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CHAPTER SEVEN Only the Land L ooking back in 1878, an anonymous writer for the Indian Journal, published in the Muscogee Nation, wrote,“At the close of the war [Muscogee] families were again gathered together only to find their farms desolate, their homes burned, their fences destroyed, their fields overrun with weeds, their church and school buildings even burned.”Their country had been stripped of everything of value. There was“nothing left but a trackless waste.”He concluded, they “found the land here but only because it was immovable.”1 William McIntosh, formerly a slave of the wealthy Muscogee McIntosh family, agreed. He had gone north with OpothleYahola and spent most of the war in the Union Indian Home Guard. As a soldier stationed at Fort Gibson in the last half of the war, he distributed supplies of food and clothing from the commissary to destitute Muscogees and Osages. He told his son, The Creek Nation was in a pitiable condition. Many of the Creeks had been killed or died of hunger and exposure. Their homes and barns were burned to ashes by opposing armies. Their horses had been stolen and their cattle killed and eaten or left to go wild in the cane brakes and their farms were grown up with weeds and underbrush . Surely the poor Creeks had suffered for no good cause on the part of any of them. They were aware of this, although an enmity still existed between them.All they really had left was their land, and [in 1865] they were being told they would have to share a part of it with their wild neighbors back in the states.2 It was hard to say whether the Muscogee Nation was hit harder by the Civil War than the Cherokee Nation, but they both had much to lose and lost more than most other Indian nations. On October 1, 1865, Agent Justin Harlan, who had shared the wartime troubles of the Union Cherokees, wrote: 263 No one can fully appreciate the wealth, content and comparative happiness the Cherokees enjoyed before the late rebellion . . . unless he had been here and seen it, which was my case, and no man can believe more than half of the want, misery and destitution of the Cherokee people now. Blackened chimneys of fine houses are now all that is left,fences burned,and farms laid waste. The air of ruin and desolation envelops the whole country. None have wholly escaped.3 Many Indian Territory people had also died or gone missing due to violence, disease, and other causes. Indian governments, with the exception of the Choctaws, rarely had a reason or any desire to take a census. Indians did not pay taxes and were excluded from the federal census, so an accurate count is hard to find. Still, the best estimate of the population loss is staggering. In 1860 there were about 4,500 Chickasaws; 500 were still unaccounted for in 1866, or one in nine. There may have been as many as 15,000 Choctaws before the war, but an estimated 12,500 when it was over. There were probably 2,500 Seminoles at the beginning of the war but only about 2,000 when peace came, a loss of about one in five. Including their slaves and legally resident white people, the Cherokee population stood at about 22,000 before the war. The number lost is estimated at about 4,000. An 1863 census of Cherokees at Fort Gibson revealed that one-fourth of the children there were orphans, and one-third of the women were widows. There were about 13,500 Muscogees at the beginning of the war. The difference between a Muscogee census taken in 1859 and one from 1867 showed a decline of 24 percent,or about one person in four lost. Even this percentage does not compare with the Tonkawa losses suffered in the 1862 massacre at Wichita Agency.4 Some Indian Territory people never knew exactly what happened to their loved ones. Slaves ran away, noncombatants scattered, and some men left to fight and simply never came back.Some were known to be dead, but no one knew where or if they were buried. The George McPherson family, mixed-blood Cherokees, farmed near today’s Claremore, Oklahoma. Mrs. Tom Rattling Gourd, a daughter, said, “My father was killed in the Civil War and was never buried. Mother looked for his bones for a long time after the war but never could find...

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