The Chickasaw Rancher

Neil R. Johnson

• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781786255990
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1961, Neil R. Johnson's The Chickasaw Rancher tells the story of Montford T. Johnson and the first white settlement of Oklahoma. Abandoned by his father after his mother's death and then left on his own following his grandmother's passing in 1868, Johnson became the owner of a piece of land in the northern part of the Chickasaw Nation in what is now Oklahoma.The Chickasaw Rancher follows Montford T. Johnson's family and friends for the next thirty-two years. Neil R. Johnson describes the work, the ranch parties, cattle rustling, gun fights, tornadoes, the run of 1889, the hard deaths of many along the way, and the rise, fall, and revival of the Chickasaw Nation.—Print Ed.

1—CHICKASAWS IN MISSISSIPPI

On July 4, 1837, a large cavalcade of Chickasaw Indians passed through the town of Memphis, Tennessee, and headed toward the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. Most of the Indians, men, women and children, were mounted on ponies, and followed by a train of wagons and pack horses carrying their household belongings. All of them were excited, and many of them sad, for they were about to set forth on a great pioneering expedition forced on them by the rapid settlement of white men on their homelands in Mississippi.

In the year 1820, there were two and a half million people living west of the Allegheny Mountains; by 1830 the number had increased another million. Most of these people were native Americans who had moved from the Atlantic seaboard, pushed, and were at last forced out by the large plantation owners. To most sections of the western country, these frontiersmen moved slowly, but along the Mississippi River travel was easy, and the river became the highway on which moved not only the honest men seeking new homes and lands, but also roving bands of adventurers ranging from schemers and tricksters to robbers and outlaws. Among the easy victims of these adventurers were the Indians living along the great river. Not understanding the white man’s notion of the rights of property, the Indians could easily be persuaded to sell or lease their lands and homes which they had never been conscious of owning. Claims and counter-claims were made; sometimes between the swindled Indians and the tricksters, sometimes between the Indians and innocent men who believed they had a right to the property they had bought from the tricksters.

In 1830 the frontiersmen, who had elected Andrew Jackson as President, began demanding the lands occupied by the Five Civilized tribes; that is, the Chickasaws, Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. In June of that year, Congress, on the recommendation of President Jackson, passed a law providing for the removal of the Indians east of the Mississippi River to lands in the West. The government assured the Indians that this new home was to remain exclusively Indian country. No doubt the government also had in mind the advantage of having the peaceful Five Civilized Tribes as a buffer state between the settled white communities and the wild tribes of the plains. The first move was to find a suitable place west of the Mississippi in which to settle the Indians. Captain Bonneville was sent out in September, 1830, from Fort Gibson, located in the eastern part of what is now Oklahoma, to examine the territory adjacent to the Canadian River. Upon his return, Bonneville forwarded to Washington a report and map of the country he had inspected. This map included the headwaters of the Little River. Bonneville described the country through which he had passed as a barren waste. He did not find any game, any timber suitable for use, or any land fit for cultivation.

From the report, it is quite obvious that the Government thought that these lands would never be of use to white settlers, and that in giving them to the Indians, the Government was making a good bargain. Yet the Indians who came to this “barren waste” managed to survive and to develop the country; it happens that the western limit of Captain Bonneville’s travels is on the eastern line of what thirty years later was to become the range of Montford T. Johnson.

The white settlers continued to overrun the Chickasaw lands in Mississippi. Tension was reaching the breaking point in 1833, and President Jackson asked twenty of the Principal Chiefs to come to Washington that he might explain his plan to them. He told them that the white men would continue to encroach upon their country. He said: “Laws will be passed and enforced by white men that will be unsuitable for you, and that you will not understand. You will be unhappy and finally overwhelmed. Cross the Mississippi River and enter into a new country. As chief representative of the white man’s Government, the great United States of America, I pledge to you that this new country shall be yours and your children’s as long as the grass shall grow and the water shall run. Upon this solemn pledge, I ask you to give up your homes, cross the great river, and take up your homes in the West.” Persuaded by President Jackson, the Chickasaws entered into a treaty with the Government. This treaty was made as between independent peoples, for the United States has, from earliest times, treated each Indian tribe within the borders of their respective nations as distinct communities over which the United States exercised control and guardianship. Boundary lines between states and Indian nations were designated and established, and agreements were made with as much care and precision as between the United States and a foreign country.

