Kingdom of Weeds: An Oklahoma Prince Dreams of an All-Indian State

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

AUTHORS’S FOREWORD—Once There Was an American Indian Kingdom

P a r t

CHAPTER 1

THE DREAMER—1870

CHAPTER 2

DREAM OF AN INDIAN CITY—MARCH, 1870

CHAPTER 3

BATTLE-ROBIN’S WARNING—1870

CHAPTER 4

YELLOW CREEK—1870

CHAPTER 5

THE DANGEROUS WILDERNESS—1870

CHAPTER 6

A TOWN APPEARS—1870

CHAPTER 7

CAPTURED BY OUTLAWS—1870

CHAPTER 8

DISOBEYING ORDERS—1870

CHAPTER 9

DISASTER—1870

CHAPTER 10

LOVE MAKES US FOOLS—1870

CHAPTER 11

AN AGREEABLE MARRIAGE—1871

CHAPTER 12

MARKED FOR GREATNESS BY A PUNISHMENT—1871

CHAPTER 13

SOLEMN WAITING—1871

CHAPTER 14

CAUGHT AFTER A GREAT JOURNEY—1871

CHAPTER 15

DELL IN TROUBLE AGAIN?—1871

CHAPTER 16

COUNCIL BUSINESS—1871

P a r t ii

CHAPTER 17

A RICH YOUNG GENERATION—1880

CHAPTER 18

INCREASING WHITE POVERTY—1880

CHAPTER 19

HOUSE FOR A GOVERNOR—1880

CHAPTER 20

WEDDING DAY—1882

CHAPTER 21

WEDDING TRIP—1882

CHAPTER 22

SCHOOL WORK—In the 1880’s

CHAPTER 23

LIGHTHORSE—1884

CHAPTER 24

WHITE JURY IN YELLOW CREEK—1894

CHAPTER 25

MYSTERIOUS WHIPPOORWILL—1896

CHAPTER 26

WHIP AT SACRED FOREST—1896

CHAPTER 27

WHIP THE JOCKEY—1896

CHAPTER 28

ALL-INDIAN CHURCH?—1896

CHAPTER 29

SCREAMING WAR CRIES—1896

CHAPTER 30

FIRES?—1896

CHAPTER 31

THE TRIAL—1896-97

CHAPTER 32

WHAT CONSTITUTION?—1897

CHAPTER 33

THE RACES—1897

CHAPTER 34

INDIAN MUSIC?—1900

CHAPTER 35

AFTER CHIEF MATHER WHAT?—1891

CHAPTER 36

MATHER’S WILL—1892

CHAPTER 37

WHO WILL BE CHIEF?—1902

P a r t iii

CHAPTER 38

THE POWER BEHIND THE MASK—1905

CHAPTER 39

CELEBRATION—1906

CHAPTER 40

THE FESTIVE BALL—1906

CHAPTER 41

A WELL-OILED CHIEF—1907

CHAPTER 42

THE ELECTION—1908

CHAPTER 43

DREAM OF A NEW FUTURE—2007

This story begins when a Native American teenager in 1870 and until 1908 dreamt of creating in Oklahoma Territory an all-Indian state with a red star on the American flag. It is a love story, an adventure story, and the story of how a unique punishment turned a teenage dreamer into a successful politician. As far as we can find there has been no novel or film about those fateful dramatic years in Indian Territory.

The author wished for this to be an interactive, regularly updated book online and therefore invites comments from Indians on the suggestion in the last chapter that now there can be an online ‘virtual state’ that unites all Native Americans in North and South America. Might it provide a powerful political voice for all Indians? Already there are virtual reality re-creations of ancient Native American sites that can be visited as they were. New technology makes it possible for large numbers of Indians to dream together online about a great new future. Such thoughts are welcome at <g.p.ross@mchsi.com.> Perhaps, if there is much to say, there can be an interactive blog as a place for discussion.

The author already has a very successful experimental electronic online book http://ecolecon.missouri.edu/globalresearch that is regularly updated with corrections and suggestions from readers. It has been accessed over a half million times by readers in 37 countries. It has been translated into Chinese by Oceans University Press there.

