Video Script: Wagoner, Okla. and the Story of Nigger Creek


A Creek Correcting the History of a Nation

Introduction

(Host): There are many reasons this story must be told, most importantly to correct the record of history and shed a light, even if so small, in memoriam, on the lives ended in a creek in eastern Oklahoma that filled with the blood of Union soldiers near the end of the American Civil War.

The story revolves around a creek that winds itself through hay fields just to the north of a small municipality named Wagoner, Okla. The narrator of the following story is Andy Cravello, a long time Wagoner resident and best friend of the second voice you will hear, that of the mayor of Wagoner, Albert ‘AJ’ Jones.

Jones has spent his life in Wagoner and many years thinking of this story, what it means to the area and how to tell it. That decided, he and Andy — voices interchanging throughout the narrative — will take you through the happenings in the early fall of 1864 that led to the naming of the story’s focal point Nigger Creek, why that named was put there and held a place on official U.S. maps until 1990, and the effort to change it.

Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, the renaming of the creek to Battle Creek by a young black man in his final year at Wagoner High School would — some 29 years later — prompt a mayor in his first term as leader of that city to find the battlefield, using accounts contemporary to the skirmish by soldiers involved, and have it officially deemed an American Civil War battlefield, Congressionally recognized, along with a proclamation within his powers as mayor to give those that died there the proper recognition and official recognition.

They will tell this story so you can remember these men — most just barely free from the binds of slavery — whose lifeless bodies weren’t even counted by the Union Army.

Part I: The Creek, the Camp & the Civil War

(Narrator - Andy): Times were different then. People were different. The Civil War raged, as American blood spilled on the soil of our homeland. As with the people and the times being different, in that era of the 19th century, so, too, was the value of a human life different — white people were valued much higher than the darker skinned man. Black people were hardly valued at all, save for their potential productivity as a measure of their sale.

(Narrator - AJ): The Indians were not treated much better. Just like the Civil War divided the rest of the nation, the Five Civilized Nations here in Indian Territory were also divided ... They too owned slaves.

(Narrator - Andy): Humans buying and selling other humans ... a low point for this country that now sits unremovable on the fabric of our history ...

(Narrator - AJ): The battle took place on September 16, 1864. About 2,000 Confederate Rebel troops crossed the Verdigris River that morning just to the southwest of a Union haying operation — the northernmost of several hay camps for the North between Fort Gibson and Fort Scott, strategically placed to produce hay to feed the thousands and thousands of horses required for the Union’s calvary.

Throughout the war, these haying operations had to be protected from Rebel forces. Some soldiers served as security detail, while other soldiers ran machines to cut, rake and bale hay, each camp ensuring continuous operations. At this northernmost station, in an area referred to by troops at that time as Flat Rock, there was a Union force of about 200 soldiers — part of that force were the remaining members of Company K of the 1st Regiment Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry. ............ (more coming on this as I do more research into how to tell this battle story, but it will start something like the aforementioned before going into more Andy and AJ interchanging narration.)

(Narrator - Andy): To tell this story means a change will inevitably have to come. The tellers of history, in this case, messed up. The story of what we thought we knew will have to add a chapter, and a small municipality in Oklahoma will get added within its city limits a monument marking the very location of a Civil War battlefield that we — now so far removed — would likely never have known about had it not been for racism and bigotry leading to the naming of a small, winding ravine Nigger Creek where an outnumbered company of black infantry soldiers fought to their death. That creek ran through the hay meadow that became the resting of just over thirty black Union soldiers, joining the army ranks to obtain a smidgen of freedom. These unremembered, untold of black soldiers — gracing the pages of history a slight few times as a side story — fought in the first regiment of their race to be allowed to join the Union Army.

The white men in the violent skirmish, numbering over 140 and made up of officers and calvary men, were spared, captured with mercy. Those black soldiers faced a couple thousand Rebels as their white comrades ran into their captors arms. Showing a heroic resistance, holding off their inevitable destruction for a couple hours by some accounts, they saw the complete demise of their company — the only remaining soldiers in Company K of the 1st Regiment Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry. Most accounts lead to the number of 37 left in Company K that had put on the haying operation detail just prior to the Nigger Creek incident. That’s 37 black infantrymen that had just a couple month before lost more than they numbered at the brutal Battle of Poison Springs — Company K numbering near or just over 100 men before that battle in Arkansas.

Four of the remaining 37 probably escaped the hay field skirmish, though even with decent accounts it’s hard to verify. More will be told about these four escapees later. The 33 that died, assuming the first hand accounts that corroborate are the truth, did so as Union soldiers and no longer slaves, despite their plot likely not that much better in an army full of racism. I still want to believe there was some feeling of hope in their heart when they perished outside the holds of slavery in the South ... hope for their children, the future, and in the cause of the Union, to end slavery. So much hate and destruction of life they’d seen.

It’s unforgivable what was done to the black people in this country, but those 33 soldiers did see, even if so slight, a bit of change. And while it will never be able to be repaid, we have come a long way. Still disgusting racism exists and persists today, daily, but we’ve come a long way. There is the feeling that if those soldiers could see today, a nation where we condemn racism and a nation that equal opportunity is closer now than its ever been, they would be proud to have joined the Union cause — proud to know they were fighting for a just cause that has lived on and continues to live on now.