Ch. 16 An Okie's Racial Reckonings
Copyright 9 July 2022, Hershel
Parker
Ch. 16--The Glenn-Tucker Lawsuit: The Jarndyce vs Jarndyce of Indian Territory
My great-aunt Essie Rogers (1900-2001) lived
in three centuries but not very long in two of them. On her 90th
birthday I talked to her and her younger sister Ethel in Leflore County,
Oklahoma, about their not being on the Choctaw rolls. Essie thought the Choctaw
officials might have made her mother or grandmother travel too far away to register.
Ethel had no idea, but envied a neighbor with less less Choctaw blood than she
had. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had built her neighbor a little brick house
nicer than Ethel had ever lived in. Essie remembered her mother, Amanda Glenn
Rogers, and her grandmother, Nancy Ann Coker Glenn, and her great grandmother,
Amanda Jane Predella Tucker Coker, whom she described as a “Chockie” (Choctaw):
she smoked a clay pipe and pinched children hard. Seaborn, the Coker great grandfather,
was white although Uncle Joe and some of the other Coker men in early Arkansas
had children with Cherokee women. (Very early: a Coker household figures in Journal of a Tour into the Interior of
Missouri and Arkansas [London: Sir Richard Phillips, 1821.]) A Coker woman
is now a Cherokee official, a cousin of mine on her white side.
Amanda Glenn Rogers had Choctaw
ancestry two ways, from her father, John B. E. (Jack) Glenn, a six foot five
soldier in the Mexican War, a grandson of John Glenn and his wife, the half
Choctaw Abigail Rogers. The Mexican War Jack Glenn after the Civil War married
a new young cousin, Nancy Ann Coker, whose mother was a Tucker, child of Robert
Tucker and Elizabeth Glenn, daughter of old John Glenn and Abigail Rogers. Her
father, Seaborn, was killed in the war and hastily buried by women in sand by a
river. You know what happened to that
body. The young wife was one step further away from a Choctaw ancestor than
Jack.
In 1942, through the winter after Pearl
Harbor, we lived in a large tent in Pryor, Oklahoma, directly across from gates
to the DuPont Smokeless Gunpowder plant. H. Fletcher Brown was the smokeless
powder man in Delaware, where much later I held a chair endowed by H. Fletcher
Brown and lived by the tiny H. Fletcher Brown Park where I held Bill Clinton’s
hand as he promised me to be good if I voted for him. On 27 April 1942, I
remember, the sky turned a turgid green before a cyclone killed 70 or so people.
Then my father left to build warships in Portland, Oregon, and Mother and the
children came temporarily to Wister, Oklahoma, Essie’s home town, where the
kindest kinsman was John Glenn, son of the Mexican War man, brother of Amanda
Rogers, who had been dead since 1909. (Her married name of Rogers had nothing
we know of to do with Abigail’s ancestors.) Uncle Johnny was very dark and
extremely tall, like his father. (A 2nd cousin of his father’s, Sam
Glenn, had been a revered pioneer and storyteller in Kerrville, Texas, so tall
he shot down any street sign he bumped his head on.) Uncle Johnny dressed
totally in black and wore the only top hat (black) I ever saw in use. Doubtful
of my memory, I verified this with a Wister classmate, now dead. Regularly Johnny
walked down the distance of three blocks (they weren’t set off as blocks) or so
to bring little baskets of fresh spring vegetables. He was not my uncle. He was
not my father’s uncle either. He was the uncle of my grandmother, Essie’s
oldest sister. My grandmother, Rosa, was nursing my father when Amanda died, so
she nursed her baby sister, my great aunt Ethel also. The Glenns I knew were
all very dark and may have had other Indian blood I did not know about. Essie’s
younger sister Alice married Herbert King, who was at least half Choctaw, so
Bobby King, my father’s first cousin (although a few weeks younger than me) was
very dark, and short, but in his middle age looked perturbing like my father.
Everyone on my father’s side was aware
of being part Choctaw. They thought they were a little Cherokee, too, maybe
because some of their half-breed Cherokee cousins were “very dangerous men when
drinking,” according to William Monks’s 1907 History. They had no particular feelings about being part Choctaw,
not pride, not shame. It was just a fact of life. My father, after all, was
born in what was still Indian Territory. Everyone was aware of how dark or
light others were. One of my aunts, younger than my sister and oldest brother,
was always known as “Blanket.” I never knew her real name until I was grown.
She came out so dark they thought they might as well wrap her in a blanket and
drop her off at the reservation. This is Okie humor, you understand.
But why were my great-grandmother Amanda’s
descendants not on the Choctaw tribal rolls? It was not that some of us were only
one sixteenth part or even one thirty-second Choctaw, or one sixty-fourth or infinitesimal.
Look at the Caucasian faces of Choctaw tribal leaders now! I bore in mind
Essie’s speculations for a decade and a half before exploring further: I was
writing books on Herman Melville, still. In the meantime, I learned that Essie’s
father, John Rogers, the man I had seen on his deathbed just months after the War,
had been two years old in 1864, over the border in Arkansas, when Confederate
thugs hanged his father for his strong Union sympathies. Union feelings in the
South? Yes, just as in my chapter on Trap Hill, North Carolina. This I learned
from Internet Cousin David Damron (a Rogers) and a brilliant transcriber of Southern
Claims Commission documents, Karen Toellner. Imagine documents surviving about
an aged Okie’s great great grandfather’s being hanged in Arkansas and a
daughter’s cutting him down (still breathing for a while), the daughter being
David’s ancestor!
Essie said her father (born in 1862) was
red-headed and a full blooded Irishman. By Irishman, Southerners often meant an
ancestor who had come from Ireland. They did not know that the early immigrants
from Ireland were Scottish, descendants of people shipped there by James I and
later kings as the first line of defense against the natives, the way the royal
government in Charleston as late as 1773 gave new Scottish immigrants from
Ireland like my Copelands nice plats of land far to the west (Spartanburg!). The
new Scots from Ireland were their first line of defense against the Cherokees:
here’s free land for you: protect us with it if you can, it’s better than
rackrent Ireland. John Rogers in fact, DNA and Damron’s archival research
shows, was Scottish with German from his mother, a Cagle. When Damron learned
this it happened that I already had many files on the earlier North Carolina
Cagles, including several on the magnificent bastard Eben, the King of the
Moonshiners. In Moore County they were neighbors of my Richardsons. Essie
herself was red headed as a child. My Great Grandfather Rogers was silent when
I saw him on his deathbed, but on Essie’s 90th birthday I learned
from younger first cousins of my father that he used to tuck his head down
before meals and mumble. He was saying the Lord’s Prayer in Choctaw.
