It's More Than the First Holiday of the Summer

                Memorial Day originated with the purpose to honor the confederate dead. The designated date for observance was May 30 with the solemn day being called Decoration Day. Its first  observation began in 1868. How fresh the losses and pain of the Civil War loomed in the minds and hearts of almost every family since the war ended only three years earlier!

                Recently, I discovered an unusual article written by Randy Krehbiel of the Tulsa World five years ago. Its title, Indian Territory Suffered Greatly in Civil War. His second paragraph quoted a historian who said no other area of the country suffered more than Indian Territory.  The paragraph below stunned me as I read it:

By the end of 1863, one-third of married Cherokee women were widows; one-fourth of Cherokee children were orphans.

                Those statistics mirrored my Cherokee ancestors’ plight in the 1860s in the Cherokee Nation where they resided in the Saline District. My maternal grandpa, Calvin Callcayah Smith, an original allottee on the Cherokee Rolls in 1907, descended from a Civil War veteran.

                Grandpa Cull, the name his family and close friends called him, was named for his paternal grandfather, Cullikayah or Ga-la-ka-yah or Cullacayah or Cullcayer (pick the spelling you like). The man for whom my grandpa was named had been born in Georgia in 1832. The Cherokee Trail of Tears, the forced removal of most of the Cherokee people from the Cherokee Nation East to what is now Oklahoma, occurred during 1837-1838. His mother was designated as a trail of tears survivor so I drew the conclusion that he came to Indian Territory the same way.

                He married Rachel Kingfisher. The fourth son born to them in 1855 was my great-grandfather Walter Smith. They had three other sons and three daughters. Only my great-grandfather, Walter, his youngest brother, John, and two younger sisters, Josephine and Elizabeth lived to adulthood.

I photographed and enlarged the name of his father
as written in Cherokee by my great grandfather,
Walter Smith, in a letter to get reparations for family
members who were forcibly removed to Indian Territory.

This is an enlargement of the Cherokee name of
my great great grandmother, Rachel Kingfisher
Smith from the same letter. Walter spoke Cherokee,
Spanish, and English. Obviously, he wrote
Cherokee. too.

                At six years of age, little Walter experienced his father leaving their home to volunteer for John Drew’s Regiment of Cherokee Mounted Rifles, the result of a reluctant alliance with the Confederacy. On November 5, 1861, Cul ca yer Smith, at twenty-nine years of age, enlisted in Company A from the Saline District. According to my great-grandfather, Walter, his father died around 1862. Very few records remain concerning the Native American casualties of the Civil War, not to mention the details of them. Oral family history related that he died in the Civil War.

                By 1867, Rachel, my great-great grandmother, was dead, too. A man fearful of bushwhackers shot her in a cornfield as she shocked corn to later grind into cornmeal for her children. When the man realized his horrible mistake, he carried her limp, dead body and placed it on the front porch of their home. Walter, aged 12, John, aged 10, Josephine, aged 8, and Elizabeth, aged 6, became orphans suddenly and went to live with their maternal grandmother, Ge-la-ner-jay. (This information was provided by Joe West, the son of Josephine Smith West, for the Mayes County Historical Book.)

                The earlier quote from Randy Krehbiel’s article accurately described my Cherokee ancestors. From my research of John Drew’s Regiment of Mounted Riflemen, those full blood Cherokee fathers sought to protect their homes, the Cherokee Nation, and their families whom they fiercely loved. My great-great grandfather, Cullikayah Smith, gave his life, not for preserving the states’ rights of the confederacy or for the freedom of all living in the United States. After all, the government in Washington, D.C. had ordered the forced removal of his people. He only wanted his little family safe.

Cover of the book about the regiment in which my great-great
grandfather volunteered to serve to protect his nation, the
Cherokee Nation. In the muster roll, his name is spelled
"Cul ca yer." The photograph on the cover is of John Drew, 
the commander of the regiment.

                The fearful Cherokee who killed Rachel, Cullikayah’s widow, found himself motivated by fear of the “carpet baggers” from the North or “bushwhackers” of the sympathetic Southerners and in turn, destroyed the last parent of the Smith children.

                Both Cullikayah and Rachel are buried in unmarked graves in Steeley Cemetery near Kenwood located in Delaware County in Oklahoma.

                Yet Walter Smith, my great grandfather, led a productive life, rising above the separation, loss, and pain he experienced in his formative years. To learn more about him, go to: https://bernadeanjgates.blogspot.com/2014/12/a-cherished-new-years-eve-centenarian.html

                I am deeply indebted to Elizabeth Purcell Hammer, my mother’s only living cousin on her father’s side. Without my conversations with Elizabeth, I would not have known these family stories, books to read, or articles to research. She has been a family jewel. I am so glad I found her.