Great Leader: Yonaguska, Janaluska and William Holland Thomas

Today's post is a story of cruel ingratitude and selfless loyalty.  William Holland Thomas was the only White man ever appointed as a chief of the Cherokee Nation and it's easy to see why they reposed such trust in him.  His story intersects with the lives of two other great leaders, so we'll tell all three men's stories here.

Janaluska (1775-1868) was a war leader of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, in what is now North Carolina.  In 1813, he and his warriors joined General Andrew Jackson's army in a punitive expedition against the Red Stick Creeks in what is now Alabama.  At the battle of Horseshoe Bend, March 27, 1814, he joined Jackson in interrogating some prisoners.  One of them broke loose and lunged for the General.  Janaluska intervened and killed the attacker, saving Jackson's life.  Later, Janaluska was awarded land for participating in the fight against the Creeks.  In 1819, he lost his rights to the land after yet another treaty with the Natives was violated.  He moved to the larger Cherokee settlement of Qualla Town.  While there, he may have become acquainted with a young clerk at the trading post, William Holland Thomas.  Their acquaintance would stand Janaluska in good stead later in life.

Yonaguska (1759-1839) was another Cherokee leader who knew Thomas well.  William Holland Thomas (1805-1893), was born in what is now Waynesville, North Carolina.  His father died by drowning when William was a baby.  Later, he was apprenticed to a trader in Qualla Town and took a genuine interest in the post's Cherokee clientele, learning their language and customs.  In time, the fatherless young man and the older Cherokee warrior Yonaguska developed a close friendship.  Yonaguska adopted Thomas as his son, giving him the name "Will-Usdi" or Little Will.  In 1820, the trading post closed.  As partial payment of his past-due wages, the trader gave Thomas a set of law books.  Thomas studied them and was admitted to practice law in North Carolina.  Eventually, he came back to Qualla Town and reopened the trading posts.  He and Yonaguska remained in close touch and they would have much to talk about in the years to come.

Jackson's Administration passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, aimed primarily at the five largest Southeastern tribes, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole.  As the pressure mounted on the Cherokee to leave or face military action, Janaluska made the journey to Washington and asked to see the man whose life he'd once saved.  Jackson granted him an audience, then denied the incident ever happened.  He told Janaluska there was nothing he could do and dismissed him.  Later, as he saw his people being dispossessed, Janaluska remarked that, if he'd known at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend what was to come, history would've been written differently.  In 1838, he was placed in a stockade and began the trip to Oklahoma.  Several weeks in, he and fifty other Cherokee deserted and tried to head back to North Carolina.  They were arrested and deported to Oklahoma.  Janaluska stayed until 1847, when he could stand it no longer and returned to North Carolina.

Meanwhile, Yonaguska had been made the Principal Chief of the Cherokees remaining in North Carolina.  Some of them had received earlier land grants and believed the government would honor them.  Yonaguska wasn't so sure.  He asked him adopted son to represent the North Carolina Cherokee's interests in Washington.  Thomas realized that the Cherokee wouldn't be able to stay in North Carolina unless someone bought the land outright.  Since Natives were losing their land rights and unable to purchase land, Thomas used his own money and credit, as well as available Cherokee funds, to purchase land in North Carolina in and around Qualla Town.  This land became the Qualla Boundary, the nucleus of the land held by the Eastern Band Cherokee in North Carolina.  He also fought for, and won, the right of Yonaguska and several other Cherokee to become citizens of North Carolina and thus avoid deportation.  

Yonaguska now repaid the debt to his adopted son, by convincing the Eastern Cherokee to chose William Holland Thomas to replace him as Principal Chief, the only White man ever to hold that post.  After Yonaguska's death, Thomas continued to fight for the right of his adopted people to stay in North Carolina.  In 1847, when Janaluska returned home, Thomas took his case to the state legislature, earning state citizenship for the old warrior so that he could remain in Qualla without fear of arrest and removal, again.  Thomas continued his labors on behalf of the Cherokee, seeking election to the state legislature so that he could use the leverage of that position on their behalf.  He served from 1848-1860.  When North Carolina seceded from the Union, Thomas formed a troop of cavalry and infantry from Cherokee recruits, and others of Scots and Sotch-Irish extraction.  Thomas' Legion of Cherokees and Highlanders.  They fired the last shots of the Civil War, days after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox.  Another Cherokee unit serving in the West under General Stand Watie also claims that distinction. 

