Confederate Service of Alabama and Coushatta Indians

🏛️The era

The Alabama and Coushatta peoples came to Texas from the Southeast, which was their ancestral homeland. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, as settlers and governments pressed them, they moved west into the forests of East Texas. By the 1850s the State of Texas had set aside land for them in Polk County, in the Big Thicket country. It was a small foothold at a time when most other Native nations were being pushed out of Texas entirely.

When Texas left the Union in 1861 and joined the Confederacy, the Civil War reached even this quiet, wooded corner of the state. The Confederacy needed men, horses, food and ways to move supplies. Southeast Texas had rivers flowing down to the Gulf coast, and those rivers became useful supply lines.

All of this put the Alabama and Coushatta people in a hard spot. They were a small community, dependent on state goodwill for their land, in a society built on slavery and racial hierarchy. When war came, they had to decide how to deal with it.

👥People & events

In 1861 an Indian agent, Robert R. Neyland, began training Alabama and Coushatta men as cavalry. In April 1862, nineteen of them enlisted in the Confederate army as Company G of the 24th Texas Cavalry, among them Chief John Scott. They trained at Hempstead, Texas, and then in Arkansas.

In Arkansas, General Thomas C. Hindman turned them into infantry. That happened to many Texas cavalry units, which were dismounted when the army needed foot soldiers more than riders. The Alabama and Coushatta men made their displeasure known, and they were allowed to go home to Polk County and wait for orders.

Their service went on in other forms. They spent a short time in the Confederate Navy under Commander W. W. Hunter at Galveston Bay. They were then reorganized as a cavalry company in the 6th Brigade, 2nd Texas Infantry Division. By 1864 the company roster listed 132 men. Their main job was building and running flat-bottomed scows that carried farm produce and supplies down the Trinity River to the port at Liberty.

Wartime governors Francis R. Lubbock and Pendleton Murrah noted their loyalty in official letters. Those letters do not tell us what the men themselves thought about the war or what moved them to serve. That part of the story is mostly unrecorded, and it is fair to leave it as an open question.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Most Civil War stories are told in blue and gray, Union and Confederate, North and South. This marker shows another side. Native nations across the country were drawn into the war, often under pressure, and often for reasons tied to their own survival rather than to either side's cause.

The Alabama and Coushatta experience matches a broader pattern. Small Native communities that depended on a state or federal government for their land often had little real choice when that government asked for their help. Serving could be an act of loyalty, a strategy for protecting their homes, or both. Their story raises hard questions about what loyalty means for a people with so little power.

The story also shows how much the war depended on unglamorous work. Moving food and supplies down the Trinity River in homemade scows never made headlines, but armies could not run without it. And the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas is still in Polk County today, a living link to the people this marker remembers.

🧭If you visit

Livingston sits in the Piney Woods of Southeast Texas, close to the Big Thicket. The forests and rivers here help you picture the work the marker describes: men building flat-bottomed boats and steering them down the Trinity toward the coast.

The Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas still lives on its homeland nearby. As you visit the area, remember that this marker is about the ancestors of a living community, not a vanished one. If you look for tribal cultural sites or events, check the tribe's own current information instead of relying on assumptions.

This stop fits naturally into a drive through East Texas forest country, along with the region's other Civil War and early Texas sites. Before you leave, spend a minute on the numbers on the marker. Nineteen men enlisted in 1862, and the roster had grown to 132 by 1864.