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There is a chart of characters at the end here and also the author’s acknowledgements.

Dedicated

—the state of Montana’s constitutional requirement that Indian history and culture be taught, not just to Indians, but

to all students, not as special courses, but integrated into all aspects of the curriculum,

and

—to the Native Americans who participated in the

United Nations May 2007 Indigenous Peoples, Pluralism, and Nationhood Roundtable, such as those from the National Council of Indigenous Women I in Ecuador; from Naskoonlith Indian Reserve in Canada; from the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies and others.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  

It is impossible to name everyone who across many years has helped me write Kingdom of Weeds. A student in a writing class at the State University of New York once asked me how long it took to write a novel. What could I say? This novel began when I was in secondary school and ate succotash with one or another Indian family, and heard their stories. Not all were poor, especially those with oil wells. One of my friends could at fourteen fly his own airplane. This was at a time when—if out-of state visitors to Oklahoma sometimes asked if Indians were dangerous—the humorous reply was: Yes, if you don’t watch out they will run you down with their limousines.

Anyone who doubts that Indians had cities before Europeans arrived should read archeological studies on the Cahokia Mounds and the book 1491 about Indian civilization in North America. Walter Fleming in Myths and Stereotypes about Native Americans points out that most people in the USA know very little about Indians, and much that they know is wrong. It is a myth, he says, that Indians prefer to be called Native Americans, that they are dying out, that most live on reservations, that they are easy to recognize, and that they get special privileges from the government. Stereotypes and falsities like these must be corrected by teaching all USA citizens more about Indian history, culture and current concerns, and doing this in all schools is discussed in the March 2006 issue of the education journal, Phi Delta Kappan.

Much credit for stories in this novel come from things I heard when young in what was Indian Territory. For example, one of my closest lifelong friends is Cherokee. We were born in the same place, worked for years together in the same office as Oklahoma university students. He by coincidence then was at Chicago and then at Yale when I also did graduate work there. We were required at O.U. to take a course in Oklahoma history. Our instructor was a young easterner just out of an Ivy League College. Before his first class lecture he said: This course begins with Indians before Europeans arrived. So it occurs to me there may be students with Indian blood in this class, if so would you raise your hands? About half of us did, so he gulped, closed his inadequate notes and fled. However this novel was enriched by what I read for his course, such as Edward Everett Dale and Morris L Waddell’s History of Oklahoma. I especially appreciated knowing Dale when I read his chapters on The Five Civilized Tribes in the West and The (civil) war in Indian Territory and Indian Territory: 1866-1906. I owe much to books by Angie Debo. As an undergraduate I learned from her The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic, and her Princeton University Press book And Still the Waters Run (about broken treaties with Indian tribes that were supposed to stay in force ‘as long as the waters ran’ but did not.) I am indebted also to her The Road to Disappearance that was published the year I graduated from the university. Disappearance? Most of the entire state of Oklahoma was given to ‘Indians only’ but then the USA treaties ‘disappeared.’

On the Natchez Indians, I was greatly helped by Archeology of the Fatherland Site: The Grand Village of the Natchez, Vol. 51, Archeological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, by Robert Neitzel of the state history museum in Mississippi; also by the chapter Natchez; People of the Sun. in Peter Farb’s ‘Man’s Rise to Civilization: The Cultural Ascent of the Indians in North America.

Also I was influenced by the writings of Alexander Posey because he lived the years of this novel, 1873 to 1906. He was born in Creek nation, attended Bacone College that was established for Indians there. He published a newspaper near where I went to high school and was for a time employed by the Dawes Commission that figures in this novel. My imagination was also stimulated by Indians of the Southwest by ethnology curator Pliny Goddard who 1930 wrote about Indian houses, cloth-making, weddings and funerals, religion, tales, dances and art before Europeans came.

On the other hand, what I saw and learned about miserable white sharecroppers who worked Indian land was re-enforced by Oscar Ameringer’s If You Don’t Weaken. (University of Oklahoma Press.) Also I should express special appreciation for The Cherokee Strip by that great story teller, Marquis James. I never actually met Marquis myself, but he was a friend of many in my family and one of the characters he told many stores about was a close relative of the oil entrepreneur who married my grandmother’s sister.