Following the War, Thomas' health began to deteriorate.  It's believed he suffered from Alzheimer's Disease.  He was eventually sent to a mental institution and spent the next several years of his life in and out of mental hospitals.  During his lucid moments, he assisted ethnologist James Mooney of the Smithsonian Institution by recounting his knowledge of the Cherokee, their history, legends and traditions.    

The End of the Trail(s): Fort Gibson, Muscogee County, Oklahoma

Between 1831-1838 thousands of men, women and children were forcibly deported from their homelands in the Southeast and sent to live in what is now Oklahoma.  Embarkation points for the Five Southeastern Tribes of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee and Seminole were in large eastern cities such as Memphis or New Orleans, but most of them ended in one place, Fort Gibson, in what is now Muscogee County, Oklahoma.  This desolate outpost in the west was the last stop for sick, hungry, stressed and unhappy people who had nowhere else to go.

Fort Gibson was created in 1824.  At its inception, it was the westernmost outpost for the U.S. Army, meant to guard the border of the Louisiana Purchase from incursion by Spain and later Mexico.  The harsh conditions of garrison life on the Plains, including fevers and arduous marches in the heat and dust were viewed by many officers and men to be almost a death sentence. What is now Oklahoma and Kansas was designated Indian Territory and the garrison at Fort Gibson had a new assignment, to keep the peace between the various tribes assigned to live there.  This was no easy task.  Policy makers in Washington seemed oblivious to the fact that Oklahoma at the time was already home to various Plains tribes, notably the Osage, who weren't ready to welcome thousands of other Natives onto land they needed to feed their own families.  As soon as they arrived in Oklahoma, many Southeastern Natives often ran into conflict with bands of nomadic Plains warriors trying to defend their hunting range, too.  The garrison was spread thin trying to protect the new arrivals from raids by already existing tribes.

Natives who were deported west had been promised rations.  These would be provided by government contractors at government expense.  The contractors were almost always corrupt and rations were always short.  Many Natives who had already suffered the deaths of family members and friends along the trail now faced famine, disease and death themselves.  They congregated at Fort Gibson until they could move on to their assigned land and the garrison didn't have the resources to house and feed so many displaced people.  The situation became so bad that in 1841, Major Ethan Allen Hitchcock was sent by the Army to investigate.  As outspoken as his famous grandfather, Hitchcock wrote several blistering reports to his superiors in Washington.  They were shelved and the situation unimproved.  Ironically, people who had been successful farmers for generations weren't given seed or other implements to begin their own food production.  Neither did the schools or other services outlined in the treaty materialize.  With traditional lines of community and tribal leadership disrupted, and unable to hunt or farm for themselves, families and individuals sank further into despair.  The Trail of Tears was not over. 

There were deep fissures within each tribe, arising from disputes about whether to remove to Oklahoma willingly, or try to fight the inevitable as long as possible.  The Muscogee/Creeks had fought an internal civil war in 1813-14 over the issue of land concessions and cooperation with White settlers.  After William McIntosh and other leaders ceded the last of Creek land in Georgia in 1825, the old resentments flared again.  McIntosh's family fled the vengeance of their fellow Creeks and removed to Oklahoma.  As other Muscogee began arriving in 1836, matters came to a head between the two factions, those who supported the leadership of William's son Chilli and those who adamantly did not.  Fort Gibson's commander, Col. William Arbuckle, convened a counsel of both sides and the McIntosh faction maintained control.

Cherokee had already begun settling in Oklahoma since the opening decades of the 19th century.  The Old Settlers had formed their own government.  They did not want to live under newcomers from back east.  Once again, factions developed.  Old Settlers versus the leadership of John Ross, who had masterminded the Cherokees final exodus from their homeland in 1838.  Once again, Arbuckle intervened and Ross' side won out.  Anger simmered into open blood feuds between the various Cherokee groups, often stemming from incidents that had happened long before Removal.  In both cases, Arbuckle was careful to favor the faction seen by Washington as being most amenable to White interests. 

