00:00:01 Speaker 1: People typically look at the Native Americans who were relocated out to present day Oklahoma, and they say, Okay, federal government is the oppressor, the five civilized tribes are the oppressed. And then we'll also look and say, okay, slave owner is oppressor. Slave is the oppressed. Well, what do you do when you have an oppressed people who are oppressing people? You know what category do they fall into? And I don't know if they fall into any category except for complex human being. 00:00:38 Speaker 2: One of the most interesting components of the Civil War for me is trying to understand why individual people in different groups of people fought. We're about to explore the reasons why and learn about some unique groups and it's going to get personal quick as I learned some stuff about my family the newcoms that I didn't know, and we're going to spend the second half of the podcast diving into an unlikely group. We're gonna try to understand why the Native Americans fought. They're hardly mentioned in the recounting of the war that they did fight and they were significant and JD. Hewett and I are going to go on a field trip to visit the graves of some Union soldiers who were scalped. The plot thickens, and I hope that you will join me on my personal exploration of the Civil War. I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one. My name is Clay Knucomb, and this is the Beargrease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Brought to you by to Covi's Boots Cowboy boot Man, and I've been wearing to Covis for years. They're the most comfortable boot I've ever put on. Good boots for good times. J D. Hewittt of the History Underground YouTube channel has been dropping some serious knowledge on us. In the last two episodes, he's mentioned some of his direct descendants who fought for the Union and some more distant who fought for the Confederates. And he's gonna ask me a question that I ashamedly wasn't ready for. 00:02:37 Speaker 1: I mentioned my ancestor, do you know what? Do you have any ancestors in the Civil War. 00:02:42 Speaker 2: I'm ashamed to say I know little about it. I know that we had people, so the short answers. No, I don't really have that's I mean, that's fine. Most most people, right, most people don't. I did a little research before I came out. One of the individuals who was in Company H of the twenty third Arkansas Infantry Regiment was a guy by the name of Thomas Nukeomb, who is your third great grandfather. 00:03:12 Speaker 3: So you wow, you just totally bushwhacked me. This is awesome. 00:03:20 Speaker 2: I mean I know Thomas nukelemb Yeah, I know that. I'm a seventh generation ar Kansas. 00:03:25 Speaker 1: Yeah, so Thomas Nukeomb is going to be part of the Second Battle of Corinth to try and retake that. 00:03:35 Speaker 3: How did you find this out? 00:03:36 Speaker 1: So here is can you believe this? 00:03:40 Speaker 3: Josh? 00:03:41 Speaker 2: Well, see, I know my ancestry back Gary Lewin Oscar Robert Thomas Thomas. Yeah, that's the seventh So the original Thomas that came to Arkansas was in the early eighteen thirties. This is his son, yet this is the second Thomas. 00:04:02 Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. 00:04:03 Speaker 1: So what you're holding there, that's a copy of his Confederate Military service record. So they had to keep a document that's from the Civil War. They had to keep a document of when they had roll call and you know, if they were president and all kinds of stuff like that. So we have a paper trail of where Thomas Newcomb was. 00:04:28 Speaker 3: I'm astonished. 00:04:29 Speaker 2: JD. 00:04:30 Speaker 1: Yeah, so it gets better. 00:04:32 Speaker 2: I'm taking aback when things highlight how recently the Civil War was. My grandfather used to take me to the Crumbling Oak home place of his grandfather, Robert Newcomb and the community of Bumblebee and Montgomery County in southwest Arkansas. The Thomas Newcomb who fought in the Civil War was Robert's father. Thomas would die in his sixties in eighteen ninety five, twenty four years before my grandfather would be born nineteen nineteen. So this man who impacted my life so much. My grandfather, Lewin Nukom, bird dog trainer and pastor, was within arm's reach of veterans of the Civil War, and many of them would live well into his lifetime. For instance, Hulk Collier lived until nineteen thirty six. But here's where we're at in this grandiose feet of attempting to dip a pail of water out of the ocean of the Civil War. I've talked about how intimidating it is to do this, but This war began in Earnest with the Confederate victory at the First Battle of bull Run or Manassas, which shattered the hopes of both sides that the conflict would be short. Over the next two years, the war expanded into a vast struggle across the eastern and western theaters. The Battle of Corinth took place in late April eighteen sixty two, when Union forces took the railroad junction at Corinth, Mississippi. The capture gave the Union control of one of the most important transportation hubs in the Confederacy. And the Second Battle of Corinth, where Thomas Nukembe was occurred in October of sixty two when Confederate forests tried to retake the town, but they lost, so like a band of thieves, the Confederates took to the river and headed south. 00:06:21 Speaker 1: Sorry to say that the Confederates aren't able to retake Corinth. They but Thomas was there. Thomas was there. He's one hundred percent part of that action. Yeah, they're trying to take Corinth from the northwest. They're going to be sent down to Port Hudson. So this is another one of those key points along the Mississippi River. Twenty third Arkansas infantry is going to have to guard this spot. So you got that, and then you've got Vicksburg, so again, just to keep everything kind of general. Vicksburg ends up falling in on July fourth of eighteen sixty three. Even though they had taken vicksb they still had Port Hudson that that had to be taken in order to get a complete control of the Mississippi River. These poor guys at Port Hudson were in about as awful of a shape as you can possibly imagine. 00:07:15 Speaker 3: They are completely surrounded. 00:07:17 Speaker 1: It's the longest siege of the Civil War, just a day longer than the siege at Vicksburg. They are reduced to eating rats. I'm sorry, they have to eat the mules. 