Anticipating an official inquiry into
the mounting expenses of Chickasaw removal, which despite that
nation's small size would eventually exceed one million dollars,
federal agent A.M. Upshaw sought to deflect blame from himself and
his contractors. In an 1838 letter to Commissioner of Indian Affairs
Carey Harris, Upshaw argued that his cost overruns originated with
the demands of the Chickasaws, whom the Treaty of Pontotoc (1832)
authorized to pay for and supervise their own emigration. Chickasaw
leaders wanted to assemble emigrants at Memphis and take them to
Indian Territory by water, which obliged Upshaw both to hire
steamboats and pay demurrage fees while they awaited their
passengers. Then, after a steamboat accident killed 300 Creek
emigrants and alarmed their Chickasaw counterparts, many of the
latter decided to move by land, a slower and more expensive process.
Overland travel proved costly because,
Upshaw noted, the Chickasaws brought a huge quantity of baggage. Many
families brought at least one wagonload (half a ton or more), some
took three or four fully loaded wagons, and one had eight of them.
The first few emigrant parties also brought 7,000 horses and ponies,
packed high with luggage, “and [Indians] can pack more on a horse
than any other people I ever saw.” Individual heads of household
spent up to $1,000 on merchandise before Removal. "In fact,
sir” (Upshaw wrote) “I saw two women purchase seven hundred
dollars' worth of goods in the course of two hours.” This was the
modern equivalent of somewhere between $4,000 and $8,500 per hour.
This might sound like prudent, if
frantic, preparation for an arduous journey, except that little of
what the Chickasaws bought was food. They planned to draw government
rations during their emigration, or hunt for their meals en route.
According to another official, the Chickasaws had instead loaded
their horses and wagons with “many heavy articles of comfort as
well as convenience.” None of the Removal agents recorded Chickasaw
men and women's precise purchases, but based on the goods they bought
at their trading factory two decades earlier, and based on the
records of an Alabama merchant who traded with Chickasaw customers in
the late '30s, Your Humble Narrator suspects their Removal inventory
included plaid and calico cloth, finished clothing, hardware, ammunition, furniture, and scarce consumables like
coffee, sugar, and whiskey.
The money for this spree almost
certainly came from the sale of the Chickasaws' land reserves, which
federal commissioners and Chickasaw leaders had recently allotted to
each adult member of the nation. Under the treaties of Pontotoc and
Washington (1834), each man and woman received one square mile of
land in the old Chickasaw nation; each head of household received
three additional square-mile tracts, or four if he owned slaves; and
bonus sections went to a dozen or so national leaders. The treaties
authorized the emigrants to sell their reserves on the open market,
at a minimum price of $800 per square mile. Despite price-fixing
efforts by white land speculators, who formed semi-monopolistic land
companies, many sellers cleared more than the minimum price for their
land; some, generally biracial Chickasaws with large improvements,
sold their reserves for several thousand dollars. The proceeds went to buy wagons, horses – though the Chickasaws already had
large herds of them before Removal – the aforementioned “articles
of comfort [and] convenience,” and, more opprobriously,
African-American slaves, several hundred of whom accompanied the
first emigrants westward.
In one sense, Removal presented the
Chickasaws with a terrible loss: their homes and their familiar
country, with all the memories and collective history embedded in its
features.* In another sense, the Chickasaws did not so much lose
their land as transmute it, under duress to be sure, into different
forms: slave laborers, transport, a surplus of the manufactured goods
on which they had come to rely, and, from the remaining portion of
their old homeland that the U.S. government sold, funds to purchase a
new homeland in the west and sustain the emigrants for their first
few years there.
One final point: the Chickasaws' heavy
pre-Removal investment in consumer goods, hardware, livestock, and
slaves certainly helps explain their initial decision to settle among
the Choctaws in southeastern Oklahoma rather than on their national
reserve in the south-central part of that territory. The new
Chickasaw national domain fronted the Texas borderlands and
Comancheria, and the Indian inhabitants of both regions periodically
plundered their neighbors' horses, cattle, and possessions, and
captured (or offered refuge to) runaway slaves. Moving to that domain
would put the Chickasaws' property, whose cost had been so high, at
risk. In 1841, the U.S. Army established a post at Fort Washita to
guard the Chickasaw-Texas frontier, and within a couple of years many
of the Chickasaws were moving to their new homeland to establish
farms and rebuild their old lives.
**
1 Aug. 1838, Upshaw to Harris, Letters
Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, NARA Microfilm M-234, Reel
143: 692-94; J.A. Phillips to Harris, 4 May 1838, ibid, 143: 614;
List of Goods Wanted for the Indian Trade for the Years 1816-17,
Miscellaneous Accounts of the Chickasaw Bluffs Factory, Records of
the Office of Indian Trade (National Archives Records Group 75,
Washington, DC), Entry 39, Folder 5; John Allen to Thomas McKenney, 7
Feb. 1830, Letters Received, M-234, 136: 17-18; Account Book of
William Otey, Folder 64, Wyche-Otey Papers, Southern Historical
Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina; Barbara
Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters (Chapel Hill, NC,
2013), 39-44; Dan G. [last name illegible] to the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs, 12 Dec. 1841, ibid, 144: 193-194; Annual Report of
the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1838, 510-511; Arrell
Gibson, The Chickasaws (Norman, OK, 1971).
* Not to mention the five hundred men
and women who lost their lives to a smallpox outbreak in Arkansas as
they moved to Indian Territory in 1838.
Above image of Tishomingo from https://www.chickasaw.tv/historic-figures/video/chickasaws-signatories-to-the-choctaw-removal-treaty/list/chief-tishomingo
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