The stone in the weeds

For the record, no one keeps it up. There it stands, strong and square, I might add, just off an ordinary almost unpaved road, amid a chorus of mangy prairie grass, its own special space surrounded by a fence erected years ago. 

A new book, Remember Us, says Dutch schoolchildren, yet today, eighty years later, are still assigned to keep up the graves of fallen Allied soldiers--keep the grass cut, the weeds down, the stones themselves unsoiled by what birds. The idea is obvious--teach kids not to forget sacrifice.

No one tends this stone marker. It's not a gravestone, it's a highway marker, one of those history things that flash by when you're trying to get someplace important. To read this one, you have to look hard, pull off the road, and kick around in the long grass. 

It's obscure, but then its story is. "The BATTLE OF ROUND MOUNTAINS," the stone says, all caps. But controversy still rages about exactly where the Battle of Round Mountain occurred. I suppose here or there doesn't matter so much anymore, despite the fact that the Battle of Round Mountain, 1861,was the first Civil War battle in Indian Territory, which is to say Oklahoma. 

Let me try to pull some weeds. There were, by 1861, two bands of Creeks, Lower and Upper. Generally speaking, the Lower Creeks were assimilated to the culture of white folks moving in, the Uppers less so. The Lowers were content to acknowledge their Native-ness, but the Uppers wanted to nurture old cultural values and ways. 

Okay, think typical bitterness between brother and sister, or brother and brother. In 1861, the Uppers and the Lowers didn't hit it off at all and hadn't for decades. What's more, it was difficult for all Native tribes to know how to negotiate the war between the States. The Lowers sided with the Confederates; they hailed from the South, after all. The Uppers sided with the Union, and the Uppers had a great orator, a head man with the unpronounceable name of Opthala Yahola, who, with courage and conviction, led the Upper Creek nation for forty years. 

As if all of this isn't messy enough, let's add more weediness. Opthala Yahola owned a sprawling 2000-acre ranch in Indian Territory, much of it worked by slaves. Yahola wanted the old time tribal ways; but, in his own house, he had exchanged Native religious rites for Christianity and had even joined the Masons. 

This almost hidden monument celebrates a Civil War battle fought almost totally by Native Americans, combatants often coming from the same tribe--brother against brother.

Yahola's big ranch became the center of those Native people--Chickasaw, Seminole, freed slaves and others--who, like Yahola and his Upper Creek people, sided with Yankees.

The Battle of Round Mountain, wherever it was fought, was the first of three battles along the route Yahola and his Yankee sympathizers took in a desperate flight to what they believed would be safety in Kansas, by then a free state.

Round Mountain, wherever it happened, was the first; two weeks later the Rebel forces attacked once again at Chusto Talasah, then disastrously at Chustenahlah, where finally the Confeds whipped Yaholah's people, killing hundreds and sending those survivors who could north to Kansas, in a long, frozen trek sometimes called "The Trail of Blood on Ice." 

Yahola's survivors made it to Kansas, made it to freedom, but arrived in bitter cold without food and water. Once 1500 people were with Yahola. Only 200 made it to freedom in Kansas. Of course, all of this is after the Trail of Tears.

Sometimes stuff gets hidden away. You've got to trimming the weeds.