Also when living in the Philippines I had the chance to visit, high in the mountains, the aborigines who had inhabited those islands before the Filipinos arrived; and I had similar experiences with other aborigines in Colombia and elsewhere. This story deals somewhat with the problems of Indian culture with European society—and I note here a Crow Indian chief Plenty Coups who faced this problem as reported in the Harvard University Press book, Radical Hope (in face of cultural devastation) by Jonathan Lear. Thanks to Google and Yahoo I found that a young generation of Native Americans are connecting with and using the Internet to generate new hope for their future, as I point out in the last chapter of this novel.

Also I have been able to make online searches to see if anyone else has yet written a novel about those traumatic days when Indians had to give up the hope for an all-Indian state. Google searches also lead me to confess that I have not read some novels discussed by James Lenfesty in The State of American Indian Literature. He said that much of the best writing by Native Americans is poetry, children’s books, anthologies and nonfiction. He reported on the first novel by an American Indian was written by Cherokee John Ridge in 1854 and it was 45 years before the next, Queen of the Woods by Pottawattamie Simon Pokagan. There are more novels by Indians now—Louise Erdrich for example has won a literary critics award.

However, I found no novel about the statehood issue in Eastern Oklahoma. Lenfesty says that Native American fiction is still in its adolescence. One of the first by a woman was published by Alice Callahan, a Muscogee. There is a novel, Clearwater, about bandits attacking a town in Indian Territory in 1879. There are Indian Territory novels about an earlier period in Indian Territory such as one by Wentworth and How Few Remain. The University of Oklahoma Press has in recent years published several historical novels. There is of course much about bandits—white and Indian—in court records and historical documents. Finally, there is no shortage of information on Amerindian art in Latin America; see for example: http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/region/indigenous/ Also see books like Miguel Covarrubas Indian Art in Mexico and Central America that was not written in time for the Latin American art explorations of Sadie Star and Nachay Poteau, characters in this novel.

I apologize for any historical or other errors in this novel; after all it is fiction.

AUTHORS’S FOREWORD—Once There Was an American Indian Kingdom  

A shadow narrator tells this story. He is a Native American, Odell Wilberforce Paix II (his family always pronounced it ‘Pay-x.) Half paralyzed now in the 21st century he lies in bed and dictates the story of his grandfather, Dell Paix, who until 1906 dreamt of creating in Oklahoma an all-Indian state.

As Odie remembers his grandfather’s hopes, he wonders what it might have been like had Europeans met Native Americans as equals and had become partners and citizens of an indigenous Indian federation. This story takes place between the Civil War and when Oklahoma became a state. This is also the story of some women in his family who might have played an unusual role in an all-Indian state. The author finds it a fascinating coincidence that long before I ever heard of Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller, the first woman chief, I wrote here about my Indian hero’s sister, Wilhelmina, who I said should have been chief of her tribe. She proposed that Indians in North and South America should use the telegraph—the revolutionary technology of her day—to work together politically to serve their common interests. Now the Navajo Indians in 2007 are using wireless Internet connections to connect with Indians in Brazil. Can this be a first step towards creating a ‘virtual’ state online?

As a teenager I was able to know Indians who had lived at the time of this novel and also I was a newspaper reporter in the Creek Indian country in southeast Oklahoma at the time when sharecropper ‘Okies’—as in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—sold out and left for California. The depleted soil of the cotton fields was no longer productive enough to support the sharecropper economy.

Indeed, in 1986 a county agricultural agent there told me that except for river bottom land it would be perhaps a hundred years before much one-crop abused land in my Creek Indian county could be used for really productive farming again. Until then much of it would be a realm of weeds.

The eastern half of Oklahoma, Indian Territory, was a very unique place. Since no one but Indians could own land there until early in the 20th century, some well-to-do Indians held white sharecroppers almost in peonage. As a teenager I once saw an Indian woman take a whip to one of her adult male white sharecroppers for cutting down a tree without her permission. So this is a unique novel in that it tells a story of a place in America where the position of Native Americans and ‘Europeans’ was for a time reversed, that is Eastern Oklahoma was the one place in America where privileged Indians were ‘at the top of the heap’ and many white people at the bottom.

