The American Future (46 page)

Ross tried everything, overplaying his hand in an interview with Jackson in 1834, that may have contributed to the relatively meager sum—$5 million—that the Cherokee were to be paid for leaving their millions of acres. The lottery went ahead, and when properties were distributed, Ross went home from negotiations in Washington to discover his had been taken and that he and his family had been summarily evicted. The lottery winner was already installed, and Ross had to leave his horse with him while he went on foot to search for his family. They moved into a two-room log cabin for the rest of their time in the territory, and no one complained.

Jackson and the Department of War wanted the removals to be
“voluntary” but Ross refused to budge from his policy of defiant resistance, urging the Cherokee at their council to stay united. So they became united in misery. The “treaty” enacted in 1836 by the majority of one provided for a two-year grace period before the removal was made coercive. Only a bare handful of Cherokee took advantage of the offer. The vast majority, listening to Ross, awaited their doom.

In the late spring of 1838, under the presidency of Martin Van Buren, Jackson's successor, the deadline for voluntary removal having expired, the Cherokee, the last of the “Five Civilized Tribes” to hold out in the Southeast, were rounded up and hunted down by General Winfield Scott's 7,000 troops assigned to the glorious mission. The traumatized and humiliated Cherokee, many of whom were children and elderly, were held in pens and corrals in conditions of the utmost squalor and deprivation. So many became sick and died of maltreatment that officers in charge of the operation resigned in abhorrence of what they were being asked to do. Thousands of the Indians were herded onto rickety boats for the first stage of the journey west. One of those, on the Arkansas River, a hundred feet long and twenty wide according to the Reverend Daniel Butrick who saw it, was so over-packed with terrified Indians that “the timbers began to crack and give way and the boat itself was on the point of sinking…Who would think of crowding men, women and children, sick and well together with little, if any more room…than would be allowed to swine taken to market?” Overnight they were guarded like convicts. Others were packed into railroad boxcars, the dead and dying thrown out before the survivors were made to walk, in a file miles long, the rest of the 800 miles into their new home in the Great American Desert. Appalled at the army's treatment, Ross pleaded that he might take over the command of the transportation. He was allowed this, only to see fully a quarter of his 16,000 people perish.

In January 1839, a traveler from Maine, who published his account in the
New York Observer
, saw a sad caravan of 2,000 Cherokee extending for three miles, “the sick and feeble carried in wagons—a great many ride on horseback and multitudes go on foot—even aged females apparently nearly ready to drop into the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens attached to the back—on the sometimes frozen ground and sometimes muddy streets with no covering for the feet except what nature had given them…we learned from the inhabitants on
the road where the Indians passed that they buried fourteen or fifteen at every stopping place.”

Back in Georgia and Tennessee jubilant homesteaders moved into their allotted properties. Many of those who hoped to make colossal fortunes were deceived, for there was less gold than the first excited wave of prospectors had predicted. From the time that the last of the Cherokee trudged west to the Mississippi to the end of the Georgia gold rush was just five years.

In early March 1893, the Reading and Pennsylvania Railroad went into receivership. The rail companies that could make no mistake in calculating their part in the American future had overestimated demand. Some of the biggest names in the business followed, burdened with credit liabilities and sharply dropping receipts. The bankruptcy of the National Cordage Company, thought solid, was another shocking blow. By the end of the year 15,000 businesses had declared insolvency, more than 600 of them banks that closed their doors. When the United States Treasury announced that its gold reserves, required to shore up the currency, had fallen below the magic figure of 100 million, on 5 May, Wall Street panicked, writing off millions of dollars of stock. The steady rain of failures turned into a downpour. By the summer most industrial cities in America had unemployment rates of 18 to 20 percent. In some of the heavy manufacturing states of the Midwest as many as one in two adult men were out of work. With surviving banks calling in loans, small businessmen were hit especially hard. One of them who owned an ironware company in Massillon, Ohio, Jacob Coxey, demanded the government use currency unbacked by gold, to finance public works. Written off as a socialist fanatic, Jacob, along with his son Legal Tender Coxey, led “Coxey's Army,” a procession of some hundreds of unemployed in a march on Washington.

But the president was not well. Grover Cleveland, in his second term, was so nervous of the public mood that when his physicians told him he was suffering from cancer of the mouth and jaw and would need surgery, he kept the matter secret lest it roil the markets further. On
the yacht
Oneida
, surgeons cut away a large part of his jaw as the boat steamed gently out of New York Harbor.

