Ned Christie: The Creation of an Outlaw and Cherokee Hero by Devon A. Mihesuah (review)

Devon Mihesuah's book corrects 130 years of misinformation about Ned Christie, the Cherokee councilman who allegedly murdered US marshal Daniel Maples on Cherokee land in 1887. Christie refused to appear before a US judge in Fort Smith during the investigation and ultimately avoided arrest for five years before he was killed by federal lawmen. Originating in Indian Territory around present-day Wauhillau, Oklahoma, Christie's story of resistance was picked up by newspapers across the country, who put their own sensationalized spin on the man. Christie was respected enough in the southwestern corner of the Ozarks to be elected to the Cherokee National Council in 1885, but those outside Cherokee Nation were told by unscrupulous newspapermen that he was among the West's most notorious outlaws. Largely a case study on Gilded Age print media, Mihesuah painstakingly dispels the inaccurate reports, exaggerations, and fabrications of journalists and novelists, while trying to explain why Christie's story became so distorted. "There needed to be some excitement about the vanishing frontier in the news and Christie provided it," Mihesuah reasons. She also criticizes the "deliberately deceptive" twentieth-century writers that continued to present imagination as fact.

Mihesuah reconstructs a more realistic picture of Ned Christie and his life as a Keetoowah Cherokee, the traditionalist and strongly nationalist Cherokee band. Despite her intense research into Christie, his family, and his nation (using family oral histories, hundreds of newspaper reports, Cherokee and US government records, among others), Mihesuah admits that Christie, and his innocence or guilt for the murder of Maples, remains a mystery. She believes that Christie refused to appear at court in Fort Smith because he was afraid that he would be wrongly accused and hanged ("it was the U.S. laws he feared," she writes), but she does not fully explore the possibility that Christie simply would not acknowledge the sovereignty and jurisdiction of the US government and its courts. Unfortunately, understanding Christie's motivations is complicated by the many erroneous reports about his life and by the fact that, even though he was literate in both English and Cherokee, his own thoughts do not survive. Nevertheless, Mihesuah connects Christie's history to the challenges faced by other Native Americans in the southeastern Plains during the late nineteenth century, their struggles for sovereignty, white encroachment, racism, and the persistent violence in that borderland region, which makes it a useful resource for historians of the Great Plains.