Catawba
Spoke Sioun language
Lived east of the Appalachian Mountains in the Carolina piedmont.
Long before Columbus, Catawba women were fashioning sturdy cookware and handsome ceremonial vessels; when the English settled Charleston, the women bartered pots for metal tools, clothing, and other necessities. In the 1860's the Catawba were confined to a tiny reservation in South Carolina-which by chance contained the deposits of distinctive reddish clay they had used for years. Pottery became a key to their very survival.
Now as then, Catawba potters eschew kiln firing, modern glazes, and potter's wheels. Using techniques handed down from mother to daughter for generations, they build their vessels from clay coils, polish them with quartzite pebbles, decorate them with ancient designs, and fire them on the hot coals of an open fire. The resulting hard finish produces a metallic ring when tapped-the echo of a well-tended tradition, still audible among the red clay hills of South Carolina.
Cayuga
Occupied the inland forests that skirted Lakes Ontario and Erie and lived in large fortified villages. They moved from time to time, and they used fire to clear land for crops and to keep the forests open, a practice that encouraged the growth of brushy browse for deer and other animals.
Shared a tradition of warfare that centered on taking prisoners and either adopting them into the captor's society or, more often, sacrificing them.
Evidence that enemies raided each other's towns regularly appears in distinctive pottery styles found at different sites....The major Northeastern nations might have destroyed each other in due course, but around the 15th century AD-dates and details differ in tribal traditions-a peacemaker came among them, and rival Iroquois tribes formed a political confederation.
For more information, see Iroquois as they were part of this nation.
Cherokee
For the Cherokee, gogi, the warm season between April and October, was the time to travel, to make war, to plant, and harvest. The cold, goga, from October to April, was the time to collect nuts, to hunt for deer, black bears, wild turkeys and other game, and to gather inside to tend the fires and retell the stories.
spoke a form Iroquoian and inhabited a large area west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Tradition dictated the protocol to be followed in dealings between humans and plants. The Cherokee and others believed, for instance, that ginseng, an aromatic medicinal herb that grew wild in the mountains, was a conscious being and that it could make itself invisible to anyone unworthy of gathering it. The women who went out searching for ginseng were thus instructed to show their respect by leaving the first three plants they found untouched and, before digging up the fourth, to say a prayer and place a small bead on the ground as compensation to the plant's spirit.
The Cherokee used a booger mask during a riotous ceremonial dance that may have originated as a reenactment of De Soto's invasion. Dancers wearing the masks ("booger" refers loosely to any ghost or monster) burst loudly into the room and launch a manic display of lewd, aggressive behavior that leaves no doubt about the Cherokee's opinion of the celebrated conquistador.
The Spaniards crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains in May of 1540, encountering little hostility but also finding few stockpiles of corn to steal. The area was controlled by people whose descendants would be known as the Cherokee...and were related to other Iroquoian tribes in the Northest. (One township visited by De Soto was called Chalaque, similar to a Muskogean word meaning "people of a different speech.")
Cherokee medicine men squeezed tobacco's juice on bee stings and snakebites and boiled its leaves into tea as a cure for fever.
The smallpox epidemic in 1738 hit the Cherokee nation. Cherokee elders wondered if the smallpox epidemic might be retribution for sins committed by some of the young people, and had their shamans lead rituals of contrition to appease the offended spirit. But such measures often failed, and when they did, some townspeople began to question the power of their shamans.
More than 300 years had passed since the first Europeans stepped into the Southeast...Yet even those who held fast to tribal identities were much changed from the ancestors who had greeted the early white explorers....The Cherokee had their own written language, thanks to the genius of Sequoyah, and their own newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, with a readership reaching well beyond the tribal homelands.
No group succeeded more dramatically in modernizing itself than the Cherokee. Taking new European ideas of republican government and blending them with their own tradition of tribal councils, progressive Cherokee leaders attempted to construct a model society. They built a capital, New Echota, in Georgia (their original capital in Tennessee having been lost by treaty), established a 32-member legislature, wrote a constitution, and framed a judicial system.
But to the growing white majority on the western frontier, the presence of any Indians at all, "civilized" or not, was unacceptable. Every perceived failing was dredged up to discredit the Cherokee-including the fact that they had sided with the British during the American Revolution. (No matter that more recently, in the War of 1812, Cherokee warriors had allied with Jackson to defeat the Red Sticks.) Meanwhile, white planters and land speculators continued to pour in. Hungry for new acreage...they relentlessly pressed the federal government to remove the Cherokee, along with the other Southeastern tribes.