00:07:28 Speaker 2: Uh. 00:07:29 Speaker 1: So they're they're in a bad spot. 00:07:33 Speaker 3: So he's there, he's at Port Hudson. 00:07:35 Speaker 1: He's at Port Hudson. 00:07:36 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:07:37 Speaker 1: Wow. Now they surrender and the guys in the twenty third Arkansas the officers go to a prisoner of war camp. The enlisted men are are just placed on parole, so they're they're allowed to go home as far as a paper trail with him specifically, that's that's where That's all that I could so. 00:08:01 Speaker 2: Thomas Nukemb would have been twenty four years old in eighteen sixty one, which would have been the perfect age for fighting. 00:08:10 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:08:10 Speaker 2: I mean, you think about ultimately, the sovereignty of God in terms of when you're born and kind of what the time period you're on this earth kind of leads you into in golly, a man in his early twenties in the eighteen sixties, he's probably going to war. 00:08:27 Speaker 1: Most likely he definitely did. 00:08:29 Speaker 2: I'm sitting here looking at images of the headstone of Thomas J. Nukem and his Confederate paperwork. I knew my family fought as most did down here, but I'm still kind of just blown away, just hovering here. I've got so many questions. Did he suffer at Port Hudson? Did he have to eat mule meat and rats? But really what I'm interested in is why did my ancestor with the last name just like mine, why did he fight? I honestly don't know if he owned slaves, but based upon where he lived in evidence of his financial situation, I'd say it's quite unlikely. But I think I need to understand more about Vicksburg and Port Hudson to put Thomas J. Newcomb's service in the Confederate War into context. By the summer of eighteen sixty three, Port Hudson and Vicksburg where the last major Confederate strongholds. 00:09:26 Speaker 3: On the Mississippi River. 00:09:27 Speaker 2: By this time, the Union had gained control of much of the river system, crippling Confederate mobility in the West, and these victories would help seal the war for the Union. Grant would say the fate of the Confederacy was sealed at Vicksburg. When Port Hudson, two hundred and forty miles south of Vicksburg, fell, Lincoln said, the father of waters again goes unvexed to the sea. The Confederacy was quote cut in twain, just like the Union's A A Conda Plan had scripted. 00:10:00 Speaker 3: That's right. 00:10:00 Speaker 2: They had a plan called the Ana Conda Plan, which was designed to surround the South via water along the Mississippi River, the Gulf Coast, and the Atlantic Coast and basically constricted choking out supplies and gradually moving into the heart of the South. These Union victories marked the turning point of the war, and this is where the paper trail of Thomas J. 00:10:25 Speaker 3: Neukom ends. 00:10:26 Speaker 2: But as I'm looking at his service papers, I noticed something peculiar. 00:10:32 Speaker 3: So can you tell me what these other papers are? 00:10:35 Speaker 1: And yeah, so here's the role of the prisoners of war. 00:10:38 Speaker 2: Look how they spelled their name. He spelled his name n wkh Am. 00:10:42 Speaker 3: Did he spell it that way? Yeah? 00:10:44 Speaker 1: Yeah, So you see that quite a bit. These guys were maybe like functionally literate. So maybe maybe he just couldn't spell his name that will you can? 00:10:55 Speaker 2: You can stop with the illiterate South, all right, all right n Ewkham. Yeah, we've never been good spellers, still aren't. 00:11:08 Speaker 3: So here's here's where he's Wow. 00:11:10 Speaker 2: He was captured at Port Hudson in July ninth, eighteen sixty three. 00:11:15 Speaker 1: Yeah, most of those guys are a decent portion of those guys were so weak and famished they couldn't even stand in order to be counted prisoner of war. So here's the must rule where he's mustered into service. So initially it's for a period of twelve months, and then later it gets. 00:11:36 Speaker 3: He was mustered in in Arkadelphia. 00:11:38 Speaker 1: Yep, yep, March sixth, eighteen sixty two. 00:11:41 Speaker 3: Our last name is spelled n. E. W. 00:11:44 Speaker 2: Comb, and it's spelled that way on Thomas's headstone, but on his Confederate paperwork he's spelled at n E Wkham. Thomas had just been married for a little over a year when he mustered into the Confederate see, and he married my great great great grandmother, Lydia Markham. But here JD is gonna make a wild connection. 00:12:10 Speaker 1: The twenty third Arkansas Infantry Regiment kind of ceases to exist at this point, but they're going to reform. 00:12:20 Speaker 3: Now. 00:12:20 Speaker 1: Let's say you're Thomas Newcomb and you've been paroled and you get sent back to Arkansas. Bumblebe, Arkansas, Bumblebee, Arkansas. Yeah, civil War's not over yet. What do you think he would have done? 00:12:34 Speaker 2: You tell me, brother, I'm on the edge of my seat. 00:12:37 Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know a lot of these guys, even though they had been paroled and weren't supposed to. Sometimes they change their name. Sometimes they jump back into the fight. The twenty third Arkansas Regiment is going to be reformed. They end up linking up back with Sterling Price, and in eighteen sixty four, the fall of eighteen sixty four, Sterling Price is going to launch an invasion into Missouri, they're gonna make a basically a loop that goes through They're trying to recruit new troops and they are wrecking stuff as they go, So they make this big circle. They're gonna go up, they're gonna hit the Missouri River. They're gonna go over to Kansas City. They're gonna find the Battle of Westport and they are going to have a big loss there, and then they're gonna start making their way back to Arkansas. If Thomas Newcombe was part of that group, which there's a likelihood that he is, we don't know for sure, but if he was your third great grandpa fought directly against my third great grandpa in the tenth Missouri Cavalry. 00:13:44 Speaker 2: Wow, yeah, Wow, that's incredible man. 00:13:47 Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, So all kinds of cool little personal connections and stuff like that once you start digging. 