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The Pony Club of Carroll County, Georgia
Sometime in 1826, a group of about 50 interrelated family members of the Philpots and Yorks of McMinn County, Tennessee, left the state and traveled to the newly opened part of Northwest Georgia ceded by the Creek Indians in the 1825 Treat of Indian Springs. Among them were the Majors, Wrights, Ramseys, Johnsons and Mehaffey's. According to family members the group settled near Sandtown, Georgia for the specific purpose of running a criminal horse theft operation. Their victims were almost exclusively Cherokee and Creek Indians living in the Cherokee County and in Alabama.

A Pony Club was nothing new to most Government Officials in early America. The idea of stealing horses in one part of the country and selling them in another part was an old concept made efficient by both Indians and white men. The frontier and Indian border made it easy not only for runaway slaves and criminals and later those loyal to the King of England to hide in lands in which local law enforcement and militia could not operate. Key to the Pony Club was having compatriots in other counties, even states, who could hold the property or even pass it on to other compatriots in order to avoid detection by the owner and perhaps to sell in a distant place. In many ways the Pony Club operated like that of another criminal empire, the Clan of John A. Murrell, which operated in a dozen states, stealing mainly slaves and charged with attempting to produce a countrywide revolt by slaves. As odd as this plot sounds it was quashed and many men in a dozen states were hanged, as were some slaves said to be involved. In any event, the slave stealers would pass stolen slaves onto friends and relatives in far away counties and states for resale to unsophisticated buyers.

In 1829, the state of Georgia passed a law making it illegal for any Indian to testify against a white man. This allowed the Pony Club to enter Indian Territory and steal not only horses, but cattle and hogs at will. In many cases Indians refused to prosecute, knowing their word would not be taken into account in the courts of counties surrounding Indian country. The plunder of both the Cherokee and Creek continued unchecked until the last Indians left in 1838.

What we know about this Pony Club in Carroll, later Paulding County, is due mainly to the articles in the Cherokee Phoenix and other local newspapers of the time. In 1842, when the Cherokee made their spoliation claims against the state of Georgia, they named members of the Pony Club who had stolen their horses and other belongings. Over 6000 documents list members of the Pony Club, who plundered the Indian lands for more than 10 years. Each county near the Indian territory seemed to have its own group of tormentors and who can say whether they all worked with each other, but the group which started out at Sandtown and then moved to Carrollton and later Cleantown or Van Wert were recognized by both Indians and locals as a fordmidable criminal empire with ties to the Government of the State of Georgia.

There is not a single document in the annals of the State of Georgia which discusses this group or its impact on the history of Northwest Georgia. Though it has been forgotten, the Pony Club at the time 1826-1838 created quite a stir in literature. William Gilmore Simms grew up listening to the wagon drivers who stopped in Charleston to pick up goods for shipment to Georgia. Simms wrote many books like "Guy Rivers" and "Border Beagles" based on the exploits of the Pony Club. He created an entirely new genre of adventure book the "border romance". Twain and Dickens also wrote about the club, assigning to them great power and reach in Georgia affairs. The Pony Club was a well known Phenomenon in a time when there was much Lawlessness in the old southwest, which is what Georgia and Alabama were called back in those days.

(from: History of the Pony Club ... unpublished)