Brigadier General Stand Watie, C.S.A.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Watie wasted no time in joining the Confederacy, viewing the federal government—not the South—as the Cherokees’ principal enemy. He raised the first Indian regiment of the Confederate Army, the Cherokee Mounted Rifles, and helped secure control of Indian Territory for the rebels early in the conflict….

Watie became known as a gifted field commander and a bold guerrilla leader. At the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas in March 1862, his troops earned acclaim for capturing a Union battery in the midst of a Confederate defeat. On June 15, 1864, his men scored a major victory by capturing the Union steamboat J.R. Williams. The following September, they seized some $1.5 million worth of supplies on a Federal wagon supply train at Cabin Creek….

Watie was so committed to the Southern cause that he refused to acknowledge the Union victory in the waning months of the Civil War, keeping his troops in the field for nearly a month after Lieutenant General E. Kirby Smith surrendered the rest of the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Army on May 26, 1865. A full 75 days after Robert E. Lee met with Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Watie became the last Confederate general to lay down arms, surrendering his battalion of Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, and Osage Indians to Union Lieutenant Colonel Asa C. Matthews at Doaksville on June 23.

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“Stand Watie’s gone.”