00:13:52 Speaker 2: A little and it's I'm always astonished at how little people know about their history, including me. 00:14:00 Speaker 1: I'm still learning all kinds of stuff a but money. 00:14:01 Speaker 2: Yeah, just in the last fifteen years have I started asking my dad questions? Who started asking people that knew more than him about our family history, and like he wouldn't have grown up even knowing that much about the new coms, just in my generation of we've been like, oh dang, we've been here since the eighteen thirties and there is this paper trail of where people came from. But I'm astonished how quickly we forget. But also how I mean this explains like the unintentional impact of the Civil War even on my life. Like I started off this series by talking about how as a kid grown up in Mina, Arkansas, there was this like the Civil War was a thing. 00:14:50 Speaker 3: Yeah, you know. 00:14:51 Speaker 2: It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized it and thought it was peculiar that this war one hundred and seventy years ago still people were talking about it. But three my point in that is that third great grandfather seems like a long ways away, but really wasn't that far. 00:15:09 Speaker 1: It's not that far. 00:15:11 Speaker 3: Time is so deceptive, but it. 00:15:13 Speaker 1: Just wasn't that long ago, no, And that helps us understand why people are still passionate about the war today. 00:15:22 Speaker 2: This whole series is my personal exploration into the Civil War, and one of the most perplexing questions is what was the motivation of the people who fought It's actually one of the most important questions and JD's gonna address it right here. 00:15:41 Speaker 1: So again going back to my original analogy of looking at history from thirty thousand feet and looking at it on the ground from thirty thousand feet, this is a conflict that comes about because of the institution of slavery. It's not a war of abolition in the beginning. Now the warreams are going to change as things progress. But when you get down on the ground. A common objection that I hear when people say that it wasn't about slavery. You know, my ancestor didn't own slaves. Okay, so I have an ancestor, my three time great grandfather who was in the fifteenth Texas Cavalry. Have a photo of him, rough looking old dude. Is he is a rugged looking man. He didn't own slaves. Did he go to war to protect the institution of slavery? Probably not? And in ken Burns series on the Civil War, Shelby Foot recounts you know a story where a Union man is talking to a Confederate prisoner and he says, why are you fighting? And he says, because you're down here. So for the guy on the ground, that might be why he is fighting, but there's something that is bigger, that is going on in a larger context that that has put him into that place. On the same token, is it a war of abolition that the guy from you know, the farm in Iowa who signs up and is fighting with the Third Iowa Regiment is Is he fighting to free the slaves? Probably not. What he's fighting for is the union to keep the country together. So there it is possible for two things to be true at the same time. It's possible that from the founding of our country all the way up to the firing on Fort Sumter, which I'm sure we'll talk about later, that this country is wrestling over slavery. And it's also true that on an individual level, these guys have lots of different reasons why they are fighting in the Civil War. 00:17:53 Speaker 2: Some might view assigning any moderate or reasonable reason for a Confederate to fight as attempt to give shade to racist terrorist traders, but I. 00:18:05 Speaker 3: Don't think that's entirely fair. 00:18:07 Speaker 2: I'm just actually trying to understand them, which I have good reason to, and I'd be fine with admitting that my ancestors were evil people, and they may have been As a matter of fact, I know they weren't saints. But what I do know is that my grandfather Lewin accepted the forgiveness of Christ, and his life was radically transformed in the late nineteen forties after he attended a tent revival, and it forever shifted him in the generations of Newcomb's beyond him to this day. I've made many references to the book Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, and I'd like to read an excerpt highlighting the complexity of why people fought. 00:18:55 Speaker 3: Will start off. 00:18:56 Speaker 2: With the Union, and I quote from the book. Scholars who have examined thousands of letters and diaries written by Union soldiers found them expressing similar motives. Fighting to maintain the best government on earth was a common phrase. It was a great struggle for the Union Constitution in law, wrote a New Jersey soldier, quote, our glorious institutions are likely to be destroyed. 00:19:22 Speaker 3: We will be held responsible before. 00:19:24 Speaker 2: God if we don't do our part in helping to transmit this boon of civil and religious liberty down to succeeding generations. A Midwestern recruit enlisted as a duty I owe to my country and to my children to do what I can to preserve this government, as I shuddered to think what is ahead for them if this government should be overthrown. Americans of eighteen sixty one felt responsible to their forebears as well as to God and posterity. 00:19:53 Speaker 3: I know how greated that. 00:19:54 Speaker 2: We owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution, wrote a New England private to his wife on the eve of the first Battle of bull Run the Manassas quote, I am willing, perfectly willing to lay down all my joys in this life to help maintain this government and to pay that debt. That's what the guys from the Union were saying. Here's what some others said. And again I quote from the book. Jefferson Davis said repeatedly that the South was fighting for the same sacred right of self government that the revolutionary fathers had fought for. In his first message to Congress after the fall of Sumter, Davis proclaimed that the Confederacy would seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the states with which we were lately confederated. All we ask is to be let alone. Both sides believed they were fighting to preserve the heritage of Republican liberty. But Davis's last phrase, all we ask is to be let alone specified the most immediate tangible Confederate war aim defense against invasion, regarding the Union soldiers as vandals bent on