Originally published in The Daily, November 19, 2011.
Unlike many Amerindians of the South, Opotleyahola of the Muskogee Creeks was a Union man. He led his warriors in the first battle of the Civil War in Indian Country—now Oklahoma. But even choosing the winning side didn’t prevent him or his people from losing, as Americans continued their successful struggle for political control of North America.
There’s at least one lesson learned from American history from 1756 to 1876: A people who forge and maintain a strong union will crush those who do not. Amerindians, Mexicans, and American Southerners lost to their rivals largely because they lacked the unified ruling institutions capable of mobilizing resources for defense of territory, population, and resources. Amerindians in particular fell victim to the divide-and-rule tactics of the British colonists and their American descendants. The Muskogee were no exception. Siding with the more distant power over the nearer one, they allied with the British during the Revolutionary War. After losing their lands in the peace settlement, they forged a new and equally futile alliance with the doomed Spanish empire in Florida, and eventually agreed to President Washington’s offer of regime change—meaning the acceptance of a way of life devoted to agriculture and commerce, as taught by Washington’s General Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Benjamin Hawkins. This settlement exploded when the Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, falsely prophesied victory in war against the Americans; the Muskogee factionalized, with the Upper Creeks or Red Sticks allying with the British in the War of 1812 against the Lower Creeks or White Sticks, allied with the United States. General Andrew Jackson defeated the Red Sticks but required his erstwhile allies to cede much of their land as well.
An Upper Creek who may have fought against the United States in 1812, Opothleyahola came to prominence when he negotiated a treaty with the John Quincy Adams Administration in 1826, selling some of his nation’s Georgia lands while stipulating that his people would remain in the state. Ignoring the federal government, local militias drove the Muskogee into Alabama. After passage of the Indian Removal Bill in 1932, the Jackson Administration forced them still further west, along the “Trail of Tears.”
By 1861, Opothleyahola had lived to see the United States itself factionalized into ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ sections, and he had another hard geopolitical choice to make. He chose as his Upper Creek ancestors had done. Opposing six other tribes, who sided with the nearby Confederate States of America, Opothleyahola allied with Lincoln and the United States—the more distant power. The Lincoln Administration directed him to lead his people to Fort Row in Kansas for protection from the Confederate forces and, perhaps, eventually to enter the war. They would enter it much sooner than they expected.
Before the war, Douglas H. Cooper had served as the United States Agent to the Choctaws. A veteran of the Mexican War and a Mississippian, he came from a family friendly with the new president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, under whom he served in Mexico. As Secretary of War during the Pierce Administration, Davis had obtained Cooper’s appointment; in this capacity, Cooper had urged the eventual incorporation of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations as a state in the Union. They were, after all, slaveholders, and an additional slave state would help the Southern cause. When the Confederacy formed, Cooper maintained his allegiance to Mississippi, to Davis, and to the Amerindian slaveholders, who allied with the Confederacy and sent warriors to fight in its army. They would be, Cooper predicted, “a terror to the Yankees.”
This put Opothleyahola and Cooper on a collision course. The Confederates wanted to control the Indian Territory as a buffer between the Confederacy’s Texas and the Union’s Kansas. Opothleyahola and his people (estimated to number between 5000 and 9000) were encamped somewhere west of what’s now Tulsa, Oklahoma, then called “Tulsey Town.” Hoping to capture the Muskogee force, Cooper brought some 1400 soldiers to a still-disputed site—claimed to have been either Keystone, Oklahoma or Yale, Oklahoma, depending upon whether you’re from Keystone or Yale—in mid-November 1861.
At the base of Round Mountain on November 19, Opothleyahola and his warriors fought well, driving the Confederates back before setting the prairie grass ablaze and retreating under cover of night. Having inflicted 110 fatalities upon the Muskogee and having induced them to leave the area, the Confederates claimed victory; in fact Cooper was frustrated by their escape.
He caught up with them a few weeks later at Chusto Talasah. This time, Cooper had the upper hand in the fight but withdrew when he ran low on ammunition as the Muskogee retreated. A third battle at Chustehahla, northeast of Tulsa, the day after Christmas, drove the Muskogee out of Indian Territory forever, into a furious snowstorm. Cooper was angered once more, as the notoriously aggressive Colonel James McIntosh had launched his cavalry attack prematurely, without Cooper’s authorization, permitting the Muskogee to elude capture once again. (Cooper’s superiors were more favorably impressed, upgrading McIntosh to brigadier general.)
Defeated, pursued, and beset by the winter blasts, about 2000 of Opothleyahola’s people straggled into Kansas with no cattle, horses, or wagons left. Many soon died of disease, including Opotheyahola’s daughter. The Muskogee leader himself would die less than two years later, in March 1863.
As for Colonel Cooper, he eventually took command of the Indian Territory after promotion to the rank of brigadier general. Choctaw and Chickasaw troops under his command held the line against Union invasion of Texas until the end of the war, although parts of the Territory itself were retaken by their enemy. His biographer, Muriel H. Wright, maintains that his forces were the last Confederate troops to surrender. He died in 1789, among what one might with reason call his adopted people in Fort Washita, Indian Territory.
Decimated by the Confederates and by disease, the Unionist Indians scattered. The Choctaw and Chickasaw lands eventually became part of the State of Oklahoma. The American Union having held, the geopolitical struggle for the North American continent would end in 1890 with victory over the remaining Amerindian peoples in the far West. No matter which side they took—French, Spanish, British, American ‘North’ or ‘South’—and no matter what way of life they adopted—warrior or farmer—Amerindians could never unite in sufficient numbers to rule the continent they had settled. In fact, ‘they’ were not a collectivity in ‘their’ eyes, but instead rivals for dominance, until it was too late for ‘them’ to fight back against the several European invaders—who also saw themselves as rivals at least as much as fellow-Europeans.
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