All of which made the 600 acres of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago more, rather than less, necessary as a bright show of faith in the American future. If half the country was stricken, the other half went to Chicago. Twenty-seven million passed through the gates at Jackson Park between May and the end of October. Westinghouse (rather to Thomas Edison's annoyance) supplied electrical lighting; a White City with work of America's most showy and inventive architects—Charles McKim, Henry Cobb, and Louis Sullivan among them—adorned the center with Beaux Arts cupolas and gleaming halls. In the national and “ethnic” pavilions it was possible to see hula dancers from Hawaii (the islands Cleveland declined to annex) or lacemakers from Bruges. But having done their dutiful tour of elevated exhibits, most of the crowds headed for Midway Plaisance, Sol Bloom's pleasure grounds where they could giggle at the ethnically incorrect “Arabo-Egyptian” hootchy-kootchy, sail 200 feet into the sky on George Ferris's Big Wheel (the first in the country), watch dumbstruck as Eadweard Muybridge showed his images of Animal Locomotion, and sample the enticing array of snacking wonders available for the very first time: Juicy Fruit gum! CRACKERJACK! If the mood took them, they could actually have listened to the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declare that it was all over with frontier democracy, before going on to Buffalo Bill Cody's show to make sure they got a sighting of Sitting Bull and bronco busters before it was too late. But amid all the ragtime honky-tonk clamor (Scott Joplin was there, as well as John Philip Sousa) and electrically charged fun, millions upon millions of the visitors lined up to see one small, quiet emblem of the America that had been and, they hoped, always would be.

The Idaho Pavilion was at its heart a log cabin; admittedly the grandest and most richly decorated log cabin imaginable, glowing with richly woven rugs and tapestries, all with western and Indian themes, heavy turned tables and sideboards in the oddly separated Men's and Women's Reception rooms. Some of its designs in wood and metalwork inspired the beginnings of the American Arts and Crafts movement. But its message, appreciated by the millions, was that amid modern wonders and sumptuousness, the true America
was still log cabin simplicity, and for all the daunting immensity of a New York or a Chicago, the heart of the country beat in the most rudimentary shelters. “The children who come here,” one account said, “should see these rooms as they teach the lesson of the growth of our national civilization and how step by step men have made their way in life as well as something of the costs of the luxuries we now enjoy. When the foundations of a national civilization are bared to our eyes we are apt to judge them with greater acumen…the foundation is here in the cabin and the log hut.” The sense that there was still something solid to hang on to while the American economy disintegrated around them could not have been more important for the millions who wondered whether there would be plenty in their own American future. Was the dream of the pioneering homestead, 160 acres of good earth for every family willing to bend their backs in tillage, lost forever?

 

The thousands lined up on the dusty empty plain of the Cherokee Outlet on the morning of 16 September certainly didn't think so. Right across the neck of land called the Cherokee Strip, reporters looking to pump up a nice round number for their readers back East claimed 100,000; certainly a whole lot more than the 42,000 parcels that were up for allotment that day. It was going to be, they said, the last great Run. There would be nothing left of the Indian Territory after the Strip had gone, so this was their last crack at plenty. If they were fast and lucky and got to make their claim at one of the land offices, they would move their family out to the plain, cut themselves a sod house, raise some corn, and stay maybe five, six years, just until they had enough to move on again. Who knew how long the good times on the prairie would last; when the next big drought would come?

The railroad companies had scooped up the best land as the government had sold off millions of acres and then had promoted westward migration and farm life on the plains just as hard as they could. Come to Kansas, their papers and flyers had said, the rainiest place in America, fertile and green. On came the greenhorns from the cities; anything to escape the tenements, and the railroad had them in its power. The farmers would need the railroad and the country banks they owned to advance them money for tools and seed and a team of oxen. They would need the company dry-goods stores for their provisions, and
they would need the railroad itself to get their crops to mills and markets.

Here was one last chance to get a piece of land the railroad people hadn't put away. So they couldn't turn their back on the Run, everyone waiting, fidgeting at the line ready, once the cannon fired, to charge hell for leather. Lined up on the prairie was every kind of conveyance to get a man where he needed to go fast: wagon teams, buckboards, buggies, every kind of horse too, including the iron one, a train steaming on its tracks, loaded with men hanging out of the cattle cars, whooping away.