In spite of the treaty made in 1834, it was three years before the Chickasaws could bring themselves to leave their homes and begin the journey to the new country. To understand this reluctance it is necessary to review briefly the history of the Chickasaws before they crossed the great river.

When De Soto made his memorable journey up the Mississippi in 1540, he found Chickasaw Indians living on lands east of the river in the northern part of what is now the state of Mississippi. They were living in well-built log cabins, constructed of poles or rails placed upright in the ground. These poles were plastered over with a mortar made of clay and grass mixed with water. The roofs of the cabins were also made of poles which extended from the walls to a short ridge pole. A thick layer of mortar was spread over these poles, making the roof thoroughly waterproof. The only opening was a door, covered with skins. During the warm months, the Indians did not sleep in their cabins, but pitched camps under trees or under made arbors.

The cooking was done in the open or under an arbor. After the fire was started, ends of large logs placed like spokes in a wheel were thrust to the edge of the fire. To keep the fire going, the logs were shoved toward the central point as the ends burned. At this time, the Chickasaws did not have tables or chairs; when they gathered to eat, they sat tailor fashion on the ground or on a skin spread out there, or perched on the ends of the logs away from the fire. The cooking utensils consisted chiefly of a wooden mortar and pestle, with which they pounded and broke their corn into meal. The chaff from the corn was blown away by the wind as they poured the meal from the mortar into a tightly woven basket. They had in addition a few pots and bowls, which were fashioned out of clay and baked.

Although the Chickasaws held their lands in common, each cabin had a small garden patch where each spring they planted beans, peas, squash, corn, maize, and some other varieties of vegetables. Later in the spring sweet potatoes were set out. In the fall, these crops were harvested and stored. The sweet potatoes were an important staple food. After being sorted, they were placed in a heap near the house and then covered with corn stalks and dry grass. A box-like opening was made with brush, so that the potatoes could be reached as needed. A coating of earth and mud was spread over the mound to keep out the air.

The Chickasaws were a proud and haughty tribe. The women and children, aided at times by the old men, did most of the work around the cabins and gardens. The younger men did the hunting, fishing, and fighting. When De Soto asked some of the young Chickasaws to act as porters for him, the warriors felt themselves insulted. This suggestion that they do manual labor, and other misunderstandings, induced the Chickasaw warriors to attack De Soto’s camp. In these raids, the Chickasaws stampeded his hogs, which he had brought along for food. These hogs, which were never recovered, ran wild, multiplied, and fattened on the mast in the forest. Later the Chickasaws domesticated some of these hogs and began the business of hog raising.

As early as 1736, English visitors to the Chickasaw country reported many sleek cattle and horses grazing in their beautiful and fertile valleys. Major Rogers, on a tour of their domain in 1758, noted among other things the remarkable beauty of the Chickasaw women. He described them as tall and handsome, very attractive, with sunny dispositions; they were very friendly, yet virtuous as well. The character of the women accounts, no doubt, for the fact that four times as many whites intermarried with die Chickasaws as they did with any of the other five civilized tribes.

Speculation in lands lying west of the Appalachians began as early as 1800. These lands were sold on credit and, for those times, at what was considered a very high price. After the panic of 1819, the credit system was abolished. A flat price of one dollar and a quarter an acre was agreed upon. Compromises were made with the defaulters, and they were given title to as much land as they could pay cash for. The remainder of their contracted acreage was repossessed and resold. At about the same time, the idea of free land for homesteaders developed, and free land was demanded as a right for men who would settle on it and improve it. Soon speculators and homesteaders were crowding out toward northern Mississippi, where the Chickasaws had had their homes for hundreds of years. And now the government asked them to give up their homeland, to leave their houses, their burial grounds, and the very forests and valleys, steeped in their traditions, and to find themselves a new land beyond the great river.

The treaty of 1834 recites that the Chickasaw Indians find themselves oppressed in their present situation by being made subject to the laws of the states in which they reside. Being ignorant of the language and laws of the white man, they cannot understand them, and therefore cannot obey them. Rather than submit to this great evil, they prefer to seek a new home in the West, where they may live and be governed by their own laws; and, believing that they can procure for themselves a home in a country suited to their wants and conditions, provided they have the means to contract and pay for the same, they have determined to sell their country and hunt a new home.