Also this story it is about a great dream. As far as I can tell this is the first novel written about oil-and-cotton-rich Indians. Few people today remember when the president of the Phillips 66 oil company was also chief of the Cherokee tribe.

Just after the civil war many former southern servicemen had come west looking for land and became sharecroppers for Indian landlords, assuming that sooner or later the federal government would push the Indians out and give them title to the land they cleared and farmed. However, that never happened. So, since it was not their land, many ‘croppers’ did not take good care of it. The price of cot-ton—that could be shipped down the river to Memphis—was at first high enough to provide a good living. By the time of the great depression however, the one-crop cotton farming had depleted the land and many of the ignorant white sharecroppers became impoverished. There were at first no rural schools for white youngsters and later when there were, the rural schools were very limited.

So the annual income of some of those sharecropper families was as low as in some of the poorest parts of India. One Socialist from that sharecropper background said to me: too deep in the manure pile to climb out. The sharecroppers could vote once Oklahoma became a state and for a time there as a daily Socialist newspaper in Oklahoma City. Following and helping cause that short, failed socialist era ended when the oil boom created great wealth on land owned by Indians or on land where the Indians held the mineral rights. While many Indians were cheated of their new money, some became wealthy. The Osage Indians in northeastern were at one time reputed to be the richest people, per capita in the world. Is it true that hardly anywhere else—except now from gambling casinos—have there been wealthy Native Americans?

This novel is about an Indian family that became rich from their half of the cotton crop on many hundreds of acres of tribal land long before the oil boom. Many of the characters in Kingdom of Weeds are based on real people and the rest on stories I heard, told to me by Indian students and by people I met as a young newspaper reporter. Having no way to verify many of those stories I use them in fiction. Rather than create an imaginary native American tribe—so that this novel could use incidents from various Indian nations—I have imagined ‘what might have been’ if more than the surviving few Natchez Indians (here I call them Nachay) had moved to Oklahoma in the hope of helping establish an Indian nation, or at least an Indian state.

There are perhaps no surviving full-blood Natchez Indians in the 21st century. Once, however, they really had a royal kingdom north and east of New Orleans. When LaSalle explored the region "in 1640 they were a ‘royal people’ who ruled over some neighboring tribes. They perhaps migrated to what is now the United States from Mexico and were more educated than most neighboring tribes. Their king was called the Great Sun. That fascinated the French who also had a ‘Sun King’ and the Natchez had standards, ideals and values similar to those at the French court. When in 1662 the French first visited the Natchez capital, named White Apple, it was laid out like a French town with streets and lanes and many large houses." Many Natchez became Christians and some later owned plantations and slaves. Most interesting is the fact that after the civil war they adopted their former slaves to become full members of the tribe. Also they were pioneers in the rights of women and in co-education for girls.

Their noble class was actually very small, Peter Farb says in Natchez: People of the Great Sun. Power passed down through the women of the royal family, the title of Great Sun remaining in the female line. Many of the haughty Natchez were slaughtered or sold into slavery by the French and in 1795 only about 700 had survived, according to Samuel Stanley in The End of the Natchez Indians.By 1899 there were only twenty full bloods remaining and in l940 only two Natchez could still speak the language. Their elite culture was extinguished forever, Stanley says, Through contact with the invading whites. Here is an imaginative alternative future for some of the tribe. This novel begins in 1870 when the future Senator Paix—as a young teenager—was going with Chief Mather’s e xpedition to search in what is now Oklahoma for a place to build a town for the surviving Nachay and to accomplish their great dream for all Indians. Its narrator, however, reflects on other events across the years and some possible futures for Native Americans.

I am not much Native American myself but my mother’s great-grandmother was a member of the Creek (Muscogee) tribe that settled in the area near where this novel takes place. In Kingdom of Weeds this novel’s hero discovers that his identity and survival are dependent on telling the stories of the tribe. There are parallels in other tribes, stories about getting lost that now can help the young who get ‘culturally lost’ and struggle to find their way back into Indian culture by recovering traditional stories. The reader may be helped to keep the characters straight by a chart at the end.

