Tahkatokah Watie (abt. 1806 - 1871)

Born about 12 Dec 1806 in Oothcaloga, Cherokee Nation (now Calhoun, Georgia)

Ancestors

Husband of Elizabeth Fields — married 1826 (to 1828) in Cherokee Nation (East)

Husband of Isabel (Miller) Hargrove — married 1829 (to 1829) in Cherokee Nation (East)

Husband of Eleanor (Looney) Davis — married 1833 (to 1835) in Cherokee Nation (East)

Husband of Sarah Caroline (Bell) Watie — married 18 Sep 1843 in Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, United States

Died 9 Sep 1871 at about age 64 in Honey Creek, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory (near Grove, Oklahoma)

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Biography

Stand was Cherokee.

Stand Watie is Notable.

Stand (Tahkatokah) Watie, known to many only as the last Confederate General to surrender, was born in the Cherokee Nation (East) the son of Oowatie/David Watie and Susannah Reese, both Cherokee, on December 12, 1806 (or 1804). He was the nephew of Major Ridge and the brother of Elias Boudinot (Buck Watie). He attended the Moravian mission school at Springplace, Cherokee Nation (now Georgia) from 1815 to 1822. ^[1] He married four times; all his wives were Cherokee. His first wife was Elizabeth Fields who died about 1828. They had no children. He was married briefly to Isabel Miller. They also had no children. He married Eleanor Looney about 1834. The 1835 Cherokee census shows the couple living at Oothcalooga (now Georgia) ^[2] They were the parents of one child, Susannah, born in Indian Territory about 1840. ^[3] The couple separated not long after Susannah's birth and Stand married his last wife, Sarah Bell on September 18, 1843 in the Cherokee Nation (Indian Territory). ^[4] They were the parents of seven children, Saladin, Solon, Eugene, Reece, ^[5] Minnehaha, Jackoline (Charlotte) ^[6] and Elias (died in infancy). ^[7] None of his children had any children who survived.

In 1825 Stand was chosen as clerk in the Coosawaytee District for the first Cherokee constitutional convention. The Cherokee hoped that establishing an American-style government and constitution would enable them to remain in their homeland. ^[8] Pressure on the Eastern tribes increased and in 1830 Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. A small number of Cherokee, led primarily by Stand's uncle Major Ridge, came to believe that the Cherokee Nation would only survive if lands in the East were relinquished and the eastern Cherokee joined those who had already emigrated to Indian Territory. In 1835, contrary to the wishes of most Cherokee and without approval of the Cherokee government, the men who became known as the "Treaty Party" negotiated a Removal treaty with the United States. Over the protests of the Cherokee Nation, the Treaty of New Echota ^[9] was ratified by the United States Senate in May, 1836, by a margin of one vote. The treaty led to the forcible Removal of the Cherokee over what is now known as the "Trail of Tears” in 1838. The Ridge and Watie families, along with about 400 other Treaty supporters and their families, had removed to Indian Territory in 1837. Stand settled in the Delaware District, began farming and opened a store. ^[10]

After the remaining eastern Cherokee had arrived in Indian Territory a new convention was called with the aim of returning the "Old Settlers" (those who emigrated before 1835), the Treaty Party supporters, and the "Emigrant" Cherokee led by Chief John Ross into one political body. The Emigrant group believed that Major Ridge and his son John were impeding the process and in June, 1839 a group secretly decided to assassinate the Ridges, Stand Watie, his brother Elias Boudinot, his brother-in-law john Adair Bell, and other Treaty signers. When the assassins struck and killed Boudinot a Creek man was sent to Watie's store to warn him. Stand escaped through the back of the store building and rode away on the Creek man’s horse. He later posted a reward and assembled a band to search out the assassins but was unsuccessful. ^[11]

The new Cherokee government was dominated by the eastern Cherokee led by John Ross and declared the surviving Treaty signers to be outlaws unless they confessed to their error in signing the Treaty. Watie and his nephew John Bell refused to concede, and in response wrote a letter to the Arkansas Weekly Gazette with their version of the adoption of the Treaty and subsequent events. ^[12] Watie never became reconciled to the government led by Chief John Ross, but he served as a councilor from the Delaware District from 1853 until the time of the Civil War. Early in 1861 Watie, who had become a wealthy slaveholder, organized a company of Cherokee who supported the Confederacy with himself as captain. This unit joined with other Cherokee units in July, 1861 and became the Cherokee Mounted Rifles, with Stand Watie, as Colonel. John Ross reluctantly agreed that the Cherokee Nation would support the Confederacy, but immediately left for Washington, D.C., where he remained throughout the War. Along with many other Cherokee, Watie sent his wife and children south to the Red River in Texas for safety. ^[13] In August, 1862 the “Southern” (Confederate) Cherokee met at Tahlequah and elected Stand Watie as their chief. ^[14] Watie led the Cherokee in a number of successful engagements against Union forces and also against Cherokee who supported the Union. He was appointed a Brigadier General in May, 1864. He refused to accept Lee's surrender in April, 1865 and did not surrender until July. ^[15]

