Riding Out the Storm: 19th Century Chickasaw Governors; Their Lives and Intellectual Legacy

Riding Out the Storm: 19th-Century Chickasaw Governors; Their Lives and Intellectual Legacy profiles the lives of three nineteenth-century Chickasaw governors–Cyrus Harris, Winchester Colbert, and William L. Byrd. Revealing the three leaders not merely as historic politicians, but as human beings, Phillip Carroll Morgan portrays their personal and political lives against literary backdrops relating directly to their experiences–Cyrus Harris with his northern Mississippi neighbors, the Faulkners; Civil War governor Winchester Colbert with Native American literature about war; and William L. Byrd with his great-grandniece Jodi A. Byrd’s twenty-first-century indigenous critiques of colonialism. The tenures of these governors span the period from the reorganization of the post-Removal Chickasaw Nation as a republic in 1856 until 1892, the end of William Byrd’s second term. Featuring historic photographs from the Chickasaw archives, Riding Out the Storm illustrates the intellectual history of the Chickasaws, offering new views on the rich legacy of the tribe’s mythos and personalities in northern Mississippi and the Civil War in Indian Territory. It also examines the constant siege by settlers and entrepreneurs on the Chickasaws and their lands, leading to the Dawes Act of 1887, or General Allotment Act–the heart of a strategy meant to break up American Indian nations once and for all.