Around the Chota Farm area outside of Boulder, Colorado, they still tell the story about how Aunt Goody Kit and the Cherokee won the First World War by resisting the draft.
For most Americans, the so-called “war to end all wars” began on April 2 1917. The local newspapers, including the Cherokee paper, the Tsalagi Panopolist reported Woodrow Wilson’s stirring speech. “We have no selfish ends to serve,” Wilson assured the nation. “We desire no conquest.”
It was going to be a just war, people were saying, a war against the Germans who as most people around town could tell you were naked aggressors, godless Huns transgressing against elemental standards of international law, basic principles of human decency, and other things like that. Even Henry Ford, the papers and newsreels said, had stopped railing about the war as a conspiracy of “International Jews” and had gotten busy manufacturing helmets and airplane motors. Around the country nearly 10 million men registered for the draft in a twelve hour period on June 5.
Closer to home, Ms. William Randolph Hearst led a stirring war bond rally down at the Boulder County Courthouse, grade school kids started saving peach pits for making gas mask filters, and on Easter morning Albert Goodnight, grandson of one Colorado’s great cattle ranchers, was beaten to death by a drunken mob of firemen when they mistook him for a German spy. Coeds from the university were joining the Woman’s Land Army in droves, signing up mostly to work as farmerettes picking the orange crop in Florida, and everyone was “Hooverizing” themselves, planting backyard gardens, giving up meat on Tuesdays. Restaurants around town were renaming everything vaguely German on their menus, of course, calling hamburger “Liberty steak” and chalking in “Freedom cabbage” for sauerkraut.
In spite of all the enthusiasm, Frank Kroeber had a problem. A businessman by trade who had gotten rich milling self-rising flour for the Army during the War with Spain, Kroeber had been appointed County Draft Commissioner for Boulder, and he had sat through a first class dressing down by the Governor’s office in Denver. Unlike almost every other district in the state, Kroeber’s conscript numbers were on the low side. In particular, it was clear that the Cherokee boys from Chota weren’t exactly racing to get in line at the draft board office on Broadway. In fact, they weren’t coming in to register at all.
“Well, you see, they’re not actually, you know, citizens,” Kroeber tried to explain. It wasn’t until 1924, of course, that someone decided that Indians would be better off as citizens. Still, Kroeber began to get pressure from the Governor’s Office to get his conscript numbers up.
“They’re American enough,” the Governor’s aid told him. “I mean Jesus, Kroeber, what does it take to be an American anyway, except to know how to say nice doggie just long enough to pick up a rock. Even a goddamn Indian can do that. Hell, they eat dogs.”
Kroeber tended to get lost when people got too far into the complexities of American foreign policy, but he did realize that he was going to have to go down to Chota himself. There was no way around it.
The next Monday he rang up Susi Parsons, the clerk at the Chota Iris farm, the only person in the community who had a telephone. Kroeber didn’t relish any of this. The last time he had had any dealings with the Cherokees, he had ended up getting tricked into speaking at an Equal Suffrage League rally in Denver. That newspaper woman from Chota, the cigar-smoking one, who edited the Tsalagi Panopolist from that sty of an office by Goose Creek, had told him it was a public appearance by D.W. Griffith who was to speak to the local Rotary Club on the theme “Undoing the Reconstruction.” Instead, Kroeber found himself on a makeshift platform with Emma Goldman, and my God, Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, who, he noticed with disgust, had hair on her knuckles. Nothing good came from going to Chota.
Kroeber arranged a meeting later in the week with Aunt Goodey Kit, who was at the time the principle woman in the Chota Council. Auntie Kit, as a leader of the community and a respected woman and elder, was to also line up all the draft age men of Chota, ages eighteen to thirty, so that Kroeber could talk to them about their patriotic duty, the war effort, the fabric of national life, and such other matters that might come up.
On the appointed day, Kroeber piloted his DeSoto through Boulder and out past the fields to Chota. It had been a slow trip across town. The YMCA was holding a “100% American Rally” downtown where they were burning books by German writers in a big bonfire on Pearl Street. Kroeber had to stop and pitch in a cardboard box of dusty volumes his wife had in the attic of their new house. As he tossed the books one by one into the flames, most of the names meant nothing to him, exept one maybe.
“Hegel,” he said to himself, pausing to read the name of one Hun author. That one seemed vaguely familiar. Kroeber strugged and pitched it in with the rest.
By the time Kroeber swung into the dirt yard of Auntie Kit’s place off of 13th Street, he was late. In front of the sheds, the old woman was driving a decrepit Ford truck back and forth across piles of black walnuts to break off the shells. A little girl in calico and bare feet was dragging burlap sacks of nuts out of the dark square of the shed door, spreading them out in the dirt to be winnowed by the tires of the truck.
As Kroeber should have expected, none of the Chota men had showed up. Not one.
“They’re away,” Auntie Kit explained. “Duck hunting in . . . Wyoming.”
Somehow this didn’t sound right. Kroeber had never heard of anyone from Chota doing any duck hunting, and he was pretty sure he had seen that young Clement Lesbos fellow coming out of the latest Mary Pickford film just the night before.
He was going to have to get tough with the old lady.
“Look, Miss, ah, Kit,” Kroeber began. “It’s time to get your young fellas all signed up to fight Kaiser Bill.” Kroeber had just seen the The Beast of Berlin at the picture show the week before and he told Auntie Kit about the scene where Kaiser Wilhelm was depicted with the nose of a great swine ready to devour Europe.
Auntie Kit seemed unimpressed by the story.
“I like pigs,” she said. “Pigs, among all the animals, treat human beings as equals.”
“Yes,” said Kroeber,” but look here — the Hun has promised to help Mexico reclaim its lost territory in Arizona.”
“Arizona belongs to the Mexicans,” Auntie Kit said.
“Well,” Kroeber tried again. “Fritzie’s subs are sinking our ships on the ocean.”
“Whose ocean is it anyway?” Auntie Kit wanted to know. Kroeber thought she was beginning to sound a little irritated.
“It belongs to everyone.”
“Well, why don’t we all just stay home until this war quiets down?”
Kroeber figured he had to try another route.
“Look, ah, what if your men went over the mountains to Shiprock to well . . . duck hunt, let’s say, and the Navajo chased them out? How would you feel?
Auntie Kit looked at him like he was stupid.
“Our boys know better than to do that. That’s Navajo country. They’d get their asses kicked. It’s better to stay home, mind your own business. Say, what do these Germans look like anyway?” she wanted to know.
Kroeber explained that they looked like any other white people. Suddenly a little light seemed to go on in the old woman’s eyes.
“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll have a talk with the boys.”
Of course it wasn’t the men Auntie Kit went to talk with after she finally got Kroeber to drive away. She had a better idea.
Since the late 1990s, the local Cherokee paper, the Tsalagi Panopolist had been run by Martha Redbird, now a lively, hard drinking middle-age woman who had come to Chota from the Qualla Boundary. In the long tradition of Cherokee newspapers going back to the Phoenix of the 1820s, the Panopolist was bilingual, each page divided between the thin angled lines of English text and the deeper, darker loops of Sequoia’s syllabary. Martha ran the Panopolist out of a little office on the far end of second street by the coal oil dock. The place was chaotic, the massive cast iron Washington press set up in the middle like some dark alter, surrounded on all sides by a maze of wooden shelves and doors thrown across saw horses, coffee boxes stuffed with books and newsprint, typewriters — the ones that worked and the ones for parts — and everything slathered in decades of slick black ink from the two sets of cases — the letters for the English, the characters for the Cherokee syllabary.
When Auntie Kit emerged from the dark bowels of the Panopolist office, she brought with her a plan. That night, Martha Redbird had kept the press running hot. As the printing plates smacked the press bed, she repeated again and again the traditional formula for war:
Hayi Yu. Sge. Usinuli du da anta unan ugatsi dasti nige sun a. Dud anta elaw i ni iyu ta a tasu digu nage I degu lskwi tahise sti, anetsage ta unanuga isti nigesuna pitinu neliga
It was a prescription so powerful that saying it, remembering it now, you must throw something away from yourself to make the words not stick.
Listen. Quickly his soul shall be without motion. There under the earth, where the black war clubs shall be moving about like ball sticks in the game, there his soul shall be, never to return.
The next morning the front page of the Panopolist splashed its banner headline in English and Cherokee:
YO NV U HAN LU A!
CHEROKEE ENLIST IN CANADA
TO JOIN FIGHT AT FRONT
Literally, of course, the Cherokee words were about an angry bear, snorting, swinging its head from side to side, but everyone at Chota understood how it could be translated that way to English.
