Encyclopedia of North American Indians -

Encyclopedia of North American Indians

Porter, Pleasant

(1840-1907)

Creek political leader

Pleasant Porter was born on September 26, 1840, in the Creek Nation (present-day Wagoner County, Oklahoma), the son of Benjamin Edward Porter and his wife, Phoebe, the daughter of Tahlopee Tustunnuggee and Lydia Perryman. The original Porters, Pleasant Porter's grandparents, were whites from Pennsylvania who settled in the eastern Creek Nation after the War of 1812. Identifying with their Creek neighbors, they supported the faction of Lower Creeks led by the McIntosh family and in 1828 voluntarily migrated to the "Creek Nation, West" in Indian Territory. Settling in the Arkansas River valley, the Porters built a plantation and enjoyed the benefits of a slave-labor force. The many Porter sons married Creek women and settled on the family plantation. From one of these unions came Pleasant Porter.

Creek matrilineal descent gave Porter the clan (Bird) and the town (Okmulgee) of his mother, and he grew up in a bicultural, bilingual, and affluent household where Anglo-American cultural values were respected. During the 1850s he attended the Presbyterian mission school, Tullahassee, and joined the Presbyterian Church. Having completed his education in 1860, he briefly clerked in a store and then herded cattle in New Mexico, but in August 1861, after the Creeks entered into an alliance with the Confederacy, Porter enlisted in Company A of the First Creek Regiment. Porter saw enough action in the Civil War to receive three wounds and win a promotion from private to first lieutenant.

The war devastated much of the Creek Nation. At war's end Porter returned to the family plantation to find his slaves and livestock gone, his buildings burned, and his fields overgrown. He set to work rebuilding his estate. Never interested in farming, at various times he owned stores, including one in Okmulgee, his town and the Creek Nation's capital, but cattle was the main source of Porter's wealth. Common ownership of Creek land meant that any Creek could use as much of the nation's land as he needed. Some Creek entrepreneurs took advantage of this, making use of thousands of acres for grazing. Though Creek ranchers ran their own cattle, they also frequently leased much of their range to Texas cattlemen. Porter, in partnership with Clarence W. Turner, made a fortune in leasing and stock raising. He also acquired a great deal of property in Muskogee, established as a shipping point on the rail line, and built his home there in 1889.

On November 25, 1872, Porter married Mary Ellen Keys, a daughter of the chief justice of the Cherokee Supreme Court. She died on January 15, 1886. Porter married his second wife, Mattie Leonora Bertholf, on May 26, 1886. The first family included three children; the second, one child.

Although Porter grew rich as a businessman, government service was his preoccupation. After the Civil War the Creek Nation underwent a political renovation whose results in many ways still mark the essential conflict in Creek political society. Formerly a decentralized alliance of autonomous towns, the nation in 1867 became a constitutional republic with an elected executive, a bicameral legislature, a tiered court system, and a concept of nationalism that seriously reduced, and in many cases obliterated, town government. Porter supported this constitutional reform and worked to preserve and strengthen Creek nationhood.

Porter's public service began in 1867 when the newly elected principal chief, Samuel Checote, appointed him superintendent of schools. Under his direction the Creeks rejuvenated and expanded a public school system shattered by the Civil War.

In 1871, Chief Checote appointed Porter commander of the national militia to put down a rebellion against the new constitutional order led by Oktaharsars Harjo (Sands). Porter's skill at defusing the volatile situation led to similar duty in 1876, when the supporters of Lochar Harjo, an impeached principal chief, launched a rebellion. On yet a third occasion, the Green Peach War of 1882-83, Porter and the national militia put down an attempted coup. Porter's dedication to Creek constitutionalism also led him into the national council, where he served four years in the House of Warriors (lower house) and eight in the House of Kings (upper house).

Much of U.S. Indian policy after the Civil War was directed at undermining tribal organization, acquiring Indian-owned land and resources, and assimilating native people into the larger American society. In response, the Creeks, along with many other tribes, kept close watch on Washington by employing lobbyists to influence congressional legislation. Beginning in 1872 and continuing for the next two decades, Porter made almost annual trips to Washington, where he became well known as an articulate and effective spokesman. Though his trips were primarily political in purpose, Porter also consulted with ethnographers at the Smithsonian Institution about Creek culture and history and supplied much of the detailed information on which scholars now depend.

But Porter and his colleagues could not derail federal Indian policy. Although the General Allotment Act of 1887 had exempted the Southern Indians, in 1893 Congress created the "Commission of the Five Civilized Tribes" to negotiate allotment agreements with those nations. Forced to respond, the Creek Council appointed a commission in 1897, chaired by Porter, to conduct the negotiations. The Creeks defeated their agreement in an 1898 referendum, but the Curtis Act, enacted the same year, empowered the congressional commission to proceed unilaterally. In 1899, in the midst of this crisis, Porter, an unsuccessful candidate for the office of principal chief in 1895, was elected to that office. His platform recognized the inevitability of allotment and argued that the nation should negotiate the best terms possible for its people. Talks began in 1900; a referendum approved the agreement in 1901 and a supplement in 1902. Under the terms of the agreement, a complex equalization formula attempted to secure a fair distribution of allotments to all Creek citizens.

Few Creeks favored allotment and the dismantling of the national government. Most, like Porter, accepted it as inevitable, but some, influenced by Chitto Harjo (Crazy Snake), resisted. Organizing a separate government at Hickory Ground in 1900, the dissidents claimed that the constitutional government was unrepresentative of the will of the Creek people and hostile to the Creeks' best interests. Chief Porter appealed to the U.S. Army to quell this latest anticonstitution movement, and in 1901 troops broke up the Hickory Ground encampment and arrested its leaders.

Porter was reelected principal chief in 1903, but because the 1898 Curtis Act had dissolved Creek government, his second term was little more than a charade. In 1905, Porter organized the leaders of the Five Tribes to oppose a statehood plan that would link Indian Territory to Oklahoma Territory. Their solution was to create an Indian state and seek separate admission. With Porter sitting as president of a constitutional convention, delegates designed the state of Sequoyah. Congress refused to consider the idea, however, and the single-state plan was adopted, with Oklahoma joining the Union in 1907.

Though Porter's role during the allotment crisis appears to have been shaped by his desire to guide the less well acculturated Creeks through a minefield not of their making, it remains nevertheless true that Porter represented a segment of Creek society that was prepared by training and experience to succeed in an Anglo world dominated by the market economy. Wealthy by any standard, he profited under the terms of the allotment agreements he negotiated. Porter died of a stroke on September 3, 1907, in Vinita, Cherokee Nation, while on his way to St. Louis on business.





	Entries

	Publication Data

	Advisory Board

	Maps

	Introduction

	Contributors

	Credits



	U.S. History

	Western Civilization

	World Civilizations