An Unholy Union: Southern & Western History [PAGE PROOFS]

Introduction James F. Brooks The Journal of the Civil War Era, Volume 11, Number 1, March 2021, pp. 3-8 (Article) Published by The University of North Carolina Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2021.0001 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/783004 [ Access provided at 10 Sep 2021 17:04 GMT from University of Georgia ] james f. brooks, Guest Editor Introduction I first drove Colorado Highway 160 in March 1973, on a spring break trip from Boulder to Taos, New Mexico, in a 1963 Toyota Land Cruiser, powered by a war-surplus Chevy six that worked hard to reach fifty miles per hour. Four high school classmates and I planned to camp at a dilapidated guest ranch in the foothills above San Cristobal, New Mexico, courtesy of family friends Jenny and Craig Vincent. Jenny, a Vassar alum and classical musician–turned radical Left folksinger and her husband, Craig, the target of House Un-American Activities Commission investigations and smears, had once dreamed of hosting progressive political gatherings and intercultural youth programs at the ranch. We felt quite adult, hosted by a couple who had (purportedly) spied on the Los Alamos Nuclear Labs on behalf of the Communists . . . the Cold War world visiting our little corner of the West.1 Descending from the 9,380-foot La Veta Pass, we were some five miles down 160, near the junction of the Sangre de Cristo and Placer Creeks, when the canyon opened out into a slender valley of dried winter grasses and bright red willows. To our right, we passed a ghost town; three tumbledown houses, one hip-roofed ranch complex with sagging barn, and a schoolhouse, whose roof gaped where once the belfry stood. Forty-four years later, the much-decayed remains of that settlement would become surprisingly meaningful to me and help to inspire this special issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era. Hoping to update unpublished research fieldwork I’d undertaken in the late 1980s, I’d been visiting public historical sites in Las Animas, Huerfano, and Costilla Counties during the summer of 2017. At Francisco’s Fort, an adobe-walled trading post established by Virginian John M. Francisco in 1862 in today’s La Veta, Colorado, my partner and I chatted with the docent, who asked our origins. Mine, Colorado, lay unremarked, but Julia’s, Georgia, drew a query. “You here for the Georgia Colony?” 3 Figure 1 Russell, Colorado, 2017, courtesy of author. Well, it’s three years on, and I’m still sorting out the preludes and postludes to the story that question unleashed. A short version, however, involves the mass migration, across the winter and spring of 1869 and 1870, of some sixty-five families in 150 wagons from the Etowah River valley in north Georgia to Huerfano County, Colorado. Led by William Greenberry “Green” Russell and his partner, James “Cate” Paterson, the white exodus was triggered by the passage of the Georgia Reconstruction Act of December 1869. Many of the emigrants took up homestead claims, presumably swearing pro-Union sympathies, and loyalty oaths, on lands first awarded in the Mexican-era (1843) 4 million–acre Vigil and St. Vrain Grant. Their descendants remain today, proudly defining themselves as members of the colony. Some are known to have flown the Stars and Bars from their ATVs during the town’s Fourth of July parades.2 Historians of Colorado and mining will recognize Green Russell as the prospector who discovered and claimed the Russell Gulch gold placers in June 1859, triggering the Colorado Gold Rush. By 1860, he enjoyed the “richest man in Colorado” title. In 1862, however, he found himself imprisoned at Fort Union, New Mexico Territory, after attempting to assist the secessionist war effort by smuggling $20,000 in gold dust 4 j ou rnal of th e c iv i l wa r e ra , volum e 1 1, i s s u e 1 back to the Confederacy. The year 1863, however, saw him back on his Big Savannah Plantation in Dawson County, Georgia, where he formed “Captain Russell’s Company, Georgia Cavalry,” to track down deserters and terrorize Union sympathizers. His role as empresario for whites fleeing the Reconstruction South for southern Colorado bore few rewards, however— his own homestead, on the headwaters of Apache Creek below Greenhorn Mountain, returned well for several years, but the panic of 1873 and a brutal winter in 1876 took his credit, his haystack, his cattle, and finally, his land. He scrabbled by, panning for gold in the gravels beneath the flows of Sangre de Cristo and Placer Creeks. He soon set out with his Cherokee wife, Susan “Sukie” Willis, their four children, with “two wagons and four mules,” for the Cherokee Nation, where he’d hope to take up an allotment “by right of wife” and renew his ranching life. Yet within a week of their arrival, a malarial fever struck the family. Green died on August 