After the War Watie represented the former Southern Cherokee in negotiations for the Treaty of 1866. Along with many other Southern sympathizers he settled his family in the Canadian District, near Webbers Falls. The 1867 Cherokee Census lists Stand, Sarah, and children Solon, Nancy, and Jackoline living in the Candadian District. ^[16] Some sources say he later returned to his home in the Delaware District where he lived until his death in 1871. He is buried at the Polson Cemetery, Grove, Delaware, Oklahoma. ^[17]

Research Notes

History Stories, "Who was Stand Watie?", By Sarah Pruitt - http://www.history.com/news/who-was-stand-watie Born in Georgia, Stand Watie left his native Cherokee lands behind in the 1830s, after signing a controversial treaty accepting removal to Oklahoma’s Indian Territory. Watie’s loyalty to the South led him to join the Confederate Army as leader of the first Cherokee volunteer regiment soon after the Civil War broke out. Unlike most of his fellow Cherokees, who switched their support to the Union over the course of the war, Watie remained a loyal Confederate, rising to the rank of brigadier general. Unwilling to accept defeat at war’s end, he held out longer than any other rebel general before finally surrendering on June 23, 1865. Stand Watie was born in Oothcaloga, Cherokee Nation (near present-day Rome, Georgia) in 1806. The son of Oo-wa-tie, a full-blooded Cherokee, and Susanna Reese, who was of half-Cherokee, half-European heritage, he was given the Cherokee name Degataga, meaning “stand firm.” After Oo-wa-tie was baptized into the Moravian Church as David Uwatie, he changed his son’s name to Isaac S. Uwatie, but as an adult the younger Uwatie combined his Cherokee and Christian names (and dropped the “U”) to get Stand Watie. As a student at the Moravian Mission School, Watie learned to speak English, and he later helped his brother Buck (who would change his name to Elias Boudinot) publish the Cherokee Phoenix, a tribal newspaper. By the time his son reached young adulthood, David Uwatie had become a wealthy planter who owned African-American slaves. Beginning in 1829, thousands of prospectors poured into Georgia after gold was discovered in Cherokee territory. The gold rush led Anglo settlers to put increasing pressure on the Cherokees to relocate to reservations further west, aided by Congress’ passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Watie, who served as a clerk for the Cherokee Supreme Court, was among the minority of tribe members who supported removal to the western Cherokee Nation, believing it was the only way to preserve the tribe’s autonomy. In 1835, the group signed the Treaty of New Echota, ceding their ancient homelands in Georgia in exchange for land on Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Watie made the move west in 1837, settling in the northeastern corner of the western Cherokee Nation, near Honey Creek. Thousands of other Native Americans evicted from their homes in the 1830s and forced to migrate west along the Trail of Tears were not so lucky. In 1838, the U.S. military began forcing other Cherokees from Georgia; out of an estimated 15,000 Cherokee who made the arduous journey, as many as 4,000 died. Under Cherokee law, anyone who alienated tribal lands was subject to the death penalty, and in 1839, Watie’s co-signers of the New Echota treaty—his brother, Boudinot; his uncle, Major Ridge, and his cousin, John Ridge—were executed. Watie, who barely managed to escape the same fate, would become a prominent figure in Cherokee politics as the surviving member of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot faction, and a lifelong enemy of principal Cherokee Chief John Ross. He was also a slaveholder, and established a successful plantation in Indian Territory. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Watie wasted no time in joining the Confederacy, viewing the federal government, not the South, as the Cherokees’ principal enemy. He raised the first Cherokee regiment of the Confederate Army, the Cherokee Mounted Rifles, and helped secure control of Indian Territory for the rebels early in the conflict.