P a r t  

CHAPTER 1  

THE DREAMER—1870  

My grandfather, Senator Paix, was a dreamer and he never got credit for the great ideas he had. Even at fourteen he dreamt about a great future for Indians, influenced by his older sister who hoped that sometime all Indians in the hemisphere might be united. Across his career he did not get credit for the good he did because, like me, he was a bit blond. Because of that many people thought he was lying when he said he was Native American.

Everyone knows that Indians aren’t blondish.

So why was he somewhat blond-headed? It is important to his story that our tribe thinks that in the 16th century a ship from Europe sank off shore of what is now Mississippi and the crew found its way into our Natchez kingdom. Also there is another theory, and perhaps both are true, that when the French first sailed up the Mississippi one of them found an ancestor of ours alone on the riverbank and raped her. In any case by the time our tribe moved to Oklahoma there had been some intermarriage between whites and Indians. When I tell you about my grandfather, Odell Wilber-force Paix, however, you will see that, although a bit blond he really was a high-boned Nachay Indian prince. And he was a dreamer in the sense that all Indians should be dreamers.

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Winter, 1870

The royal flag of the Nachay Indians fluttered in the wind above the side-paddle steamer that had been renamed the Sun-Princess Leah. That red flag with a blazing white sun had never before been seen in Memphis and there were fistfights in saloons over whether an Indian nation had the right to fly its own flag and whether the American flag should fly above it.

Dell Paix, writing to describe the scene to his beloved Esther, told how Memphis had been ablaze with gossip about the wealth on the five barges behind the paddleboat.

Seeing the civil war coming, Major Paix—Dell’s dad—and his mother, Princess Melissa, and Chief Mather O’Donnall of the Nachay and his wife Princess Leah, had sold their plantations—to be handed over after the war—and purchased the paddle boat and supplies they would need to found a new town to be capital of an all-Indian state.

That fact alone, Dell said in a letter to Esther, could explain why some sniper had taken a shot at Grandpa Dell and ‘Chief Matt’ in Memphis. Grandma Esther was a sort of half-cousin since she was the daughter of Princess May Belle, an adopted sister of Leah and Melissa. Nearly all of them, except the Major, were full-bloods.

At fourteen, Dell saw Memphis to be a dangerous place. And in the Nachay Indian Museum at Yellow Creek, Oklahoma, is the 1870 diary of thirteen-year-old Esther Kirby, the Nachay pastor’s daughter, the deep black-eyed beauty who loved and later married Dell. Although she never could spell, she shared great ideas with grandpa.

However, she was promised to and expected to marry his older brother.

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Some of what I tell here is from Dell’s journal. It began with the paddleboat journey; and also from Esther’s diary of the Indian women’s tragic encounter with outlaws as their covered wagons went through the wilderness from Texas to join their men. Her first entry from a refugee tent city in Texas reads: "Mrch. 2, 1870. Her royal Meowness, Feline IV is surer than I am that we’ll leave tomorrow. Maybe. No last letter from Dell. Auntie Blossom can’t find her best chicken, the ban

tam dandy that gives an egg a day. Some dirty white trash like Little-Ben Scarf probably ate Banty. I wish they was’nt going with us, or I really wish and hope we won’t meet shootin (her spelling) outlaws.

Esther’s diary is hard to read. The ink has faded and the first page was ‘sploshed’—her word for it—with rain water and maybe a tear or two when she wrote about Dell. Esther always wrote carelessly and too fast when she was excited or was scared as she was then confronting a dangerous wilderness.

Later that wilderness became for her a metaphor for white American society.

Tuesday was the leaving day for the expedition that the three Indian princesses would lead. Dell’s mother, Melissa, wife of confederate Major Elias Paix, was worried about the gold coins hidden in her wagon. In 1870 her sister Leah, Chief Mather’s wife, was worried about their teen-age daughters. They were rightly scared that they would be attacked by outlaws, young runaways from the former Confederate army. The pastor’s wife, May Belle and her daughter, Esther—with the help of only a few adolescent cowboys and one Nachay wheelwright, No-Treaty Fuell—were to keep the 100 or so wagons organized as the white and Nachay women and children moved from their refugee camp in Texas to the site for Chief Mather’s dream town in Indian Territory.

