Cherokee and Blacks
The Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole owned slaves.
The slaves were Black, White, and Red.
On April 10, 1758, uninvited and unwanted, he [ Little Carpenter, a Cherokee leader] enterred Charlestown. . . . The Little Carpenter [Attakullaculla] then attempted to exchange the Frenchmen for two Negro slaves to take their places as helpers for his wife. See Source.
[BTW, Little Carpenter came to Fort Loudoun Winchester VA more than once.]
Celia E Naylor's book, "African Cherokees in Indian Territory, from Chattel to Citizens," reports of the Cherokee back slaves and black freedmen fighting for full citizenship rights within the Cherokee nation frrom 1817 which was the first major move of Cherokee to Arkansas and before and after the Trail of Tears in the 1830s through the Civil War and on up to losing what little automony they had when on November 16, 1907 the Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma. This battle for full Cherokee citizenship has led even up to the 2000s.
Citizenship
The Cherokee are still legally considered a nation. When American law changed towards rights, such change did not automatically apply to the nation of the Cherokee. And so the blacks have fought for full citizenship rights within that nation.
And how was the traditional definition of citizenship defined? If you were non Cherokee, white, black or red, and you married a Cherokee Women, you got rights and so did your children. But if a Cherokee man married a non Cherokee woman then their children would not be Cherokee. But if you were "adopted," then you did get full rights. Being a matrilineal society, family and bloodlines grew out of the woman, not the man.
Number of Black Slaves
According to Celia E Naylor in her book, African Cherokees in Indian Territory, from Chattel to Citizens, page 17, there were counts made before the Trail of Tears, removing the 5 civilized tribes of Cherokee, Chocktaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminoe:
.
A December 1835 census by the US War Dept reported
Of 16542 Cherokee, 1592 were enslaved blacks and 201 intermarried whites.
in 1837 the Chickasaw Nation of 5000 to 6000 had the highest percentage of enslaved but that percentage is skewed by their smaller population.
An 1831 census:
Of 19500 Choctaw, 512 were enslaved blacks. But some scholars argue that enslaved number might be smaller.
There are no census for enslaved in the Seminole because they refused to report any numbers. And many black slaves escaped into Seminole territory. Celia E Naylor stated that the enslaved and free black might have constituted 1/5 or 1/6 of the whole Seminole population before removal to Oklahoma.
Choctaw chief Greenwood LeFlore had 15,000 acres of Mississippi land ( his Mississippi home Malmaison) and 400 enslaved Africans under his dominion.-- from Smithsonian magazine article.
Does Judgment distort what we observe?
Before you read more of this story, please look at the thought expressed by a Hindu Indian Philosopher:
This Indian philosopher taught that concepts get in the way of observation.
Only by ridding yourself of concepts can you experience freedom.
He eventually rejected Theosophy, along with every other system created by man.
Observation,
not prejudgement,
is a recurring theme
in his talks,
pointing to a path
to understanding meaning — if meaning is even to be derived.
.
.
And what does the modern mind think as it observes?
“Obviously,” Smith [museum curator Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche)] said,
“the story should be,
needs to be,
that the enslaved black people
and soon-to-be-exiled red people
would join forces
and defeat their oppressor.”
But such was not the case—far from it.
“I don’t know why our brains make it so hard to compute that Jackson had a terrible Indian policy and radically expanded American democracy,” Smith said, “or that John Ross was a skillful leader for the Cherokee nation who fought the criminal policy of removal with every ounce of strength, but also a man who deeply believed in and practiced the enslavement of black people.”
In particular, Celia E Naylor's book, "African Cherokees in Indian Territory, from Chattel to Citizens," looks at the Cherokee and this "peculiar institution."
Even after the Trail of Tears, their slave holding increased, and possibly because of it.
Men's roles were combined with the women on growing food. And slaves helped with that. The men no longer hunted. No longer fished. No longer warred. Now they felt as if women. And what of the women? And of the slaves?
Their status of being lesser was emphasized even more after the Trail of Tears. The women really were the matriarchs in traditon only. They were being used for the purpose of defining who was a Cherokee Citizen and who wasn't.
Everyone was demoted. And demoted in their minds too.
That's it.
That's our lead story.
There's always more.
Read bits and pieces.
Skip around.
Compiled and authored by Jim Moyer 10/22/2022, updated 10/23/2022
.
George Washington's ownership of slaves
and white colonists ownership of slaves can be found here:
GW's Slaves
New Years Day – Slave Auction Day?
