No Resting Place (30 page)

They bore long guns, mostly old flintlock rifles but some few more modern percussion-cap-and-ball rifles, and many carried pistols, with powder horns and beaded pouches, for bullets and wads, slung from shoulder straps. Some carried bows and, on their backs, quivers of arrows. Few were mounted, most were on foot. These forest-dwelling eastern Indians had no tradition as cavalrymen.

The Chief rode a sorrel horse with four white-stockinged feet and a white patch on its forehead that looked like war paint. The old man sat as erect as though he were cast in bronze. His varnished black hat shone, his red vest blazed, his long sword glinted. Tied to the pommel of his saddle was the tin box containing his treaty with the Texans. Perhaps he thought of it as his last will and testament, and hoped that when it was found on him and read it would gain his followers their rightful heritage, after all.

Out of the woods on the far side of the battlefield, a quarter of a mile away, the Texans issued like birds from their roosts. They, too, were mainly foot soldiers. In their lead rode their mounted officers. They dubbed themselves “Rangers” since their defeat of the Mexicans three years earlier, and while at San Jacinto they may have been an undisciplined assortment of erstwhile civilians, following that victory they had shaped themselves into a formidable fighting force, self-confident, proud, with a strong sense of esprit de corps.

Their officers were now within range to be identified. The old Chief was flattered by their ranks and reputations. They took him seriously. There was Vice-President Burnet, Secretary of War Johnson, Adjutant General McLeod, General Rusk, the fast-rising Colonel Burleson—all their big men except the biggest one of all, the one who had ridden to his eminence on horseback: Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. Although ridding the country of Indians was his top priority, and this was the occasion he had created to do so, he was noticeable by his absence today. No doubt he was occupied with weightier affairs of state. Or perhaps he had been taken with the inspiration for another of those poems of his which so tickled Houston by their unintended humor.

Noquisi, watching from the woods in which he and his father had set up their field hospital, and on the margin of which the Indian forces were ranged, was surprised to see how formal a thing a battle was, at least as the curtain rose. The opposing sides might have been dancers at a ball advancing to square off with their partners and waiting for the music to strike up. They approached, both waiting for the other to fire first. It was as though the two players of the game of checkers were disposing their pieces on the board and deliberating their opening moves.

The beginning and the end of the battle were all that Noquisi was able to relate to his grandson having seen, because from the first the Indian casualties were so heavy that he and his father were too busy attending them to look up from their work. The old Chief chose his moment when the Texans were fully exposed on the prairie to open fire, then rush them. Like a volley of arrows he loosed his warriors. The boy heard the crackle of gunfire and the screams of the wounded. He saw men reel and fall, saw others spin around and double over in pain, clutch at themselves, at their arms and their legs and their midriffs, saw the shock and stunned surprise of flesh struck and invaded by bullets. On the bare bodies of those of his side he saw blood burst forth like messy, misapplied war paint in inappropriate places. Then the ones who could do so began limping and staggering to the field hospital in the gulch below the line of fire just inside the woods.

After that the boy heard the gunfire in bursts and the silence while weapons were reloaded for another round. Mainly what he heard as he sponged wounds while they were probed for bullets and dirt, and passed the gut and the silk thread for suturing them and the saber cuts was, “Tourniquet. Scissors. Forceps.” Finally the gunfire grew sporadic, like the fading thunder of a passing storm. The patient on whom they were working died from loss of blood. Father and son peered over the bank of their gulch.

Long after his warriors had fled for cover, the old Chief fought on. When he gave the command to retreat he was almost alone on the field, engaging the enemy single-handedly. Of the hundred and more dead and dying, no more than half a dozen were Texans. His own men lay like spent arrows that had missed their mark.

Now by drawing their fire while his few remaining men made good their retreat, he was commanding his enemies. He was playing with them, playing upon them, playing to them. Every bullet aimed at him missed one of his men. It was to his enemies that his life mattered; to him it meant nothing. His battle now was not with Texans; they were merely the henchmen of his mortal enemy. He would lose this contest; all men did; there was no indignity in it. He would have in his defeat the triumph of dictating the terms of his surrender.