No-Treaty dreamt not of a future city but of restoring the past, like his uncle the Nachay medicine man, Battle-Robin, and he silently tried to ‘straddle the fence’ between ‘real Indians’ and the ‘town Indians" who owned the paddle-boat and who were daring to bring white settlers into Indian Territory.

"It’s not just the ice or snow that’s giving Aunt Melissa cold feet," Esther wrote. "Few of the white young’uns are ready to go."

Dell’s mother, Melissa, was the second daughter of the last ‘Great Sun’ of the Nachay Indians. So many handsome men had chased after stately Aunt Melisa that she didn’t know how to choose. Finally when she was seventeen she let three of them get within catching range. Major Natch Paix—pronounced Pay-x by the Indians—impishly requested that her three suitors run a foot race, loser getting the girl.

Melissa, her hair beautifully braded as always, had been sitting on her pony. She was always on a pony though the neighbors jokingly figured she could walk. She nearly took off in a ‘fit’n-canter’ when the Major proposed the contest. She thought maybe it was because he loved to eat too much to be able to win a race

She laughed Why should I marry the man who comes in last?

Because, he teased. Loaded down with so many jewels for you, I couldn’t possibly win a race! That reply, as he opened a bag full of persuasive gold trinkets, had so amused the Indian princess that she had married him.

Women of the princely family had authority in the Nachay tribe. So Melissa and her two sisters had in 1869 made the decision for the Indian men—and about eighty white and a few black farmers—to go ahead up the Arkansas River by paddleboat to find a place for the new all-Indian capital city.

Now the three women had chosen this Tuesday to start their trek to join their men. They had to lead loaded covered wagons through the dangerous wilderness from their encampment by the Red River at the northern border of Texas.

Their fists were clenched with determination!

After all, they were descendants of their great king who was known in the chronicles of the Nachay tribe as Principal Chief Stand Firm of the Bighouse clan.

In these days of women’s liberation it is amusing to recall the astonishment of DeSoto and other European explorers when they had first encountered the Nachay tribe! In those days even the Chief-husband of a Nachay queen could never disagree with her, at least in public. Also her younger husbands had to stand behind her and wait table for her while she ate. As young men of the tribe came of age at fourteen she could each year require the handsomest to join her harem of husbands. The strongest of them carried her in a litter on all formal occasions.

By the 1800’s European influence had weakened Nachay customs, especially as the tribe fell apart during the civil war. So Leah now asserted her regal authority only in religious and marriage matters, or by insisting that her husband be elected Principal Chief from among ‘chiefs’ of various settlements. Yet everyone knew that if she waited until the right time she still would have the final say when tribal factions were fighting over something, such as the right way to undertake their dangerous journey through the wilderness.

Leah was ready to face storms, outlaws, and wild animals. She was less sure how she could handle the crises involved in moving so many white women and children across Indian Territory from their ‘temporary’ camp in north Texas. The few black women along were her allies.

The Nachay women argued while Christmas dinner was cooking, ham and beans in a big iron pot over a campfire. It would be a hundred and twenty-five miles from their camp to the river junction where they were to meet the scouts who would lead them to the destination of their husbands’ paddle-steamer and barges.

At five miles a day, could they make it in twenty-five days?

No, argued May Belle, rubbing her unusually small eyes as she did when others dared to disagree with her. "That doesn’t allow enough for accidents and getting the wagons across creeks and rivers.

Melissa had let her seventeen-year-old son, Brown Bear or B.B., speak for her: This winter, as soon as we can, let’s move camp to the Indian Territory side of the river. We can take our time ferrying everything across, first trying one way and then another to make sure we don’t lose your things to the water.

Melissa, whose two wagon loads of household goods included silver plate, gold coins and fashionable clothes, was also worried about the petty thievery of nearby white youngsters. So she wanted to get the wagons to the Indian side of the river as soon as possible.

We’ll build two rafts, B.B. proposed to No-Treaty Fuell. First we’ll try ferrying a couple of horses. Then we’ll try an empty wagon, not ferrying anything we can’t easily salvage from the river … until we make sure the rafts work.