Then there was the matter of blacks who were either held as property by Native families, or where were mixed-race Native themselves.  Oklahoma was a slave territory, meaning that owning slaves was legal.  Many blacks took the opportunity of the displacement of the Trail of Tears to escape enslavement.  Some tribes, such as the Seminole, had large numbers of freed blacks and mixed-race blacks among their ranks.  Slave catchers did a lucrative business in Oklahoma, retrieving blacks who fled there hoping for a no-man's land and freedom.  The Seminoles suspected, in some cases correctly, that Creeks were assisting the slave catchers or doing slave raiding themselves.  Animosity between the Creeks and Seminoles, who had been assigned the same land, added to the tension.

As the Five Southeastern Tribes began to find their own footing in Oklahoma, the need for any protection or assistance from Fort Gibson declined.  Arbuckle departed in 1841, believing that he had done a good job in pacifying the various tribes in Oklahoma.  The reality was much different.  Along with the government contractors and shoddy rations came unscrupulous traders who sold liquor to the tribes despite the fact that it was illegal to do so.  Fort Gibson, like other military outposts, generated its own town with the resulting saloons, gambling dens, and brothels.  Cherokee leaders petitioned Washington to close down the Fort, which it did in 1857.  Then the Civil War happened.  Union troops reoccupied Fort Gibson, which fell into Confederates hands in 1862, before being recaptured in 1863 and remaining Union throughout the War.  The majority of Creeks and Seminoles supported the Union.  The majority of Cherokee supported the Confederacy, though not all.  Violence flared between the two groups in the winter of 1861, when Creek leader Opothleyahola led Creek and Seminole warriors and their families from Oklahoma to Fort Row, Kansas in the Trail of Blood on Ice.   

After the War, Fort Gibson became a post for units of the 9th and 10th Cavalry, the Buffalo soldiers, fighting a variety of Plains tribes.  The black troopers had no choice but to accept an assignment that many white soldiers were lucky they did not have to take.  Fort Gibson was finally abandoned in 1890, though the surrounding town of Fort Gibson had become a prosperous cattle town.  Beginning in the 1930's, some of the old buildings were reconstructed and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960, later added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. 

Places: the James Vann House, Chatsworth, Georgia

A house can be a visible reminder of the triumphs and tragedies of the people who live within its walls.  The James Vann House, a National Historic Place in Chatsworth, Murray County, is one example.

James Vann (c 1765-1809) was a mixed-race Cherokee with a Native mother and Scottish father.  He quickly rose to prominence in the Cherokee Nation and was a colleague of Major Ridge and Charles Hicks.  He was also a successful businessman and planter who owned extensive properties in Georgia.  And, like many Native leaders in the Southeast of this era, he did own slaves.  In 1803, he began work on a home that would reflect his status, a red brick Georgian and Federal style mansion.  The bricks were made with red clay from one of his plantation properties.  The nails, hinges and other iron components were made in a foundry on the plantation site.  It was the first such house in the Cherokee Nation at the time and remains a cultural treasure.

Unfortunately, James didn't live long to enjoy his home.  He did in 1809 and, contrary to Cherokee custom, left the house to his son Joseph, called Rich Joe by his neighbors.  Joe had his father's knack for business and continued to add to the family holdings.  He also added on to and improved the house his father had left him.  In 1819, when President James Monroe was visiting Murray County, he requested to stay in the Vann House because it was the most comfortable house in the area.  Then, in 1829, Georgia experienced a gold rush, with some of the strikes being on Cherokee land.  As more and more settlers poured into the area seeking gold, they couldn't help but notice the prosperous home and property of the Vanns and other Cherokee land owners.  Greed kicked in.  Joe Vann had hired a white man to look after the house while he was away tending to his other properties.  Georgia authorities used that as a pretext (Whites could not legally work for Natives) to seize the house in 1835, forcing Joe and his family to remove to Oklahoma in the windup to the Trail of Tears.  The house remained vacant while two claimants to the property (sold in a land lottery along with other Cherokee holdings), litigated about who owned it.  Joe Vann later sued for the loss of his property and received $19,000 in the currency of the time.  This was far below the market value of the house and its surrounding land. 

The house passed through several successive owners before being sold to the Georgia State Historical Commission in 1952.  The house was restored in 1958 and is administered by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.  A museum and interpretive center accompanies the house today.