Catawba Nation by Thomas J Blumer

Author:Thomas J Blumer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in The Herald, June 10, 1999.

Chief James Harris 1858–1912

The Catawba have survived as a nation for many reasons. Fortunately, they had leaders of great genius at critical points in their history. One of these men was Chief James Harris. Local non-Indians complimented him on many occasions, calling him the smartest Indian ever born on the Catawba Reservation.

King Haigler set the stage for the Catawba Nation’s political survival. His contributions of 1760 and 1763 gave the tribe its legal basis for the Catawba Settlement of 1993. The contributions of Chief James Harris overlap those of King Haigler. Harris showed the Catawba that they needed lawyers to handle the ancient land issue. He also pushed the Catawba to accept the benefits of education. These two actions prepared the Catawba for the challenges of the twentieth century.

Chief James Harris, the son of James Harris and Sarah Jane Ayers Harris, was born in 1858. His earliest memories were of the abject poverty the tribe suffered during the War Between the States and Reconstruction. Like the other Indian men, he cut cordwood at fifty cents a cord and farmed the often-flooded Catawba River bottoms on the reservation. He first married Fannie Harris around 1879. She died without bearing him any children. His second marriage was to Margaret Harris. With Margaret he began a family dominated by Georgia Harris, who gained recognition in the twentieth century as a master potter.

James Harris’s political life began when Tom Morrison returned from the Choctaw Nation in Indian country and was subsequently elected chief of the Catawba. Morrison was deaf and needed the support of an intelligent young man; he wisely chose James Harris to assist him in bringing the old land claim back to life.

In 1885, Chief Morrison and James Harris visited Washington, D.C., to investigate the tribe’s claim to the 144,000 acres reserved by the Treaty of Augusta in 1763. The two men bravely forged ahead using the few financial resources available to them. In 1887, they hired Attorney J.Q. Marshall of nearby Lancaster, South Carolina. He was the first of a long line of lawyers who handled the claim from 1887 to 1993.

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