The Goingsnake Tragedy: Conflict and Compromise, Cherokee Style

Abstract

Two men stood face to face in Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. The feud between their families had cost a dozen lives in 1872 and threatened to erupt in renewed violence for the next fifteen years. Even the intervention of President Ulysses S. Grant had failed to smother their smol dering hatred. But now, at the urging of their friends, Ezekial Proctor and White Sut Beck shook hands sealing a compromise that closed a tragic chapter in Cherokee history. Although the per sonal feud had been laid to rest, the jurisdictional dispute between Indian and white authorities that had caused most of the bloodshed remained unre solved and continued to trouble rela tions between the first Americans and those who came later. The feud and its bloody aftermath were played out in the Illinois River basin of the Cherokee Nation. The rug ged, tree-covered hills had been cut by the winding river whose blue-green waters had worn through the ancient land of flint and limestone for millennia. Many of the hollows and hills were inac cessible, an attraction to several noto rious criminal gangs of the Ozark re gion. The James Brothers, the Youngers, and many other well-known outlaws made these isolated hills their haunts. The people of the Cherokee Nation were a hardy breed. Most had come to the valleys over the Trail of Tears after the white man had pushed them out of their native Georgia. The territory was rough, the inhabitants fierce, and the law was determined by the draw of the gun. Ezekial Proctor, a full-blood Cherokee, came to this country over the Trail of Tears as a boy. He grew up five miles from the Arkansas line in the Goingsnake District of the Cherokee Na tion, a lawless region where desperadoes from the states would flee the juris diction of the federal government. By the age of twelve, Zeke was well-known for his accuracy with rifles and pis tols. He was also an expert with a knife, which he could draw with light ning speed and hurl with deadly accuracy at a foot-square target 100 feet away. Proctor was educated in schools oper ated by the tribal government and fought in the Civil War with the Union. Re spected by his neighbors, he became a prosperous Cherokee farmer and rancher and also served as sheriff in his dis trict. The man himself was tall with long black hair that hung loosely below