The First Indian Home Guard Regiment and the Civil War on the Border

The First Indian Home Guard Regiment was a tri-racial Union regiment with a combination of Indian, Afro-Indian and Euro-American soldiers.  Its very organization embodied the contested borders of race and identity in the Indian Territory.  The paper will demonstrate how such contestations were negotiated and what the results were for the peoples involved.  Within the First Indian's ranks were men from the first black community in the country to organize armed resistance to the Confederacy, Indian veterans of the Second and Third Seminole Wars, culturally conservative Creek and Seminole Indians who rejected an alliance with the Confederacy, white abolitionists and Free Soilers from Kansas and Nebraska, and Creek and Seminole former Confederates.  All these groups had competing visions of what they were fighting for and yet they fought together as a unit on the battlefields of Missouri, Arkansas and the Indian Territory.

These contested meanings of race and identity played out in different ways during the four years of war.  The alliance between the Indian and Afro-Indian peoples had been developing in the Creek and Seminole nations for many years and played a critical role in galvanizing resistance to the Confederate treaties.  After the First Indian was organized in Kansas in the spring of 1862 the role that the Afro-Indian soldiers played as interpreters and cultural brokers between the white officers and Indian soldiers, who spoke little or no English, became even more important.  And while some white officers bristled at the idea of all communication having to take place through "ignorant and uneducated (N)egroes who display to a large degree the prejudices of the Indians," other white officers recognized the vital role the Afro-Indian soldiers played in the unit and worked to insure that the Afro-Indians remained in the First Indian instead of being transferred to U.S.C.T. regiments.