Martha produced a special press run of twenty thousand copies. The Chota paper boys plastered Boulder with the Panopolist, and old Quentin Pathkiller who delivered milk in Denver, dropped off bundles at every news stand. It was a brilliant idea, one that worked like a charm too.
Both the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News picked up the story. WAR WHOOP ROUTS HUN, screamed the Post’s headline. FRENCH CHEER AS CHIEFS REPLACE GENERALS AT FRONT, responded the News. Within two weeks, the national press was all over the story. The New York Times early edition bannered RED WARRIORS SWEEP NO MAN’S LAND. A Detroit Free Press reporter, claiming to be wiring his story under artillery fire from the first battle of the Marne, sent the rewrite men back home the lead “Albert Screaming Eagle, a Cherokee warrior from Colorado led a charge on German trenches today. Stop. Putting down the tomahawk and picking up the Springfield, Screaming Eagle led his brigade through entangling wire and mustard gas. Stop. ‘All men are Americans,’ his commander said, after the assault.”
Unwilling to ruin a good story with too much truth, one paper after another rewrote their competitors’ news, adding details not present in the originals. “What have ya got?” Editors demanded, and frantic reporters answered with increasingly elaborate stories of Indian heroism, the savage onslaught of patriotic Redmen against the Boche.
Indian women understand language. Auntie Kit and Martha Redbird’s plan successfully managed to convince the nation that hundreds of Cherokee troops had miraculously appeared in the trenches. Without actually sending any of the men off to fight, the two women quickly began to have an impact on the success of the war for the allies.
Within a couple of weeks, the whole thing had outgrown the Cherokee. There were Omahas, Sioux, Choctaws, and Creeks, all leaping off transports at Brest, driving at the Argonne. If you believed the press, Indian tribes that had been exterminated by smallpox forty years earlier were suddenly reinforcing the British in Belgium, and the San Francisco Examiner ran photographs of so called Patafanny warriors of the 32nd Division eating apple pies with the Salvation Army girls in Monsard.
Stories like this took a big toll on German morale. Most of the German conscripts, although they were called themselves “huns,” or “barbares,” or “Boches” by the French and American press, had grown up reading Karl May western novels, wild and improbable romances about the American frontier. They were scared to death of Indians.
Stories circulated about how the opposing trenches were inhabited by lurking “Redskins,” of patrols sent on midnight reconnaissance of American trenches who returned to tell of fearful scalp dances and war painted heathens dancing around a blazing fire. An American officer, captured by the Germans in the battle of St. Mihiel, was surprised to find himself interrogated not on his division movements or objectives, but on how many Indians there were in the units opposing in that sector. The Germans seemed particularly wary of Cherokees.
So numerous were the examples of Indian heroism that eventually the Army began to conduct studies to determine if Indians had particular gifts as soldiers. Newspaper articles began to appear about so called "natural" abilities of these born-warriors. The East Coast papers in particular seemed to embrace the idea. Le Monde ran a whole series of roto pages about the superiority of Indian soldiers. There was a story that several brigades of the 43rd Division were issued Indian regalia — feathers, beads, things like that and were instructed in how to whoop like Indians by none other than Douglas Fairbanks himself.
At home. military officials began to dress up Indians and white guys alike in make up and feathered bonnets and beaded buckskin to employ them as recruiting agents and Liberty Bond salesmen. On June 17, 1917 the French paper Le Miroir ran a picture of somebody called Chief Eagle Horse dressed up in Indian drag standing beneath the statue of George Washington on Wall street trying to convince a crowd of onlookers to enlist. The folks at Chota figured Chief Eagle Horse had to be Eddie Cantor. Some said Fatty Arbuckle.
It was beautiful. It was fiction. And it was not as outlandish as it sounds. By 1918, America’s newspapers were feeding their own bulldog on war hysteria, 100 percent Americanism, and the jailing and execution of labor agitators and communists. If the story took Indians, there could be Indians.
Dr. McDuffy Gibbon, an Irish-born eugenicist working on an Army contract at Yale University began conducting psychological tests on Indian soldiers to analyze their seemingly natural heroism. “The American indigene,” Dr. Gibbon was quoted in the New York Times as saying in 1918, “could very well represent a great reservoir of genetic potential. If his seed were introduced, that is grafted scientifically, in monitored proportions on the clean stock of the Anglo-Saxon, a race of super-Hessians yet in the service of democracy might be developed like the world has never known.”