Melissa had selected No-Treaty, a tough unmarried Nachay cowboy and wheelwright, to stay and help the wagon train of women because he was the strongest and cleverest with wagons. He first was sent ahead as scout to plan out their route.

Now’s the best time to go, he argued when he returned. The river’s as low as it’ll get this year. Once it rains we would have to cross a river flooded from the spring thaws.

Let’s get everyone to the Indian side of the river now, B.B. had urged the chief’s wife. So we’ll all be ready to go north before everything gets muddy.

B.B. had secret and immoral reasons for wanting to winter on the Indian side of the river. There were few eligible husbands for the white girls encamped along the river because so many boys had been killed in the ‘war between the states’ or had taken off alone to go west. Some of the whites, like Mindy Scarf and Susie Berry, were half-starved and almost barefoot even during winter months. Such girls had private arguments among themselves about how best to trap a rich Indian boy into marriage by having his baby.

Esther in her diary worried most about such pretty white girls after watching Susie and Mindy have a hair-pulling ear-tearing dogfight. Esther wrote: "As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing? Katie wants to marry B.B. Aunt Leah says he must marry me. But he’s being chased after by that slut, Mindy Scarf. And Wilhelmina loves No-Treaty who is got by Susie Berry, one of the white trash girls."

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The impoverished white farmers—who had joined the Major and Chief Mather and the Indians on the expedition—were from were several rag tag encampments of the families of stranded ex-Confederate war veterans. One of those settlements on the Texas side of the Red River was called ‘Last Shot’ since the last possessions of those white refugees had long ago been traded to survive the winter. The Nachay leaders had recruited Dee Berry there and most of the other rebel white farmers who were going along to Indian Territory.

Another squatter settlement was called Scarf-town because for three years its brush-roofed lean-to shacks had been the home of Ben Scarf, his ten brothers, their common law wives and no one knew how many children and bastard grandchildren. By the time the Scarf youngsters—many of them confusingly having the same names—were fifteen or sixteen many had run away to become saloon girls or to join gangs of rustlers or other renegades heading further west. Their settlement was also called ‘Angel Camp’ because the Scarf youngsters were all unbelievably charming and handsome, with winsome blue eyes, long eyelashes, and silky gold-tan skin. The neighbors all said it should be called Devil Camp, however, because the Scarf children were ‘thieves, whores, alcoholics, incestuous perverts, illiterates and morons,’ to name their better traits as moralistic Indians viewed them.

So Grandpa Dell’s mother, Melissa, had been furious when Scarf brothers had also been signed on as tenant farmers, although the reasons made sense. When it was cotton-picking time, nearby farmers had brought their wagons to the Texas riverbank camps to hire loads of children to work in the fields. Dee Berry’s good children from Last Shot Camp tended to be lazy—probably from having so little to eat \—and would not put in a full day’s work without being spanked from time to time.

The Scarf youngsters, on the other hand, seemed born to work cotton. Offer each of them some good meals, a few cents for each bag of cotton they picked, and a couple of bottles of whiskey to be delivered when the job was done and all of them, even those as young as five or six, would work from dawn to sunset, day after day, without hardly stopping.

The Scarf children also loved Dell’s sister Wilhelmina Paix, Melissa’s eighteen-year-old daughter. As a teacher and amateur veterinarian it was her job to care for the horses … and sick children. After she had found that one of the Scarf twins, Noah and Jonah, was a near-genius, Wilhelmina—with the help of Esther and Katie—had all winter used cookies to entice the Angel Camp children for bible instruction on Sunday afternoons.

At the Sunday School the Scarf children were perfect little angels, she reported, Unless drunk. They seemed to know how to distill alcohol from almost anything that grew.

Mindy Scarf had her eyes on Uncle B.B. and he loved it. When she tied up her skirts to help push a wagon he said she was too pretty for her own good. However if B.B. got a white girl pregnant on the Texas side of the river she could make him marry her. That was not so on the Indian side where such laws were not enforced and where public opinion had a low view of white girls who would sleep with Indian guys.

B.B. had therefore been pleased when Leah ordered him to go with her and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Katie, to negotiate with Choctaw Indians about moving to their side of the river.

