BLACK BEAVER continued When the Rocky Mountain fur trade
declined in the 1840s, Black Beaver turned to guiding wagon trains westward. He also guided an expedition of the naturalist painter, John Audubon. During the Mexican War, in San Antonio, he raised a company of Dela- ware and Shawnee Indians, Black Beaver’s Spy Company, Indian, Texas Mounted Volunteers. As the captain of the company, he served un- der General William S. Harney’s command during the fighting. After the war, Black Bea- ver continued to serve the United States Army under contract as a scout. By the 1850s, Black Beaver and other
Delawares were employed by military of- ficials as well as by the various Indian agents at Fort Arbuckle and Fort Cobb as guides and interpreters. Black Beaver reportedly spoke English, French, Spanish and about eight dif- ferent Indian languages. He was also adept at Indian sign language. In 1858, he even served as a guide for the future Confederate Colonel Douglas Cooper, during Cooper’s stint as Fed- eral agent for the Chickasaws.
obligations and earlier military experi- ences. As in olden days, participation in war validated tribal leadership and status within one’s community. However, there appears to be one overriding reason. A universal motive in the North, South and Trans-Mississippi West was to maintain homeland. Indeed, all Native peoples who participated in these three regions hoped to save their communities from further land loss and removal. Unlike African American troops who were struggling against slavery, most Indians in the Civil War were fighting to be left alone from past intrusions and threats to themselves and their land bases. Mostly non-citizens of the United
States until 1924, American Indians felt much more patriotic to their own nations than to the Stars and Stripes or to the Stars and Bars. Faced with a precarious existence, they saw military involvement as their only chance, the last desperate hope of obtaining a more secure recogni- tion of their territories. – Laurence M. Hauptman
CIVIL WAR SERVICE
Black Beaver put this experience at the service of the Union early in the Civil War. In need of troops in the East and realizing that In- dian Territory was surrounded by secessionist states, federal officials began an evacuation of Indian Territory in the spring of 1861. At that time, Black Beaver, well into his 50s, was leading a respected and comfortable life on his farm near Fort Arbuckle. According to the local Indian agent, Black Beaver had the most substantial residence on the reservation, “a pretty good double log house, with two shed rooms in the rear, a porch in front and two fireplaces, and a field of forty-one-and-a-half acres enclosed with a good stake-and-rider fence,
thirty-six-and-a-half of which have
been cultivated.” He was gainfully employed as the interpreter for the Wichitas, working for Matthew Leeper, the Indian agent. On April 16, 1861, the Union, under the
command of Colonel William H. Emory, quickly abandoned Fort Washita and with- drew north. Emory had been under orders to withdraw troops in the event that Arkansas passed an act of secession. But fearing the reported advance of Confederate troops from Arkansas and Texas, Emory was forced to act without orders.
After concentrating his forces at Fort
Cobb, the colonel moved his troops against a Confederate advance guard of William W. Averell’s Texas Mounted Rifles. According to Emory, Black Beaver warned him of the ap- proaching Confederate column and “gave me the information by which I was enabled to capture the enemy’s advance guard, the first prisoners captured in the war.” The Delaware scout then guided Emory’s
forces and his Confederate prisoners north- west to Kansas. Black Beaver was the only Indian who “would consent to guide the col- umn.” The Union expedition was composed of the combined commands of Forts Ar- buckle, Cobb and Smith, the largest remain- ing concentration of federal troops in Indian Territory. It eventually arrived at Fort Leaven- worth on May 31. Despite this dangerous mis- sion through Confederate occupied territory, hundreds of miles across open prairie, the column arrived “without the loss of a man, horse, or wagon, although two men deserted on the journey.” Later in the Civil War, Black Beaver’s name
was evoked by Union officials seeking to win support from Tusaqueh, the Wichita chief, as well as other leaders in southern Indian Ter- ritory. Union agent E.H. Carruth invited the Wichita chief and his delegates to come to Kansas to meet with him: “Your friend Black Beaver will meet you here and we will drive the bad men who entered your company last spring. The Texans have killed the Wichitas; we will punish the Texans.” Throughout the war, both Confederate and Union dispatches indicate Black Beaver’s continuing role as a valuable Union scout. As a result of Black Beaver’s support of the
Union during the war, Confederate officials later seized his cattle, horses and crops and de- stroyed his farm. They also placed a contract on his head, making it impossible for him to return to the agency during the war. Until his death in 1880, Black Beaver attempted with- out success to secure compensation for his sizable loss, estimated at about $5,000, while in federal service as a scout. In the late 1880s,
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 41 E
IMAGE COURTESY NEW YORK STATE LIBRARY
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