Already bleeding from several wounds, his horse now received a fatal one. In its fall the Chief was thrown, thereby losing his hat and sword, but clutching the box containing the treaty with Houston. One of the few Indians remaining on the field dashed in and snatched it from him like the next runner in a relay race being passed the torch. The Chief rose, took a few steps, then fell, shot in the back. He lifted himself and sat facing his foes.

“This is a good day to die!” he cried.

Two Rangers came running. The first one to reach him, disregarding the other's shout not to shoot, put the muzzle of his pistol to the old man's forehead and fired. At point-blank range, the shot could hardly be heard.

Other Rangers on the run reached the spot while the body still sat upright. One of them toppled it face down with his foot, and with his bowie knife slit in half the red silk vest. Then while he skinned and sliced the corpse's back in strips the width of harness straps, another one, lifting the head by its hair, circumscribed the scalp with a cut and peeled it from the skull.

By the time Amos Smith I told his grandson about it, sixty-odd years later, the biggest battle ever fought on Texas soil was forgotten.

The Texans withdrew to the shade of the woods on the opposite side of the battlefield, taking with them on horseback their wounded and their few dead. Once they were out of gunshot range, a party of Indians, stripped to the skin to show that they concealed no weapons on them, ventured onto the field. They were not fired upon. The Fergusons, father and son, worked on the wounded they brought in, most of whom, injured beyond help, died on their hands. The dead were left where they lay on the field. To the survivors' grief must be added the shame of leaving them unburied. There were too many of them, and there was not time. The Texans' victory was so conclusive they had not bothered to follow up on it by pursuing their enemies in retreat, but in the morning they would return to confirm that what they had won was not just a battle but a war, and that the Indians, to the last and least one, were on the road, fleeing the country.

From village to village, from farm to farm, word of the outcome of the battle was relayed, and all day long the women and children and the old men streamed in to join the defeated warriors. All through the night they chanted their dirge of defeat. At daybreak they scattered in coveys like birds flushed from cover.

There was not safety but rather danger in numbers now. Alerted by hoofbeats, shouts, gunshots, the band would scatter, every man for himself, then later regroup like a covey of quail finding one another again, often by imitating the whistle of the quail. As water seeks its own level, so the Cherokees sought their trail of roses. Some strayed so far from it as to be long unable to get back, others had been too closely pursued to dare to move. Afraid to build fires for fear of giving away their whereabouts even when they had anything to cook, afraid for the same reason to shoot game, they went without eating for days.

Their route was all too familiar. They had blazed it, cleared it, decorated it, for twenty years had traveled it to visit relatives and friends in The Territory. They might have found their way by smell alone, and sometimes at night, along stretches near settlements to be avoided, they did.

They were entering Sulphur River Bottom now. The Rangers called off their pursuit when they were satisfied that they had achieved their objective. They had not done so quite as thoroughly as they supposed. Some of the fugitives dropped out of their bands to settle in those vast bottomlands. Mostly members of the lesser tribes those were, never numerous or now decimated in numbers, with few of their own kind to welcome them in The Territory. In time, after the old hostilities had faded from memory, and after intermarriage between them and the loggers, the trappers, the market hunters, the farmers on the edges of the woods had lightened skins and mongrelized features, they ventured out from their lairs as foxes do after the dogs have been called off. Even two generations later, Amos Smith would see faces on the streets of the county town of Clarksville that gave him a start of recognition, and sometimes his look was fleetingly returned, as two people of a banned belief or an outlawed taste might identify each other in passing and, although disposed to mutual self-disclosure, to alliance against the world that had branded and ostracized them, hesitate, out of conditioning and cowardice and fear of being mistaken about each other, and hasten on their separate ways. Inaccessible, counted in no census, in Amos Smith IV's time, in a county dry by local option, these people would be moonshiners long after the repeal of national prohibition, and as dangerous to approach in their dens as a nest of water moccasins.

