His announcement ran in the Port Gibson Correspondent on July 15. Addressed to “fellow citizens,” it said, “I have fought for you, I have been by your own act, made a citizen of your state. … According to your laws, I am an American citizen … I have always battled on the side of the republic … I have been told by my white brethren, that the pen of history is impartial, and that in after years, our forlorn kindred will have justice and ‘mercy, too.’” In 1824, when the Choctaw discovered that white squatters already lived on the land the government wanted to send them to in Oklahoma, Mushulatubbee and other Choctaw leaders, including Chiefs Pushmataha and Appuckshunubbee, traveled to Washington to complain to President James Monroe and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. The trip ended in failure with the delegation returning disheartened, unable to stem the tide of white settlers and having lost both Appuckshunubbee and Pushmataha to death, thus roiling the tribe's leadership at a critical moment when forces were moving to push them out of their homeland. This movement would eventually send them down the infamous “Trail of Tears.” An imposing speaker, Mushulatubbee once encountered the Marquis de Lafayette at Congress and was not at a loss for words. “You are one of our fathers that fought in the War with Gen. George Washington. We take you here by the hand as a friend and a father. We have always walked in the white paths of peace; and in those paths we have traveled to visit you. We offer you pure hands, which have never been stained with the blood of Americans… We live in the south, where the sun shines hot upon us. We have been neighbors to the French, neighbors to the Spaniards, and neighbors to the English. But now our only neighbors are the Americans, in the midst of whom we live as friends and brothers,” the chief said, as reported in newspapers of the day.
100 Mississippi Miracle
| Choctaw Nation Part II
“He was tribal minko during that pre- and postRemoval transitional period which witnessed rampant factionalism within the tribe, often pitting pure blood, traditionalists against mixed blood, progressives who merely through their blended ancestry claimed to better navigate a changing landscape that would be dominated by white Americans,” said Tupelo attorney Brad Prewitt, a direct descendant who recently visited Mushulatubbee’s purported final resting place in Latham, Okla., near Fort Smith, Ark. Leader of the full-bloods, the chief stood against rival mixed blood leaders David Folsom and Greenwood Leflore, who attempted to replace traditional Choctaw notions of culture and inheritance, arousing conflicts between the two sides and almost leading to civil war within the tribe. But the toughest major decision Mushulatubbee ever made turned out to be his last — the reluctant decision to sign the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which preceded the tribe’s long march to its new home in Oklahoma. He and other chiefs didn’t want to leave but, threatened by then-President Jackson’s forces and squeezed by a new state legislature that wanted them gone, they had little option. So Mushulatubbee went westward with the dispirited tribe. It was there, in what is now Arkansas, that he met his end. It is no small irony that his death was reportedly due to smallpox, a disease introduced to the New World by Europeans and one against which Native Americans had no natural immunities. “No doubt the choices he made for himself and his clan were made carefully, with whatever measure of wisdom he possessed, and at times with great anguish,” Maxine W. Barker wrote in The Third Arrow: A Story of Mushulatubbee, Choctaw Chief. “But ultimately those choices made for his people were those of peace, not bloodshed.”