Essie’s mother was Amanda Precilla
Glenn Rogers (1866-1909), whose mother was Nancy Ann Coker Glenn (1848-1934)
and whose father was John B. E. Glenn--Jack Glenn--(1818-1876), the soldier whose
horse had died under him in the deserts of Mexico. (His brother George, who
served with him, was shorter, six foot four, Army records show.) One perhaps embellished
story is that toward the end of the Civil War young Nancy had survived a
bushwhacking in Arkansas on her way to take refuge with her Cousin Jack over in
southwest Missouri somewhere and when she got to him, on foot, he said he was a
widower so she could stay if she married him. I review a little here. Jack was
the grandson of John Glenn (1760?-1830s?) and Abigail Rogers Glenn (1760s?-1842?),
whose mother was a Choctaw. Nancy Ann Coker Glenn’s mother was Amanda Predilla
[sic] Tucker Coker (1832-1912). Her
father was Seaborn Coker (1827-1862). Nancy Ann Tucker Coker (1832-1912) was
the daughter of Robert Tucker and Elizabeth Glenn Tucker. The Tuckers were an
old Virginia family, kin to other old Virginia families. Elizabeth was a
daughter of Abigail Rogers Glenn, the half Choctaw. (I have at least four
different lines of possibly unrelated Rogers or Rodgers kinfolks, not omitting
George Rogers Clark.)
There’s a pamphlet written in 1892, In the Choctaw and Chickasaw Citizens Court
at South McAlester--Glenn-Tucker et al.--The Choctaw and Chickasaw
Nations--Plaintiff’s Abstract, Brief and Argument--T. N. Foster, Attorney for
Plaintiff. It begins with several pages of affidavits from Glenns and
Tuckers all claiming “Citizenship in the Choctaw Nation by virtue of descent
from Abigail Glenn (born Abigail Rogers), a half breed Choctaw woman who
married John Glenn, a white man.” Little is known of John Glenn except that our
DNA shows that he was a Renfrewshire Glenn, near Glasgow, as was our DNA cousin
the astronaut John Glenn, all of us perhaps descended from a rowdy fellow banished
from Glasgow to Philadelphia in the early 1700s. What we know of Abigail Rogers
comes mainly from the affidavits.
When I encountered the “Plaintiff’s
Abstract” online after 2002, I was just beginning to try to identify some of my
American ancestors. Here were dozens of attempts to tell family history,
written down in the 1890s or earlier (for affidavits from previous applications
for citizenship were included with new ones). All written down after the Civil
War, some of the affidavits of the plaintiffs go far back in the century, to
the 1830s or beyond. My reaction in reading the affidavits was joy at hearing a
large attempt by individuals and a group to put their family story on record,
some affidavits older, with special memories, some admitting areas of ignorance
or forgetting, but all the voices together creating a united if imperfect portrait.
This was riches for anyone envying family stories like those lucky Jim Webb
knew.
Out of all the affidavits, what most
awed me in the early 2000s was an 1886 affidavit from Frances Tucker about her
grandmother in Yalobusha County, Mississippi, in the late 1830s. Frances had
witnessed Abigail Rogers Glenn, then around 70, as she (my amazed italics) “started from the old nation with a yoke of
oxen and a wagon.” The old nation for Choctaws was Mississippi. Illiterate
in two languages, with no map and, surely, almost no money, she drove the team
up into Tennessee before crossing the Mississippi River on a ferry (likely at
Helena) and went from Arkansas into southwest Missouri before going down to Carroll
County, Arkansas, near Fort Smith, where she cared for one of her daughters and
where she died. This is my 4 times grandmother one way and my 5 times
grandmother the other way. In my career I have displayed vaulting ambition and intellectual
temerity which I thought was courage, and paid the price, so I have some idea
how to appreciate her wanting to see her children and starting from the old
Choctaw Nation with a yoke of oxen and a wagon. She outdoes another hero, the Revolutionary
veteran Uncle Daniel Moore at 78 saddling his horse in western North Carolina
in 1842 and riding off over the Blue Ridge Mountains to see a daughter in
Indiana and another in the flatlands of Illinois, and making it back home alive,
even with legs needing Gray’s Ointment--maybe what was left of the package he
bought in 1827 at his father Jesse Moore’s estate sale.
The affidavits told me nothing about
the voluminous history of the old Virginia family of Tuckers (who married into
interesting neighboring families), but they told almost all we know about Abigail
Rogers Glenn, John Glenn, and their next descendants, whose relations were
immensely complicated by the fact that (as B. O. Roop explained) five Tucker
brothers married five Glenn sisters, and a Tucker sister married a Glenn
brother. In fact, my GGGG Grandmother Elizabeth Glenn Tucker (1792-1865) first
married Wyatt Tucker then nine years after his death or disappearance married
his brother Robert (1791-1850), my GGGG Grandfather. How often did poor people
make long distance telephone calls in the 1930s or 1940s or 1950s? Here is evidence
of how families could lose touch. The best place to study that is in the
Revolutionary pensions so devotedly transcribed by Will Graves and Leon Harris.
Distance meant reduction or loss of contact: at least one of Wyatt Tucker and
Elizabeth’s children did not know that her mother had remarried and had other
children by Wyatt’s brother Robert. Yet in pursuing the case for recognition of
their Choctaw blood many of the kinfolks around Fort Smith stayed in touch, all
the easier since many of the grandchildren of John and Abigail were double
cousins. Repeatedly in the affidavits the family contributed bits of history
even while admitting, at times, ignorance of other points. They were not
colluding on one standard story.
My Great Great Great Grandmother,
Amanda Tucker Coker, testified that she had been told that her great
grandmother, Abigail’s mother, was a Choctaw woman. She went on to say that
Abigail’s father “was some kin to the Cherokees and a white man, I have heard.”
Remember that before 2002 or 2003 I still knew only two tiny anecdotes about
different great grandfathers, Parker and Bell. I quote her because I am so proud
to have words of this remote ancestor: “Abigail claimed that her mother was a
Choctaw. I reckon I am Choctaw and white. I was seventy years old in February.
My mother was Betsy Glenn. She was a child of Abigail Rogers and John Glenn.
She married Wyatt Tucker and the second time married Robert Tucker. I am a
child of that marriage. Uncle Joe Tucker is my cousin. My mother’s children
were Jonathan, James, Elizabeth, Dave, Joe Berry, Taylor, Margaret and Dolly. I
cannot tell the name of Abigail’s mother.” Some of the descendants had known
both John and Abigail in Mississippi, the Old Nation, where, some said, she had
been a citizen. One of the ones who remembered something no one or almost no
one else mentioned was Mary Wells Barnes, who said, “Abigail’s mother was a
full blood Choctaw woman named Starnes.” Many of the grandchildren lived in
Mississippi nearby but most of them left for the Indian Territory in the 1830s,
with the bulk of the tribe. Abigail stayed a while. We were never people for
going anywhere just because almost everyone else was going.
A big problem was knowing where
Arkansas stopped and the Indian Territory began. The boundary shifted for many
years, with the result that some of the Glenns and Tuckers settled in extreme
western Arkansas, on the Fort Smith side rather than the Choctaw Nation side.
Some of those crossed over when they learned what the current boundary was. At
83 Margaret Tucker, one of the granddaughters, was the daughter of Elizabeth
Glenn (my GGGG Grandmother) by her first husband, my Uncle Wyatt Tucker. She
and her closest family members identified as Indians. “We settled right on the
line; we though we were in the nation; there was talk that the line would be
run ten miles beyond us but it was not, and that left us right on the line.”
The biggest reason we never got on the
Choctaw rolls is that the dynasty of McCurtain brothers as Choctaw chiefs spanned
the time the Glenns and Tuckers were trying to claim their places on those
tribal rolls. Jackson Frazier McCurtain (1830-1885) was chief in 1880-1884.
