(1806-81)
Choctaw political leader and diplomat
Peter Perkins Pitchlynn, one-quarter Choctaw, exemplified the bicultural elite who dominated political and economic life among the so-called Five Civilized Tribes during the nineteenth century. Born on January 30, 1806, at Hush-ook-wa in the Choctaw homeland in Mississippi, Peter was the son of John Pitchlynn, a prosperous white farmer, and Sophia Folsom, a member of a prominent Choctaw-white family. Peter grew up in an affluent household that valued English education and Protestant Christianity. His sporadic formal schooling, begun at age fourteen, included a few months at Choctaw Academy (Kentucky) and the University of Nashville (Tennessee) following his marriage to his cousin Rhoda Folsom in 1824.
Pitchlynn raised livestock and crops, but his real interest lay in Choctaw politics. His life coincided with the most critical period of Choctaw history, during which the nation faced forced emigration to the Indian Territory, the Civil War, mounting threats to its sovereignty, and rapid cultural change. Many Choctaws responded to these pressures by adopting some Anglo-American ways while retaining as much of their Indian culture and nationhood as possible.
The ambitious Pitchlynn, called Snapping Turtle by his traditionalist supporters, was usually at the turbulent center of Choctaw politics. His first public service was as "colonel" of the Choctaw "lighthorse," the mounted police force established in 1820. While still a very young man, he participated in creating the Choctaw constitution of 1826.
Throughout the 1820s the federal government pressured all eastern Indians to move west of the Mississippi River. Geographically divided into three districts, the Choctaws were also divided politically over whether to agree to leave Mississippi. As they tried to decide how to deal with the crisis, the Pitchlynn family, supporting Chief Moshulatubbee of the Northeastern District, was often at odds with the Christian Party, led in part by Rhoda Pitchlynn's nationalist brother, David Folsom. Fortunately the Choctaws escaped the removal-era violence that racked the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole nations. In the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (1830), they reluctantly agreed to exchange their eastern homeland for a reserve west of Arkansas between the Canadian and Red Rivers, in the southern third of present-day Oklahoma. Other considerations they were promised included annuities, educational funds, and federal guarantees to protect their lands and sovereignty. Peter Pitchlynn, who later claimed to have opposed the treaty, received two sections of land for his cooperation and, at age twenty-four, briefly replaced Moshulatubbee as chief of the Northeastern District.
Pitchlynn moved west with the Choctaws in 1831 over their version of the Trail of Tears. They immediately began to reestablish the Choctaw Nation in the West and to work toward creating a centralized republican Choctaw government there. Pitchlynn founded farms near present-day Eagletown and Tom in far southeastern Oklahoma, but he devoted most of his time to public life. In 1834 he helped draft the first constitution written in Oklahoma; three years later he served with the commission that negotiated a union (1837-55) with the immigrating Chickasaws.
Pitchlynn often served as a member of the Choctaw National Council, but his greatest achievement before the Civil War was the establishing of the Choctaw national school system. Although in 1841 he was named superintendent of Choctaw Academy, the Baptist boarding school in Kentucky founded by the former U.S. vice president Richard M. Johnson for Choctaw boys, Pitchlynn was also instrumental in its closing. He wanted Choctaw boys and girls educated in their own institutions in their own country and lobbied to have their educational funds redirected from Kentucky to the Choctaw Nation. As speaker of the council in 1842, he wrote a new constitution that allowed the appropriation of funds to found Spencer and Wheelock academies. Shortly afterward, Pitchlynn became president of Spencer Academy's board of trustees. Allegations that he misused school funds entrusted to him marred his record of contributions to Choctaw education and provided evidence, according to his biographer, of a tendency on his part to put personal profit ahead of Choctaw public welfare. Nevertheless, by the 1850s Pitchlynn had established himself as an able politician and "delegate" representing Choctaw interests in Washington, D.C.
During the Civil War the Choctaw Nation allied itself with the Confederacy. Pitchlynn, initially a Union man even though he owned 135 slaves, avoided conflict by withdrawing to his home deep in the mountains of southeastern Oklahoma. Still, in 1864 he was declared chief of the Choctaw Nation. As such he led the negotiations to reestablish federal-Choctaw relations through the Reconstruction Treaty (1866). Although they were forced to make important concessions, Pitchlynn and the Choctaw delegates successfully opposed federal proposals that they substitute individual landholding for traditional communal ownership of land. They also resisted the incorporation of the Choctaws into an intertribal territorial government.
Pitchlynn's major postwar concern as a politician and delegate was the "net proceeds" claim. The Choctaws insisted that the federal government owed them $3 million from the sale of 10 million acres of their former Mississippi homeland. Though Pitchlynn was tenacious in pressing the claim from 1854 until his death in 1881, his political motives were suspect given the kickbacks, excessive "attorney's fees," and collusion that were so often a part of federal dealings with the Five Civilized Tribes in the late nineteenth century. Even so, his groundwork was primarily responsible for the successful settlement of the claim in 1886, five years after his death.
Pitchlynn led a frustrating life in which his business and political schemes rarely paid off. Opportunistic, vain, materialistic, and hot tempered, he owned brass knuckles and a brace of dueling pistols, but he was also a romantic who enjoyed Shakespeare, Milton, and Scott. George Catlin painted him as a Choctaw warrior, but Pitchlynn wrote poetry that suggested his sense of alienation from both the Anglo-American and Choctaw cultures. A loving, indulgent father, he was often away from his eight children by Rhoda Folsom, who died in 1844, and his five children by Carolyn Eckloff Lombari, a Virginian he married in 1869. In financial straits, Pitchlynn died in Washington, D.C., on January 17, 1881, and after Masonic services was buried in Congressional Cemetery. Perhaps this was a fitting resting place for a Choctaw citizen who, though absorbed in the affairs of the Choctaw Nation, lived a large part of his life at a physical and cultural distance from his people.
See also
Choctaw.
W. David Baird, Peter Pitchlynn: Chief of the Choctaws (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972); Angie Debo, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934).
Mary Jane Warde
Stillwater, Oklahoma
