The Cherokees from New Echota

Back in February, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Daughters of the Confederacy, which takes place Sunday, April 23 at 2 p. m. at the Resaca Confederate Cemetery. This is a great honor for me and a real enjoyment in researching some of the things I needed to know to make a speech. The Sons of Confederate Veterans unit in Calhoun is named the General Stand Watie Camp. The United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter in Calhoun is named the Harriet Gold Chapter. Learning about Stand Watie and Harriet Gold has been very interesting.

The capital of the Eastern Cherokee nation was a Cherokee town known as New Echota. The exact location of New Echota is not known, but it was in the vicinity of Calhoun or Resaca. There was a baby born in 1802 in New Echota whose name was Gallegina Uwatie. He was an intelligent young man and the Moravian Church sent him to a mission school in Connecticut to get an education. While he was in Connecticut, he fell in love with a local girl named Harriet Gold. He also had a mentor with the last name of Boudinot and although he was not adopted, he changed his name to Elias Boudinot to honor this man. Elias and Harriet Gold married and came back to New Echota where Elias set up a printing shop and began to print a newspaper named the Cherokee Phoenix for the Cherokees. It was printed in the Cherokee written language that had been developed by Sequoyah. Only the Cherokees knew how to read the written language.

Sequoyah was born in Tennessee near Fort Louden in the Cherokee town of Toskegee. The Cherokees had a spoken language, but had no written form of the language. When he was grown, he noticed the soldiers had written papers in the English language having their instructions on it. He spent 12 years studying the Cherokee language and came up with 84 syllables that made up every word in the Cherokee language. He developed a symbol for each syllable but he could not get an adult to try to learn the new written system. He taught it to his daughter. Before he finished the symbols he had moved to Alabama. He chose to travel to the Western Cherokee leaders in Arkansas and he explained his system to the leaders. They had no interest. He talked to them and while they watched, he wrote the words that he spoke. When he had finished, he called his daughter into the room and she read the words that Sequoyah had spoken to them. They could see the advantage of being able to send messages without trusting the rider to remember every instruction they had given. They gave Sequoyah a message which he wrote down to carry back to the Eastern Cherokees. Sequoyah came back to the leaders of the Eastern Cherokees and read the paper to the leaders. They agreed that this was important and began to teach every Cherokee to read the new writing. Sequoyah died before the war between the North and the South but he did serve in the Federal Army for two years as a young man.

Four years after Elias Boudinot was born to the Uwati family, another son was born and he was named Degataga Uwatie. Degataga translates as Standfirm. When he was old enough to make his own decisions, he chose to be called Stand Watie. When we first heard about Stand Watie, he was working for his brother in the printing shop in New Echota. He also wrote some of the copy that went into the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper. Harriet Gold Boudinot was sick just before her marriage. After ten years of marriage, she again became sick and died. About this time, the federal government began to talk about moving the Cherokee Nation to Oklahoma.

Principle Chief John Ross was determined not to allow this to happen but the Uwatie family saw that there was no need to fight it and Elias, Stand, an uncle and several others signed a treaty with the government to exchange their land in Georgia for land in Oklahoma. They were in Oklahoma and already established when the government forced all of the rest of the Eastern Cherokees to walk to Oklahoma. The experience was called “The Trail of Tears.” There were a few of the followers of Chief John Ross that were very unhappy with the men that had signed the early treaty. They attacked the earlier group when Stand Watie was not with them and they killed Elias Boudinot. His six children were sent back to their grandparents in Connecticut.

When the war between the North and the South began, Chief John Ross left Oklahoma and went north to be with the Union side of the war. Stand Watie became the Principle Chief over all of the Cherokees that stayed with the Confederate States of America. At the same time, Stand Watie organized an army group made up of Indians to fight for the Confederate States. His rank was raised rapidly until he became Brigadier General Stand Watie over all of the Confederate troops west of the Mississippi River. When the war was ending, General Stand Watie fought for several weeks after all of the rest of the Generals had surrendered. He was the last Confederate General to surrender.

When the war was over John Ross returned and the federal government recognized him as the Principle Chief of all of the Cherokee Indians. Stand Watie retired and returned to his farm in Oklahoma, where he stayed until he died at 64 years of age.