Edmund (1842-1890) was chief 1884-1886. Then Green McCurtain (1848-1910) was
chief 1896-1900 and 1902-1906. All of them hated us for political reasons.
Jackson, the first of the McCurtain brothers who became Governors, hated us
during the Civil War because he was a fanatical follower of the Confederacy, and
hated us for two decades afterwards, during which he continued to be powerful
in the Choctaw Nation. The Dallas Morning News on 16 October 1902 printed
a picture of Green, newly elected Governor, and declared: “He was too young for
service in the Civil War, but came of a family of warriors. His two elder
brothers, Edmond and Jack McCurtain, served with distinction in the Confederate
army, and both in turn served as Governor or Principal Chief of the Choctaw
Nation.” (After he was out of office, Edmund “indulged freely in strong drink”
on a train then the next day suffocated while dressing. The Little Rock Arkansas Gazette on 5 November 1890 said
he had “killed several men” and [not “but”] was a man of integrity.) We have
two separate affidavits about Jackson
(Jack) McCurtain robbing us of all our animals and sacking our houses, starting
well before we were agitating to have tribal recognition.
To my surprise, the Tuckers and Glenns
seem all to have been Union sympathizers, and the McCurtains were Confederates
who carried their hostility over long after 1865. For them it was as if the
Cause would really have been Lost if one Union family stayed on in the Nation. A Tucker boy (last name Barnes) remembered seeing
Jackson McCurtain’s men kill one young man then seize his own young cousin
Jonathan Glenn (one of several with that name) and take him away, not to be
seen again. One Tucker cousin said accurately that Jackson was a “rabid rebel,”
but in 1903 and later younger-brother Green’s hatred was virulent still, more
so than ever because so many more claimants to being recognized as Choctaws were
alive, and recognizing any one of them would deplete Green’s pot of gold.
When Jack McCurtain in 1862 or 1863 or so saw one of us he felt
he was at war with enemies who ought to be annihilated. Fort Smith, a Confederate bastion, was taken
by Union forces at the start of September 1863. The 3rd Choctaw
Cavalry Regiment was organized during the fall of 1863 out of Jackson
McCurtain’s earlier 1st Choctaw Cavalry Battalion. Yet toward the end of 1863
Jackson McCurtain gave every sign of abandoning the Confederacy. The Lancaster
PA Express on 29 December 1863 was
clear: “The Chief of the Choctaws, and other rebel Indian leaders, have
abandoned their alliance with the Confederates, and have surrendered themselves
to General McNeil, at Fort Smith, in Arkansas, and desire to avail themselves
of the President’s Amnesty Proclamation. The tribe is highly civilized, and
their action will have great weight with the other tribes who at first went
over to the rebels, in bringing them back to their friendly relations with the
Government of the United States. The Choctaws are slaveholders, and they
purpose to emancipate their slaves in accordance with the requirements of the
Proclamation.”
That was clear enough. For months Jack
McCurtain tried to reassure everyone that he had resumed his “relations to the
General Government,” meaning the Union. The Pittsburgh, PA, Commercial on 12 March 1864 declared:
“The rebel General Moxy failed to induce the Choctaws to continue their
relations with the Confederate government. The convention will propose the old
terms of allegiance to the United States. Chief Jack McCurtain circulated over
four thousand copies of the President’s amnesty proclamation, which received
great favor.” Another report said he passed out 400 copies--either way, a
boldly staged effort at signaling his abandonment of the Confederacy.
That “Convention of Choctaws” sent
Lieutenant Perkins, of the 13th Kansas, to Washington carrying
letters “from prominent Indians” who had “been in the rebel service. The St
Louis, Missouri Republican on 7 April
1864 asserted that one letter was from “Captain Jack McCurtain, who has now
returned with his men and is engaged in putting in a crop. As soon as
protection can be assured, there is no doubt that nearly the entire Choctaw
Nation will avail themselves of the amnesty. They are said to have had two thousand
soldiers in the rebel service.” Putting in a crop? Maybe, but Jackson must have
thought, in Choctaw and English, “Fooled you, fooled you!” Passing out
Lincoln’s amnesty papers had caused the local Union forces to let down their
guard. Military savvy? Cunning treachery? How clever!
The Confederate roster dated Camp Cedar
Creek, C. N (that is, Choctaw Nation) 30 June 1864 lists “Jackson McCurtain,
Col. 3 Choctaw Regt” as “being organized,” and on 26 July 1864 shows “Lt. Col”
J. McCurtain at Camp Double Springs, C. N., “zealous, diligent & attentive
to duties. Sober.” (The last word is significant, since many in the Nation were
called “drunken Choctaws” in the newspapers. Remember, Brother Edmund choking
to death as he was dressing after heavy drinking.) In late July Brigadier
General Douglas H. Cooper, the Choctaw rebel leader, learned that the Union
forces at Fort Smith were vulnerable in their camp at Massard Prairie, at that
time outside the limits of the small town. When the rebels attacked, Jackson
McCurtain was stationed in ambush, at Devil’s Backbone, an east-west mountain
ridge, and was not in the main action. Cooper reported on 10 August 1864 (See Dale
Cox, p. 61) that on 29 July Lt. Col. Jackson McCurtain was holding his
battalion in readiness at Double Springs, expecting to attack Yankees again.
McCurtain may have been more active
than that. We have an eyewitness in the family, James Robert Barnes, who was
interviewed in Poteau (10 or 12 miles east of Wister) in 1937 by the WPA. At 14
or so he was staying with an uncle at what the interviewer copied down as
“Mazard Prairie.” On lookout duty, he watched the arrival of “a part of Jack
McCurtain’s Choctaw Army (Rebels), about 1500 in number.” These soldiers killed
one of the men at the Barnes house then caught a cousin I mentioned, young
Jonathan Glenn, who had been hiding in the timber from the Confederates and
coming in only for food, and took him away. In his old age James told of going
down there after the battle was over and seeing precisely what was done with
the rebel and federal bodies, including scalping of slain rebels.
Jackson McCurtain served the
Confederacy until the end of the war, and one of his more exuberant tasks was
raiding houses and barns of Union families. My cousin (double cousin) the Union
soldier Joseph B. Tucker testified this about Jack McCurtain: “while I was in
the Army more than two hundred miles from home, he and his Command robbed me
and he suffered his men to come in my house ripping open the beds and
scattering feathers all over the place and leaving my wife and children in a
destitute condition while I was in the Union Army fighting for my country.”
McCurtain also raided the house of Uncle
Edward Tucker, Joseph’s father, over in Arkansas. (He was the son of a Glenn,
but hereafter I stop saying “double.”) The WPA interviewed Leona Smedley, a
granddaughter of Edward Tucker, who explained: “At the beginning of the War, Mr. Tucker was a prosperous farmer and
stockman and resided near Hartford, Arkansas, a short distance from the Indian
Territory line. He, like all others of that vicinity of that period, had
fattened sixty head of four year old steers, and prepared to drive them to Fort
Smith where he hoped to sell them for the butcher trade. In addition to these
beef steers he had some eighty head of stock cattle, four hundred bushels of
wheat, and quite an amount of corn. McCurtain, an officer in the Confederate
Army, and the commanding officer of a troop of Choctaws, made foraging forays
into the border areas of Western Arkansas before Mr. Tucker had disposed of his
cattle and other property.” McCurtain “confiscated all the livestock, wheat and
corn owned by Mr. Tucker and converted it to the use of the Confederacy.” As Mrs.
