Complex History.
White Americans enslaved Black ones. White Americans fought to free them.
Union Army, 8th Regiment Conn. Volunteers |
"The regiment was mustered out on the 12th of December, 1865, after four years and two months of service. Its tattered colors in the Capitol at Hartford speak more eloquently of its service than pen can do here, and the brave men who helped to make and maintain its honorable record.
History of the 8th Regiment of the Connecticut Volunteers
Stephen Nealon is my great grandfather. He married his wife, Avarilla, when she was fifteen, and she had already birthed three of her ten children by 1883, when they came to southern Oregon and bought the family farm at the base of the Table Rocks. My great-grandfather arranged that his gravestone would mark his service as a soldier in the Union Army in the Civil War, Company H of the 8th regiment of the Connecticut Volunteers.
A history of the regiment reports a dozen engagements including the siege of Fort Macon, and battles at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and a last battle at Fort Harrison. Some 72 men were killed in action, another 42 died of wounds, 132 died of disease, and 610 survived the war. A monument was erected at Antietam for the regiment.
He was a survivor, and possibly did particularly heroic things in the war. He was there for all of it, which was heroic enough. Within the family there is less information about his war years and more about his having married a very young Southern girl, and then burdened her--or was it blessed her?--with ten children. She died young--or was it young for that time?--at age 60. His mother-in-law moved in with them. Was this elder care in the era when expectations and necessity meant care for frail seniors was done in the family, or was she there to help her daughter with the child-rearing? Maybe both. There was a small farmhouse and room for eleven.
My great grandmother, Stephen's wife, is the old-looking woman, right of center in a white apron, holding toddler John, and there were two more children to come. Her oldest children, boys Marian and Harry, on either end, were in their 20s.
The great-great-grandmother, Atlanta Law, lived in Georgia and may have been a Confederate sympathizer. It seems likely to me. The Union Army burned down her city.
There is good legal title to my farm land. Stephen Nealon purchased it from a man who received it under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, an act that distributed land to settlers in the Oregon Territory. The act was the predecessor to the Homestead Act. White male settlers could claim up to 640 acres of land after working and residing on it for 14 months. Indians could not. Indians were not "citizens."
The land was available because of the displacement of the local Indian tribes during the 1850s. The lands along the rivers in the Pacific Northwest were unusual because they allowed large permanent settlements of hunter-gatherer populations. Salmon were abundant and easily harvested. There was no need to travel with the game and the seasons. The fish came to them. My farm abuts the Rogue River, and arrowheads are visible on the pumice soil after a rain. It was Indian land.
Indians were displaced after skirmishes, an Indian War, a treaty, then a second displacement and removal. By 1883 it was a White man's area, and my great grandfather paid $3,000 for the 180 acres. Stephen Nealon's hands are clean, I suppose, but there is a darker past in the origins before him. The United States occupied it sufficiently that the Spanish and Russians didn't contest the land. We signed a treaty with Britain for land south of the 49th parallel. The people with the best title were Indians, but the White settler mindset was that they didn't count except as inconvenience and impediment. The land was the U.S. government's to distribute by right of occupation and conquest.
My father, home from WW2 |
A few years ago an Indian group, the Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua Tribe, bought a large piece of property very near my farm, having paid money to the heirs of the businessman who then owned the ranch. Once again the descendants of Indians control native land at the base of the Table Rocks. The Cow Creek Band are not the descendants of the displaced people, but they are here now and claim the most valuable part of the privilege of ownership and occupation--a monopoly right on local gambling customers. They were the first to open a profitable casino in the area, in a spot on the I-5 freeway 70 miles to the north. Another tribe would like to site a casino locally but cannot get the permits. The Cow Creek Tribe has "dibs" the same way White settlers did, by occupation and conquest.
Today I visit the gravesites of my parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and one great-great grandparent. I am the heir to benefits and miseries. They survived, and here I am. It is all unearned.
7 comments:
Thanks for the history Peter, very interesting. In the end power decides who gets what. Gay people are getting more rights in my opinion. Why? I think it’s because enough of them have money, power. Indians were dispatched by the more powerful European culture. Mexico lost California land to the US.Incas lost Mexico to Spain. We bought land from France, because they were going to lose it anyway, probably. The south didn’t lose much beyond legal slavery from the civil war because they had too much power. Might makes right.
Throughout life's harshness and unpleasantries what is often remembered, in subsequent generations, are their stories and myths. If the progeny are well and successful the rough stuff is described as tempering the genetic line. If on the other hand the subsequent generations are unwell and barely making it there is resentment and a general feeling of injustice. In short, our current status and our understanding of it is measured by those living and telling the stories. We are at one of these moments today as we remember Tulsa Oklahoma where the genetic line ended for many. The victims and losers do not go on, able to carry the myths of their generation, as they no longer exist. Here there is no justice only extinction.
Citizens are free to return their land to Native American ownership at any time. After death, as directed in a will, might be a convenient time.
A legacy we all share is one of war. Our fathers fought, some of us have, and some are at this moment. I wish it wasn't so, I wish it will not be in the future.
Maybe one day Memorial Day will be a less bittersweet holiday.
Ask a member of the American Indian Movement about might is right. Ask a Palestinian. Ask a Jew who could not rent a room in Montecito in the 50’s. Grab the land. March the Takelma Natives 265 miles to Siletz, Oregon , let them die along the way. My land now. Erase your ancestry memory, it’s in the way. Revise the sorrow at the grave site. Plant some flowers. Me heap big chief.
“History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books—books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe.”
Churchill?
Nah, Dawn Brown, the DaVinci Code
When I was a kid, they still taught "manifest destiny." I guess that was supposed to mean that
OOps -- mean that all that injustice was God's will. Wrong!
G
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