Civil War Series
Choosing Sides
AMERICAN INDIANS SQUARE OFF IN SOUTHWEST MISSOURI
Although American Indian participation in the war was mainly confined to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) and other tribal lands such as the Osage territory of southeastern Kansas, the Indians occasionally marched into the adjoining states of Arkansas and Missouri. In fact, Missouri holds the distinction of having been the stage for the only conflict of the war, the First Battle of Newtonia, in which American Indian units of regimental strength faced each other in combat. During the period leading up to the Civil War, most American Indians in Indian
Territory had little interest in taking sides in the mounting conflict between the Northern and Southern states, and Chief John Ross of the Cherokee, the territory’s most advanced tribe, advocated neutrality. White agents among the Indians, though, mostly favored the South, and they were joined by a few slaveholding Indian leaders like Stand Watie, Ross’s main rival among the Cherokee. Watie, who later became the only American Indian of the Civil War to attain the rank of general, was the leader of the mixed-race Cherokees, while most of Ross’s followers were pure-bloods, and the feud between the two factions dated back
By Larry Wood
to the tribe’s removal from the Southeast to the frontier during the late 1830s. When the war broke out, the Confederacy sent Arkansas lawyer Albert Pike into Indian Territory as an envoy to recruit the tribes to the Southern cause, and he quickly signed treaties with the Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw. Douglas Cooper, agent for the latter two tribes, raised a regiment called the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles, and Watie raised a regiment that became known as the First Cherokee Mounted Rifles. Altogether, Pike organized three regiments under his Confederate command.
© ISTOCKPHOTO/GEORGE CAIRNS; RIGHT: STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY AT COLUMBIA
“One of the most unknown aspects of the Civil War,” according to historian Arnold Schofield, “is the participation of American Indians as soldiers in the Union and Confederate armies.”
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