Smedley summarized, the “Tucker family, in common with other families who lived
near the Indian Territory border, lost all their possessions during the first
years of the Civil War.”
Soon after the war, some of Abigail
Rogers’s descendants began trying to be acknowledged as Choctaw. My double
cousin (well, sometimes I will use double), Joseph B. Tucker at 78 years old
noted, “Began right after the war to contend for my rights as a Choctaw.” A
Union veteran, he was emboldened by his military service to expect the
government to respect him, much the way some black and Hispanic World War II
veterans did on their return home in 1945 and 1946. In 1882, writing to Henry
M. Teller, the Secretary of Interior, he said Jackson McCurtain “is still not
satisfied, now he wishes to rob us of our rights in the nation” (that is, the
Choctaw Nation).
Governor Jack McCurtain in 1881 was
removing intruders
with the help of the
U. S. Army, once his enemy army. The Little Rock Arkansas Gazette (1 July 1881) helped push public opinion against
those intruders: “The Indian Nation west of us are the harbor of law-breakers
from all the United States.” Such characters “go in there and defy all
authority to put them out. They associate themselves with the lowest and vilest
of the Indians for their own personal pleasure, and live in habits of laziness
and lust.” The Cincinnati Gazette on
26 August 1881 picked this up from a Fort Smith paper: “Lieut. Shoemaker,
United States Army, acting under instructions of Indian Agent Tufts, camped
together with a company of about twenty soldiers and a body of Indian militia,
under Gov. McCurtain, a few miles from this city in the Choctaw Nation, is
issuing peremptory orders to all white settlers who have not yet paid the
odious license fee to the Choctaw authorities to quit the country immediately.
Many persons are forced to leave their crops, their homes, and all seek refuge
in the State [i.e., Arkansas], being unable to pay the tax. They have no other
resource, the Indians being inexorable. Great distress prevails. One hundred
are rendered homeless. The headline in the Cincinnati Gazette for this 26 August 1881 article was “Clearing Out the
Indian Country.”
On 8 September 1881 the Coffeeville,
Kansas Star was contemptuous of such
people in its reprint of the Eufala Indian
Journal. The language was conspicuously like that of some Californians in
the 1930s who wanted to block entry to us Okies and to expel those already in
the state: “Lieut. Shoemaker and Governor Jack McCurtain, of the Choctaw
Nation, are hard at work removing intruders, and such a set. The effects of a
dozen families could all be placed in one wagon with room to spare, but the
twelve men and one dozen women have 144 red-headed, tow-headed, shock-headed
urchins of all sizes tugging along after them barefooted, and more also. There
being no provisions visible, it’s a wonder how they lived. They have remained
there because forbidden to do so--if ordered by the United States to remain
they would all have skipped out in one night. It’s no wonder the Arkansas
papers howl over the enforced exodus from the Indian country, if that state is
to be afflicted with such a class of shiftless emigres.”
Edward Tucker, having during the Civil
War been robbed by Confederates under Jackson McCurtain, now faced his foe and new
cavalry again. The Fort
Smith Independent wrote this portrait
of the “Centenarian,” as reprinted in the 28 July 1881 Memphis Public Ledger. The title may be off a
couple of decades, but some of the rest is true. Abigail Rogers Glenn was his
grandmother, so he was probably an eighth Choctaw: “Uncle Edward Tucker, of
Sugar Loaf county, C. N., was before the United States Commissioner last
Thursday. He is 101 years of age, and is probably the most remarkable man for
his years in all this country. He married a Choctaw woman in 1800, and came to
this country ‘the years arter the stairs fell.’” [That is, “after” 1833. If the
marriage to a Choctaw woman is true, his son Joseph B. was Indian at least three
ways.] For the WPA interviewer in September 1937 Tucker’s
Smedley granddaughter described what happened: “In 1881 Governor Jackson
McCurtain rode up to Ed Tucker’s place again” (rebuilt by the old man after the
wartime destruction) “to evict him if he would not pay the annual permit levied by the
tribe upon all non-citizens in the Choctaw Nation.” Told to pay up or get out,
Tucker exploded: "You take your damn Lighthorse and get away from here. I
will not be run over any more by you. You robbed me of all I had during the
War, and you are not going to rob me again. I had rather you would kill me, if
you must, than to submit to your authority. If you are determined to put me out
or kill me, I only ask that you kill me right here in the front yard where I
can be decently buried." Mrs. Smedley said that “the Chief rode off with
his Lighthorse and since he did not press the matter further at any subsequent
time, it is to be inferred that something which Mr. Tucker had said to the
Chief had the effect of swerving him from his original intention. Mr. Tucker
was permitted to remain in the nation without the payment of the annual
permit.”
Jackson McCurtain never surrendered his
fervent loyalty to the Confederacy. Edward Tucker’s son Joseph B. Tucker was
specific about the source of McCurtain’s animus toward him and the family. He
wrote to Henry Moore Teller at the Department of Interior on 27 April 1882
about the harassment by the Indian authorities such as making false arrests
which cost the family hundreds of dollars in legal fees. For decades, the strategy of the Choctaw Council
was effective: take applications (which involved travel and always involved
considerable expense) and then delay acting on them--delay so long that new
applications had to be made, at new expense and at greater inconvenience all
the time. Joseph knew the reason. It
was “only because” he, two of his brothers, and a brother-in-law had been Union
soldiers in the 2nd Regiment Arkansas Voluntary Cavalry. McCurtain
in the war had been “a ‘rabid rebel’ as is well known to every person in this
county.” Family service in the Union army was cause enough for hatred. Now Tucker
hoped for protection papers he could produce during the endless waiting for
action from the Council.
Teller may not have been the
best man to consult. The Wichita Kansas Oklahoma
War Chief on 30 April 1885 declared: “It certainly now looks as though
ex-Secretary of the Interior, Teller has lined his pockets out of the Oklahoma
business. The editor of the Iowa Tribune
who has lately visited the Oklahoma country says he can name men who read letters
from Teller to the cattle men, after they raised him $65,000 and sent a lease
for him to sign. He replied that he could not officially sign it, but gave them
his solemn pledge that they would not be disturbed.” And like General Sherman,
Teller did all he could to discourage the practice of Indian customs and the
use of Indian languages. Getting more people on the Choctaw rolls was not a
priority of Teller’s.
Pushed hard in 1881, one of the
cousins, Robert Barnes, gave sardonic proof of his citizenship: “I have had my
stock taken and sold by the Choctaw Courts for a judgement they had against me
in Skullyville County. They took me and tried me as an Indian in the Choctaw
Nation. They put me in prison and then turned me loose. The sheriff sold my mare
and cattle for the judgement. They made me pay permits. I told the sheriff I
would only pay as a citizen and they granted me on that way and I paid for the
men on my place. Permit offered and admitted.” My cousin Jan Cutsinger identified
some of the part-Choctaw Glenns and Tuckers who were forced to leave as “White
Intruders.” John Champion Glenn’s son James moved his family to the Hackett,
Arkansas, area and his daughter Annie moved her family to Texas. These and
others may not have been threatened by soldiers as Edward Tucker was.
