No Resting Place (7 page)

Inside the
asi
the boy fanned the embers of last night's fire with a turkey wing and fed it wood. They stripped. Being a man now taught him a new awareness of his body, and seeing his grandfather's an intimation of its destiny. He would remember throughout all the many years until it came to pass wondering whether his would one day be so wrinkled. That would be in far-off Texas, where he would scratch his grandson and bathe with him in the waters of that red river that he had once seen redder with blood.

1814. If only!
Ai
! If only they had done this!
Ai
! If only they hadn't done that! If only! Agiduda was sick of hearing it. It made his ears want to throw up. “If only” was not just a lament too late, it was an admission of foolishness, of lack of foresight—even of hindsight! If only they had realized that in fomenting the Indians' petty and pointless intertribal wars the whites were exploiting them for their own gain, leaving it to them to exterminate themselves. If only they had realized they
were
Indians, all of them. Not Cherokees and Creeks and Chickasaws and Choctaws and Seminoles but
Indians
—brothers not just beneath but on the skin. In numbers was strength. What we needed, we Cherokees, each and every one of us, was cousins, able-bodied cousins—cousins by the dozens. But without seed grain does not grow.
Ai
! If only our grandparents had bred more!

If only in that year of 1814, on that day at Horseshoe Bend, Junuluska, the Cherokee chief, had seized his chance to kill that viper Andrew Jackson instead of saving the day for him! There was an act to cause the bitterest of regrets. To have killed men whom he mistakenly thought to be his enemies in the service and for the glory of one whom he mistakenly thought to be his friend. More than Jackson's day, Junuluska saved his life by tomahawking the Creek poised to kill him. If he had known that Jackson would one day drive the Cherokees from their homes, he would have killed him himself there that day on the Horseshoe, said Junuluska.

There at Horseshoe Bend, allied with the Americans against Britain's allies, the Creeks, there where none of them had any business being, were some seven hundred Cherokee warriors, including the one who would distinguish himself the most, the one without a drop of the blood in his veins but no less, maybe more, of a Cherokee for all that, whose career as a man of destiny, for all its later ups and downs, was to have its dazzling debut in the bravery and bloodshed of that day:
Kalunah:
The Raven, sometimes
Ootsetee Ardeetahskee:
The Big Drunk—best known as Sam Houston. Fighting alongside him that day, his future father-in-law. Not the first one, nor yet the third one, but the intervening one, the red one: John Rogers, one of The Ridge's deputies in the execution of the traitor Doublehead.

Then newly commissioned in the United States Army (he would thereafter take his service rank as his given name) Major Ridge was there that day. Who among the fighting Cherokees was not there? John Lowrey, Gideon Morgan, George Fields, John Drew, George Guest (when not known as Sequoyah), Richard Brown, George Hicks—Cherokees to a man, every mother's son of them, their peculiar names notwithstanding, and all were on the battle roll. Even the least likely of the lot was there, little Johnny Ross. Least likely of
armed
warriors, that was to say—though more of a fighter than the rest all put together. Passive resistance would be this one man's brainchild, and by his genius at waging it he would almost succeed (he still had not given up the fight, even this late in the day when all seemed lost) in defeating an enemy of overwhelming might and unscrupulous ruthlessness, meanwhile restraining by his persuasiveness (though obliged to speak to them through an interpreter, so little of the red red blood did he have in him) one of the most warlike people ever known and one now provoked beyond human endurance.

The battle plan that day was for a slaughter. For the taking of prisoners provision was not made. The thousand defenders were besieged in their compound. Flight could be in one direction only, by water, and there on the bluff overlooking the river sharpshooters lay in wait to pick them off. Though the odds against them were two to one, the Creeks in their stockade held out all afternoon against cannon and musket fire, and might have held out longer but for the example set by Sam Houston, who, though at that hour severely wounded by an arrow in his thigh, led the charge of his Cherokees to the walls and over them, where, in the mopping-up, he was shot twice in the right arm. He was twenty-one by less than a month.

Out of that thousand, one hundred-odd was the outside number of those reckoned to have escaped with their lives. To the last man, the rest, asking for none, knowing that none would be accorded them, were accorded no quarter.

By the next morning's light a detail was sent out to count the dead. The sight they saw should have assured them that they need have no fear of being charged with inflating the size of their victory. However, to forestall any innuendo that a single one of their fallen foes had been counted more times than one, the precaution was taken of cutting off its nose as each body was counted. Five hundred and fifty noses was the tally. Meanwhile, until the process of decomposition bloated them and floated them to the surface, the number of those potshot in the river as they tried to swim to safety could not so precisely be stated. Conservative in this as they had been conscientious in their count of those on the ground, they estimated it at just around 350. The Indians, as was their wont, scalped the dead bodies; the whites, as was theirs, flayed them in strips for leather to make themselves souvenir belts and bridle reins of Creekskin.

