Researching John Ridge

In the 1830s, Ridge was part of the Treaty Party with his father Major Ridge and cousins Elias Boudinot and Stand Watie. Believing that Indian Removal was inevitable, they supported making a treaty with the United States government to protect Cherokee rights. The Ridges and Boudinot were signatories to the Treaty of New Echota of 1835, by which they ceded Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for lands in Indian Territory. The land cession was opposed by the majority of the tribe and the Principal Chief John Ross, but the treaty was ratified by the US Senate.

In 1839, after removal to Indian Territory, opponents assassinated the Ridges, Boudinot, and other Treaty Party members for their roles in the land cession. This eliminated them as political rivals in the new territory. Stand Watie survived such an attack and later fought on the side of the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War.

His father John Ridge had been assassinated in 1839 in Indian Territory, after removal, by Cherokee who condemned his having signed a treaty to cede communal land to the United States. Ridge was taken by his mother to Fayetteville, Arkansas, for safety. He later attended school in Massachusetts. After returning to Arkansas, he read the law, set up a practice and married.

In 1850 he went West in the California Gold Rush, where his wife and daughter later joined him. There he started writing – both poetry and essays. In his novel and other works, he criticized American racism toward Mexicans, several years after the war by which the United States acquired California and much of the Southwest. After the American Civil War, he was among the Cherokee delegation that negotiated a new treaty for peace with the United States.