Jefferson's Rough Draft in more ways than one
A Young Poet and a future President
A Stolen Mount Rushmore?
.
The Moor Charity School
Celia E Naylor is an assistant pofessor of history at Dartmouth College.
She is author of African Cherokees in Indian Territory, from Chattel to Citizens, published in 2008.
It is interesting to note that she is professor of Darthmouth College whose origins involved Moor's Indian Charity School:
Carpenter wanted Black Slaves
On April 10, 1758, uninvited and unwanted, he [ Little Carpenter] enterred Charlestown. . . . The Little Carpenter [Attakullaculla] then attempted to exchange the Frenchmen for two Negro slaves to take their places as helper for his wife.
But Carolina law forbade the giving or selling of slaves to the Indians.
Source:
Blue text from Page 145 in "The Cherokee Frontier, Conflict and Survival 1740-1762, " by David H Corkran, published by University of Oklahoma Press 1962, paperback published 2016
The Cherokee knew Social Standing
Fall of 1757
Tanase trader Sam Benn, passing through the Valley witha a caravan of goods, was set upon near Nottely by a horde of angry Cherokees demanding rum.
Benn, adhering to the law, refused
The outraged Indians pelted him with sticks and stones.
When one bold red man reached to pull Benn from his horse, the rrader shot him, and the assailants momentrarily drew back.
Benn's Negro slave, safe in the immunity Cherokees granted Negroes, shouted to Benn to leave his pack train and run, that he would care for the goods.
Badly bruised, Benn rode for his life.
The Indians instantly calmed and, rounding up the the caravan, ordered the slave to camp with it in a designated spot until they gave him permission to leave.
Then they drove off a horse loaded with goods.
When Old Hop heard of the Nottelies' behavior, he was calm in his new-found confidence in the English. He told Benn he had done right in killing the offender, that the Nottelies had behaved badly, and that as soon as his warriors came in from hunting, he would send for the goods and demand satisfaction for damage and lossses. The Fire King then sent physic to the Warrior of the long Savannah, whose brother Benn had killed, with orders to cleanse himself of bad thoughts. The Warrior obeyed.
Source:
Blue text from Page 140 in "The Cherokee Frontier, Conflict and Survival 1740-1762, " by David H Corkran, published by University of Oklahoma Press 1962, paperback published 2016
Questions:
Did this author assume Cherokee gave blacks immunity?
Did he assume that because they did not hurt the black?
Or could another interpretation infer that the Cherokee saw the black as a lesser.
Could it be that they wouldn't want their own slaves killed or hurt?
How Native American Slaveholders
Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative
The new exhibition ‘Americans’ at the National Museum of the American Indian prompts a deeper dive for historic truths
Choctaw chief Greenwood LeFlore had 15,000 acres of Mississippi land ( his Mississippi home Malmaison) and 400 enslaved Africans under his dominion. Library of Congress3.2K)
When you think of the Trail of Tears, you likely imagine a long procession of suffering Cherokee Indians forced westward by a villainous Andrew Jackson. Perhaps you envision unscrupulous white slaveholders, whose interest in growing a plantation economy underlay the decision to expel the Cherokee, flooding in to take their place east of the Mississippi River.
What you probably don’t picture are Cherokee slaveholders, foremost among them Cherokee chief John Ross.
What you probably don’t picture are the numerous African-American slaves, Cherokee-owned, who made the brutal march themselves, or else were shipped en masse to what is now Oklahoma aboard cramped boats by their wealthy Indian masters. And what you may not know is that the federal policy of Indian removal, which ranged far beyond the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee, was not simply the vindictive scheme of Andrew Jackson, but rather a popularly endorsed, congressionally sanctioned campaign spanning the administrations of nine separate presidents. Report an ad These uncomfortable complications in the narrative were brought to the forefront at a recent event held at the National Museum of the American Indian. Titled “Finding Common Ground,” the symposium offered a deep dive into intersectional African-American and Native American history.
For museum curator Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), who has overseen the design and opening of the widely lauded “Americans” exhibition now on view on the museum’s third floor, it is imperative to provide the museum-going public with an unflinching history, even when doing so is painful.
John Ross, the Cherokee chief lionized for his efforts to fight forced relocation, was also an advocate and practitioner of slavery.