Lieutenant Shoemaker was there with his forces, riding with Jackson McCurtain.
The McCurtains used their power to
enrich themselves. The Eufala Indian
Journal on 24 January 1884 reported on new Choctaw Laws, the first of which
was the establishment of a militia for the Governor. Each the McCurtains needed
his own force of Lighthorsemen. Bill No. 39 was “An act granting a charter to
the Poteau Slack-Water Navigation company “for the purpose of improving said
river by means of a system of dams and locks, so as to render it navigable at
all times for steamers and flatboats, by means of which the immense deposits of
coal, ores, timber and stone along the way and of easy access to said river may
find an outlet and be utilized to the great and lasting benefit of the Choctaw
Nation”--not to mention the benefit to the joint stock company members Edward (meaning
Edmund) McCurtain, Green W. McCurtain, and three other men.
The Dallas Morning News on 9 December 1897 printed a long article dated from
the day before in “Muscogee, I. T.” Here were the display headlines, reduced in
size: “Choctaw Citizenship Case. History Of The Glenn-Tucker Litigation, Which
Is Of Far-Reaching Importance. Decided Against The Claimants. A Large Number of
People Who Have been Claiming Citizenship Have No Status as Choctaws Now.” This
article did not date the earliest appeals but did record rebuffs in 1884, in 1887,
in 1890, in 1895, and again in 1896 (this last by the new Dawes Commission). Joseph
B. Tucker wrote to the Indian Agent in Tushahoma on 7 October 1886: “We have
been trying to get this case to a hearing for some 10 or 12 years. We appeared
at Council with our witnesses some 9 years ago, but before that had made
application to U. S. Indian Agent at Muskoge[e] Indian Territory.” Even though
their appeals were regularly denied, their descent from a Choctaw woman was
recognized by some of the authorities.
On 5 July 1890 the Philadelphia Inquirer reported: “Assistant
Attorney-General Shields, of the Interior Department, has rendered a decision
in the case of Glenn, Tucker and other persons whose claims for citizenship in
the Choctaw Nation were rejected by the local Choctaw tribunal. These persons
were the children of a half-breed Choctaw woman who married a white man. They
based their claim to citizenship upon the fact of their having Indian blood,
and insisted that these claims were improperly rejected. The Assistant
Attorney-General says in his opinion, among other things, that “it would seem
reasonable that the predominance of blood should determine the race, and that
the common law rules should prevail, and the condition of the child follow that
of the father.” His opinion is that the claims should be rejected.” Shields--George
H. Shields from St. Louis, the lawyer in charge of litigating citizenship suits
in Interior Department, had made this stunningly up-side down ruling.
Shields (not one of my Tennessee Shield
cousins, I hope) was not outright crooked, the Kansas City, Missouri, Times said on 15 April 1880. Rather, “shields is very, very harmless: . . . . When
you see him, you size him. He is slouchy and shuffling; he is slovenly in mind
and body. His appearance suggests soiled socks. He is insufferably egotistical;
his self complacency is indicated by his every look and tone. . . . How ever he
came to be Chairman of the State Central Committee it is for the historian of
the future to discover. There are some things we can never, never find out. All
the wise men of the world cannot tell us why a wart sometimes grows on the top
of a bald head.” Slovenly in mind, for sure, he did not acknowledge that his
ruling before the Emancipation Proclamation would have made most part-black
slaves free, to the consternation of their white fathers and grandfathers among
Southern slave owners and other virile white men. Harmless in some ways he may
have been, but his ruling now deprived the Glenn-Tucker family of their rights.
We were hit
from different directions. The Buffalo News
on 22 August 1893 was sure “The Choctaws Will Suffer” because “Treasurer
McCurtain has failed, and the payment of the lease district money to the
Choctaw Indians will have to stop. No reason is given for his failure.
McCurtain had over $1,00,000 of money due the Choctaws in his possession, and
his bond is only $30,000.” The Choctaws who had not received their money were
“feeling very blue over it." The Grand Rapids, Iowa Gazette on 12 October 1893 now figured that Green McCurtain had not
accounted for $454,844 in lease district money and $130,000 in royalty.” Word
was that he had “over $225,000 of the lease district money deposited in a bank
in Missouri and has never drawn a cent out.” His friends were “beginning to
desert him.” On 25 October 1893 the Pittsburg KS Headlight printed “Investigating McCurtain--Finance Committee of
the Choctaw Council Will Carry the Matter Over Another Year--Amnesty Bill
Killed.” Ex-Treasurer Green McCurtain had “succeeded in getting the work of the
finance committee postponed until the next session of council. No one will know
the exact shortage until after the session next October.”
Before that
session, the 18 September 1893 St Louis Globe
Democrat reported a fight over rules and behavior, “Killed on the
Ball-Field.” A Choctaw, Dave Wooldredge, had been shot dead, reportedly by
Green McCurtain, “Treasurer of the Choctaw Nation,” although not all the facts
were clear. On the same day the Globe-Democrat
commented, “Green is ‘devillish sly,’ but not quite as cute as he thinks.”
(cute meaning acute, sharp). Green was under some stress, for on 11 October
1893 the Tuskahoma I.T. (as copied on the 19 October St. Francis, KS Cheyenne County Rustler), reported
“McCurtain’s Shortage: It Increases the More His Report is Looked Into.” This
was bad: “Besides the $100,000 of the lease district money, there is still a
larger amount of the general fund that has not been accounted for.” The
national agent’s report showed “that $130,000 has been collected on royalties
and turned to Treasurer McCurtain, which he failed to account for in his report
and only turned over $18,000 to the general fund.” Even Green’s “political
friends are beginning to admit that he is short.” The thought now was that he
would “be tried by the United States court as a defaulter.” Not to worry. Business
as usual.
In 1902 or 1903 Townsend N. Foster, the
attorney for the Glenn-Tucker plaintiffs, summarized some earlier
acknowledgments of the Indian blood of his clients: “Even the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs, Mr. Atkins, in his order of expulsion says, that they are of
Indian blood, ‘Undoubtedly part Choctaw.’ No other conclusion was possible.
(Order of Mr. Atkins attached as an exhibit to the plea of Res Adjusticata.)
Before the Dawes Commission was set up they were denied enrollment, nobody has
known how or why.” Aunt Essie did not really know when she wondered if the
Choctaw authorities required that to register you had to go, by wagon or horse
or foot, to McAlester or somewhere else, far away. Foster went on to say that
in the district court Judge William M. Springer had denied the Glenn-Tucker
claimants a trial “on the merits upon the absurd and flimsy pleas of ‘Res
Adjudicata’ now abandoned by the defendants here. The language of Assistant
Secretary Chandler in referring to the action of the Choctaw Council would seem
applicable all along the line, i.e.: ‘It was determined to reject them at all
hazards.’ They have constantly been defeated thus far by arbitrary denials of
their plainest rights and until they reached this Court have never had accorded
to them a fair patient and unprejudiced hearing.” So Foster quoted Assistant
Secretary Chandler: “‘It was determined
to reject them at all hazards.’” Indeed, and sometimes the reasons for
rejecting the Glenn-Tuckers were ludicrous.
