General Stand Watie’s Confederate Indians

Book excerpt: This is the story of Stand Watie, the only Indian to attain the rank of general in the Confederate Army. An aristocratic, prosperous slaveholding planter and leader of the Cherokee mixed bloods, Watie was recruited in Indian Territory by Albert Pike to fight the Union forces on the western front. He organized the First Cherokee Rifles on July 29, 1861, and was commissioned a colonel. In 1864, after battling at Wilson’s Creek and Pea Ridge, he became brigadier general. Watie was the last Confederate general to lay down his arms in surrender, two months after Appomattox. “Frank Cunningham tells with all its gusto, hard riding, triumph, and heartbreak, the story of Stand Watie’s Cherokee Brigade that fought mightily in Missouri, Arkansas, and the present Oklahoma, under Generals Sterling Price, Thomas C. Hindman, Kirby Smith, and other commanders of the Trans-Mississippi Department, and when no superior officer was available, then pell mell and uncompromisingly on its own.”—North Carolina Historical Review “A graphic and authentic account of General Stand Watie and his Indian troops....[It] fills a long-neglected gap in the Civil War annals.”—Civil War History