Stark, poignant accounts of tribal relocation
By Steve Raymond
Sept. 21, 2007
These books, first of a projected series on Native American history, tell the sad story of the forced relocation of two great tribes that once occupied large areas of the Eastern and Southeastern United States.
In "The Shawnees and the War for America," Colin G. Calloway, series editor and a Dartmouth professor of history and Native American studies, delivers a succinct history of one of the first tribes to feel the pressure of European colonization. The Shawnees, whose ancestral home was the Ohio Valley, "fought for their lands, their freedom, and the right to live their own ways of life," Calloway writes. "Even their enemies grudgingly acknowledged the Shawnees' tenacity and courage."
"For almost 25 years, throughout the American Revolution and the years that followed, Shawnees fought to stop white settlement at the Ohio [River]. Never again would Indians face Americans on such nearly equal terms as they did here; never again would Indians win victories of the magnitude they did here." One of those victories was over a 3,000-man American Army under Gen. Arthur St. Clair. In that fight, the Shawnees and their allies inflicted nearly a thousand casualties, the greatest loss ever suffered by Americans in Indian warfare.
The Shawnee leader Tecumseh was "to some ... simply the greatest Indian who ever lived," Calloway says. But when Tecumseh was killed in battle, the tribal coalition he had forged began to fall apart, and the Shawnees eventually yielded to overwhelming pressure, scattering over states as far west as Kansas and Oklahoma.
The forced removal of the Cherokees from their native lands in Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas is a more familiar story to most Americans, perhaps because missionaries and literate Cherokees documented their suffering. In "The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears," University of North Carolina history professors Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green describe decades of convoluted political treachery that eventually led to the sad spectacle of 7,000 U.S. troops forcibly evicting the Cherokees from their homes, imprisoning them in stockades, then finally starting them on their fateful march to Oklahoma.
In emotionally detached, just-the-facts-ma'am prose, Perdue and Green relate some horrifying anecdotes. Examples:
• "Tik-i-kiski, who was over a hundred years old, was left behind because the soldiers had no conveyance for him, but they took his entire family. He nearly starved to death, but some white children found him and brought him food. Finally he was reunited with his family at the stockade."
• "A deaf man failed to respond to the soldiers' commands, and they shot him dead."
Things got even worse once the Cherokees started their journey to Oklahoma. Often they were without shelter in terrible weather, disease was rampant and food was frequently of poor quality or lacking altogether. Of approximately 13,000 tribal members who started on the Trail of Tears, an estimated 4,000 perished en route.
These books are short, no-frills histories, but each is packed with information. They also pack an emotional wallop, despite — or perhaps because of — their authors' studiedly dispassionate approach.
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September 2007 Reports
Last updated on September 21, 2007