In 1828 gold was discovered on the edge of Cherokee territory, and the cries for removal reached a crescendo...later that year...Andrew Jackson was elected president. He objected to the existence of sovereign Indian nations within the boundaries of the United States. He feared they might make their own alliances with Spain or England, which still posed a real threat to America's national ambitions.
After a furious debate, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 by one vote. The bill allowed the president to give the Five Civilized Tribes land in Indian Territory, later named Oklahoma, in exchange for the Southeastern lands they now occupied. That was the carrot. The stick was a provision that the new law could be enforced, if necessary, with military action.
In their battles against removal, the Cherokee were led by their principal chief, John Ross, the de facto head of government at New Echota. He had fought on Jackson's side at Horseshoe Bend. But Ross was adamant in opposing Jackson's removal plans: the Cherokee were a sovereign nation, he argued, whose territory the federal and state governments must respect. Ross gained the support of several prominent white politicians, including Sen Henry Clay of Kentucky and the great Massachusetts orator Daniel Webster. Yet he never succeeded in winning over all of his own people.
One of those who disagreed with Ross was a Cherokee Council speaker called The Ridge...who believed it was in the tribe's interest to negotiate with Washington, make the best deal possible, and move west. Ridge had another motive as well-he wanted to replace Ross as principal chief. In this he had the support of his son, John; his brilliant cousin, Elias Boudinot, editor of The Cherokee Phoenix; and Boudinot's brother, Stand Watie. The "Ridge Faction", as it was known, inspired little enthusiasm from the rest of the tribe; only a few hundred favored accommodation.
When the Supreme Court handed down its verdict, the result at first seemed ambiguous. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Indian tribes were "domestic dependent nations"-wards of the federal government, in effect, with no right to file suit. Then in a second case (Worcester v. Georgia), the court held for the Cherokee, declaring them to be "a distinct community, occupying its territory," which the people of Georgia had no right to enter without Cherokee consent. But President Jackson simply sneered at it, "John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it."
Government negotiators soon began talks with the Ridge Faction and its supporters. In 1835, at the New Echota, Ridge and a group of several hundred supporters agreed to trade the remaining Cherokee lands for territory west of the Mississippi. Remembering a Cherokee law of 1829 that decreed death to anyone selling land without the consent of all Cherokee people, Ridge grimly remarked, "With this treaty, I sign my death warrant." Four years later Ridge, his son, and Elias Boudinot were put to death for their actions. On June 22, 1839, they were stabbed to death by unknown assailants. Amnesty was subsequently granted to others who signed-and to the unidentified executioners.
But the treaty of New Echota-which was never approved by the Cherokee Nation nor by John Ross nor by anyone seriously considered a leader-was ratified by the US Senate and became the legal basis for exiling the Cherokee people.
To force compliance with the illegal Treaty of New Echota, the US government sent more than 7,000 troops into Cherokee country; state militias swelled the army of occupation to more than 9,000 men. The soldiers built stockades in key locations and in late May of 1838 began to fill them with ordinary people pulled from their homes.
Years later an eyewitness remembered the scene: "Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the trail that led to the stockade." Individuals were seized "in their fields or going along the road, women were taken from their spinning wheels and children from their play."
As soon as soldiers removed the Indians, local whites rushed in, ransacking their abandoned homes and stealing anything of value. Searching for Cherokee gold that was rumored to have been hidden, white mobs feverishly ripped apart burial grounds and opened old coffins, tossing aside the sacred remains of Cherokee ancestors. Within a single month more than 8,000 Cherokees had been rounded up and herded into the stockades. Only one small group managed to escape the soldiers; they took refuge deep in the North Carolina mountains, where their desendants remain today.
Drought struck the Southeast, drying up wells and streams and destroying crops. Cholera and dysentery broke out in the stockades. Watching their people die, Cherokee leaders negotiated an agreement that allowed them to control their own removal. As the long caravans began to move toward Oklahoma, the emigrants were already running short of food and supplies.
Tuberculosis, pellagra, pneumonia, and other diseases stalked the wagon trains. Of the 16,000 men, women, and children forced to relocate, more than 4,000 died either in the stockades or on the way west. The tragedy of the removal still lingers in the memory of the Cherokee. They call it oosti ganuhnuh dunaclohiluh, "the trail where they cried."
