Trail Sisters: Freedwomen in Indian Territory, 1850-1890

African American women enslaved by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, andCreek Nations led lives ranging from utter subjection to recognized kinship. Regardless of status, during Removal, they followed the Trail of Tears in the footsteps of the slaveholders, suffering the same life-threatening hardships and poverty.As if Removal to Indian Territory weren’t cataclysmic enough, the Civil War shatteredthe worlds of these slave women even more, scattering families, destroying property, anddisrupting social and family relationships. Suddenly free, they had nowhere to turn. Freedwomen found themselves negotiating new lives within a labyrinth of federal and tribaloversight, Indian resentment, and intruding entrepreneurs and settlers.Remarkably, they reconstructed their families and marshaled the skills to fashion livelihoods in a burgeoning capitalist environment. They sought education and forged newrelationships with immigrant black women and men, managing to establish a foundationfor survival. Linda Williams Reese is the first to trace the harsh and often bitter journey of these women from arrival in Indian Territory to free-citizen status in 1890. In doing so, she establishes them as pioneers of the American West equal to their Indian and other Plains sisters.