The Chickasaws agreed to cede to the United States all their lands east of the Mississippi, provided that they found a suitable country in the western area which they could purchase. A committee of Chickasaws made three trips to the Choctaw country in the Indian Territory, and then made a trade with the Choctaws for a part of their western country. The Choctaws had been led to believe that they could be the leaders in creating an Indian United States in the Indian Territory. Now they saw an opportunity to place the Chickasaws, whom they feared and respected as warriors, between themselves and the wild Plains Indians. On January 17, 1837, at Doaksville, near Fort Towson, Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory, the treaty between the Chickasaws and the Choctaws was made In part, it provided that the Chickasaws should have the privilege of forming a district within the limits of the Choctaw country, which would be held in common by the Chickasaws and the Choctaws. The Chickasaws were to have equal representation in their general council, and were to take an active part in the Choctaw government. The truth was, however, that the Chickasaw Nation was being absorbed by the Choctaws, except that each tribe reserved the sole right to their respective tribes to share in the residue funds which were left from the sale of each other’s lands.

The Chickasaws paid the Choctaws $530,000 for the district in Indian Territory bounded as follows: Beginning on the north bank of the Red River at the mouth of the island Bayou about ten miles below the mouth of False Washita, thence River, thence west along the main Canadian River to its source, if within the limits of the United States, or those limits, and thence due south to Red River to the point of beginning. This district includes about two-thirds of the lands located between the South Canadian and Red Rivers in the present state of Oklahoma. It was learned later that part of the territory originally described lay in Texas, at that time an independent republic, and therefore beyond the limits of the United States.

Among the government agents who assisted in making the treaty, and later in enrolling the Chickasaws for removal, was Charles N. Johnson. He was born in England, and came from a family which had long been connected with the theatre as actors and musicians. When he was nineteen, he and his brother visited America. Both of these young men had been trained as Shakespearean actors, and while they were in Philadelphia, Charles joined a small stock company which was to make a tour of the South. His brother returned to England and became a popular and successful London physician.

Charles family lost touch with him for several years. When they next heard from him, he had married a young Chickasaw girl and was running a small Indian trading post in Mississippi. This trading post was located near the banks of the Mississippi River and deep in the Chickasaw country. Here the Chickasaws gathered to trade, to loaf, and to visit. They discussed the plight of their tribe with the sympathetic young trader who had courted and married a beautiful, blue-eyed, half-breed Chickasaw girl, Rebekah Courtney. Her father was a Scotchman, and her mother, Sallie Tarntubby, was a full-blood Chickasaw, who later married a Chickasaw named Wolfe.

After the Chickasaws were enrolled, Charles Johnson sold his trading post and joined his adopted tribe in their migration to their new homes. He helped them as they gathered together their personal property, which included horses, grain, cattle, hogs, chickens, turkeys, negro slaves, and household utensils. At last they were ready, and after a last sad look around at their homes and burial grounds, they set out toward Memphis, where they and their heavily loaded horses and wagons could be ferried across the Mississippi.

The story goes that while camped on the bluffs overlooking the river, Rebekah and many of the other young men and women spent much of their time swimming back and forth across the Mississippi while the boats were being loaded. De Soto reports that all the Chickasaws could swim like ducks, and the accomplishment was handed down from one generation to another. After considerable time and difficulty, the crossing of the river was made. Soon the Indians and their belongings were drenched with almost incessant rains. Several heavily loaded horses, after crossing the river, were bogged down and lost; the swamps, lagoons, and marshes of Arkansas became impassable. The Chickasaws threatened to rebel and return to their Mississippi homes, which they had so reluctantly given up. In a long council, and after much debate, Charles Johnson convinced the Indians that they were going to a virgin country which was much better than the land they had left. He organized the men into small companies. They cut down saplings, and spreading these poles across the route, they built a corduroy road through the swamps, and with this footing, managed to get through. Because of Charles N. Johnson’s ingenuity in getting them through this boggy country the Chickasaws, in Indian fashion, gave him the name “Boggy,” which he used the rest of his life.

This particular band of Chickasaws settled around what was called Boggy Depot on Boggy Creek, in Indian Territory. The name given to Johnson had nothing to do with the naming of this place. Boggy Johnson did, however, build a home on Blue Creek, north of Tishomingo, and opened a small trading post at Fort Coffee.