Library of Congress“I used to like history,” Smith told the crowd ruefully. “And sometimes, I still do. But not most of the time. Most of the time, history and I are frenemies at best.” In the case of the Trail of Tears and the enslavement of blacks by prominent members of all five so-called “Civilized Tribes” (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole), Smith went one step further, likening the ugly truth of history to a “mangy, snarling dog standing between you and a crowd-pleasing narrative.”
“Obviously,” Smith said, “the story should be, needs to be, that the enslaved black people and soon-to-be-exiled red people would join forces and defeat their oppressor.”
But such was not the case—far from it.
“The Five Civilized Tribes were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.”
In other words, the truth is about as far a cry from a “crowd-pleasing narrative” as you could possibly get. “Do you want to hear that?” Smith asked the audience. “I don’t think so. Nobody does.” And yet, Smith is firm in his belief that it is a museum’s duty to embrace and elucidate ambiguity, not sweep it under the rug in the pursuit of some cleaner fiction.
Tiya Miles, an African-American historian at the University of Michigan, agrees. At the “Finding Common Ground” event, she meticulously laid out primary-source evidence to paint a picture of Indian/African-American relations in the years leading up to the Civil War.
"Americans" curator Paul Chaat Smith (as well as historian Tiya Miles, not pictured) spoke on the fraught intersectional history of African- and Native Americans at a "Finding Common Ground" symposium recently convened at the American Indian Museum. Leah Jones Native Americans, she said, had themselves been enslaved, even before African-Americans, and the two groups “were enslaved for approximately 150 years in tandem.” It wasn’t until the mid 18th-century that the bondage of Native Americans began to wane as Africans were imported in greater and greater numbers. Increasingly, where white colonists viewed Africans as little more than mindless beasts of burden, they saw Native Americans as something more: “noble savages,” unrefined but courageous and fierce.
Perversely, Native American ownership of black slaves came about as a way for Native Americans to illustrate their societal sophistication to white settlers. “They were working hard to comply with government dictates that told native people that in order to be protected and secure in their land base, they had to prove their level of ‘civilization,’” Miles explained.
How would slave ownership prove civilization? The answer, Miles contends, is that in capitalism-crazed America, slaves became tokens of economic success. The more slaves you owned, the more serious a businessperson you were, and the more serious a businessperson you were, the fitter you were to join the ranks of “civilized society.” It’s worth remembering, as Paul Chaat Smith says, that while most Native Americans did not own slaves, neither did most Mississippi whites. Slave ownership was a serious status symbol.
Smith and Miles agree that much of early American history is explained poorly by modern morality but effectively by simple economics and power dynamics. “The Cherokee owned slaves for the same reasons their white neighbors did. They knew exactly what they were doing. In truth,” Smith said, the Cherokee and other “Civilized Tribes were not that complicated. They were willful and determined oppressors of blacks they owned, enthusiastic participants in a global economy driven by cotton, and believers in the idea that they were equal to whites and superior to blacks.”
The "Americans" exhibition currently on view at the American Indian Museum sets out to erase popular myths about Native American history, bringing to light the complex, often ugly truths hidden beneath the simplistic narratives we tend to imagine. Paul Morigi/AP Images for NMAINone of this lessens the very real hardship endured by Cherokees and other Native Americans compelled to abandon their homelands as a result of the Indian Removal Act. Signed into law in the spring of 1830, the bill had been rigorously debated in the Senate (where it was endorsed with a 28-19 vote) that April and in the House of Representatives (where it prevailed 102-97) that May. Despite a sustained, courageous campaign on the part of John Ross to preserve his people’s property rights, including multiple White House visits with Jackson, in the end the influx of white settlers and economic incentives made the bill’s momentum insuperable. All told, the process of removal claimed more than 11,000 Indian lives—2,000-4,000 of them Cherokee.
What the slaveholding of Ross and other Civilized Nations leaders does mean, however, is that our assumptions regarding clearly differentiated heroes and villains are worth pushing back on.
“I don’t know why our brains make it so hard to compute that Jackson had a terrible Indian policy and radically expanded American democracy,” Smith said, “or that John Ross was a skillful leader for the Cherokee nation who fought the criminal policy of removal with every ounce of strength, but also a man who deeply believed in and practiced the enslavement of black people.”
As Paul Chaat Smith said to conclude his remarks, the best maxim to take to heart when confronting this sort of history may be a quote from African anti-colonial leader Amílcar Cabral: “Tell no lies, and claim no easy victories.”
