In Indian, my brother (2011), Corporal Blutch and Sergeant Chesterfield are given a perilous mission: to cross Confederate lines to negotiate Comanche aid. These Amerindian people, who lived mainly in Texas, a secessionist state, had a reputation for attacking convoys relentlessly. Whether one wears a blue or gray uniform, traveling to this desert territory was a constant danger. In this album, our two heroes manage, with cunning, to obtain 30 horses from Loup-Gris, a chief prisoner of a southern colonel, James Bourland, an authentic character who usually hangs the “Redskins”. “A good Indian is a dead Indian!” let know the “Executioner of Texas”, his nickname, on page 18.
Were the Comanches involved in the war between Northerners and Southerners, as the comic seems to indicate The Blue Tunics ? In fact, when the Civil War broke out in 1861, this tribe of the American West (the Wild West), to which we can add the Sioux, the Apaches and the Pawnees, did not take part in this conflict of “Pale faces”. If these West Indians sometimes revolted against the occupier, they especially saw, through this civil war, the opportunity to get their hands on some spoils by attacking military convoys. The situation was different among the Indians settled in the south of the United States: the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles. They had no other choice but to engage in this fratricidal struggle between Unionists and Confederates. These “Five Nations”, Christianized and having adopted Western culture since the conquest of the West at the beginning of the 19th century, lived in a reserve state: the Indian Territories. An area of 180,000 square kilometers located west of the Mississippi River and corresponding to present-day Oklahoma. This state-reserve was assigned to the Amerindians by the American government in 1830, after they were driven from their homeland, the Appalachians, a mountain range located in the northeast of the country. Bordered to the north by Kansas and Missouri (controlled by the Union) and to the south by the two Confederate states of Texas and Arkansas, the Indian Territories were crossed at the start of the conflict by a front line. A strategic area for both camps. “Neutrality seemed impossible because this war threatened the integrity of this region,” writes historian Bradley Clampitt in his book The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory (untranslated, University of Nebraska Press, 2015).
The Amerindians of the Indian Territories do not all engage with the Confederates
In this struggle for influence, the Confederates left with an advantage over the Unionists. The 65,000 Indians of these reserves, according to the census of 1860, had developed an agricultural economy close to that of the South, in particular the cultures of tobacco and cotton. They also maintained a commercial relationship with the secessionist states whose way of life they shared. Including the practice of slavery. “The forced servitude of blacks and the trade of which they were the object did not arouse any controversy within the Five Nations”, notes the historian Serge Noirsain, specialist in the Civil War. There were thus 7,000 slaves in the green meadows of the Territories.
In May 1861 the Indians were visited by emissaries from the South, including Captain Douglas H. Cooper. This officer, sent by Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States, was not chosen by chance. A former member of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an administration created in 1824 to treat the Amerindian question “diplomatically”, he was in the best position to negotiate the terms of an alliance as well as possible. After a quick discussion, the Territories agreed to provide him with several thousand warriors in exchange for protection from the Washington government and guaranteeing the autonomy of their state. The pact was made with Stand Watie (1806-1871), leader of the Cherokees, the most important community in the Territories. Promoted colonel of a rifle regiment, the First Cherokee Mounted Rifles, Watie and his men immediately distinguished themselves by their guerrilla actions against the Unionists. But the Cherokee leader was far from rallying all the Five Nations …
Although influential, Watie had, in the eyes of other tribes, one major flaw: that of being of mixed race. A “half-breed”, as the Amerindians used to say. An “Americanized” Indian, he found himself in conflict with two Nations of the Territories: the Creeks and the Seminoles. Attached to their origins and to the “purity of their race”, they reproached the Métis Indians for having signed in 1830, with the American government, a treaty (the Indian Removal Act) which favored their deportation, between 1831 and 1838, from east to west of the Mississippi. A forced exodus known as Trail of Tears, the Trail of Tears.
