John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867)

Sources

Newspaperman and novelist

Idylls and The Trail of Tears . John Rollin Ridge was born in the Cherokee Nation in Georgia to a Cherokee father, John Ridge, and a white mother, Sara Bird North-rup. He recalled his early childhood years as a pleasant idyll, straying along the “summer-shaded shores” of the Oostanaula River near his grandfather’s home in Rome, Georgia, gliding along “in a light canoe” and lolling beneath the river’s “overhanging willows.” His life changed when the federal government passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, legislation that allowed the federal government to resettle Indians in lands west of the Mississippi River. Ridge’s grandfather, Major Ridge; his father; and other Cherokees challenged the legality of the Indian Removal Act. When their protests failed, the Ridges came to terms with the federal government and voluntarily moved to Indian Country (Oklahoma). During the late 1830s the Cherokees who did not acquiesce to the government’s plans were forcibly removed by federal troops from their own nation and pushed westward along what became known as the Trail of Tears. Along the way four thousand Cherokees died from starvation, exposure, and exhaustion. Followers of the Cherokee leader John Ross who wanted to remain in their homeland viewed the acquiescence of the Ridges as despicable and were determined to punish them. In the summer of 1839 members of the Ross party assassinated both Major Ridge and John Ridge. Twelve-year-old John Rollin Ridge witnessed the murder of his father, an event he could never forget or forgive. As he wrote to his uncle in 1849, “there is a deep-seated principle of revenge in me which will never be satisfied until it reaches its object. It is my firm determination to do all that I can to bring it about.”

Miner and Poet. After the assassinations the Ridge family fled to Arkansas, and the young John Rollin Ridge was sent to school in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He eventually returned to Arkansas and is said to have killed David Kell, a pro-Ross partisan in 1849. Fearing a trial, Ridge fled first to Missouri and then, in 1850, to California. In California, Ridge tried his hand at prospecting, trapping, and trading, but without much success. He had more success as a correspondent for the New Orleans True Delta, sending back letters, printed under the title, “Letter from Yellow Bird—Our California Correspondent.” (“Yellow Bird” was the English translation of Ridge’s Cherokee name.) Ridge’s True Delta letters vividly conveyed the frustrations and hard-fought rewards of life in the mining camps. “Two or three months have placed me on the list of acknowledged miners,” he wrote in 1851, “giving me the miner’s experience, with its sweet and bitter fruits.” At the same time Ridge was publishing poetry in respected California literary journals such as the San Francisco-based Golden Era. Ridge’s poetry, like much of the poetry in this period, was modeled after the works of European Romantics such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. “Mount Shasta,” the best known of Ridge’s poems, echoes Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” In both cases the mountain’s grandeur suggests permanence amidst change; Mount Shasta is, in Ridge’s words, “the great material symbol of eternal / Things.” Isolation and exile were major themes of Ridge’s poetry. At times he portrayed himself as a darkly fated Cain figure. In “To Lizzie,” addressed to his absent wife who remained in Arkansas, he appears as “a wanderer from my distant home … I look around me sternly here, / And smother feelings strong and deep.” In other poems he pines after “the beauteous one” and her “pure spirit.” His collected poems were gathered and published posthumously in 1868.

The California Bandit. In 1854 Ridge published The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, the first novel in English published by an Indian author. Ridge based the story on California newspaper reports of Mexican bandits who stole livestock and robbed businesses and travelers. The leader of many of these bands was said to be a dashing, mysterious figure named Joaquin “Murieta” or “Murreitta.” According to newspaper accounts and interviews, Murieta turned to crime in order to avenge the abuse he suffered at the hands of racist Americans. They drove him from the Shaw’s Flat mining area, beat and flogged him, and, in some versions, raped his wife and hung his half brother. In 1853 Harry Love, a Texan scout and soldier, claimed to have captured and killed the elusive Murieta, though some Californians believed the outlaw still lived. Whatever the facts of the story, Murieta’s legend held fascination for Ridge. Like Ridge himself, Murieta was driven to desperate acts by crimes against his family. And like Ridge, Murieta was forced into exile by the forces of American racism. While The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta was not, as Ridge hoped, financially successful, it did secure him a place in the literary history of California. Murieta became a popular icon; pirated versions of Ridge’s book began to appear, and Murieta appeared as a character in plays and novels. In 1936 a film version of the Murieta legend was produced, and in 1967, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote a play depicting Murieta as a victim of American racism and expansionist policy.

Newspapers and Politics. After the financial disappointment of The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, Ridge took a series of jobs editing California newspapers. He was known for his quick wit and equally quick temper. His columns railed against Lincoln, abolitionists, and the Republican party, forces he felt were destroying the Union. At the same time he did not lose sight of the Cherokee cause; his greatest hope, as he wrote to his uncle in 1855, was to publish “a newspaper devoted to the advocacy of Indian rights and interests,” but this plan was never realized. In 1867, shortly after a failed attempt at gaining federal recognition of the Southern Cherokees, the group still opposed to the Ross faction, he became ill and died of “brain fever.” Ridge’s life was one of contradiction: he was the author of sentimental love poetry, but he was also obsessed with violent revenge. He studied and worked in white society, yet clung strongly to his Cherokee heritage. He deeply lamented the suffering endured by Cherokees, yet defended slavery and became involved with the Know-Nothing Party, an anti-immigration political party. As one biographer, James W. Parins, has suggested, it would have been difficult for Ridge, given the circumstances of his life, to resolve these conflicts. As one of the first modern American Indian writers he “found himself caught between two worlds, discovering sympathy and hostility in both.”

Sources

James W. Parins, John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991);

John Rollin Ridge, A Trumpet of Our Own: Yellow Bird’s Essays on the North American Indian, edited by David Farmer and Rennard Strickland (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1981).