plundering the South and liberating the slaves. Many Southerners literally believed they were fighting to defend home, hearth, wives, and sisters. Our men must prevail in combat or lose their property, country, freedom, everything, wrote a Southern diarist. On the other hand, the enemy, in yielding the contest, may retire into their own country and possess everything they enjoyed before the war. A young English immigrant to Arkansas enlisted in the army after he was swept off his feet by recruitment meeting. He later wrote that his Southern friends said they would welcome a bloody grave rather than survived to see the proud foe violating their altars and their hearths. Southern women brought irresistible pressure on men to enlist. Quote if every man did not hasten the battle, they vowed, they themselves would rush out and meet the Yankee vandals in a land where women were worshiped by the men. Such language made them war mad. A Virginian was avid to be in the front rank of the first brigade that marches against the invading foe, who now pollute the sacred soil of my beloved native state with their unholy tread. The Confederate soldier captured early in the war put it more simply. His tattered homespun uniform and even more homespun speech made it clear that he was not a member of the planner class. His captors asked why he, a non slaveholder, was fighting to uphold slavery. He replied, I'm fighting because you're down here. For this soldier, as for many other Southerners, the war was not about slavery. But without slavery, there would have been no black Republicans to threaten the South's way of life, no special Southern civilization to defend against Yankee invasion. This paradox plague Southern efforts to define their war aims. End of quote from the book Battle Cry of Freedom. I don't know why Thomas J. Nucom fought. If I had to guess, he'd probably fall into the category of this is my home, it's being invaded. And the cultural pressure to join the Confederacy was probably so strong he felt it his civic duty. But I'll never know, and I recognize that I'm giving him a generous benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was a slave owner. But the South has never been a monolith, and still today it's divided into two main groups, and it's really simplified. This is oversimplified. But the plantation belt is the most fertile, lowland regions with large scale ag that heavily relied on slavery. And then the highland South or the upcountry south of Appalachia and the Ozarks, where Yeoman's subsistence farmers lived, often with very low numbers of slaves in these regions. But most of the upcountry folks sided with the Confederacy, constituting the bulk of the Confederate soldiers, but were often upset, claiming that this was a rich man's war. 00:24:12 Speaker 3: By the end of the. 00:24:13 Speaker 2: War, over one hundred thousand Confederate soldiers would desert, and one officer observed that they were the poorest class of non slaveholders whose labor is indispensable to the daily support of their families. Many were upset by the unprecedented conscription or draft of the Confederacy. Men's families were starving, but they had to fight, many for a cause that they didn't believe in. A mother of three children whose husband was fighting wrote to Jefferson Davis in eighteen sixty two and said, if I and my little children suffer and die while their father is in service, I invoke God Almighty that our blood rest upon the South. Inflation in the South was exorbitant, and one newspaper said the whole South stinks with the luss of extortion. The North had it rough too, but their economy fared better and the war just wasn't being fought there. Wealthy Southerners were also legally able to hire a substitute to go to war for them, and those positions were paying as much as six thousand dollars, which was equivalent to a three years annual wage. And because of all this there was a rise of what they called upcountry unionism. This became significant, and we've said it before, but there was a secret society in the Ozarks that supplied eight thousand men to the unions. This also took place in the East Tennessee. In eighteen sixty five, a journalist defined upcountry Unionism as a hatred for all those who went into the rebellion. So these are Southerners who hated people that brought them into this. But this brings up another interesting group that we haven't addressed, and that's the one hundred and thirty thousand blacks that fought for the Union, which was ten percent of the Union Army. In eighteen sixty two, before the Emancipation Proclamation of eighteen sixty three, Congress passed an act freeing slaves who had owners in the Confederate Army. Lincoln was concerned, though, that allowing them to enlist in the US military would entice the border states to secede, so he didn't let him join the army right off. But in sixty three, after the proclamation, they began to recruit blacks. 00:26:34 Speaker 3: To join the Union Army. 00:26:36 Speaker 2: These were the first blacks to serve in the US military since legislation in seventeen ninety two outlawed them from serving. Thousands of blacks served in the Revolutionary War, but in May of eighteen sixty three, the Bureau of Colored Troops was formed to help manage them. Some of these people were already living as freemen in the North. Some were runaway slaves, and they fought to solidify their future rights as full citizens. And I'm certain that their reasons were personal and varied, just like everyone else. Forty thousand African Americans would die in the Civil War. It's estimated that thirty thousand were lost to disease. I'd love to talk with the black person that knows their family history and had something to add to our conversation about the Civil War. I'm certain there are many who know their family history as slaves and then as free people. It's kind of a touchy subject, but I invite you to email us at bear Grease at the meadeater dot com. But this brings us to a crossroads and our bucket dip into the Civil War. I'd like to learn about a unique group of unlikely people who also fought, most of which who served in the Confederacy. You wouldn't have thought they'd have a dog in this fight. 