The article made the rounds among all the boys from Chota, those who were in the service and those who weren’t. They were generally enthusiastic about all this talk about seed introducing.
Back at Chota, all this created quite a stir. The hounding questions of reporters were met by the young wives and the mothers of the local men with confused stares. Margret Basket Tree, a Paint Clan woman, and consequently characteristically impatient, shot one reporter from the Post with a load of salt.
Even though Frank Kroeber’s draft commission had not succeeded in registering a single Chota man for the draft, suddenly it seemed like he had succeeded in spades. Later in the war, Kroeber was awarded a civilian citation by the Provost Marshall for his contribution to the war effort.
In spite of everything, however, Kroeber felt uneasy. It seemed to him there were just as many men living and working around Chota as there had been before the great enlistment. Riding past downtown one day a few months into the war, he spotted a perfectly healthy twenty five year old who used to work for him at the mill.
“Hey young fella, aren’t you Jimmy Harlen?”
“No,” the young fellow said. “That’s my. . . uncle. He’s in the war.”
“With the Canadians, right,” said Kroeber.
“Yes, said Jimmy Harlen.” “At the front.”
If they didn’t just all look alike, Kroeber worried.
In spite of Auntie Kit and Martha Redbird’s best efforts to keep the men home and win the war at the same time, quite a few men from Chota eventually enlisted — probably about twenty. Men sometimes can’t be reasoned with. Mink Mooney flew with the Lafayette Escadrille, and Charlie Wheeler served with General John Pershing at St. Mihiel in 1918. Carlo Dan fought with British Gurkas in Palestine. It was popularly believed that the German Minewerfer artillery piece was named for Nemo Mine who left Chota to develop quite a reputation for dodging artillery fire as a courier. In all, probably about 17,000 Indian soldiers from around the country fought in the war. A good share of them were real.
In his 1919 report, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells cited Twell Green Corn for heroism, specifically for “exceptional skill, courage, and coolness under fire.” Apparently Twell had guided an Australian patrol into the heart of No-Man’s Land to rescue a convoy of circus performers that had accidently strayed off the main road south of Ypres. Twell single-handedly dragged two clowns and the famous “Hyena Woman of Montpelier” from the mud of a shell crater in a ravaged forest. Twell was awarded the French croix de guerre by Marshal Petain himself in a special ceremony in Paris. The official certificate got home anyway. Shortly afterwards in a bistro near the Gare St. Lazare Twell was beaten to death by a drunken doughboy from Nebraska, son of a court marshalled trooper who fought against the Apaches with Crook.
Marian Oklama, the son of a blacksmith at the Chota livery, rallied an infantry attack at Amiens by rushing German machine gun positions in an abandoned creamery, dashing ahead of the brigade under a violent barrage of fire to rap a startled German officer on the helmet with what he called a “homemade coo-coo stick” made out of a piece of a wooden wine barrel. Oklama said he learned it from a Cheyenne kid in motorpool.
Bad news came aplenty, of course. Quallo Holmes died of influenza somewhere on a ship off the coast of Turkey. Dorsey Chino was killed in Italy. Domi Moon was perhaps the last casuality of the war. Domi had been hit in the head with a shovel by an angry Welsh kid at the Union School in third grade and had never been quite right since. His transport ship was torpedoed by a German submarine as it left Le Havre for the trip back to the States.
One day after the armistice, Auntie Kit ran across Joni Moon, Domi’s mother, at the green grocer on Valmont.
“Siyu Dohitsu (see-yoo taw-hee-jsoo),” Auntie Kit asked.
“I’m well, thank you. Better,” said Joni.
“I’m sorry the plan didn’t work perfectly,” Auntie Kit said.
“You’re not to be sorry,” said Joni. “I figure the war is the great snake, the Uk ten they talk about in the old stories. It’s a creature so large, they say, that people sometimes mistakenly hide behind its scales seeking safety.”
Everybody at Chota remembered Auntie Kit and Martha Redbird, or the stories about them, with fondness and good humor. It should be an old woman’s job, and an old man’s too, it was frequently said, to try to keep the young people out of war.
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