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Russell Guerin
A Creole in Mississippi
2013-01-06 10:49:07
More on the Choctaws
....a sad tale
A county tract book, an 1880’s Indian school attendance roster, a photo with maybe a couple of Choctaws mixed in.... Do we not have more history of the people who lived on the lands we now call Hancock County, the lands that they once owned, not for just a little while, but for hundreds, maybe thousands of years?
Perhaps we have almost succeeded in consciously erasing the images from our collective conscience.
So little has been written about the Choctaws of Hancock County that I am prompted to begin gathering information to restructure what we know. In thinking about this, I am struck by the awareness that a great deal has been known and written about our prehistoric sites, but very little about the historic Choctaw. The science world knows of the Claiborne and Cedarland sites. We have had recent investigations of the mound near the Bay St. Louis bluff; a midden has been studied nearby. A large oak grove sat atop a cache of artifacts near Bayou Caddy, but is now destroyed. But these are all about prehistoric peoples.
How very little we know about those who lived - for a while - side by side with the first settlers of the Bay and Waveland, Pearlington and Gainesville.
The single most important person in the sad narrative of Indian removal was Andrew Jackson. Though known as the president of the common man, Jackson did not include Native Americans in that number. A complicated person of much merit and many faults, he had enough sympathy to rescue a Creek orphan child, later adopted by the general, off a battle field, but it must be considered that he was the commander who had led the slaughter of the child’s parents.
Even before he became president, Jackson was an impatient commissioner appointed to obtain land cessions from the Choctaws. For a concise description of the dynamics after his election in 1828, the following quote is offered from Charles Hudson’s The Southeastern Indians'.
“...Jackson appointed John Eaton, who shared his views on the Indians, to the post of secretary of war. Jackson’s bill requiring the Southeastern Indians to emigrate touched off one of the most bitter debates of the period. Proponents of the bill assured opponents that force would not be used.. ..In the end the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 28 in favor and 19 against. Debate was also held in the House, where the vote was 102 in favor and 97 against. Jackson signed the bill into law on June 30, 1830. It was now official. The southeastern Indians