It was his victory at Horseshoe Bend that first brought Jackson to national attention, that set him on the road that would lead to the White House, to the Cherokees' woe. That it was also then and there that their best friend, Sam Houston, first came to Jackson's favorable notice, leading to his lasting patronage, would avail them nothing. On the question of Indian removal the two men did not differ, they agreed, albeit for opposite reasons, Jackson because he wanted to get rid of them, Houston because he wanted them.

The true casualty figure at Horseshoe Bend was forty thousand: men, women and children, the entire Creek and Cherokee nations, might-have-been allies against their common enemy. If there be such a thing as justice in this world, then of what was about to befall them The People had brought much upon themselves.

But first, from out of a chronicle of ever-deepening darkness, a blaze of brilliance. 1821. Already inclined that way by their tribal bond, the Cherokees were unified into a single soul by the public demonstration (out of the mouths of babes, this one Sequoyah's six-year-old daughter) of his alphabet. They were like Adam first opening his eyes upon the newly created world, finding his tongue and giving names to all that it contained.

At a stroke, Cherokee utterances, theretofore as perishable as the breath they were borne upon, were thenceforth and forever fixed, transmissible, infinitely reproducible, and the living and the dead and the yet unborn could communicate with one another at global distances and across the unopposable onrush of time.

The Choctaws, the Chickasaws and the Creeks had sold out, the Seminoles had fought in the field, or rather in the everglades, the Cherokees had fought to save themselves in the white man's courts and to transform themselves in his school-houses. Told that their way of life was not good, they had changed it. Led by those of their own with a foot in each of the two worlds, the mixed-bloods like the Rosses, the Fergusons, they evolved overnight in their bid for acceptance. This was just what those who wanted their land did not want. In the eyes of the outside world it refuted the charge that they were unregenerate savages, subhuman, varmints—even, or perhaps especially, those the most white—as though the ermine were to be told, “You are a weasel. That black tip of your tail gives you away.”

Education was nothing new for well-to-do mixed-blood families like the Fergusons. To prepare him for the College of William and Mary, Agiduda's early schooling had been acquired at an academy in Philadelphia. Noquisi's father, Abel, had been taught at home by a succession of live-in tutors. But the mission schools were open to all, to the children of the most backward, the poorest, the darkest-skinned. Universal education would break down class barriers and be another tribal bond.

Then came the summer day when the village was roused from its early afternoon torpor by the roll of a snare drum and the shrilling of a fife. What people saw from their doorways was a squad of the Georgia Guard marching down the main street. There were five of them, one, an officer, on horseback, one driving a wagon, and three—the musicians—on foot. The measure they marched to befitted a firing squad. It was their second visit. The outcome of the first, some months ago, was widely known, and this one had been expected in consequence ever since. Though they went in dread and suspense, every inhabitant of the village, bewitched as the children of Hamelin, turned out to follow them up the street to the parsonage.

The minister had heard them coming and stood waiting outside his garden gate. His wife looked on from the front porch. The squad halted ostentatiously, the music stopped, the officer dismounted.

“Henry Wentworth?” he demanded.

“Your servant, sir,” said the minister.

“By the authority invested in me I arrest you, Henry Wentworth, for the high crime of treason against the sovereign state of Georgia.”

What the minister had done was refuse to swear his oath of allegiance to the newly amended constitution of Georgia. The amendments provided:

That the Cherokees' tribal government be abolished.

That the Cherokees be forbidden to assemble for any purpose, including religious.

That any Cherokee who advised another not to emigrate to the west be imprisoned.

That all contracts between Cherokees and whites be nullified unless they had been witnessed by two certifed whites.

That Cherokees be forbidden to testify in court against whites.

That Cherokees be forbidden to dig for the gold recently discovered on their land.

“Sir,” said the minister, “I am a citizen of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and as such—”

A blow to the head from the officer's fist knocked the minister to the ground. He fell face-forward, landing on his hands and knees. His wife screamed and the crowd of onlookers emitted in chorus a loud “
Ai
!”

“Call yourself a white man?” the officer snarled. “You're a disgrace to the race!”

He gave a nod to the driver of the wagon (it was evident that this had been rehearsed with an audience in mind), who leapt down from his seat, whip in hand, and commenced lashing the minister across the back. The blows were heavy, but though the first one wrung from him a deep-drawn groan, thereafter he held himself to a whimper. The crowd wailed and mothers clutched their children to them.

When the beating was concluded the officer flattened the minister with a foot planted in the small of his back. The driver manacled his hands, then snapped a trace chain around his neck. He was ordered to his feet. He shivered and his jaw trembled out of control. The tears from his tight-shut eyes made it appear as though they were being squeezed dry.

