Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2001
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 169-70.
Abstract
Late in his long and illustrious life, George Washington Grayson wrote a memoir. W. David Baird edited and published it in 1988 under the title A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy. Grayson had written mostly about his service in the Civil War but included enough about his life as politician and businessman to suggest he would be an excellent candidate for a biography. Mary Jane Warde, who began this study as a graduate student under Baird's direction, has done her subject justice.
Warde says Grayson was a progressive nationalist and a cultural broker. Well-educated, he represents a type in post-Civil War Indian Territory. Bi-lingual and bi-cultural, prominent in business and politics, men like Grayson established constitutional governments, ran businesses, encouraged market agriculture, published newspapers, and worked to bring more culturally conservative people into what they believed was the modern world. In part they were motivated by many of the same concerns and interests that drive progressives anywhere. But for most, certainly including Grayson, learning to use the skills, technology, and ideas of contemporary America were also necessary tools for survival. Inundated after the Civil War by a host of economic and political forces dedicated to destroying the Native nations of Indian Territory, tribal leaders had to become nationalists. Warde succeeds best in her analysis of Grayson the Creek nationalist. He held virtually every elective and appointive post in the nation, used his newspaper, the Indian Journal, to defend Creek interests and rally the people to national defense, and spent months at a time in Washington lobbying Congress and working to win powerful friends for Indian Territory.
At the same time, Warde shows Grayson as a man of the people. As comfortable in Muskogee as in English, he won the respect of large numbers of traditional Creeks who looked to him for advice and guidance. A classic cultural broker, Warde argues, Grayson devoted himself to educating the Creeks about America and instructing Americans about the Creeks.
Warde has not only written a fine biography about a remarkable person, she has made an important contribution to Creek history, which remains virtually unknown for the period from the Civil War to the present. Through Grayson, whose life and career are remarkably well-documented, we can glimpse post-Civil War recovery, the maturation of constitutionalism, the economic and social change accompanying the railroads and allotment, and the struggles of the early twentieth century. The Creek Nation was much more than Wash Grayson, but Mary Jane Warde has given us a fine starting point for further investigations.
Comments
Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln