Year: 1814 · Places: Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma & the Five Tribes
SUMMARYAlbert Pike, deeper (Nov 6, 2026). ENSLAVER, Record: Pike's own runaway notice in the Arkansas State Gazette (Little Rock, June 24, 1840): "Ran away from the subscriber... a negro woman named Rebecca." She was held by him; she freed herself. NATIVIST, Record: Pike joined the Know-Nothing (American) Party, partly over slavery and partly out of anti-Catholicism, and walked out of its 1856 national convention with Southern delegates when it wouldn't adopt a strong pro-slavery platform (Encyclopedia of Arkansas). Ties to P748: the party called its men "Native Americans" while Pike signed treaties with the real nations. LAWYER TO THE NATIONS, Record: hired by the Creek (1852) over land lost in the 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson, then by the Choctaw and Chickasaw (1854); awards in 1856–57 were "insufficient" (Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History). Fees: OPEN (pull the Choctaw net-proceeds case files and Pike's contracts). His fortune came mainly from his receivership of the failed Arkansas State Bank. WAR, Record: Confederate commissioner to the nations (March 1861); treaties with the Creek, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Seminole, Osage, Seneca-Shawnee and Cherokee (John Ross, Oct 7, 1861); brigadier general Oct 1861. Pea Ridge (Mar 7–8, 1862): about 1,000 men; Union dead found scalped, and Pike was condemned in the North (NPS). Resigned July 12, 1862, saying the Confederacy was breaking its treaties with the nations; arrested November 1862 after attacking Hindman in public; charges dropped. AFTER, Record: amnesty from President Andrew Johnson, Aug 30, 1865; sworn 1868 to uphold the emancipation laws (Memphis Daily Avalanche, Sept 24, 1868). Edited the Memphis Appeal (1867–68): an editorial reprinted in Austin (Tri-Weekly State Gazette, Mar 6, 1868) urged "doing without negro labor" (may be others' words in his paper). His farewell card refused to speak where "a negro sits swelling in the bloom of his majestic self-importance" (Flake's Bulletin, Sept 16, 1868). RACE AND THE LODGE, Record (quoted 1906): letter of Sept 13, 1875, to John D. Caldwell, Grand Secretary of Ohio: "I took my obligations to white men, not to Negroes," and of keeping the Rite free of "the leprosy of Negro association" (Samuel W. Clark, Colored American Magazine, Feb 1906; secondhand, so find the original). KLAN: Pike's own membership is Disputed. Record: a second-era Klan klavern named itself "Albert Pike Klan No. 12" in Illinois (Rockford Daily Register-Gazette, Nov 13, 1922). FAKE PIKE: the "Lucifer is God" quote comes from Léo Taxil's hoax, which Taxil confessed in Paris, Apr 19, 1897 (Killed by the hoaxer's own admission). The "three world wars" letter to Mazzini (1871) surfaced in William Guy Carr's books (1950s); the original has never been produced and the British Library says it holds no such letter (fails the archive test). Lens: the real paper trail (the runaway ad, the treaties, the 1875 letter) is heavier than the fakes. Fakes about Pike pull attention from what he did to the nations and to the people he held.