It’s interesting how projects and research often end up overlapping. The celebration of Mississippi’s bicentennial and the bicentennial of the settlement of Columbus will kick off Oct. 2 in Columbus. It should be followed in 2019 by the bicentennial of the official recognition of the Town of Columbus, though then it was as Columbus, Alabama Territory. Also, I was recently researching the land upon which the new Mossy Oak Golf Course was built. In tracking down the names of Native Americans who may have lived near that land prior to the Indian cessions, I came across references to Gen. William Colbert of the Chickasaw Nation. He was living nearby around the time of the Creek Indian War of 1813-14. As is often the case, finding out one historical fact just leads to the trail of others.
I have a Baltimore newspaper from September 21, 1816, that contains a copy of a letter sent to the Nashville Whig. The letter was signed “William Colbert, Brig. gen. of the Chickasaws.” Colbert begins the letter: “Brethren of the whites — It is with the most unfeigned pleasure that we contemplate the long and steady friendship subsisting between our nation and our American white brethen.” After other words of praise and friendship, Colbert brings up the subject of “the horde of straggling pedlars that have so long infested our nation.”
The general went on to say that such speculators surely must be unknown and unauthorized by the U.S. government. He considered it a dangerous situation developing and added: “Was any argument necessary to enforce this idea, it will be found in the history of the late transaction that has taken place in the Cherokee Nation. …We therefore caution in the strongest terms, all such persons from entering our nation.”
What had happened in the Cherokee Nation? That might be answered by two articles in the same newspaper. One was datelined Huntsville, Mississippi Territory (now Alabama) and the other “Creek Path, Cherokee Nation.” In August 1816, an incident had occurred eight miles below the head of Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River, where a group of eight whites led by a Capt. James Burlesson killed two Cherokees. The paper gives two different accounts of what happened. In one account, the White Burlesson and Taylor famlies claimed members of their family had been attacked by Cherokee Indians. A letter written by the prominent Cherokee leader Richard Brown provided a different account. He stated two Cherokees were shot and killed in an unprovoked attack by four whites with a party of 10 or 12 other whites who were on horseback. Brown was requesting the whites be brought to justice under the laws of the United States.
This incident on the Tennessee River and the letters about it may reflect circumstances that would a year later result in the founding of Columbus. As Paul Harvey would say, here is “the rest of the story.”
The earliest history of Columbus, which was written by Oscar Keeler in 1848, states that in the latter part of the year 1817, Thomas Thomas, a man who had been driven out by the agent as an intruder in the Chickasaw nation, built a small split log hut. Its site was around the northeast corner of Third Street South and College Street, or about where the office of the Columbus Convention and Visitors Bureau is now. The cabin was built at the prime location on the bluff of the Tombigbee River overlooking the site that was to become the Military Road’s Tombigbee ferry crossing.
On Sept. 28, 1814, “Judge” William Cocke, veteran of the Revolutionary War, the Creek Indian War, a former U.S. senator from Tennessee and a friend of Thomas Jefferson, was appointed U.S. agent for the Chickasaw Indian Nation. One of his stated duties was the removal of intruders from the Chickasaw lands. A July 2, 1816, letter to Andrew Jackson said some of the Chickasaw leaders lodged complaints against Cocke that he was not diligent in removing the intruders. It was an allegation Cocke denied, but which along with disagreements with Andrew Jackson, would lead to his removal as agent.
By the fall of 1817 Col. Henry Sherburne had been notified he had been appointed the new agent of the Chickasaw Nation. On Nov. 27, 1817, he accepted the position which he would assume in June 1817.
It was in the fall of 1817 Keeler said a “Thomas Thomas” who had been “run” out of the Chickasaw Nation by Cocke built the first house at the future site of Columbus. During Cocke’s time as Chickasaw agent, a Thomas Cheadle was employed as a carpenter at the agency. He worked there from July 1814 until September 1817. It was in September that Capt. Hugh Young, surveyor of Military Road, informed Andrew Jackson of the location of the road’s Tombigbee Crossing.
On June 27, 1818, Col. Sherburne, the new agent, arrived at the Chickasaw Agency and wrote to the secretary of war that Col. Cocke had “taken himself & family about 30 miles off to a place he has or is about to purchase on the Tombigbee.” The site where Cocke and his family were living in 1819 was the site of that cabin built on the Military Road’s Tombigbee Crossing in 1817. Was the builder of the first house in Columbus Thomas Thomas, an intruder run out of the Chickasaw Nation by William Cocke, or Thomas Cheadle, a carpenter sent by Cocke to build a house and stake a claim for him at a soon-to-be very valuable piece of real estate.
It is fascinating how 1816 newspaper accounts of a letter from Chickasaw Gen. William Colbert and a deadly encounter between whites and Indians at Muscle Shoals might shed light on the settlement of 200 years ago that became Columbus.
Rufus Ward is a local historian. Email your questions about local history to him at [email protected].
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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