Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

In 1841 U.S. government authorities sent Major Ethan Allen Hitchcock to Indian Territory to investigate numerous charges of fraud and profiteering by various contractors dealing with the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Indians, who had been removed from the South during the last decade. Hitchcock's report, filed after four months of travel, exposed such a high level of graft and corruption that his investigation was suppressed and never brought to the attention of Congress.

Hitchcock kept nine personal diaries of his travels and observations, however, and they reveal much historic and ethnographic information on Indian life in Indian Territory. He observes how the Indians were adjusting alter removal and includes many details on their customs, beliefs, culture, religion, ceremonies, amusements, industry, tribal councils, and government. To aid the modern reader, editor Grant Foreman provides an introduction and annotations, and Michael D. Green, in his foreword, explains the politics behind Hitchcock's mission to Indian Territory and his accomplishments in advancing ethnographic knowledge.

Additional Editors Harry Campbell And James W. Moffitt. Contents Include Governor Robert Maxwell Harris By John Bartlett Meserve; Beginning Of Quaker Administration Of Indian Affairs In Oklahoma By Aubrey L. Steele; Southwestern Oil Boom Towns By Gerald Forbes; The Civil War In The Indian Territory 1861, Continued, By Dean Trickett; Indian International Fair By Ella Robinson; Negotiations Leading To The Chickasaw-Choctaw Agreement, January 17, 1837 Edited By Gaston Litton; Diary Of A Missionary To The Choctaws Edited By Anna Lewis.

Sequoyah is widely celebrated as an unlettered Cherokee Indian who, entirely from the resources of his own brilliant mind, endowed his whole tribe with learning-the only man in history to conceive and perfect in its entirety an alphabet or syllabary. Soon after 1800, Sequoyah began to realize the magic of writing. He and other Indians of the time, who occasionally saw samples of writing, called these mysterious pages the white man's "talking leaf." He experimented aimlessly at first, but gradually his conception took practical shape. It was slow and laborious work for an untutored Cherokee. Finally, after twelve years of labor and discouragement, he completed his syllabary, composed of eighty-five symbols, each representing a sound in the Cherokee language. The simplicity of the syllabary and its easy adaptability to the speech and thought of his people enabled them to master it in a few days. The Cherokee nation was made practically literate within a few months.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Indians j f me The Story of the American Southwest before 1830 BY GRANT FOREMAN New Haven Tale University Press LONDON . HUMPHEET MILIWD OXFOED TTNIVEESITT PEBSS 1930 Copyright 1930 by Yale University Press Printed in the United States of America No 11 To the Memory of My Father and Mother w PREFACE HEN early writers told of the West and Southwest, they were, with few exceptions, writing of a region east of the Mississippi River. As the country enlarged after the Mexican War and the discovery of gold, the West suddenly expanded to the Pacific, and the Southwest of that period was the region colored by the romantic atmosphere of Spain. The Northwest had its Lewis and Clark, its Astoria, and the Oregon Trail. Historians and novelists have reaped harvests from the fertile soil between Westport and the Pacific with narratives of the covered wagon, the pony express, and the cow-horse. The adventures of explor ers and military expeditions, the saga of white settle ment and pioneering in this boundless domain have been celebrated in volumes without number. For years scholars have been bringing into view thou sands of manuscripts from the opulent archives of Spain and Mexico, to contribute to the history of our Spanish domain and Southwest came to suggest the land of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, of the cliff dweller, the pueblo, and the Spanish mission. But there was another Southwest that has remained in eclipse. Between the Mississippi River and New Spain was a region little known. That part of the original Missouri Territory which afterward became Arkansas Territory, southern Missouri, and southern Kansas, has held for the historian only a fugitive interest. When the state waserected out of Arkansas Territory, the remain ing domain extending westward to the Spanish posses sions was held as an Indian country, and until modern times was not opened up for settlement by white people and thereby it missed much of the romance of white x Indians and Pioneers pioneering. Before the Civil War the Government made several abortive efforts to set up an Indian state here, where many indigenous and immigrant tribes were to be combined under a government in which they would all participate. This interesting experiment was never put into operation as the plans of the Government were in variably rejected by the Indian owners of the soil, though they were at the time engaged in building up an interesting civilization here. When the state of Oklahoma was admitted to the Un ion, with four times as many people as there were in the next largest state at the time of its admission, it began with a degree of literacy exceeding that of most pioneer states. Unlike other young states, her civilization was to a great extent the civilization of the aborigines. The In dian owners of this land had erected orderly constitu tional governments, and established schools patronized by them with a zeal unequaled by most frontier white settlements. These and other interesting characteristics peculiar to this region developed from an equally interesting early history that distinguished it from the surrounding territory. While most of the writers of books have passed it by in quest of the white mans adventures, this Ameri can Southwest was not wanting for chroniclers of early conditions and events. More than one hundred years ago army officers, Indian agents, factors, traders, and missionaries, matter-of-fact observers of this virgin country from the Mississippi to the Spanish possessions, in the discharge of routine duties began recording and forwarding their accounts to the East. These documents accumulated in the dust-covered files of official store rooms, appeared in early prints, or in more recent years drifted into the archives of historical societies...

In "Indian Justice," Grant Foreman presents John Howard Payne's first-hand account of the trial of Archilla Smith, a Cherokee charged with the murder of John MacIntosh in the fall of 1839. The Cherokee Supreme Court at Tahlequah (in present-day Oklahoma) found Smith guilty and sentenced him to die.

Occurring immediately after the Cherokee Removal to west of the Mississippi River, the trial involved people on both sides of the bitter factional controversies then raging in the Cherokee nation. Payne's account of this important Indian case first appeared in two installments in the "New York Journal of Commerce in 1841."

In his foreword to this new edition, Rennard Strickland places the case in historical and contemporary context, exploring the evolution of tribal court systems and Indian justice over the past century and a half.

This pioneering work is about the traders, trappers, and explorers in the vast area that would become Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, New Mexico, Kansas, and Colorado. Foreman describes the early explorations of the French and Spanish in the Louisiana Territory and often focuses on the junction of the Verdigris, Grand, and Arkansas rivers, known as the Three Forks, a trading and military center from which the conquest of a large part of the American Southwest was achieved.

Viewed in historical perspective are the business enterprises of A. P. Chouteau and others; treaties with the Indians and warfare between the Cherokees and Osage; massacres and disease epidemics; garrison life at Fort Gibson and the visits of writer Washington Irving and painter George Catlin; expeditions into the Southwest led by Colonel Henry Dodge, Captain Benjamin de Bonneville, and others; Sam Houston's sojourn in Indian country; and warfare on the Texas border.