Chief Bowles and Texas Cherokees

Here is the gripping story of the last stand of Chief Philip Bowles of the Chickamauga Cherokee Indians of Texas. Mary Whatley Clarke sets this tale against the stormy background of Anglo-Cherokee-Mexican relations in early nineteenth-century Texas.

The Chickamauga Cherokees from Running Water on the Tennessee River were continually forced to relocate–first to Missouri, then to Arkansas, and finally to Texas. They managed to make a home of their new Texas residence. Then, as has happened many times before and since in Anglo-Indian relations, settlers began to look with increasing desire at the rich Indian lands. The Chickamauga Cherokee had had enough of relocation, and, on a blistering July day in 1839, Chief Bowles and his warriors made a tragic and bloody final stand on the battlefield defending their new Texas home. Their stand resulted in defeat and the dispersal of the Chickamauga Cherokees to far-flung homes on reservations.

Could this history have taken a different course? Perhaps not, for, as Mary Whatley Clarke observes, the Cherokee had become “a red island in a white sea,” and it seems inevitable that the Anglo-American would submerge that island.

Mary Whatley Clarke is author of John Simpson Chisum: Jinglebob King of the Pecos and The Slaughter Ranches and Their Makers.