Stand Watie

Not long ago, I ran across a short article in the September 14, 1871 Neosho Times about the death of Stand Watie that had occured a few days before. (Yes, I spend a lot of time perusing old newspapers.) Watie, as anyone who has studied the Civil War in the Trans Mississippi knows, was a Confederate general during the war, perhaps most famous for the two battles of Cabin Creek near the spot where the Fort Scott to Fort Gibson road crossed the creek a couple of miles north of present-day Pensacola, Oklahoma, not far from the Craig-Mayes county line. The first battle, in the summer of 1863, was a Federal victory, but Watie got a measure of revenge a little over a year later when he whipped the Yankees at the Second Battle of Cabin Creek.
In the years leading up to the war, Watie was the leader of the mixed-race Cherokees, while John Ross, chief of the tribe, was the leader of the purebreds. This is quite ironic, though, since Watie was seven-eighths Cherokee while Ross was a Scotsman with only one-eighth Cherokee blood. The mixed-bloods, who had a long history of interaction with whites, had mostly favored the treaty by which the tribe was removed from the Southeast, while the full-blood Cherokees largely opposed it. The split led to a bitter feud between the two factions that resulted in the deaths of Watie's brother, uncle, and others and that continued clear up through the Civil War. There's a lot more to the story, but that's the very short version.
Stand Watie is buried at the Ridge cemetery just west of Southwest City, Missouri, a mile or so inside Oklahoma.