“Americans” will be on view at the National Museum of the American Indian through 2022. Author Ryan P. Smith | READ MORE Ryan graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Science, Technology & Society and now writes for both Smithsonian Magazine and the World Bank's Connect4Climate division. He is also a published crossword constructor and a voracious consumer of movies and video games
America's 2nd Largest Indian Tribe Expels Blacks
The Cherokee Nation recently stripped citizenship from a majority of African-Americans who descended from slaves of wealthy Cherokee Indians before the Civil War.
Host Michel Martin discusses this controversial move with MacArthur Fellow Tiya Miles, who studies interrelated histories of African-Americans and Native Americans. Black Freedmen, who are descended from the slaves of Cherokee Indians, protest their expulsion on Sept. 2 outside a regional Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Muskogee, Okla. Marilyn Vann, in pink, is the president of the Descendants of Freedmen Association. Alex Kellogg/NPR
Related NPR Stories Cherokee Nation Faces Scrutiny For Expelling Blacks Sept. 19, 2011
MICHEL MARTIN, host: I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News.
Coming up, a major civil rights victory for LGBT servicemembers. The policy which prevented them from serving openly in the military, the so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy comes to an end today. We'll talk with a decorated Air Force veteran who's career came under a cloud because of "don't ask, don't tell." We'll ask him about his thoughts about this day.
But first, we wanted to talk about one of the many complicated stories that involve race and heritage. While it is well-known history that slavery was a common practice in the Deep South before the Civil War, less well known is the fact that it wasn't just white families that were slave owners.
Some well-to-do Native Americans also owned slaves.
In fact, the late Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller wrote in her autobiography that, quote,
"The truth is that the practice of slavery will forever cast a shadow on the great Cherokee Nation," unquote.
Indeed that shadow continues today in the latest iteration over the debate over just who to include as members of the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee Supreme Court has stripped some of the slave descendents known as freedmen of their Cherokee citizenship in the decision last month.
We wanted to learn more about this story and the interesting intersecting histories of African-Americans and Native Americans, so we've called upon Tiya Miles. She is a professor and chair of the Afro-American and African Studies Department at the University of Michigan.
She's also the author of several books on the subject of African-American and Cherokee history, including "The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story."
And today, it was also announced that Professor Miles is a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. That means she is the recipient of one of those coveted $500,000 Genius Grants. And she's with us now from WUOM in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Professor Miles, congratulations. Welcome to the program.
TIYA MILES: Thank you so much, Michel. I'm glad to be here.
MARTIN: And I do hope we get a chance to talk a little bit about the MacArthur in a minute. But I did want to talk about this story that's in the news. It's a very complicated history. Could you just set the stage for us about the moment in which these two cultures - African-Americans and the Cherokee Nation - intersected.
MILES: Sure. Well, African-Americans - actually, Africans and Native American people first met each other during the colonial era. So, that would have been in the 1500s when Africans were brought to the Americas as both slaves and as indentured servants. That relationship then took a number of twists and turns over time. And one of the most difficult, the 1800s, the 19th century, when some Native Americans in the South began to own blacks as slaves.
MARTIN: So, what is this dispute over who is included and who is not included? And why is this - I mean, this would seem to have been something that would have been settled long ago.
MILES: Well, I think that we can look at the situation in Native American nations that had owned slaves as being somewhat similar to the United States situation. The U.S. is a country that owns slaves and all the slaves were freed and received citizenship. That is an issue that is hardly settled. They are vested as the legacies of racial division, segregation, racial hierarchy that Americans feel as a whole. And it's similar in Native American nations that have legacies of slave holding. Those tensions still remain.
MARTIN: Well, as I understand it, the whole question of eligibility is determined using something called the Dawes Rolls. This is something that arose from the Dawes Commission, which was established in 1893, as I understand it, to convince what we're called the five civilized tribes to agree to dissolve the reservation system and that they wanted a list - the U.S. government wanted a list of all the members and the so-called Dawes Rolls are considered, what, determinative of who is a member of the nation and who is not.
But so, what role did the Dawes Rolls play in this current dispute over whether the so-called Cherokee Freedman are members or not?
MILES: Well, the Dawes Rolls are central to this dispute. So, in 1887 the Dawes Act was passed. And as you said, that led to an enrollment or development of a census of Native American people. Because before land could be allotted, the U.S. government had to know who to give the lands to.
That list was a segregated list. It was a segregated census that divided people based upon their racial ancestry. So, the Dawes Roll was organized by Cherokees by blood and to married wives and also Freedmen. And these lists were incomprehensive to begin with. A number of people who were descended from slaves owned by Cherokees didn't even get to make the list, because they weren't there. They had fled during the Civil War, for example.