Katie and Leah, tall and stately on their white horses, had the bearing of queens as they rode into the Choctaw settlement. They lacked the soft curves and delicacy of Melissa and Esther but Leah’s dignity and pride made her seem much more beautiful than she really was.

The Choctaws already knew that the Nachay women and children were to meet their men at the northern boundary of the Choctaw nation. So they were prepared to permit the Bighouse clan to camp on their side of the river and then to move north across their territory.

Leah, however, wanted more. I hear there are bandits.

The Choctaw elders nodded. Their women chewed their tobacco. Many outlaws and other dangerous animals.

Leah’s request was reasonable: Will you send along braves with guns to protect our wagons?

The silence of the elders suggested a search for wisdom. They would not refuse protection to Indian women and children—for hard cash—but they didn’t like the idea of so many white people coming across their lands.

If each Choctaw settlement will protect us as far as the next one, Leah bargained. It need not be a burden on anyone.

The Choctaws continued to smoke without replying.

You can show us where to ford streams and avoid marshes, She argued per

suasively. How can we find the best route to our land without your help and protection? An old Choctaw woman spat out her chewing tobacco as a gesture of contempt: Must you bring all those thieving whites?

The Choctaws were already nervous. The treaties of 1866 that ended the civil war for the Indian tribes had required the Choctaws to allow construction of the ‘Katy’ railway across their nation’s land from Kansas to Texas. This had led to some permanent settlements of white railway employees alongside the rails. Also, coal had been discovered in the Choctaw nation. So there was talk of bringing in white miners—‘to make the Choctaws rich’—as soon as the railroad could be completed.

Leah knew that once her white women and children were across the river the Choctaws would want to help hurry them along to get them out of their territory.

These whites are our servants, She explained.

Our servants, B.B. repeated, using the Nachay word for ‘bound-servant’, a word Indians sometimes had used for their black slaves. "Now that Washington forbids us to own slaves.

When younger, Leah had thought that the ‘Washington’ that so often interfered in their lives was the General Washington she had read about in her tattered schoolbook.

Since our former slaves are now free members of our tribe, we are bringing white laborers to do our hard work for us. If’n they don’t obey us and our laws they’ll be expelled.

Now one of the Choctaw elders spoke. They will not own land, nor will they marry Indians?

Leah spoke with the authority of a queen. Of course not! They will have no rights except those we choose to give them.

The Choctaws conferred quietly among themselves. Cotton and other cash crops were hard work. Their women who no longer had slaves did not like to plow and hoe, except for vegetables.

A few of the Indians—who would no longer dare to entrap a black runaway—were already working a few white youngsters, war-orphan runaways who had strayed into Choctaw territory and had nowhere else to go. The women had heard that some Cherokees and Muscogees were now letting white men do their farm work in exchange for half the crop. Why not when the Indians had so much unused land? Originally the government had given the Indians most of what is now Oklahoma but much of it remained unused.

We will give you safe passage across our nation, the Choctaw elders concluded, If you pay us for the passage of the whites.

Leah had little gold left and needed it for food. She doubted if she could talk Melissa out of more. How much?

No money! Help us find white-trash servants too.

Leah relaxed. More very hungry southern ex-grey coats who wanted farms were nearby. Some, who had declined to go with the Nachay, were now sorry and would be glad to farm nearby Indian land on shares. I’ll negotiate share-cropper contracts for you. In return you must agree to persuade all Choctaws to give us passage, protection, and food as we pass. We’ll pay for the food.

The Choctaw elders nodded solemnly, sealing the contract. They would be glad when their wives quit nagging them to help with the plowing at a time when the hunting was best.

✶ ✶ ✶ ✶

Leah and B.B. returned to that Choctaw settlement a few days later with four hungry ex-Confederate soldiers who were ready to farm Indian land on shares. In trade, Leah was given a campsite near a clean spring on the Choctaw side of the Red River and the protection she had asked for.

As B.B. and No-Treaty moved two families a day across the river that winter, Leah wondered how they ever could have done it all if she had waited until it was time to go north. No-Treaty, aided by Susie Berry, had organized the white women