By the time the Fergusons' band reached Red River, ten days after the battle of the Neches, it was down to a dozen men. Of that dozen, seven were already halfway across the river, out of rifle range, when the party of hunters appeared out of the woods. Still stripping themselves for the swim were the last five, including the Fergusons. Seeing the hunters, they broke and ran. What stopped Noquisi at the water's edge was the explosion of the shots. There he stood waiting to be shot. Offshore, where his father's body was sinking from sight, the red water swirled a darker red, like paint when it is stirred.

“All right, young'un. You're safe now,” he heard a man's voice call.

It was his stopping at the water's edge at the last moment and not diving in along with the rest that saved him—saved Captain Donovan's maps in his pocket too. Had he done so, not even his size would have saved him. Indian children were fair game. It was his pale skin, his blue eyes, his freckled face and a frontier folklore of captive white children that told his story at a glance.

We reach our resting places, if we ever do, we restless Americans, by roundabout routes sometimes, and so, too, do some of us come by our lasting names.

“What's your name, boy?” asked the leader of the hunting party that had rescued him, powder smoke still drifting from the muzzles of their rifles.

“Amos, sir.”

“Amos what?”

The boy shook his head and tears started from his eyes. To the hunter it was evident that his family name, that of those of his kin slaughtered, perhaps tortured to death before his eyes, was too painful to pronounce.

“You'll take mine, son,” said the hunter. A boy already reared to working age was a prize on the frontier; besides, the hunter was a kindhearted man—he just, like everybody else, hated redskins—and would prove a good foster father to the boy.

As it was an old Indian custom for a man's killer to adopt his orphaned children and bring them up, to the boy this seemed fitting. Tired of running, tired of being Indian, and having nobody of his own in all the world now, he was grateful for a home, a settled life.

And that is how I, Amos IV, of the clan of Smiths, author of this book, got my name there on the bank of that red river which gives its name to my home county in the northeast corner of Texas where the trail of Cherokee roses begins and ends.

A Biography of William Humphrey

William Humphrey (1924–1997) was an American author and a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1959 for his classic book
Home from the Hill
, which told the story of a small-town family in rural Texas. Indeed, themes of family life, hardship, and rural struggle are the defining characteristics of his writing, appearing in all thirteen of his works.

Humphrey was born on June 18 in Clarksville, Texas, to Clarence and Nell Humphrey. Nestled in the heart of Red River County, Clarksville in the early 1920s resembled the Old South more than the Texan West. It is from this time and place that Humphrey drew inspiration for much of his writing career. Daily life in rural, isolated Clarksville was built around cotton farming and was emotionally and physically taxing. Neither of Humphrey's parents attended school beyond the third grade, and the family moved frequently during his childhood: fifteen times in five years. His father, an alcoholic, hunted in the snake-infested swamplands of the Sulphur River to help feed his wife and son. Although Clarence was a difficult and quick-tempered man, Humphrey cared deeply for him, and his love for his father had a profound impact on his writing.

As the Great Depression progressed into the 1930s, so did the strain on the Humphreys' already-precarious finances. Clarence worked as a shade-tree mechanic, yet was too poor to buy a car of his own. He would test-drive the cars he fixed as fast as they could go, taking them screaming down the back roads of Red River County.

In 1937 Clarence was killed in an auto accident. Humphrey was just thirteen at the time. Much later, in his memoir
Farther Off From Heaven
(1977), Humphrey commented on this period, which was to be the end of his childhood: “What my new life would be like I could only guess at, but I knew it would be totally different from the one that was ending, and that a totally different person from the one I had been would be needed to survive in it.” Soon after his father's death, Humphrey and his mother moved to Dallas to live with relatives. He did not return to Clarksville for thirty-two years.