ABSTRACT
The Civil War in the Cherokee Nation began as it did throughout the United States. Proud armies arrayed against each other in magnificent pageants that
so quickly became but fearsome reminders that ideals once so noble fall quickly before the brutal reality of war. In the Cherokee Nation, the Civil War even more quickly disintegrated into an internecine conflict in which the lines between civilian and combatant were conspicuously blurred and the ferocity and terror struck the innocent and the guilty alike. By 1866, the Cherokee Nation, once so proud, had been reduced to ruins:
The events of the war brought to them more of the desolation and ruin than perhaps to any other community. Raided and sacked alternately, not only by Confederate and Union forces, but also by the vindictive ferocity and hate of their own factional divisions, their country became a blackened and desolate waste. Driven from comfortable homes, exposed to want, misery, and the elements, they perished like sheep in a snowstorm. Their houses, fences, and other improvements were burned, their orchards destroyed, their flocks and herds were slaughtered or driven off, their schools broken up, their schoolhouses given to the flames, and their churches and public buildings subjected to a similar fate; and that entire portion of their country which had been occupied by their settlements was distinguishable from the virgin prairie only by the scorched and blackened chimneys and the plowed but now neglected fields.3