In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt appointed three
judges for the final citizenship court, Henry S. Foote, Jr., Spencer B. Adams,
and Walter L. Weaver. His selection policy was to find men in three different
states who had prominent positions and friends in the Republican Party, even if
they had no other claims for attention. These were plum political appointments.
He knew Judge Foote was the brother-in-law of California Senator Stewart. Actually,
he knew a good deal about the family. Roosevelt in his 1886 biography of Thomas
H. Benton had described his subject’s confrontation with the reckless pistol
wielding Mississippian Henry S. Foote in the Senate so he knew the strange
reputation of the father of the California judge Foote, Jr. when he named him
one of the three judges who would decide, among other matters, the fate of the
Glenn-Tucker applicants for Choctaw citizenship. There was no getting away from
that fight in the Senate. That is what newspaper editors remembered. The Hays,
Kansas Ellis County News on 3 May
1902 picked up from the Philadelphia Times
a retelling of the “Benton-Foote Battle”--a great American story. That summer
the appointed son came up to Oyster Bay to pay tribute to Roosevelt.
According to the Wilmington, N. C. Messenger of 15 July, Spencer B. Adams came
from Greensboro up to Oyster Bay to see Theodore Roosevelt on 10 July to
discuss “the frauds on the citizenship of the two tribes,” Choctaw and
Chickasaw, an indication of the way the Citizenship Court was already slanted. The
Chillicothe Gazette of 17 July
reported that on that day Walter L. Weaver had come to Oyster Bay from
Springfield, Ohio, to discuss with the President the proposed work on the
Choctaw and Chickasaw citizenship.
These developments were creating
delight--really, ecstasy--in Indian Territory. Letters show just how
complicit Green McCurtain was in their proceedings against the Glenns and
Tuckers back then. On 14 April 1903 McCurtain,
Governor, wrote to lawyers, Messrs Mansfield, McMurray & Cornish in South
McAlester, I.T.: “I am glad to know that you are so confident that you will
defeat the court claimants. The greatest ambition I have is to live to see
these court citizens defeated, and when that is done I will feel that I have
done my part toward the protection, and would die happy.” The lawyers wrote
McCurtain on 30 December 1903: “The Glenn-Tucker case is to be finally closed
on next Monday and we wish to make the very best possible showing on behalf of
the Nations.” Green McCurtain could “die happy,”
and very rich.
As it turned out, the judge who wrote
the final report was Henry S. Foote, Jr. The President knew better than anyone how
the father overshadowed the son. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any man living
deeper in the shadows than this appointee. The shadow cast by his father, a Confederate
soldier, a Governor of Mississippi, and a United States Senator, was massive.
You would think his death in 1880 would have let his memory fade. Instead, his
dueling, his military service, his fights with Jefferson Davis, Benton, and
others, and especially his oratory continued to be celebrated. The Memphis Commercial Appeal on 9 November 1902
published a long article on “The Gladiator of Popular Oratory,” illustrated
with a woodcut of tdhe senior Foote from a photograph. Here was serious praise:
“Some of his flights of eloquence are as sublime as the noble prayer of Ajax in
the Iliad.” In seven columns on 1 Sept 1904 in the Denver Post portrayed “Henry S. Foote, The Politician Who Might Have
Averted the Civil War.” When Henry S. Foote, Jr., was mentioned, you could expect to see a
comment about the father.
That was bad enough, nationally, but
the San Francisco Call on 14 February
1904 in its memorial article on the death of the great orator’s son, William W.
Foote, included a long passage on William’s heroic service as a Confederate
soldier. As “a boy only 16 years old,” he had performed “arduous and dangerous
duties.” And his brother? A decade earlier, when Henry Jr was named one of the
judges of the Northern District, the Call
(16 February 1895) had printed a picture of the appointee, mustached and goateed,
but had said nothing about his undistinguished
actions in the Confederacy (although he had served), and tarnished the news
with the headlines: “CAMINETTI ANGRY AND DISAPPOINTED. He Blamed Olney Because
Magee Was Not Nominated District Attorney.” The Mississippi connection had
pushed President Cleveland to make this appointment: “Foote Secured the Plum.
Catchings of Mississippi Backed His Old Friend and Succeeded.” Thomas
Catchings, a Confederate soldier, later longtime U. S. Representative from
Mississippi, carried particularly ugly racist baggage from his suppression of
votes for James Hill (a black man), according to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (19 March 1890). Now the Call made sure that Henry S. Foote, Jr.,
could not celebrate the day he got his picture in the paper, not with opponents
angry and disappointed.
Only months later, Foote had been
accused of kowtowing to the mighty but duly indicted Collis P. Huntington. An
indictment of the railroad magnate was “quashed by the action of District
Attorney Henry S. Foote, in entering a nolle prosequi therein” (this in the San
Francisco Examiner, 18 August 1895). In
the San Francisco Call-Bulletin for
16 December 1896 George Monteith filed charges of “collusion with the
defendant’s attorney in a criminal case to defeat justice.” The headline: “He
Would Have Foote Removed,” apparently no pun intended. The Portland Oregonian the next day used the
headlines “Charges Against A Prosecutor. Serious Accusation Against a United
States Attorney.”
Low as he was Foote, had abased himself
to pitchman status by advertising that “A Physician’s Tests” had shown that
“Bright’s Disease and Diabetes Are Positively Curable.” Ads were appearing well
before he was nominated by Roosevelt. I quote from the Los Angeles Times of 13 January 1902, but for more
than a year the ad was printed throughout the country. The most significance
for me comes from Foote’s saying that a doctor unwilling to use his name has
asked him “to certify the following facts” although they are “so squarely
opposed by all medical works.” The language about “facts” is relevant to his
ruling on the Glenn-Tucker case: “I was asked to investigate and report the
facts, which I did, and I find and certify as follows”--what follows being
claims that patients have been cured. Asked what percentage of cases are
curable by Fulton Compounds, “Judge Foote replied: ‘I am satisfied the cure has
been found.’” This is the man who soon wrote the Glenn-Tucker decision which
deprived my family of enrollment in the Choctaw citizenship rolls. Bright’s
Disease was about as curable as McCurtains’ Corruption.
In the ruling, Foote was equally
satisfied that the truth had been found. Affidavits of two dead men known to
several of the plaintiffs? Why, they have “proved to be utterly unreliable by the
oral evidence taken” before him by “many reputable witnesses” who did not know
the Glenn and Tuckers in Mississippi. Why, the use of affidavits from two dead
men (after decades of delay) “smacks strongly of fraud on the part of these
applicants.” He made up “some facts and circumstances” which “seem to point to
the fact . . . .” What writing! He twisted the words of one claimant into “a
most significant circumstance throwing discredit on the claim of these
parties.” “Further,” he said, “I have made a pat[i]ent and thorough search . .
.” He was contemptuous: “The presentation and use of such and other similar
evidence by the applicants, shows the utter want to merit in their case, and
the str[a]its to which they have been driven, and the utter absence of good
faith as to the whole matter. The truth is the facts of this case appear to me
to be such as to require the exercise of much self-control, in not dealing with
some of its features in severer language than I have used.” Remember his words
in praise of a quack cure-all: “I was asked to investigate and report the
facts, which I did, and I find and certify as follows”--what follows being
claims that patients have been cured of Bright’s disease and diabetes. Green
McCurtain had won.
