80 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 137 



would doubtless have taken place nonetheless, but it would have been 

 consummated in a manner satisfactory to both parties and creditable 

 to all concerned in it. Particularly inexcusable is the callous indiffer- 

 ence of the American chief executive, Andrew Jackson, to the suffer- 

 ings of the Cherokee to whom he was more than half indebted for his 

 brilliant victory over the Creeks at the Horseshoe Bend. Having ob- 

 tained the signatures of a small number of unrepresentative Indians 

 to a treaty of removal repugnant to nineteen-twentieths of the tribe, 

 he insisted on its legality, and it was enforced with unspeakable brutal- 

 ity. During the removal of all of the five nations, the sympathy of 

 the Chief Executive with white squatters, no matter of what character, 

 is the most patent fact connected with it. 



Intense sufferings and heavy losses were endured by all of the tribes 

 but particularly by the Creeks and Cherokee, disturbances in the case 

 of the Creeks reaching almost the proportions of a war. Upon the 

 whole, however, the removal was accompanied by singularly little 

 disturbance and surprisingly few casualties among the whites, consid- 

 ering the provocation, until it became the turn of the Seminole, of whose 

 lands at that time there was so little need that this attempt to anticipate 

 events must be regarded as a major blunder. This Seminole War lasted 

 from 1835 to 1842, and cost the lives of nearly 1,500 American soldiers 

 and 20 million dollars in money. The Indians were, however, gradually 

 hunted down and the survivors shipped to Oklahoma, though with 

 heavy losses of life in transit, until, at the conclusion of hostilities, all 

 but about 500 had been disposed of. The bad faith displayed toward 

 the Indians on many occasions, particularly by General Jesup in the 

 notorious case of Osceola, rather subtracted from than added to Ameri- 

 can military glory, and the end came at last rather through the applica- 

 tion of a milder policy than through military power. (Foreman, 1932, 

 1934; Milling, 1940.) 



But the period of removal passed at last, and all of the Indians of 

 the old Southeast except perhaps 1,500 Cherokee, 500 Seminole, 

 2,000-3,000 Choctaw, and some mixed-blood groups mainly in Virginia 

 and the Carolinas, were gone. A few bands of Seminole, Koasati, Ala- 

 bama, Biloxi, Pascagoula, and Choctaw settled in Louisiana and eastern 

 Texas before proceeding to their ultimate destination, and there are 

 Koasati still in Louisiana, and Alabama in Texas. The rest of the 

 Indian population formerly resident in the area which is the subject 

 of this study was collected in the eastern part of what was then known 

 as Indian Territory and since 1907 has been the State of Oklahoma. 

 Here they at first established little semiautonomous states under the 

 patronage of the general government which were gradually extin- 

 guished, the individuals under each becoming citizens of Oklahoma 

 and of the United States. The fragments scattered through the rest 