Other people who had been on previous lists weren't allowed to be on the lists because of the arbitrary way in which designations were made. One example of this, which I think is really telling and also disturbing, is that the Dawes enrollment group that came to make the list would set up tents in the Indian nations.
And one tent was called the Indian tent.
The other tent was called the darky tent.
And there was a second name for the darky tent, which I will not mention on air but I think that you can probably fill in that link.
MARTIN: Was it the N word? Did it involve the N word?
MILES: Yes, it did.
MARTIN: OK.
MILES: And so, when Cherokee people descendants of slaves came to be enrolled, they were directed to one or the other tent. So, the decision was made before they even had access to an interview and got to say who they were. The decision was made whether or not they should be written down on the list as a Cherokee person, quote, "by blood," or as a Freedmen.
MARTIN: If you're just joining us, I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News.
We're speaking with Tiya Miles. She's a professor of history and a 2011 MacArthur Fellow, it's just been announced. We're talking about the Cherokee Freedmen. They're descendants of slaves which were owned by members of the Cherokee Nation. That tribe's Supreme Court has recently revoked the citizenship of the descendants of Freedmen.
So, this latest chapter in this historical saga for now some 2,800 Freedmen have been stripped of their Cherokee citizenship, which means that they're no longer eligible to receive, you know, whatever tribal benefits they had been receiving and that their votes won't be counted in an upcoming tribal election. In response to that, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has frozen some payments to the Cherokee Nation until this matter is resolved. Why is this coming up now?
MILES: I think there could be a few reasons, and this is speculation on my part because I'm not in the Cherokee Nation. I'm not a member of that tribe. But I think that history suggests that when resources are at stake, there tends to be greater tension around the relationship between enrolled Cherokee people who define themselves as being Cherokee, quote, "by blood," and the descendants of freed people.
MARTIN: You can imagine that this has gotten a lot of attention. It's highly controversial. It's heavily covered, as you might imagine, in the Indian media. And there are those who are saying that this is just racist. I mean, that this is an attempt to define nationhood by blood brings up all kinds of nasty historical analogies. And there are a lot of people who are just shocked by that. Should they be?
MILES: Well, I think so. I'm shocked. And I think that it's frustrating. It's ironic. It's so difficult to confront the fact that this whole tangle around who should be Cherokee was really set in motion by the United States government, which had colonized Cherokee people and other indigenous people in this nation.
So, what the Cherokee Nation is doing now is relying on these Dawes Rolls which were forced upon them by the U.S. government.
[not part of this excerpt, but here's a question:
iF the Cherokee are an autonomous Nation,
don't they now have the ability
to change their rules on citizenship
in the Cherokee Nation? ]
MARTIN: OK, but that was in the 19th century.
MILES: Well, I think that...
MARTIN: We got a lot of racial practices that occurred in the 19th century and before that people no longer embrace.
MILES: Well, I think that those legacies remain with us. And I think that in the case of the Cherokee Nation and other native nations, there's a felt conflict between the sovereignty of those nations and the question of what the role should be, what the place should be of minorities in those nations.
So, whereas the United States can and has at times protected the status of minorities and not felt itself threatened by Canada, for instance, about what it does. Native nations definitely feel themselves threatened by the United States government. They are concerned that their sovereignty, the right to make decisions for themselves, is going to be undermined by the U.S. government as it has been so many times in the past.
But what I feel is a real problem here is that the Cherokee Nation is taking its definition from what really has been a white supremacist U.S. nation that fought to - I'm sorry. Go ahead, Michel.
MARTIN: Go ahead. I was just going to ask you how you got interested in this.
MILES: I got interested in this back in graduate school. And there were a few different experiences that led to my focus on it. One is that I come from an African-American family that has had an oral history of Native American ancestry and my grandmother, when she talked about it, didn't have facts and names. She just had the story that kind of took on the shape of a myth in our family.
It so happened that I ended up marrying into a Native American family myself,
and then I had a whole other set of experiences around black and Native American relationships.
And then when I went to graduate school and I was taking a course in Native American history and I was quite surprised to discover that, in fact, there had been quite a lot of conflict, tension, pain between Native Americans and African-Americans.
So I wanted to explore that. And I really set out to kind of prove my grandmother's story right.
And I wanted to find examples of African-American and Native American resistance to racism in colonialism in the United States.
MARTIN: But what you found was the opposite?