00:27:57 Speaker 3: But JD. 00:27:58 Speaker 2: Hewett and I are going on field trip. It is a beautiful day in northwest Arkansas. I'm here with J. D. Hewittt Hey, how's it going. I thought you were talking to me, not to your microphone. Oh, I just got out of my car. I'm talking to the microphone. We're at the Faydeville National Cemetery. Yeah, and you told me something that was shocking to me that I did not know before about some of the men that are buried here. The Faydeville National Cemetery was established in eighteen sixty seven and it sits on fifteen acres that today holds over ten thousand graves. The first interred into the cemetery were from the Battle of pe Ridge, twenty miles north. I'm told it's the biggest Civil War battle west of the Mississippi. But by eighteen seventy one there were twelve hundred people buried here, most of them unidentified and their headstones simply marked as unknown soldier. Yeah. 00:29:05 Speaker 1: Yeah, So typically after a battle, what would happen is they would bury the dead in a field grave, and then they would come back later and exhume the grave and then move them to a more permanent location. So it's a lot of work sometimes. I mean, they don't have dog tags at this point, so sometimes they might have a letter that is tucked in their pocket that has their name on it. Okay, So that's how we know that this is William Quick or that this is Dan Ringbolt or something like that. Sometimes you'll see an unknown soldier and then it'll tell what state he was from or what regiment he was from. Maybe we can identify that by by the button. So, yeah, it's just kind of all over the map. 00:29:52 Speaker 2: But the guys that we're trying to find, we know exactly how they died and exactly who they were. 00:29:58 Speaker 3: Yeah, JD. 00:30:00 Speaker 2: He anxiously looks at a map on his phone, trying to get his bearings in this cemetery. It's quiet here, there's no one in sight. We're wandering across probably two acres of graves. We're looking for a specific name a Union soldier, which I'm interested in, but I'm really mainly interested in the guys who killed him. 00:30:23 Speaker 3: I see it. Here we go. Here's elisha Ham, elishah Ham, elishah Ham. 00:30:29 Speaker 1: Okay, So, Elishah Ham was a native of Illinois but joined up with an Iowa regiment. And this man right here, at the age of twenty, was at the Battle of Pea Ridge and is going to be one of the members of the third Iowa Regiment who is going to be scalped by one of the men from the Cherokee mounted rifles at the Battle of Pea Ridge. 00:31:00 Speaker 2: These guys that were in this battle were the own, to your knowledge, the only men scalped in the Civil. 00:31:11 Speaker 1: War at the hens of someone from one of the Indian regiments. To my knowledge, yes. 00:31:20 Speaker 2: There are eight Union soldiers buried here that were scalped by the Cherokees. I had no idea that this was here. It's less than fifteen miles from my house. I've got to learn more, and I know JD can tell me what's going on. Remember, we're still exploring the question of why people fought, and specifically why did these Native Americans get involved. The Civil War invokes a lot of different people onto the battlefield for a lot of different reasons, and one of the most interesting groups of people that entered the Civil War were Native Americans, who if it just they many of the Native tribes out of the southeast had been relocated into Oklahoma Territory in the eighteen thirties. On what we know is the Trail Tears and these Native American tribes, what we saw is that they sided with the Confederacy and why did they do this? And begin to tell me about this thing that's really interesting, Native Americans fighting for the Confederacy. 00:32:33 Speaker 1: The Civil War starts in April of eighteen sixty one. What a lot of people may not know is there had already been another Civil war that had been raging for over twenty five years before that, that was in the Indian Territory. So in eighteen sixty you have about one hundred thousand Native Americans in present day Oklahoma. Most of them are from what we're called the five Civilized Tribes. So this is going to be the Cherokee, the Chalktaw, the Chickasaw, the Creek, and the Seminole. These are individuals who had been relocated out to Oklahoma from areas like Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Florida. In the Indian Removal Act, we have a tendency to view our history as being very black and white. There's good guys, there's bad guys. There's oppressors, and there are the oppressed. History is way more, way more nuanced than that, though. So in eighteen thirty five, you have the US government who has passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorizes them to make treaties and agreements with the Native Americans of the Southeast. Andrew Jackson is president at this time. He's part of the wars against the Creek Indians. What people may not know is that it wasn't just US soldiers who were fighting against the Creek. There was another element of the Creek tribes that were fighting with him, and also the Cherokee. 00:34:32 Speaker 2: The Creek War had been all the way back in eighteen thirteen and eighteen fourteen, but the Cherokees had a major division ever since they left their native homelands in the eighteen thirties. The breaking up of these societies just made it really hard to keep people unified. What's interesting is one of the things that caused a lot of tensions. 00:34:54 Speaker 3: When they made it back to Oklahoma. 00:34:56 Speaker 1: A lot of people know about the trail Tears and this relocation of the people of what were called the Five Civilized Tribes from the Southeast all the way out to Oklahoma. What they may not realize is that it's not just Creek and Cherokee and Seminole and Choctaw and Chickasaw who were being moved with them are also their black slaves. So slavery is something that is deeply embedded in the culture of these Native American people. 00:35:30 Speaker 3: They have any sense of how many or how common it was. Yeah. 00:35:34 Speaker 1: So in eighteen sixty out in the Indian Territory again present day Oklahoma, the Cherokee had about twenty five hundred slaves in their population, African slaves. Yeah, yeah, the Choctaw was about twenty three hundred. Creek you're looking at about sixteen hundred. Chickasaw had a smaller number. They had about a thousand slaves in their population, and the Seminole didn't have. 00:35:57 Speaker 3: Stuft All helped. 