The Cherokee laid out a new capital, Tahlequah, and revived their constitution. Ross won reelection as principal chief. A public school system was in operation by 1841. The Cherokee Advocate, the first newspaper in Indian Territory appeared in 1844 and was soon joined by publications from other tribes.
The 1893 opening of Cherokee land in Indian Territory to white settlement triggered a stampede that left several would-be-settlers dead. Seven such events added 14 million acres of "surplus" tribal lands to what became the state of Oklahoma.
An unforeseen consequence of the Dawes Commission's work is that in Oklahoma today there are no Indian reservations such as exist in states to the north and west of it. Yet Oklahoma boasts the largest Native American population in the US-more than 250,000. About 120,000 of those are Cherokee, which ranks not only as the largest tribe in Oklahoma but-with almost 310,000 people nationwide identifying themselves as Cherokee in the 1990 census-the largest in the United States and Canada.
In early 1994, the University of Tennessee repatriated 190 sets of Cherokee remains disinterred during a Tennessee Valley Authority dam construction.
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Cheyenne
Bear Butte, just northeast of the Black Hills racetrack, is a sacred place, mato paha. The Cheyenne say their prophet Sweet Medicine was given the tribe's sacred icon of four arrows. And it was here that the Cheyenne, starving at the time were given the gift of the Sun Dance so that they might yearly renew the world, its game, and its bountiful nature.
For the Cheyenne, the role of peace chief-charged with handling problems within the tribe-offered the highest degrees of prestige and responsiblity. Men were chosen to join the "council of 44" peace chiefs for a 10-year term of office. During that time a chief was expected to be generous to the poor, to behave as a wise father to every tribal member, and to resolve disputes with a tenderhearted yet decisive manner.
Among the Cheyenne and other Plains tribes, artison "guilds" controlled the production of all quillwork and beadwork. Members controlled the highly specialized knowledge needed for certain techniques, and instruction required payment. Those women who were fortunate enough to possess such knowledge were paid well for their creations. A quilled robe made by a member of a quilling society, for example, could easily be traded for a pony from the Arapaho or the Mandan-Hidatsa. The Cheyenne's quilling society offered graded memberships, based on the particular item that the woman had learned how to make. Ascending in order, there were membership divisions for the moccasins, baby cradles; stars for ornamenting lodges; buffalo robes; and lodge linings, back rests and parfleches.
Some of the best-known women warriors were members of the Cheyenne tribe. Perhaps the most illustrious woman warrior was Buffalo Calf Woman, sister of the distinguished Cheyenne warrior Chief Comes in Sight. In the early summer of 1876, Buffalo Calf Woman rescued her wounded brother from a battlefield where he had fallen. Had it not been for her courage, Chief Comes in Sight almost certainly would have died that day. The high esteem in which the Cheyenne held her is evidenced by the fact that the fight became known as "Where the Girl Saved her Brother."
Another Cheyenne woman who fought in battle was Island Woman, wife of White Frog. While taking part in an attack on the Pawnee, Island Woman was charged by a hatchet-wielding Pawnee warior. She reputedly wrenched the hatchet from her assailant's hand, knocking the Pawnee from his horse.
Of all the Plains' manly-hearted women, the most ruthless may have been Ehyophsta, better known as Yellow-Haired Woman. The daughter of Cheyenne Chief Stands in Timber and the niece of the old Bad Faced Bull, Ehyophsta fought not only in the battle of Beecher's Island in 1867 but also during the battle between the Cheyenne and the Shoshone the following year, when she counted coup on one enemy and killed another. One of the last Cheyenne fighting women, Yellow-Haired Woman died in 1915.
Some historians suggest that the Sun Dance appeared around 1700, possibly originating with the Cheyenne. To the Plains Indians, however, the ceremony was ageless-a divine gift from the supernatural world. To the Cheyenne, it was known as the New Life Lodge. It was a world-renewal ritual, and the altar featured elements that reminded them of their agricultural heritage.
In 1825, Brig. Gen. Henry Atkinson and Indian agent Benjamin O'Fallon sought out chiefs for negotiating treaties concerning trade and friendship. In early July, Atkinson's party intercepted the Cheyenne at their base camp near the Black Hills. An Atkinson aide described the 15 Cheyenne leaders who convened with the general as "decidely the finest-looking Indians we have seen." These 15 individuals willingly put their thumbprints to a document acknowledging US political and commercial authority over their region. But they represented only one of the tribe's 10 bands; they were only 15 out of an estimated 3,000 Cheyenne. As would happen time and again in Indian-white frontier diplomacy, what US officials considered a legally binding agreement, the great majority of Indians neither understood nor accepted.
