Ch. 16 of An Okie’s Racial Reckonings
Copyright 9 January 2023 Hershel Parker
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.
Great Aunt Essie on her 90th
birthday.
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 amcestors.) 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.
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