00:35:58 Speaker 2: Me make sense of this because it it feels like that these people would have been these. 00:36:04 Speaker 3: They were moved into in territory. 00:36:06 Speaker 2: Yeah, so you would feel like they were these completely disenfranchised people, even economically separate in many ways from this nation that was growing up around them. I mean, is that true though, because if they if they had the money to have African slaves, they would have bought that, yeah, bought them. 00:36:26 Speaker 1: Yeah. So so it's we have cotton being one of the most profitable enterprises in the South during this period of time. 00:36:35 Speaker 3: So there's the Native Americans were growing cotton. Yeah. 00:36:39 Speaker 1: Uh so, so it's used in in agriculture and and things like that. A lot of people today when they think Native Americans, they think dances with wolves, the Cherokee and the chalk Taw and these tribes. It was very, very different that they had actually adopted kind of a lot of Western ways by this time. By this time, yeah, so even after the relocation out to the Indian Territory, like there are some of these Native Americans who are are wealthy and are living in, you know, very luxurious homes. Now the war is going to tear all of that apart. So after the Confederates secede from the Union, there is a very concerted effort on the part of the Confederacy to court these Native Americans into joining with them in this fight. If you look at the geography of where Oklahoma lies today, it kind of makes sense if the Union moves into the Indian Territory, well, now you have access to texts, you can flank Arkansas. So so they don't want that. They want to kind of maintain that as a buffer zone between Kansas and Texas. And and also for many of the Native Americans, they kind of have common cause with the Confederacy and in wanting to preserve the institution of slavery. Now, the Indian nation was kind of separate in a lot of ways because they were they were their their own thing. But Benjamin McCulloch is originally going to be sent to try and recruit some of these Native Americans from the five civilized tribes into the Confederacy. There's also going to be a guy named Albert Pike. When you look at him, he looks like a mountain man, but he's he's a lawyer. He's very, very intelligent, he speaks multiple languages. He had a lot of experience with them. 00:39:00 Speaker 2: Where they also disenfranchised with the US government and just felt like if the Confederacy became its own recognized nation, that they would be dealt with better by the Confederates than they would of the United States government. 00:39:16 Speaker 1: Some of them, the tribes are going to be split, right, I mean, they're going to be split, just like the United States is. So it's not like we're dealing with a monolith where they all think one thing or they all think the other. 00:39:29 Speaker 2: It's not known how many Native Americans fought for the Confederacy, but it's safe to say a minimum of five thousand, and maybe as many as ten thousand. A smaller number of Native Americans fought for the Union, whose assumed motivation was to preserve the Union so the US government would uphold their treaties. According to the National Museum of the American Indian the Smithsonian Institution, more Native people fought for the Confederacy than the Union, but the details are very hazy. You told me that the research that you had to do to find this information out was really hard to find, and that again, west of the Mississippi River, the Civil War starts to get less. Historians are less certain about exactly what happened, but even more so uncertain with the Native Americans involved. 00:40:26 Speaker 3: Am I right? 00:40:27 Speaker 2: You had to do a bunch of going back to source documentation and like so in this book right here that's as big as an Appalachian Family Bible, there is less than a paragraph about the Native American regiments in the Civil War. And you're telling me that there were thousands. I mean, we're talking about two regiments right now that were of Cherokee, just cherokeeokey. 00:40:52 Speaker 3: In the realm of a thousand each. 00:40:54 Speaker 2: So it's not like there were like twenty Cherokees that were fighting in this war. 00:41:00 Speaker 3: Were quite a pretty big involvement. 00:41:02 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a it's a significant presence of the that warrants more attention than than what they typically get. So yeah, you you look at trans Mississippi theater, it doesn't get a whole lot of it gets the least amount of attention of any theater in the war. And then you look at these Indian regiments, it's. 00:41:23 Speaker 3: They were there and they were significant. 00:41:26 Speaker 1: And they get even less attention than than the. 00:41:29 Speaker 2: Why is that just because the documentation of it is difficult. I mean it's like it's a different government. I mean it's yeah, they were nations that were not the Confederacy and not the United States. So maybe just like record keeping was different. Yeah, that's that's marginalized, just like people didn't care. People didn't hard to say. 00:41:51 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's hard to say. It's hard to say. 00:41:53 Speaker 2: I don't know, guys outfitted like a standard Confederate regiment. 00:42:00 Speaker 1: They were supposed to be. But what ends up happening is if you look at the Indian territory, I mean this is like the front tier for both the North and the South. These guys are way the heck out there and Initially they're promised, yeah, we'll send you weapons, We'll send you this, We'll we'll send you that. But as the war really starts cranking up, the demands of the war keep a lot of those supplies from reaching the these Native American regiments. 00:42:36 Speaker 2: A Cherokee man that rose to the top was Standwaddy, not stand sta n, but stan sta n d. He's going to be an interesting player in the scalping at p Ridge. He was born in eighteen oh six in Georgia. His mother was a full blood Cherokee and his father was of European descent. His birth name was Dagadga, which means he stands. His English name was simplified to stand. He would live a tumultuous life, but moved to Oklahoma in eighteen thirty five. Wattie's name appears on the highly controversial Treaty of a Coda, which essentially ceded all Cherokee land east of Mississippi to the United States in exchange for five million dollars in land in Oklahoma. Once Watty narrowly escaped an assassination attempt from inside the tribe, only to later kill the man responsible for the plot in Arkansas, but he would be acquitted for the murder in a plea of self defense. Stand Wattie would be the only Native American elevated to the title of general in the Confederacy or the Union. 