I've previously written on this blog about the feud that developed in the early 1800s between the Treaty Party and the Anti-Treaty Party factions of the Cherokee Nation over the tribe's removal from its ancestral homelands in the southeast United States to what is now Oklahoma. One of the chapters in my book Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma https://amzn.to/3Urovbn (scheduled for release on Monday) touches on the same subject. Specifically, the book chapter deals with the murders of Treaty Party leaders Elias Boudinot, Major Ridge, and his son John Ridge by members of the Anti-Treaty Party.
The murders, which took place in June of 1839, occurred in present-day Oklahoma, but they grew out of a feud that dated back several years to a time prior to removal of the Cherokees from the Southeast. When the federal government began pressing the Cherokees in the early 1800s to sign treaties ceding their lands in Georgia and other southeastern states in exchange for land west of the Mississippi, Boudinot and the Ridges were among the leaders who aligned with the Treaty Party, which favored removal. The Treaty Party was mainly composed of mixed-race Cherokees, who had intermarried with whites and largely adopted American and European culture. The much larger Anti-Treaty Party, led by tribal chief John Ross, was composed mainly of purebred Cherokees, who eschewed the ways of the white man and wanted to preserve tribal culture.
Even Boudinot and the Ridges had initially opposed removal. In fact, Major Ridge was among the tribal leaders who had adopted a resolution in 1829 calling for any member of the tribe who signed further treaties ceding Cherokee lands to be subject to the death penalty. However, he and other mixed-race members of the tribe had gradually come to see removal as the only practical step.
Because they cooperated with the federal government, members of the Treaty Party received support and transportation when they removed to Oklahoma in 1837. The Anti-Treaty Party, on the other hand, had to be rounded up and removed forcibly in the fall of 1838, an infamous trek that came to be known as the "Trail of Tears." The ordeal the purebred Cherokees underwent during the trip further embittered them against Treaty Party members.
After the Anti-Treaty Party arrived in their new land, they, the Treaty Party, and the Old Settlers (i.e. Cherokees who had come west years earlier), met to try to reach a consensus government, but the meeting ended in impasse, as the Treaty Party insisted on retaining the government they had already established in the new land.
After the meeting, held on June 21, 1839, broke up, some members of the Anti-Treaty Party met secretly and invoked the old "blood" law that Major Ridge himself had once espoused, calling for the deaths of Ridge, his son, and Elias Boudinot. A few of those present were appointed as executioners by drawing lots.
The killings were carried out the next day. John Ridge was killed at his home on Honey Creek in the northeast part of Indian Territory near present-day Southwest City, Missouri. His father, who had left for Arkansas earlier on the 22nd, was overtaken along the road and killed near the state line. Meanwhile, a different party of executioners killed Elias Boudinot on the same day near his home at Park Hill, a Cherokee settlement in the Tahlequah area.
In the aftermath of the slaughter, John Ross was accused of authorizing it, but the best evidence seems to suggest that the killings were carried out in secret without the tribal chief’s knowledge. Stand Watie, who was Boudinot’s brother, and other Treaty Party members swore revenge, and federal troops were summoned from Fort Gibson to help keep the peace for a brief time.
A tentative truce was fashioned, but the resentments left over from the feud between the Treaty Party and the Anti-Treaty Party continued for many years. During the Civil War, for instance, most former Treaty Party members sided with the Confederacy, while most Anti-Treaty Party members joined the Union forces, and both sides used the cover of war to discharge old grudges. Confederate general Stand Watie or troops under his command, for instance, are reported to have burned the John Ross home during the war.
The sketch above is a very condensed version of the events chronicled in my new book.
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