Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,
The seeming truth which cunning times put on
To entrap the wisest.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don’t count; unavailable to them are the instincts and taboos that booming extroverts, who know the territory of self-advancement far better, can rely on.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)