Battle of Pea Ridge Arkansas

At the Battle of Pea Ridge (or Elkhorn Tavern) in Arkansas in March 1862, Watie’s troops earned acclaim for capturing a Union battery in the middle of what turned out to be a Confederate defeat. By early 1863, the Confederate hold on Indian Territory was loosening, but Watie continued to torment Union troops there for the remainder of the war. On June 15, 1864, his men scored a major victory by capturing the Union steam boat J.R. Williams; the following September, they seized some $1.5 million worth of supplies on a Federal wagon supply train at Cabin Creek. Ross, who had reluctantly agreed to the Cherokee-Confederate alliance in 1861, ended up fleeing to Federal territory, and Watie had become the principal Cherokee chief in August 1862. Much of his activity during the latter half of the war consisted of attacks against the land and property of those in Indian Territory who stayed loyal to the Union. Even after a majority of the Cherokee repudiated the alliance with the Confederacy in 1863, Watie stayed loyal, and he was rewarded for his constancy with a commission of brigadier general. So dedicated was Watie to the Southern cause that he refused to acknowledge the Union victory in the waning months of the Civil War, keeping his troops in the field for nearly a month after Lieutenant General E. Kirby Smith surrendered the rest of the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Army on May 26, 1865. A full 75 days after Robert E. Lee met with Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Watie became the last Confederate general to lay down his arms, surrendering his battalion of Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, and Osage Indians to Union Lieutenant Colonel Asa C. Matthews at Doaksville on June 23. After the war, Watie returned to Indian Territory to rebuild his home, which Federal soldiers had burned to the ground. He traveled to Washington, D.C. to represent the southern Cherokee during negotiations of the Cherokee Reconstruction Treaty of 1866, which stripped tribe members of vast tracts of land in Indian Territory in exchange for their reinstatement in the Union. Watie then retreated from public life to his old Honey Creek home, where he died in 1871.

Sources

1. ↑ Crews & Starbuck, eds. Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees. Cherokee Heritage Press, Tahlequah, OK. Vol. 4, p. 1960 and others
2. ↑ 1835 Cherokee Census, transcription published by the Oklahoma Chapter, Trail of Tears Association, Park Hill, OK. 2002. Original records: National Archives and Records Administration, Microfilm publication T496, Census Roll, 1835, of Cherokee Indians East of the Mississippi with Index. p. 56
3. ↑ Starr, Emmet. Miscellaneous Notes, Book A, p. 19. Microfilm AMD29, Oklahoma Historical Society.
4. ↑ Bell, George Morrison. Genealogy of "Old & New Cherokee Indian Families. Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1972. p 458
5. ↑ Drennen Roll of “Emigrant Cherokee,” 1851. Series 7RA-01. Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75. The National Archives at Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas. p. 188, family #1213. Digitized at Ancestry.com
6. ↑ National Archives and Records Administration, Eastern Cherokee Applications of the Court of Claims. Application #3528, son-in-law John Daniel. Digitized at Fold3.
7. ↑ Fort Smith Herald, December 29, 1847.
8. ↑ Starr, "History of the Cherokee," p. 51.
9. ↑ https://americanindian.si.edu/static/nationtonation/pdf/Treaty-of-New-Echota-1835.pdf
10. ↑ Foreman, Grant. Journey of a Party of Cherokee Emigrants, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, #XVII, September, 1931. pdf at Foreman
11. ↑ Wilkins, Thurman. Cherokee Tragedy. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma. 1970. p. 334-339
12. ↑ Arkansas Weekly Gazette, Little Rock, Arkansas, July 21, 1839. Digitized at letter
13. ↑ Some of their correspondence is included in Everett and Gaston, eds. Cherokee Cavaliers: Forty Years of Cherokee History as Told in the Correspondence of The Ridge-Watie-Boudinot Family, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma. 1939.
14. ↑ Starr, History of the Cherokee, pp. 143, 300-301.
15. ↑ Woodward, Grace Steele. The Cherokees. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma. 1963. pp. 288-289
16. ↑ Tompkins Roll [Cherokee], 1867. Series 7RA-04. Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75. The National Archives at Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas. Canadian district, p. 31. Digitized at Ancestry.com
17. ↑ Tyner, James and Alice. Our People and Where They Rest. privately published, Norman, OK, 1971. Vol. 9, p. 45

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee#Eastern_Band, by D.Crum, 5/12/2018

• http://www.history.com/news/who-was-stand-watie

• https://www.legendsofamerica.com/na-standwatie.html

• https://www.alexandriava.gov/historic/fortward/default.aspx?id=40164

• "United States Civil War Confederate Papers of Citizens or Businesses, 1861-1865," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:V4MH-TBS : 4 December 2014), Stand Watie, 1861-1865; from "Confederate Papers Relating to Citizens or Business Firms, 1861-1865," database, Fold3.com (http://www.fold3.com : n.d.); citing NARA microfilm publication M346 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1982), roll 1076.

See Also:

• Wikipedia: Stand Watie

• Wikidata: Item Q288408

• Find A Grave: Memorial #4506

• FamilySearch Person: LC96-DS7