00:43:50 Speaker 3: So he was a general. 00:43:51 Speaker 2: And we know that elishah Ham was killed and scalped the Battle of Pea Ridge, and stand Wattie and another Cherokee guy are eating the Confederate Cherokees. 00:44:01 Speaker 3: There. 00:44:03 Speaker 2: JD is going to explain their involvement. 00:44:06 Speaker 1: The Battle of Pea Ridge is going to be their first major, major engagement. So, like I said, there at the beginning, these guys come rolling in and hit the third Iowa Infantry Regiment and then and then just kind of get after it. Now there are two different regiments and both of them blame each other for the scalping incident. So John Ross's party blames stand Waddy's. 00:44:38 Speaker 2: There was a consensus that they didn't feel like that was okay. 00:44:43 Speaker 3: I mean, I would have thought they would have been proud of that. 00:44:45 Speaker 1: Yeah, what ends up happening is like Albert Pike is horrified at what he sees. The Union when they get a hold of this story. This is propaganda gold for them because they're like, hey, look at what these Confederates are doing. They're they're bringing in these these these wild, untamed you know, savages, and they're they're scalping our men on on the battlefield, and they're killing the wounded and and everything like that. 00:45:18 Speaker 2: You know, it seems like it could be used as well in the other direction of just like fear. Wow, these guys are serious, these guys. 00:45:27 Speaker 3: Are bad to the bone. 00:45:29 Speaker 2: But but I guess it ended up being a negative for the Confederates. 00:45:33 Speaker 1: Yeah, propaganda, Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't go well for them. As a matter of fact, Samuel Curtis is going to send a message to Earl Van Dorn, who's commanding the Confederate army in that region, saying, hey, this is what happened. This is out this is out of bounds. Like this, this is not how, this is not how I get. 00:45:57 Speaker 2: For some reason, that's surprising to me that scalping someone. I mean, I'm not saying I'm pro scalping, but it's like, this is the Civil War. This is this there is like incredible human atrocities happening at every level. 00:46:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so you can atomize them with grape shot from a cannon. But but scalping. 00:46:18 Speaker 2: Is and when we say scalping, we're these guys alive and they're cutting their their their their hair off. Or is it just like they're scalping a dead body. 00:46:28 Speaker 1: We don't know that for sure. That that I don't think we have a clear a clear answer on. Yeah, but the practice itself is seen as an act of savagery that has been placed on the battle. 00:46:41 Speaker 2: And it would have even had more sting to it in the eighteen sixties than it today. We hear about this practice and it's it's this sensational act of war that that's so far removed. We don't really it doesn't seem that consequent us like probably no one that we know is ever going to be scalped. Right back in eighteen sixty, this was like much closer to the surface the American frontier. Well there was still Indian wars yet to come in the west, Yeah, where you. 00:47:17 Speaker 3: Know there would be some scalping going on. 00:47:19 Speaker 2: Sure anyway, Yeah, I guess I'm just trying to understand that the psychology of this happening in the Civil War, like this is not supposed to be happening. We can kill each other, and brothers fight against brothers and people die of coleria. 00:47:36 Speaker 3: But don't scalp. 00:47:37 Speaker 1: Anybody, Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, no need, no need to be uncivilized in the way that we maim each other. 00:47:46 Speaker 2: Well, it also is this is also like one of the last wars that was in a way like a gentleman's war. And again the Civil War turned into something much different than that. But but at the beginning, I mean, you know, they're they're lining up in regiments there, they're you know, generals are communicating some with each other at different times. 00:48:12 Speaker 3: I don't know. 00:48:12 Speaker 2: It was just different than a modern war. And so for this to happen just off the chart, not. 00:48:19 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's it's definitely not something that you associate with the Civil War, Yeah for sure. 00:48:24 Speaker 3: So how where was this? 00:48:26 Speaker 2: So this happened in p Ridge, Arkansas, which is about thirty miles from where we sit. Yep. 00:48:32 Speaker 3: Where else were people scalped in the Civil War? 00:48:36 Speaker 1: There are going to be scalpings that occur elsewhere, but that's going to be up in Missouri. In the guerrilla war. There's going to be a guy by the name of Bloody Bill Anderson who is an absolute psychopath, savage of a man. That might be a conversation for a different time. But he does a lot of scalping. 00:48:51 Speaker 3: And is he a Native American or no, he's just he's. 00:48:55 Speaker 1: Just a straight up cycle path. Yeah. 00:48:58 Speaker 3: Yeah. So it only happens in this at Pea Ridge. 00:49:01 Speaker 1: It's to my knowledge, this is this is the one incident where it happens with the with the Native American regiments. 00:49:11 Speaker 2: Stand Waddy and his Confederate forces would be defeated at the Battle of p Ridge. But here's an interesting story involving him in the lone Civil War naval battle in Oklahoma. 00:49:23 Speaker 1: When you think of Oklahoma, you don't think of there being any naval operations. 00:49:29 Speaker 2: You fall a baby, Yeah, big lake, it wasn't in existence then man made reservoir. Yeah. 00:49:36 Speaker 1: So in in June of eighteen sixty four, there's there's going to be a steamboat called the j. R. Williams that is going to be making its way up the Arkansas River. 00:49:49 Speaker 3: I was gonna guess the Arkansas River. 