The Civil War rekindled this resentment and then created a fracture within the Territories. As the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws lent their support to the South, the Creeks and Seminoles turned to the Union. Comics The Blue Tunics does not face this internal war within the Territories. She prefers to locate her Indian albums in the Wild West, populated by Comanches and Sioux. Blutch and Chesterfeld thus find themselves in a western universe with, as a backdrop, the palisades of a fort, the landscapes of Monument Valley, the herds of cows and bison as well as the wild horses. Far West visible in albums like Fort Bow Wedding (2005). The issue of alliances and betrayals between Whites and “Redskins” is however addressed, in particular in Captain Nepel (1993). After a period of peace between the Yankees and the Indians, a chief, Mad Horse, unearths the hatchet because of a colonel, Nepel, who no longer supports this cohabitation. “I will no longer tolerate a single one of these metics in the enclosure of the fort!” he yells on page 12. It will take all the talent of Blutch and Chesterfield, forced to remove their uniforms and dress Indian, to settle this diplomatic incident.
In the Territories, the situation was much more chaotic for the Indians. The pro-Confederates were determined to exterminate their enemy brothers who had passed under the banner of the Union. Their main target? Opothleyahola, the leader of the Creeks. On November 15, 1861, he in turn met, six months after Watie, Captain Cooper, who gave him an ultimatum: support the Confederation or suffer reprisals from the Cherokees and their allies. And the territory of the Creeks was taken in pincers by the Cherokees in the north, the Choctaws and Chickasaws in the south … Worried, Opothleyahola then took the head of the 9000 Creeks and Seminoles in order to join a stronghold of northern Kansas, Fort Row.
Hearing the news, Cooper’s troops – including the First Regiment Choctaw-Chickasaw Mounted Rifles – harassed the convoy. On December 26, despite the protection of a Union brigade, Chief Creek and his brothers in arms suffered a devastating attack from Waltie’s troops. The Northerners, taken aback, fled in dispersed order, abandoning the Indians to their fate. In the snow and blizzard, without food, they reached Fort Row in agony. Two thousand of them died of cold, starvation or disease on this road of despair known as the Trail of Blood on Ice, the “Path of blood on ice”. Despite this disappointment, many Creeks and Seminoles remained determined to fight for their territory, now in the hands of the southerners.
After the Union victory, the Indians of the Five Nations lost their pre-war rights
From the spring of 1862, Washington accepted that these “Indian friends” could wear the federal uniform and created, in the process, three Amerindian regiments: the Indian Home Guard. For a year, these “Redskins” turned blue led a series of lightning strikes in Arkansas and the Indian Territories. Their targets: Fort Wayne, in October 1862, and especially Cabin Creek, in July 1863, where they distinguished themselves by setting out to the rescue of a supply train captured by the troops of Stand Watie. The latter, weakened, had meanwhile been beaten at the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862 against the Northerners. A crushing defeat for the Confederate Indians who wanted to seize part of the state of Missouri.
For the Creeks, it was time for revenge. Despite the death of their leader Opothleyahola in March 1863, their victorious raids allowed the Blues to gain ground until the victory of Honey Springs on July 17, 1863. Called “the Gettysburg of the Indian Territories”, this battle, which opposed 6,000 Confederate soldiers to 3,000 Unionists – most of the Creeks and Senecas, originally from what is now New York State – marked the rout of the Confederates and their Amerindian allies
After the Union’s final victory in the conflict in April 1865, Watie, the only Indian appointed general, continued the fight despite everything. He did not lay down his arms until June 23, more than two months after Lee’s surrender in Appomattox, Virginia! “During the war, the two Indian factions inflicted more damage on each other than did the white troops from the North and the South”, estimates historian Serge Noirsain.
The Indian Territories, like the entire American nation, then had to rebuild. But hope was replaced by disillusionment. Whether they remained loyal to the Union or sided with the Confederates, the Indians of the Five Nations lost their pre-war rights. Authority over this area was vested in a representative of the federal state, while half of the land was confiscated for the benefit of settlers. “The Five Nations had built a political organization completely compatible with that of the American state. They had cultural centers, schools, universities. All the criteria were met to form a new American state, on a par with the others, ”concludes Serge Noirsain. As the scout Plume d’Argent announces with clairvoyance and bitterness in the album Outlaw (1973): “White men seek only to destroy red men.” And the Civil War only precipitated this destruction.
➤ Article published in the magazine GEO October-November 2020 Story on the Blue Tunics and the Civil War (n ° 53)
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Read also :
⋙ Civil War: three Bourbons among the Yankees
⋙ Back to the causes of the Civil War
⋙ Civil War: Grant vs Lee, the battle of the leaders
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