24, 1877, in Briartown, Oklahoma, where a plaque beneath his tombstone, installed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, registers his service to the CSA.3 I’ve spent the last several years discovering this “Southern” history and trying to make sense of how it works in my “West” and how, in turn, Green Russell brought a “Western” presence to the history of my newly adopted “South.” This special issue is one result. In the autumn of 2017, while I held a Robert Penn Warren Center fellowship at Vanderbilt University, Anne Hyde, Ashley Riley Sousa, and I enjoyed a lunch at The Row on Lyle Avenue. Anticipating the soon-to-be-announced 2024 joint meeting of the Western History Association and Southern Historical Association in Kansas City, Anne saw in the Georgia Colony story an enticement that I guest-edit an issue of Western History Quarterly around a theme of flows between Southern and Western history. Anne then recruited Judy Giesberg, editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era, to the initiative, which Judy then passed to interim editor Stacey Smith. We crafted a call for papers, selected our finalists, hosted two workshop sessions at the WHA meeting in Las Vegas, even while Greg Downs and Kate Masur stepped into the journal’s editorship. We can now appreciate the outcomes. Welcome to the Unholy Union. ■ Andrew Shaler’s exploration of the Cherokee and Wyandot Companies offers a new cut on distinctions between “settled” Indians and “unsettled” overland emigrants inspired by the California gold finds. Departing from their recently assigned “homelands” in Indian Territory and Kansas, these overlanders offered non-Indians who joined their caravan expertise in gold prospecting as well as skill in westering through Indian Country. Shaler argues that “Cherokee and Wyandot emigrant companies effectively i n t r o du c t i o n 5 navigated a liminal space between the ‘indigenous’ and ‘settler,’ ‘Indian’ and ‘emigrant” and actively maintained complex relations with both communities.” Their dispossession and forced removal from homelands east of the Mississippi came strangely coupled with heightened perception of Cherokee and Wyandot progress toward civilization in the eyes of many white people. Their companies drew praise from new members, who also benefited from the gold prospecting and panning experience Cherokees could offer once they arrived in California. While some emigrant Indians remained in California—most prominent, John Rollin Ridge, grandson of Treaty Party leader Major Ridge—most returned after their sojourn. Among those were a contingent that camped on the banks of Cherry Creek in Colorado and noticed some flakes of float gold, news that would reach Green Russell through his Cherokee kinfolk. Max Flomen draws us into a world of movement as well, as the “renegades” produced by Indian dispossession and expanding slavery sought shelter and the faint promise of independence and freedom in the borderlands of Mexican Tejas, and later the Republic. Maroons, runaways, emigrant dispossessed Indians, renegades, and weapons smugglers all sought, for their particular ends, emancipation from the bonds of American imperialism, while aspiring planters looked to be in the vanguard of an expanding cotton kingdom. The weakness of Mexican control in the borderlands held promise for contending groups who, ironically, tended to reinforce each other’s strengths. The renegade factions flourished in the frailty of Mexican authority, while emigrant planters from the Old South found themselves welcomed by the same weak state for the role they played in frontier defense. As experiments in “alternative emancipations” mounted, Mexicans and Texicans maintained tactical alliances to quash those campaigns. Yet by 1836, of course, Texicans had become Anglo-Texans, and “committed to ‘whitening’ the Greater Southwest,” the failed annexation of New Mexico in 1841 aside. Rebellions and outbreaks of the enslaved held by Creek, Cherokee, and Texan planters in 1842 and 1845 made clear Mexico’s potential to destabilize even after surrendering territory, which would stimulate Texas’ annexation. In “War Waits,” Lance Blyth enters the debates around the relevancy of the Civil War to other, contemporaneous, conflicts in the West. Treating the complex array of violent exchanges among Native peoples, between Natives and New Mexicans, and between US Army forces and both Natives and New Mexicans, he offers a compelling argument that to forefront the causative role of the Civil War “tends to efface, if not erase, local, deep, and long histories in favor of the relatively recent US history, a phenomenon that can be seen in recent historiography of the Civil War in the West.” 6 j ou rnal of th e c iv i l wa r e ra , volum e 1 1 , i s s u e 1 Emphasizing the local over the national, he employs two cases, the Battle of Apache Pass in July 1862, and