Several other groups of Chickasaws were brought to the new country by agents employed for the purpose; many small groups came of their own accord and at their own expense. Sometimes the sick had to be carried on homemade litters. While they were passing through Arkansas, horse thieves and whiskey peddlers followed their trail. Many of the horses were stolen. The Chickasaws, like most Indians, got crazy drunk from drinking spirits, and this delayed and hindered the march. Soon after the Indians arrived at their new home, an epidemic of smallpox broke out, and about six hundred of them died; the rest of them were saved by vaccination. Those who survived did not have time to put out crops the first year, and it looked as if they might all die of starvation. In February a few half-starved hogs were driven into Boggy Depot and sold at the high price of twenty-five cents a pound. A short time afterwards food was brought in, and the Chickasaws managed to hold on. The more wealthy ones bought the improvements of the Choctaws and settled in the fertile valley of the Red River. Many had large numbers of slaves, and the following year began the raising of cotton. All told, the Chickasaws and Choctaws and their negro slaves in the Indian Territory numbered about fifteen thousand.

On Christmas Day in 1841, Rebekah Johnson gave birth to a girl whom her parents named Adelaide. Two years later a son, Montford T. Johnson, was born. When Montford was two years old his mother died of pneumonia. She was buried near the family home, and a small log house was placed over her grave to keep the varmints from digging it up.

After the loss of his wife, “Boggy” Johnson grew dissatisfied with Indian life and prepared to take his children back East with him. Rebekah’s mother, Sallie (Tarntubby) Wolfe refused to let them go. Among the Chickasaws it was a common practice to take into their homes motherless children and bring them up as their own children. Leaving Adelaide and Montford in the care of their grandmother, “Boggy” Johnson returned to the East. Montford helped his grandmother take care of a few milk cows, chickens, ponies, hogs, and turkeys. In looking after this stock, Montford got his early training as a stockman, for all the land was held in common, and all of the stock ran on the open range. As he grew older, Montford became a great hunter and fisherman, and in this way helped supply the family with food. Most of his hunting was done with a bow and arrow, the common weapon used by Indian boys of his age.

Living as a Chickasaw boy, Montford developed the character of his mother’s and grandmother’s people rather than the pompousness of his Shakespearean actor father. He was taught strict obedience, but was never whipped. Spending many hours alone while he herded his mother’s stock, he grew into a serenity of mind and temper that enabled him to face disappointment without fretting, and to accept misfortune as he did wind and rain, the result of forces beyond his control.

By the time Montford had come to school age, a number of things were happening to the Chickasaws. In the treaty made with the Five Civilized Tribes, the government had agreed to protect them from the wild Indians. Up to 1850, the government had done nothing to provide this protection, but now that white men were making for California during the gold rush, something had to be done. The route of the prospectors lay through the Chickasaw country and into the Plains Indian territory beyond. In 1850, Captain R. B. Marcy was sent out to establish a camp and stockade. His first site was on the Canadian River near the present town of Johnsonville; this camp he named Camp Arbuckle. During the first winter in the camp, many of the soldiers were sick, and the captain decided to hunt a new location. In 1851 the detachment moved south of the Washita River and finally located near a spring at the headwaters of a stream emptying into Wild Horse Creek. Here a permanent fort was established, near what is now the town of Davis, Oklahoma, and named Fort Arbuckle.

During these years, the Chickasaws were becoming more and more dissatisfied with the treaty of 1837 made between themselves and the Choctaws, since they found themselves outnumbered, and with very little voice in their own government. As a consequence, a new treaty was prepared in 1855, granting the Chickasaws the right to set up their own form of government. Soon afterward, the Chickasaws drafted a new constitution which was signed and ratified on August 30, 1856. This constitution was republican in form, contained a bill of rights, and guaranteed trial by jury. The chief executive was called the governor, was elected by the popular vote for a term of two years, and eligible to hold office only four years out of any six. The legislature was composed of two branches, a senate and a house of representatives. There were tw...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• 1-CHICKASAWS IN MISSISSIPPI
• 2-TREATY OF 1866
• 3-WILD INDIAN RAIDS
• 4-JACK BROWN HIS FIRST PARTNER
• 5-WALNUT CREEK RANCH TRIP
• 6-CHICKASAW RENTER
• 7-CHARLEY CAMPBELL BECOMES PARTNER
• 8-BOGGY JOHNSON RETURNS
• 9-LAW AND ORDER
• 10-TEXAS TRAIL HERDS
• 11-COUNCIL GROVE RANCH ABANDONED
• 12-SCHOOL IN NEW YORK
• 13-SNOW STORM
• 14-PURCELL TOWNSITE
• 15-OKLAHOMA RUN
• 16-WICHITA INDIAN LEASE
• 17-HALF MOON RANCH
• EPILOGUE