The Cheyenne and the Arapaho made peace in 1840; the same year the Kiowa and the Comanche, who had stopped fighting each other in 1790, forged a potent alliance. For the next quarter century the swift horsemen and stealthy warriors of these southern tribes descended like hawks on the slow-moving pack trains along the Santa Fe Trail and also launched regular rustling forays against the cattle ranches that were proliferating in western Texas and eastern New Mexico. At first these depredations brought new wealth into their tepee circles-silver to be beaten into ornaments, mirrors for dance regalia and silent signaling between war parties, and an occasional Mexican or fair-haired Anglo child as an adopted member of the family.
However...in the summer of 1849, a party of Cheyenne horse raiders returning home stopped at a wagon-train camp in the Platte River valley. By the time their leader saw the white gold-rushers dying of cholera, it was too late: water supplies for the Cheyenne campsites had already been contaminated, and the agonizing disease soon killed most of their inhabitants.
In the early to mid 1800's, the times were changing, and many Plains Indians read the signs with foreboding. One was a Southern Cheyenne war leader name Yellow Wolf. In August 1846 his buffalo-hide tepee was pitched beside William Bent's trading post, an important stopover on the Santa Fe Trail. Recuperating from an illness at the post was Lt JJ Abert of the US Army, who was about to travel to Pueblo country for the government. Struck by the 60-year-old warrior's engaging intelligence, Abert recorded Yellow Wolf's thoughts in his private journal. The Indian observed that buffalo were harder to find and confided a deeper fear that unless his people adopted the white man's ways and found some alternative to their hunting way of life, they would disappear forever.
In fact, another 40 years of Indian rebellion still lay ahead-years of whole tribes removed and resettled, of pitched battles and pitiless massacres and violent deaths of many good-hearted Indians like Yellow Wolf, who fell at the age of 85.
Just as the exile at Bosque Redondo was beginning for the Navajo, an incident took place in Colorado that sent shock waves across the country. No sooner had gold turned up along Cherry Creek in 1858 than the city of Denver was born. The eastern flanks of the Colorado Rockies were soon dotted with mining camps....By 1864 the attraction of Montana's goldfields had expanded the territory's population by 30,000 new settlers. In the face of this rampant growth, it was only a matter of time before conflict erupted.
The pretext was supplied in Denver, where the slain bodies of a miner's family were laid out for public viewing as evidence of Indian savagery. It was unclear who had actually killed them-but no matter. A force of some 700 "Colorado militia," hastily recruited from local gambling halls and ranches, set out to teach the Indians a lesson. Just after sunrise on December 28, 1864, the ragtag troops, led by a former clergyman, Col. John M. Chivington, found a quiet encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho families along Sand Creek. Here they had set up their tepees as ordered by a post commander at Ft Lyon, to whom they had surrendered two months earlier. The leader at Sand Creek was the Cheyenne peace chief Black Kettle. In a matter of minutes Chivington delivered his infamous battle cry-"Kill them all, big and small, nits make lice"-and his men attacked.
"I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces," an eyewitness later testified, "worse mutilated than any I ever saw before, the women all cut to pieces...children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors." Of 123 dead, nearly 100 were women and children. "Colorado Soldiers Have Again Covered Themselves With Glory," headlined the Denver News, Indian scalps were proudly displayed at a local theater. The outcry came from settlers throughout the West to get tough on Indians, with most of the nation's military establishment in hearty agreement.
At the same time, calls for peace and compassion were heard from abolitionist groups... Liberal-minded citizens in the East-who, angry Westerners pointed out, were comfortably distant from the realities of frontier life-demanded an inquiry into the events at Sand Creek. At length the government acted: In 1865 a congressional team headed by Sen. James Doolittle of WI was dispatched to interview Indians, traders, and missionaries across the West. Its goals were to establish who was to blame for Sand Creek and to determine why the populations on reservations such as Bosque Redondo were declining so rapidly.
The commission's final report recommended no action against Chivington or his men. It did cite such factors as disease, lawlessness by whites, corruption by Indian agents, and the loss of hunting grounds as causes in Indian depopulation-but offered no relief for the general "Indian problem," which it concluded, "can never be remedied until the Indian race is civilized or shall entirely disappear."
In October 1867, the US government and the Plains Indians held the last major peace treaty negotiations. The first meeting took place in the valley of Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas. The final Medicine Lodge Creek treaty created two large reservations in Indian Territory-one for the Kiowa and Comanche in the Leased District, and one for the Cheyenne and Arapaho in the Cherokee Outlet-for the containment and pacification of these southern tribes.
