On June 22, 1839, a young man entered a general store in Honey
Creek, Okla. and loudly ordered provisions.
On June 22, 1839, a young man entered a general store in Honey Creek, Okla. and loudly ordered provisions.
Between the commands he dropped a few words meant for the storekeeper’s ears alone. Minutes after he departed, the storekeeper casually walked through the back door, mounted a bridled horse and galloped off.
Stand Watie had just learned that his brother, cousin and uncle had been murdered at three different sites that morning and that assassins were probably on their way to kill him.
He had expected disagreement from a rival faction of the Cherokee nation after he signed an 1835 treaty calling for the Cherokees to move to reservations from their ancestral home into what is now Oklahoma, but the violence to his family unnerved him.
Over the next years Watie and his followers conducted a blood feud with the rival faction and finally came to an uneasy truce, although a bitter residue of feelings remained.
Watie maintained that the days of Cherokee greatness, especially with frequent epidemics of smallpox and other diseases diminishing the tribe, were done and that it was hopeless to resist further. Disease had taken several of his wives and a number of his children.
From his birth on Dec. 12, 1806 near what is now Rome, Ga., Watie – known to his tribesmen as De-ga-ta-ga (He Stands) – showed exceptional promise. At the Moravian missionary school he learned to read and write English and demonstrated that he had a quick mind.
His rise in tribal government was meteoric and he had the respect of all his tribesmen until the question of the treaty arose. Then he and some others, a definite minority, pressed for it and hot words often turned to violence. Watie and his faction left for Oklahoma voluntarily and so were not subjected to the later mandatory move under armed guard that came to be known as the Trail of Tears.
Watie’s shrewdness made him a prosperous man and, as an owner of many slaves, he was a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a group adamantly opposed to abolition.
He had cast his lot with the white man and when the Civil War erupted in 1861 he raised a regiment of Cherokees to fight for the South and was commissioned a colonel.
He covered General Earl Van Dorn’s retreat from the battle of Elkhorn Tavern, saving many Southern lives. His frequent raids behind enemy lines kept thousands of Northern soldiers busy chasing him, rather than being sent to battles in the East where they were urgently needed.
Watie’s regiment drove the pro-Northern Indians from the territory and some of that fighting was particularly bloody with scalps taken on both sides. But even Southerners who had looked down on Indians hailed Watie as a hero of the Confederacy.
The military accomplishments of which he was proudest were capturing and burning the federal steamship J. R. Williams in June of 1864, shortly after his promotion to brigadier general, and the capture that September of a Federal wagon train carrying $1.5 million worth of supplies.
Following the war, Watie helped form the Cherokee Reconstruction Treaty, but it was his last public service. He returned to Honey Creek with most of his fortune gone, and when he died on Sept. 9, 1871 he had outlived all his sons.
More than 125 years later he was among a number of Civil War leaders commemorated on U.S. postage stamps. His shows him mounted with the Federal steamship burning in the background.
There were generals more brilliant than he, and even a few more daring. But of all the men who wore stars in the Civil War, Stand Watie was the only Indian general on either side, and on June 23, 1865, became the last Confederate general to lay down his arms.
