When Earl Van Dorn ordered Albert Pike into Arkansas on March 3, 1862, Pike's treaties said the Indian soldiers he commanded were raised for home defense and did not have to leave Indian Territory. His men agreed to go only after he promised back pay. On March 5 he led two Cherokee regiments and a Texas squadron, no more than 900 men, toward Benton County. It was the first sizable battle of the war with Indian troops, and the two regiments had never been one force.
Two regiments, one treaty
Principal Chief John Ross had told Arkansas's governor the Cherokee would stay neutral. On October 7, 1861, concluding that Federal troops had withdrawn and the Nation had no real choice, he signed the Confederate treaty. John Drew's First Cherokee Mounted Rifles had been authorized by the Nation's own executive committee that August. Its officers were loyal to Ross, and many of its men were full-blood traditionalists. Stand Watie's regiment came out of the faction that signed the Treaty of New Echota, and his brother, uncle and cousin had been executed for it in 1839. In December 1861 many of Drew's men deserted rather than fight Opothleyahola's Creek and Seminole refugees.
Slavery ran under all of it. The Cherokee had brought more than fifteen hundred enslaved people west in the removal years. Watie's Indian Territory plantation was worked by enslaved people, nearly a hundred by one count.
Foster's Farm
On March 7 Pike dismounted Watie's men and sent them ahead at Foster's Farm, near Leetown. They ambushed two companies of the Third Iowa Cavalry, and James McIntosh's cavalry then took three Union guns. Some accounts credit Watie's regiment with the capture, but historians say white Confederate troops took the guns.
Eight Iowans were scalped and 17 more mutilated; Col. Cyrus Bussey counted 25 dead. Federal artillery scattered the Indians, who fired at anyone in blue, and Pike needed nearly an hour to find men to drag the guns away. No one was ever identified. Unionist and Confederate Cherokee blamed each other. Pike apologized to the Union commander and court-martialed a soldier who shot a wounded Federal. A congressional committee later concluded that Pike's men had done it, the Northern press condemned him, and he resigned in July 1862.
What the war cost
Drew's regiment did not last the year. After a Union expedition entered Indian Territory it was disbanded in July 1862, and many men joined the Union's Indian Home Guard. Watie fought on and surrendered on June 23, 1865, the last Confederate general to do so. More than 7,000 Cherokee died in the war. By 1863 an estimated third of married Cherokee women were widows and a quarter of the children orphans.
The treaty of July 19, 1866, declared the Confederate treaty void and ended slavery in the Nation. Freed people received all the rights of native Cherokees, and slaveholders got no payment. The Nation also granted railroad rights of way and ceded its Kansas lands.
At Pea Ridge National Military Park, off Highway 62 in Garfield, the tour road passes Leetown and Foster's Farm. South of Elkhorn Tavern, Cherokee camped in 1838 and 1839. See Pea Ridge National Military Park.