In the late summer of 1868, Cheyenne war parties wreaked havoc on some 40 white communities over a two month period, killing at least 79 settlers and kidnapping a number of children. In response, Gen Philip Sheridan ordered an ambitious lieutenant colonel of the 7th Calvary, George Armstrong Custer, to lead a surprise attack against a Cheyenne encampment on Oklahoma's Washita River.
On the morning of November 27, 1868, for the second time in his life, the peace chief Black Kettle noticed furious soldiers descending on his camp. He had survived Sand Creek; he did not survive Washita. Custer's take-no-prisoners policy resulted in 103 Cheyennes being shot to death-including Black Kettle and his wife, killed riding along the ice-encrusted river in a desperate attempt to flee. All the Cheyennes' horses were shot to inhibit the survivors' movements and to destroy their emergency food supply. Some would later call the engagement Custer's First Stand. The Cheyenne never forgot it.
In the summer of 1876, Gen Philip Sheridan proposed to confront the Indian hostiles-composed of Sioux, Cheyenne, And Araphao-from three directions. His three army columns, amounting to about 2,500 men, would include Gen Alfred Terry and Col George Custer coming in from the east, Gen George Crook entering from the south, and Gen John Gibbon striking from the west.
Coming upon the Indian camp at Rosebud Creek on June 17, Crook abruptly discovered that their numbers had been disastrously underestimated. For 6 hours his troops faced waves of attacks by well-armed warriors before he ordered a retreat. Meanwhile, other tribal groups were filtering into the area they knew as the Greasy Grass (and whites called the Little Bighorn River). More than 7,000 people in all camped in six great tepee circles, including 1,800 warriors....
Out of touch with Crook, Custer led a detachment of the 7th Calvary toward the Little Bighorn. Unaware that he was approaching the largest fighting force ever assembled on the Plains, Custer made an impulsive and fatal decision. Dividing his troops-about 210 men-into three attacking groups, he positioned them on a ridge above the camp.
A warrior named Wooden Leg remembered being awakened by the crack of gunfire. Stripping for the fight and leaping onto his favorite war pony, he and his friend Little Bird took off after a fleeing soldier. 'We were lashing him with our pony whips. It seemed not brave to shoot him. He pointed back his revolver, though, and sent a bullet into Little Bird's thigh. As I was getting possession of his weapon, he fell to the ground. I do not know what became of him.'
In the course of an hour, Custer and every one of his men perished; only a horse name Comanche, belonging to one of Custer's captains was left alive. The victors promptly withdrew, most heading up the Little Bighorn Valley-where they held a great celebration below the mouth of Lodge Grass Creek.
Only four months after the victory over Custer, a group of Northern Cheyennes led by Little Wolf and Dull Knife had their village destroyed and hundreds of their horses shot by US troops. Accused of involvement at the Little Bighorn, they were deported by train to the Southern Cheyenne Agency in Indian Territory. But these lifelong inhabitants of the northern Plains hated this strange, oppressively humid place and waited for a chance to escape. In September 1878 about 300 of them began a 1,500 mile run for freedom.
For four months they managed to elude more than 10,000 pursuing troops, until at the Platte River a dispute over strategy led to a split up. Little Wolf's group surrendered soon afterward at the Little Missouri River and, ironically, was shortly hired as army scouts on the Tongue River Reservation. Dull Knife's followers did not fare so well. Captured near Nebraska's Red Cloud Agency, they were locked in an unheated brig at Ft Robinson in the dead of winter. When the desperate prisoners attempted a breakout, 64 were killed and 78 recaptured. But the 30 or so survivors who remained free were eventually allowed to return to the Rosebud Valley, where their descendants still live today.
*Please see "The Cheyenne Woman Iron Teeth Remembers the Great Escape" on my home page for a recount from the Northern Cheyenne woman who lived through the suffering endured after the escape.
By the 1860's Plains Indians were beginning to preserve their stories on the pages of ledger books acquired from whites. Ink, pencils, and watercolors on paper were easier media than the stick and bone brushes on hide previously employed.
In early 1994, at Busby, MN, tribespeople turned out in force to reclaim and provide a proper burial for the skulls of 24 Cheyennes killed in 1878 while trying to escape from Ft Robinson, NE. The skulls had rested for more than a century at three Eastern museums. Now finally, they reached the destination the fugitives had been seeking.