MILES: I did. I did. I found the opposite. I found a story that really had to do with the ways in which the pressures of colonialism and slavery came to bear on native people as well as black people, and sometimes led them to make really awful choices.
MARTIN: So before we let you go, we always have to ask. Where were you and what were you doing when you got the call? For people who are unaware of the MacArthur so-called Genius Grants are not things you can apply for. You have to be nominated. People generally don't find out that they've won until they get the call. So, what were you doing when you got the call?
MILES: I was at home cleaning the kitchen when I got the call. And this was something that was so completely out of the blue and so completely overwhelming that I actually had to just sit down. I was on the staircase in our house. I had to sit on the steps just to kind of get my bearings and to let this sink in.
MARTIN: Any idea what you'll do with the grant?
MILES: Well, I've never actually contemplated so much money, but I do have a couple of ideas. One thing that I'm really excited about is continuing my research and taking it into other areas within the U.S. and Native American history. So, I've worked so far on the South and Indian territory. But now, I want to really look at slavery in the north and in particular in Detroit and in Michigan, because this is a place where we also don't really think about slavery existing, but it did. And the slaves in Detroit and in Michigan and Ontario were African-American and also Native American.
MARTIN: Well, I hope you'll get a nice bottle of wine, too, in there, maybe.
MILES: Maybe. Maybe I'll do that.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Tiya Miles is a professor and chair of the Afro-American and African Studies Department at the University of Michigan. And it has just been announced today that she is the winner of a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship, a so-called Genius Grant, and we want to congratulate her for that. Professor Miles, thank you so much for joining us.
MILES: Thank you so much, Michel.
Copyright © 2011 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
More on Cherokee
https://jimmoyer1.wixsite.com/fortloudounva/single-post/no-silver-arm-bands-for-attakullakulla-s-men
Unrelated.
This is about Sparrow and ongoing research about Sparrow
Moyeman's "State Department" Tour
honoring Sparrow's death a year after
Cherokee leader Moyeman arrived in Philadelphia about June 1, [1758] but became ill with pleurisy and for two weeks hovered between life and death. Fearing that business might be delayed. the Pennsylvania authorities persuaded Moyeman to give his talk for the Delawares from his sickbed. A week later, carried to the Statehouse, he dictated the talk he had for the Iroquois. As Henley, his assistant, brought out tokens and implements in their proper order, the sick man gave the talk with full ritual of pipe, wampum, and the belts as he had memorized it in Keowee.
Learning that the famous Mohawk conjurer, Seneca George, was near, he called him to his bedside. Shortly the authorities received a petition from Moyeman reading,
"I desire Seneka George may have two bottles of rum, he thinks it necessary for my service and designs it as an offering."
Effectively doctored, Moyeman proceeded to New York where he taught another set of Colonial officials how to entertain Cherokee deputies. The New Yorkers, wishing to speed the envoys, had engaged a sloop to take the Indians to Albany the day after their arrival. But the Cherokees expected a full ceremonial hearing -- a four day affair with reception by the Governor and council, talks, and gifts. That is what they received, to the extent even of the Governor's visiting the ailing Moyemen in his lodgings. The gifts from the frugal council were, however, disappointing: saucepans, ribbons, gartering, vermillion, and six pounds of soap.
When the Cherokees arrived at Fort Johnson on July 19 [1758], Sir William returned from the Lake George frontier to receive them, and with his usual feeling for protocol and dispatch, launched without delay into the proper ceremonial. Condoling with the Cherokees for their losses in battle, he presented Moyeman with a French scalp taken at Ticonderoga in symbolic replacement of Swallow Warrior killed the year before.
On the twenty first [of July 1758] in the presence of Sir William and Mohawk, Oneida, and Seneca sachems, Moyeman delivered his talk and belts. Iroquois and Cherokees under English auspices sealed their friendship in a pledge to fight the French and thus laid the ghost of the backdoor intrigue for neutrality between Chota [Capital of Cherokee nation] and Onondaga [capital council house of the 6 nations of iroquois].
On August 12 [1758], the amenities completed, Sir William symbolically cleared the path to enable the Cherokees to depart in peace, and Moyeman and his companions set out on the long path of far return.
[Question: do they run into trouble through Virginia on their way home?]
Source:
Blue text from Page 156 to 157 in "The Cherokee Frontier, Conflict and Survival 1740-1762, " by David H Corkran, published by University of Oklahoma Press 1962, paperback published 2016
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