00:49:51 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:49:51 Speaker 1: Yeah. They're taking supplies from from Fort Smith and going to Fort Gibson. Fort Gibson became like a refugee center for a lot of the the Indians in Indian territory, so they are bringing supplies up and Stand Watty and his men are going to be positioned on the south side of the river. Either there's a force of about twenty five or twenty six Union men who are armed and guarding this steamboat, and Watty's men opened up on them with cannon, so they're firing from the bank. The men from the steamship are firing back or the steamboat. The steamboat is going to end up running the ground on the north bank of the Arkansas River. They have a little bit of a shootout, and then these guys who are guarding the boat end up fleeing and trying to get to a camp to get reinforcements, and Stan Wattie's men are going to go in and raid the food and the weapons and everything off of here. So yeah, that's that's the naval battle, the lone and naval battle in Oklahoma history. 00:51:05 Speaker 3: Yeah right there. Wow. 00:51:10 Speaker 2: Uh. 00:51:10 Speaker 1: Probably probably the greatest victory that that Stand Waddy and and the Indian Brigade has is at the Second Battle of Cabin Creek. So again I mentioned that there's this north south route that that is connecting Kansas to Fort Gibson, and uh, waddy and and his men are are going to ambush this supply uh that that is is traveling to Fort Gibson. Uh, They're gonna end up with like a million dollars worth of you know, equipment and clothing and food and and things like that. What's kind of really interesting about stand watty and and something that that makes him, I don't know a little bit different is we typically look at the Civil War as ending at Appomatics Courthouse with the surrender of Roberty Lee. Stan Waddie is actually going to be the last Confederate general of the Civil War to surrender. 00:52:22 Speaker 2: Real. 00:52:23 Speaker 1: Yeah, He's going to hold out until June of eighteen sixty five. So yeah, a couple of months after you know, Roberty Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia have have wrapped it up. 00:52:33 Speaker 2: What was he thinking, Like, why would he do that? Does I mean did he think he stood a chance of like holding out for. 00:52:41 Speaker 3: His people? 00:52:45 Speaker 2: It just seems like if you're if your main guy, you know, Roberty Lee had surrendered, it would be like a sign this is probably over. 00:52:55 Speaker 1: Yeah. He is an exceptionally stubborn man, thin and yeah, is going to hold out until June. And something else that is kind of interesting is that, you know, we think of slavery ending in the United States with the Thirteenth Amendment in eighteen sixty five, legally it's going to persist in the Indian Territory all the way until the summer of eighteen sixty six. So that's that's actually the last holdout of slavery as well, is the Indian territories. 00:53:34 Speaker 3: Wow. 00:53:35 Speaker 2: So there were thousands of African slaves in Indian Territory. Yeah, owned by Native Americans, and that was the last holdout of slavery on this continent. 00:53:52 Speaker 3: Yeah, Yes, astonishing. 00:53:55 Speaker 1: I love I love digging into this and looking at it because it's so messy and and not clear cut because again, typically we look at things in very black and white terms, and in this victimizer and victim matrix or oppressor and oppressed. So people typically look at the Native Americans who were relocated out to present day Oklahoma and they say, Okay, federal government is the oppressor, the five civilized tribes are the oppressed. And then we'll also look and say, okay, slave owner is oppressor, slave is the oppressed. Well, what do you do when. 00:54:44 Speaker 3: You have. 00:54:48 Speaker 1: An oppressed people who are oppressing people? You know what category do they fall into? And I don't know if they fall into any category except for complex human being. 00:55:00 Speaker 2: Cherokee stand Waddie was the last Confederate general to surrender, months after Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederacy. That's wild and Indian Territory was the last holdout of slavery in North America. There were a minimum of five thousand slaves in Oklahoma prior to the Civil War. Some sources say ten thousand. And as we're exploring why people fought in the Civil War, I'm not trying to paint the picture that the only reason Native Americans fought was to preserve slavery. That wouldn't be true at all. The individual reasons were likely as varied as everyone else's. It's just interesting and surprising. Let's step back into the Faedeul National Cemetery where Elijah Hamm, this young man who has scalped is buried. I've got a closing thoughts. I continued to be amazed at the amount of history that is just right at your fingertips, Like ever known that right here? You know, basically ten miles from where I live. Are the soldiers buried that were the only ones scalped in the Civil War? I mean, just kind of obscure information, but but unique. 00:56:15 Speaker 1: Nonetheless, Yeah, all there's a there's a saying that all history is local. So it doesn't matter where you live, there's there's something, there's something interesting that happened close to where you live. Whether you're you know, in New York or Maine, or out in California or Oregon, or here in the in the South or in the Midwest. There there's there's always something to be explored and something to learn. 00:56:49 Speaker 2: I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Greece. I hope these conversations about the Civil War and you know that are fueled by my curiosity about it, have been informative to you. I can't thank JD. Hewett enough for his insight into all this. Thank you for listening. Leave us a review on iTunes or Spotify, Share this podcast with a friend, Email us at Bear Grease at the Mediator dot com, and thank you for listening to this feed. Thank you for taking our survey. It really helped out. Brent and Lake, thank you for listening to their podcast. Brent's This Country Life and Lake's Backwoods University. 00:57:30 Speaker 3: Hey I am Dead said on these. 00:57:33 Speaker 2: Longer historical series, I just think we learned so much. I learned so much. I love them, and there's more to come. Keep the wild places wild because that's where 00:57:45 Speaker 3: The bears live.