the Massacre at Fort Fauntleroy at Ojo de Oso in 1861, to make a granular, spirited case that for our meanings we attend to causal conditions in the canyons, mesas, sheep husbandry, and protagonists’ personal histories, well below the vantage of “the nation state.” We come away convinced that “the United States was not a full participant in the local borderland wars, . . . and US officials and soldiers in the Civil War era ultimately played a marginal role in the true wars of the Southwest.” Kit Carson, the local, laid pillage to Canyon de Chelly for reasons his commander, James Carleton, little understood. Angela Pulley Hudson chases a glancing reference to a deployment of western Indian Scouts in support the Freedmen’s Bureau in the postwar South to an unexpectedly fruitful exploration of “western” Indians in the Old Southwest—including the 1887–94 incarceration of Geronimo’s Chiricahua Apaches at Mount Vernon Barracks, Alabama. Her work not only reverses the predominant “westering” directionality of our narratives, by bringing Apaches eastward to Alabama, but also provides for discovery of a resident Indian people, the MOWA Choctaws, who became neighbors and informal kinsfolk to the Apaches. Hudson plays provocatively with the notion that Indian “removals” might also have trended eastward and that the “removals” of the 1830s in the Old Southwest were less complete than popularly imagined. Two “Native Souths” existed here, and neither what we might expect. As if anticipating my own Georgia Colony story, Hudson suggests “rather than tending to follow the westward path of US expansion, what if we follow people and stories where they lead, even if that lands us in unfamiliar historiographical waters?” Venturing that Apaches and Choctaws employed each other’s presence to enhance their own senses of indigeneity, she asks us to wonder if the imprisoned Apaches rescued their Muskogee cousins from becoming “vanishing Indians.” I thank Anne, Judy, Stacey, Greg, and Kate for their patience as we pulled the various strands of this unholy union into shape, and I hope you will find it has born healthy offspring, however discomforting its entangled lineage. notes 1. For Jenny and Craig Vincent and the San Cristobal Ranch, see Craig Smith, Sing My Whole Life Long: Jenny Vincent’s Life in Folk Music and Activism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); see also Jenny Vincent’s obituary by Glen Rosales, “New Mexico Folk Singer Dies at 103,” Albuquerque Journal, May 9, 2016. 2. There are many twists to this story, but for an emic, family, perspective, see Emma Dill Russell Spencer, Green Russell and Gold (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), i n t r o du c t i o n 7 184–90. For Green Russell’s service in the Reverend Dorsey’s Cherokee Roundup Georgia Militia Company, see “Cherokee Removal Forts in Northwest Georgia,” Trail of Tears Driving Tour (Dalton: Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia, 2005), 9; also Sarah H. Hill, “‘To Overawe the Indians and Give Confidence to the Whites’: Preparations for the Removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 95 (Winter 2011): 465–97. For Land Lotteries, see David M. Wishart, Jeff A. Ankrom, and Wendy H. Zorick, “Settling Cherokee Georgia: Land Grab, Gold Rush, or Both?” Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Economic History Congress, Helsinki, 2006, 1–41; and Sarah H. Hill, “All Roads Lead from Rome: Facing the History of Cherokee Expulsion, Southern Spaces, February 20, 2017, https://southern spaces.org/2017/all-roads-led-rome-facing-history-cherokee-expulsion. For white vigilantism against resident Cherokees and intergroup violence, see David Williams, The Georgia Gold Rush (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 34–35, 51, 89, 109. For context in the southern Colorado region, see James F. Brooks and Britt Stadig, Picketwire, an original art book in the permanent Rare Book collections of Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, accessioned March 2019, http://tellingstoriesstoriesthattell.com/james-f-brooks/. 3. Susan “Suki” Willis outlived Russell, dying in 1894 at the Big Savannah Plantation. See the voluminous Estate of W. Green Russell documents in the Probate Archives, Dawson County, Dawsonville, GA, for her own struggle to control the plantation business against a court-appointed guardian. The Cherokee lineage of the Willises and McClures begins with Irishman Indian trader Cornelius Daugherty’s marriage at Hightower (Rome) in the 1740s, to Ani’-Ga’tâge’wi, daughter of Moytoy Pigeon of Great Tellico (Tennessee), principal chief of Cherokees c. 1730s–1760s, and continues through another “Indian Countryman,” Silas Palmour, from whom Russell purchased Big Savannah in 1850. The Daughertys connected to Vann lineage by marriage as well. 8 j ou rnal of th e c iv i l wa r e ra , volum e 1 1 , i s s u e 1