To be under your father’s comprehensive
shadow and your brother’s partial shade was bad enough, but when Foote died in
1905, the year after making his Choctaw decision that I will examine below, you
saw just how sad a loser he had been all his life. After his appointment in
1902 he was overshadowed by his sister’s death in a car, riding with her nephew
Henry Foote, named for the Mississippi Senator. The Rushville, Indiana Republican on 16 September 1902
reported: “Collision with Telegraph Pole. Automobile Claims Another Among the
Ranks of the Mighty. Mrs. Senator Stewart.” Foote was overshadowed not only by
his father, his sister, and brother Billy Foote, an immensely popular San
Franciscan, but also by his sister and his brother-in-law, Senator William M.
Stewart.
When Henry Jr., died in 1905 these were
typical obituary notices. First, the Anaconda, Montana Standard for 28 March 1905: “Judge Henry S. Foote, son of
ex-Governor Foote of Mississippi and brother of Senator Stewart’s first wife,
died of pneumonia here [in Washington] this afternoon [the 27th]. He
recently served as one of the judges of the citizenship court in the Cherokee
nation.” Foote had, of course, not had to do with the Cherokee nation. No one
was paying much attention, but the case
was Choctaw and Chickasaw, not Cherokee.
Some notices were even shorter, not mentioning the first wife of Senator
Stewart. Anyone who knew him knew that he had become a hopeless alcoholic.
Foote was dead but his ruling was in effect.
In the U. S.
Senate, in May 1908, Spencer B. Adams and Marshall L. Mott, the attorney for
the Creek Nation had come “to blows.” Mott had declared, “I Know Anybody Can
Buy You” and denounced him as a “D--n Scoundrel” who had hoped that the Senate
would whitewash his actions but had been disappointed when the Senate committee
refused to adopt a resolution exonerating Adams of wrong-doings. Charges of
bribery and corruption against Adams were being pushed, “in the hope of showing
the necessity for reopening the tribal rolls.”
The Clinton, N. C. Caucasian on 20 August 1908 broke the
story which the the Raleigh News and
Observer publicized the next day:
“BRIBERY CHARGE HAS REAPPEARED
More Embarrassment for Ex-Judge S. B. Adams ABOUT
CITIZENSHIP COURT”
“The Caucasian Says: “Spencer B. Adams Named
in Petition as One of the Judges Alleged to Have Been Bribed to Rob the
Indians--The Rights of These Indians Had Already Been Conferred by the U. S.
Supreme Court--Adams and His Indian Court Reversed the Decision of the Supreme
Court in Favor of the Attorneys.” That was the heading.
Below, the Caucasian printed this, which a “Radical
organ” had already published: “Complainant is reliably informed and therefore
alleges on information and belief that certain members of said Legislative
court were bribed by said attorneys to render findings and decrees denying to
said persons their property rights as citizens of said tribes, and received as
a consideration for their decisions a part of the fee of $750,000 awarded by
said cases coming before said court; that Spencer B. Adams and Henry S. Foote
were the members of said court alleged to have been bribed.” Finally there was what
seemed like a guarantee of public scrutiny of the Citizenship Court.
In his
comprehensive look in the Raleigh Farmer
and Mechanic (29 September 1908) at the upcoming trial of Spencer Adams
against Marion and Lester Butler, North Carolina brothers crusading against
corruption, Andrew Joyner paused to look back: It “must be remembered that
Mansfield, McMurray & Cornish were employed to keep as many names . . . off
the rolls as possible so as to make the share of money and property of each one
who was on the roll greater, and that the more people they kept off the rolls
the greater fee” the Choctaw and Chickasaw Citizenship Court “would be able to
award in their favor.” Joiner had done due diligence about Judge Adams’s
strenuous lobbying “to secure the re-election of the governor, who was a friend
of these attorneys, and who was interested in their securing a large fee.”
Joiner
repeated the Butlers’ accusation against all three judges, Adams, Foote, and
Weaver: “it is alleged that the governors of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations
and those attorneys and the judges . . . were all in a common deal to keep
thousands of people off the rolls and to insure a large fee to attorneys.” In
short, the Caucasian had charged that
Adams, “in violation of is duty . . . did unlawfully and corruptly receive
money or other thing [sic] of value,
with intent to have his decision or action in certain matters of proceedings
pending before said Court, influenced thereby, and had been guilty of
corruption in his said office.” This, Adams was insisting, was “false,
malicious and libelous.”
On 27 October
1908 the Charlotte Observer compared
Adams’s responses to the Butlers’ accusations then quoted several pages from a
speech Congressman J. H. Stephens of Texas made, where he quoted, second hand,
a long statement which Gus Rosenwinkle had made to the Secretary of the
Interior: “Rosenwinkle related what he knew of the charges of bribery and
corruption against the court and the law firm of Mansfield, McMurray &
Cornish. It appears that Rosenwinkle testified that the stenographers of the
court were employed in the law offices of Mansfield, McMurray & Cornish,
where many of the opinions of the court were written; that one of the judges of
the court often received sums of money from the firm of lawyers; that Judge
Adams was a man in very moderate circumstances when he was appointed chief justice
of the court; that he invested no money in Indian Territory, except in a little
home in South McAlester, which he sold for practically the sum he paid for it.”
Then
Rosenwinkle was quoted by Stephens as saying, more damagingly still, “that
immediately after the payment of the $750,000 to Mansfield, McMurray &
Cornish, letters came daily to Cornish addressed in the handwriting of Judge
Adams; that about one month after the payment of this fee Cornish met Judge
Adams in Memphis and went with him to Monticello; that before Cornish left he
and the other members of the law firm executed checks of equal amount in large
denominations aggregating about $25,000; that afterwards Judge Adams wrote
Cornish that he was erecting a new residence at his home in North Carolina and
sent the Indian Territory lawyer a copy of the plans; that Judge Adams, upon
his return home, began to invest in other property and ‘became in a short time
regarded as one of the wealthiest men in his town.’” The Observer then put a
line in capitals: “LOOKS LIKE FIGHT TO BITTER END.”
In the trial
against the Butlers on 1 April 1909 Judge Walter L. Weaver from Springfield,
Ohio, “denied most vehemently” in Greensboro that “there was any suggestion of
a bribe in connection with the fee of $750,000 the court awarded to the law
frim of McMurray, Mansfield & Cornish, who represented the Indians” (or
represented those Choctaws in power). What could be wrong with a fee of three
quarters of a million dollars? “It appeared that the lawyers had made a contract
with the Indians to represent them for a commission of 9 per cent. of the
amount that might be recovered”--recovered from keeping off the rolls or taking
people off. “Judge Foote,” Weaver went on, “who died soon after the court
expired by limitation, was in favor of awarding the 9 per cent., which would
have approximated $1,800,000.” Weaver explained that he had “thought $1,000,000
would be a reasonable compensation and that Judge Adams was of the opinion that
the lawyers should be satisfied with $500,000.” The award of $750,00 was a
reasonable compromise. All this pleased the Charlotte Observer on 2 April: “Judge Weaver made a fine witness and
convinced the spectators that he was innocent of any knowledge of any
corruption in connection with the court of which he was a member.”
