| OCR Text |
Show MOONBY] WHITE- PATH'S REBELLION- 1828 113 Ross as assistant chief. 1 With a constitution and national press, a well- developed system of industries and home education, and a government administered by educated Christian men, the Cherokee were now justly entitled to be considered a civilized people. The idea of a civilized Indian government was not a new one. The first treaty ever negotiated by the United States with an Indian tribe, in 1778, held out to the Delawares the hope that by a confederation of friendly tribes they might be able " to form a state, whereof the Delaware nation shall be the head and have a representation in Congress." 8 Priber, the Jesuit, had already familiarized the Cherokee with the forms of civilized government before the middle of the eighteenth century. As the gap between the conservative and progressive elements widened after the Revolution the idea grew, until in 1808 representatives of both parties visited Washington to propose an arrangement by which those who clung to the old life might be allowed to remove to the western hunting grounds, while the rest should remain to take up civilization and " begin the establishment of fixed laws and a regular government." The project received the warm encouragement of President Jefferson, and it was with this understanding that the western emigration was first officially recognized a few years later. Immediately upon the return of the delegates from Washington the Cherokee drew up their first brief written code of laws, modeled agreeably to the friendly suggestions of Jefferson. 3 By this time the rapid strides of civilization and Christianity had alarmed the conservative element, who saw in the new order of things only the evidences of apostasy and swift national decay. In 1828 White- path ( Nfin'nS- tsune'ga), an influential full- blood and councilor, living at Turniptown ( tThln'yl), near the present Ellijay, in Gilmer county, Georgia, headed a rebellion against the new code of laws, with all that it implied. He soon had a large band of followers, known to the whites as " Red- sticks," a title sometimes assumed by the more warlike element among the Creeks and other southern tribes. From the townhouse of Ellijay he preached the rejection of the new constitution, the discarding of Christianity and the white man's ways, and a return to the old tribal law and custom- the same doctrine that had more than once constituted the burden of Indian revelation in the past. It was now too late, however, to reverse the wheel of progress, and under the rule of such men as Hicks and Ross the conservative opposition gradually melted away. White- path was deposed from his seat 18ee Royce, Cherokee Nation, Fifth Ann. Rep. Bureau of Ethnology, p. 241,1888; Meredith, in The Five Civilised Tribes, Extra Census Bulletin, p. 41,1894; Morse, American Geography, i, p. 577, 1819 ( for Hicks). • Fort Pitt treaty, September 17,1778, Indian Treaties, p. 3,1887. • Cherokee Agency treaty, July 8, 1817, ibid., p. 209; Drake, Indians, p. 450, ed. 1880; Johnson in Senate Report on Territories; Cherokee Memorial, January 18,1831; see laws of 1808,1810, and later, in American State Papers: Indian Affairs, n, pp. 279- 283,1834. The volume of Cherokee laws, compiled In the Cherokee language by the Nation, in 1850, begins with the year 1808. 19 ETH- 01 8 |