The chain was fastened to the tailgate of the wagon. The officer remounted. The musicians climbed into the wagon bed and the driver resumed his seat. He whipped up the team. To get to the nearest jail they had a hundred miles to go.

Thus ended Amos Ferguson's formal education.

In the same year, 1828, when the United States elected its seventh President, the Cherokee Nation elected its first one, John Ross. His determination was to keep his people where they had always been. He was Jackson's equal in tenacity of purpose, his superior in wiliness, his inferior only in the size of his following.

Though surrounded by their white enemies, The People were not without white friends. The trouble was that their friends were distant and dispersed while their enemies were united and near at hand. Those bent upon their dispossession had power, but those northern clergymen, philosophers, editors and statesmen, the conscience of the country, whose admiration for their advancement and whose sympathy for their plight the Cherokees had won, had powers of persuasion. John Ross's hopes were based upon an appeal to the better nature of the American people as a whole—when that failed, upon an appeal to their courts and their self-proclaimed guarantee of equal justice for all free men.

But you can hire the best lawyers in the land, fight your case all the way up to the Supreme Court, win, and have it decreed that you are, as claimed, indeed a sovereign nation, within the bounds of the state of Georgia yet beyond its laws, then still lose your case when the President, sworn and empowered to uphold the rulings of the Court, declares, “Chief Justice John Marshall has rendered his decision. Now let him enforce it.”

His week in the
asi
marked Noquisi's coming to manhood, but his childhood had really ended a year earlier and not here at home but in Tennessee. His ended along with that of every Cherokee child out of its infancy. Herod himself had not more sweepingly bereft a people of its children than had Andrew Jackson, “Old Hickory.”

It was at the last full assembly of the nation, or rather, the last unenforced one. The Ferguson family went provisioned for six days on the road and two days on the campsite, with a tarpaulin for a tent and with bedding for all, traveling in a wagon drawn by a span of white mules, theirs but one in the caravan on the road, for the call had gone up every mountainside and down every glen in Cherokee Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas and Tennessee—throughout the twenty million acres left to them, and which they were now being pressured to leave.

Newcomers joined the caravan at every crossroads. Some leading livestock meant to be slaughtered and cooked on the campsite, they came in farm wagons, in buggies and shays, in oxcarts, in closed carriages driven by slaves, on horseback and on foot, their faces powdered by the dust of the road. Converging from all points toward their destination, they were awed by their numbers, uplifted by their singleness of purpose. Like the smoke signals of old, like the relays of the tom-toms, the call had gone out, carried by riders and runners, and the Cherokees had issued from their lairs in all the variety they presented at this time of transition and evolution: varieties in color, in features, in dress, in deportment. Their oneness of mind contrasted with their diversity of appearance. Among them were people who might have been mistaken for the very oppressors whom they were convening to resist: whole clans of blue-eyed blonds, fair-skinned, freckled, who called themselves Cherokees and who would have fought anybody who called them otherwise, unpropitious as these times were to be one. Among others, within one family, was a gamut of shadings as broad as in one of those specimen apple trees onto the trunk of which have been grafted several varieties of the fruit. Then, down from the tall mountaintops and up from the far-off coves, came those colored and featured like the stones of their native streams: the root stock, the undiluted essence of the tribe. With pigtails and without; bearded and beardless; turbaned, plumed and hatted; shoed, booted and moccasined; in the homespuns and the calicoes of their white counterparts and also in buckskins and blankets; gaudy and drab—Cherokees all. Men in claw-hammer coats of black broadcloth, gold chains with watch fobs spanning their flowered silk vests, looking like aldermen, conversed with men in buckskin leggings gartered and tasseled above the calves, in bright, embroidered and beaded tunics and sporting necklaces of bones alternating with the skulls of songbirds. Nor was it always the lighter-skinned of the two whose measurements were kept on file by the Baltimore gentlemen's tailor. As outlandish a sight to Noquisi as it would have been to a boy of that seaboard city was the occasional exotic with an ornament in the septum of his nose and pendants in his ears that stretched the lobes almost to his shoulders. Of these specimens the most striking was one bandoliered, breast-plated, shaven-headed and turbaned, longlobed and ox-ringed, and yet the name of this atavism, this throwback, was George Lowrey, and he was nothing less than the nation's Vice President, and a very able statesman he was, highly respected in Washington. The contrast between him and his chief, sandy-haired, frock-coated, diminutive John Ross, the perfect picture of a small-town banker, presented the two extremes of present-day Cherokee-hood. Of the two, it was Ross who was the more adamantly Indian, throughout his every cell and down to his very marrow.