On 5 April
1909 Weaver was called back to the stand. Congressman Stephens, of Texas, had
challenged Weaver in Washington “after the termination of the court and told
him to his face that he (Stephens) believed the court had been bribed. Judge
Weaver swore to-day that the conversation took place before the termination of
the court and prior to the filing of the opinion giving a fee of $750,000 to
the law firm of Mansfield, McMurray & Cornish. . . . He testified that upon being introduced to
Congressman Stephens in the library of the House of Representatives, Mr.
Stephens said: ‘Oh, yes, I know you. You are one of those follows sitting on
that corrupt court in Indian Territory. You are every day turning down people
who are entitled to citizenship.” On this Weaver withstood sharp questioning
despite (as the Raleigh News and Observer
said on 17 May 1909, the fact that “Weaver was in bad health while here.” If Weaver
shifted uneasily in his chair as he testified, perhaps it was because his left
foot was giving him trouble and he was trying to ignore the discomfort to help
his friend. The next month gangrene caused doctors in Springfield to amputate
his left leg all the way to the thigh. He died a few hours after the surgery.
On 10 June 1909
(in the Clinton N. C. Caucasian) Judge
W. S. O’Brien Robinson concluded for the defense of the Butlers. He was
sardonic and downright sarcastic. He was, if fact, so witty a man that
President Taft appointed him to a post but withdrew his name when he learned
that Robinson had sent a sheriff out to buy him cotton which he stuffed in his
ears so as not hear a long-winded lawyer. Now Robinson declared that the three
judges had found enough money here “to make Croesus look like a clown.” He went
on: “Adams allowed $750,000 to these lawyers on the outskirts of civilization,
and got a coal mine in return.” This was an allusion to Adams’s hapless
accounting for new cash in his pocket by claiming to have sold a gold mine.
Some said his word was good enough, no documentation needed. His word, that is,
was good as gold. If he said he sold a gold mine, he had sold a gold mine. Robinson
continued: “He [Adams] indicts Butler after other papers published it and only
because he is afraid of being cut off from the pie-counter in Washington. One
man is as good as another, and often a d--n sight better. So when these fellows
allow $750,000 to three tramp lawyers it looks mighty bad. . . . No lawyers in
North Carolina make as much as those lawyers got for a salary and expenses.
Adams was in Washington when the injunction against Mansfield, McMurray &
Cornish was up for hearing talking through a hole in the wall to Mansfield. All
we ask is a fair verdict. This we are sure of getting. I have tried to leave all
personal feeling out of this. I conclude, as all preachers do, where did he get
that hat, ‘Where did Adams get that coal mine?’” The contemptuous put-down
about the hat was an English riposte or wisecrack before it became popular in
the United States. It was not restricted to use by preachers. Robertson here
was calling Adams’ coal mine story a barefaced lie.
In April 1909
it seemed that Adams had won his suit: he was so popular that jurors ignored
the evidence. But on 4 August 1910 the Albemarle, N.C. Enterprise had news: “Spencer B. Adams has called off his $50,000
damage suit against Butler. Compromise has been effected, it is said. Wonder if
all those things Butler said about and printed about Adams are true?” Yes,
wonder, as Robertson had wondered.
The Philadelphia
Inquirer on August 8, 1910, reported
on the “Bribery Probe” changing venue: “Congressional Investigation into Indian
Land Scandal Will continue at McAlester.” Senator Thomas P. Gore (kinsman of my
Costner and Bell double cousin Lois Gore’s husband, and Gore Vidal) said that a
thirty million dollar rip off was being planned for 450,000 acres of coal and
asphalt land” belonging to the Choctaws and Chickasaws. In 1910 money, what
would McMurray’s ten percent of $30,000,000 in attorney’s fees amount to. Can
anyone calculate what it would amount to a century later? Gore himself declared
“that he had been offered a bribe of $25,000 then $50,000. Green McCurtain, all
solemnity, testified that greedy lawyers had cost his tribe in the last ten
years $300,000 in legal fees besides the share “in the $750,000 fee paid to the
McMurray firm several years ago in the citizenship cases involving the Choctaws
and Chickasaws.”
In May 1916 came
the Choctaw Citizenship Litigation”
Report of P. J. Hurley National Attorney for the Choctaw Nation, to Major
Victor M. Locke, Jr. Principal Chief of the Choctaw Nation May 1916. The
law creating the citizenship court was “without legislative parallel; the
manner of its enactment was extraordinary, and the authority which it conferred
upon the court it created is without precedent in American jurisprudence.” As
you might expect, the judges appointed as they were, for political reasons,
proved disastrous, and thousands of people were wronged. Hurley explains: “As
soon as this court was created and organized, the firm of Mansfield, McMurray
& Cornish proceeded to bring before it a very large number of claims of
‘court citizens.,’ and they succeeded in eliminating from the rolls between
3,500 and 4,000 persons. They then claimed a fee of 9 per cent on a basis of
$4,800 per person, as provided in the contingent-fee contract made in 1901 . .
. which had not been approved in accordance with law.” That is, they made big money
for every person they rejected from the rolls. And we know from the lawyers’
correspondence with Green McCurtain that they had lists at hand, such as all
the Glenn-Tucker claimants. They did not
have to assemble and evaluate lists. Every name already in their lists was worth its weight, and more, in gold. Hurley
continued: “It was reported, and commonly accepted as a fact, that Judges Foote
and Adams received a part of the fee paid Mansfield, McMurray & Cornish,
and in the case of Adams v. Butler,
in which case Adams sued ex-United States Senator Butler, of North Carolina,
for libel, it was shown that Adams received $50,000 of the fee. While the
committee was considering the evidence upon which the above report was made,
Judge Adams cut his throat with a razor. Judge Foote died shortly after the fee
was paid. Foote was a confirmed drunkard.”
Foote being a
low-functioning alcoholic is confirmed by his slovenly ruling in the
citizenship case. Hurly does not clarify the fact, that Adams slit his throat only
after a well-documented long bout of drunkenness, intellectual confusion, and
retreat to a sanatorium. Doctors sewed the slit up and he lived from New Year’s
day or the night of January 1,1911, onwards till 1943, although in a subdued
status. Weaver was not proven to have been guilty of anything other than willful
blindness and financial irresponsibility. Weaver protesting “vehemently” could
have forced the McAlester lawyers to renegotiate the 1901 contract they had
made with Green McCurtain, but he did not make a whisper.
When I began
working on this chapter I had no idea what I would find--not the McCurtains’
Confederate bias against the Union Glenns and Tuckers, not the corruption of
the McCurtain dynasty, not the sleaziness of at least two of the three judges
Roosevelt appointed to make the final citizenship decisions, not the scandal
that broke into the open in 1908 vindicating (too late) the Glenns and Tuckers.
Great Aunt Ethel died without having the Bureau of Indian Affairs built her a
little brick house. Cousin Jan Cutsinger is not strong, if she is still alive, but
one of her collaborators on the Glenn-Tucker notebooks might help. I’ve sent my
Cousin Becky Glenn and others on the “Wister Genealogy” site on Facebook a copy
of this. It’s a hell of a family story.