But no Indians. The Cherokee Strip Run would be another farewell, but this time they were not shedding tears. With demand, first for cattle pasture and then for tillage, the nation had leased and then gradually sold off most of its remaining acres on the Outlet, the ungenerous, tight-packed sod that had never done much for them anyway. The 12,000 who survived the Trail of Tears under the leadership of John Ross had their worst fears about the Great American Desert confirmed. The landscape could not have been more different from the hills and valleys they had left behind in Georgia and Tennessee. All there was here was an endless high plain, covered with tough, short buffalo grass. No trees broke the force of the winds that blew from the north, cutting them like knives in the winter, burning them in the summer. They could graze cattle and hunt bison, but tribes already there—the Osage in particular—saw that as their preserve and were none too happy with the arrival of a foreign people in their midst. All too soon mass slaughter by the Americans had finished off the buffalo herds anyway, their skeletons littering the prairie. The deer and beaver were nowhere to be seen. They became reduced to bow-hunting jackrabbits and prairie chickens. Most difficult of all, they had lost the streams and waterfalls of their old world, the water sent by the Great Spirit to make their crops grow. This place was dry. When it rained, which it seldom did, the water ran away against the hard, grass-packed dirt; an earth so tight that to dig it was to make war on it.

The years after 1840 were grim for the Cherokee. They went from the inconsolable loss of their uprooting to the impossibility of replanting in Oklahoma. The Ghost Dancers came among them again, and with their pipes they smoked dreams of the rain-swollen white clouds that hung over their lost green mountains of the East. From Washington
they learned to expect nothing but merciless betrayal. So when in 1861 they had to make a choice, they chose for the Confederacy, for the one thing some of them still had were their slaves. The fateful decision compounded their calamities. In 1866 they ended up with neither slaves nor mastery of the acres they had been promised in perpetuity by Jackson for their removal. Now they had to make a treaty all over again, which gave the government the right to settle other Indians—how many were they bringing to this wilderness?—whenever they chose; and to insist that they relinquish title for sales should that need arise. They signed virtually at the point of a gun and continued to eat their bitter meal. One by one their councils were set aside until by the 1890s there was virtually nothing left of their old freedom; save their language, their religion, and their horses and dogs. But that little meant at least they were still Cherokee.

Indians like themselves, they tried to tell America, were people of the East. Over the generations they had learned enough about the land to know how different were East and West. East of the 100th meridian, they could expect rain enough to grow corn; west, they could never rely on it. Sometimes it came, more often it did not. So most of the Cherokee Nation began to live east of the 96th, leaving the wide-open tracts of what was called their Outlet to those who wanted to buy or rent it. Cattlemen did, because they needed pasture for their herds, uncountable hundreds of thousands of longhorns, raised to feed America's beef habit, driven up from Texas to the Kansas railheads. The Texans were prepared to pay handsomely for the lease of their land, and the Cherokee were happy to take it. But in 1886–87 there had been a winter so brutal, blizzard after blizzard, that cattle had been buried alive in the monstrous drifts, almost 80 percent of the millions of animals dying on the prairie. In any case livestock was becoming less profitable. In their greed the cattle ranchers had overgrazed, damaging the shortgrass prairie so that the amount of land needed to feed and raise a single steer had gone up and up, reaching almost fifty acres by the time of the snows of '86. The industry collapsed; and in their place came hundreds of thousands of migrants, some from the cities, some off the ship, with just an ox team, mules, and perhaps a gold dollar to start them up growing corn and beans. If the land approaching the 100th meridian and beyond it seemed too dry to make anything of, they had been told by respected persons that “rain followed the
plow”; that just by being there in their numbers and stirring the dirt around a bit, they could make the air cooler and more humid. Prices for the untillable prairie in the west section of the Indian Territory began to climb and never stopped.

The Cherokee had their doubts about white men making rain, even with the help of the Dance and the spirits. Their pessimism seemed borne out by the brutal drought of 1890, which was followed by another three years in a row of rainless heat. So when the offer of $8 million to sell their remaining acres on the Strip came along, why would they not take it? The council met, and the offer was accepted without much regret.

 

It was approaching noon. According to the land offices there were 42,000 parcels of 160 acres each available for those who made the Run. Seth Humphrey and his brother were not about to start as farmers, however bad the times were; they had come with their bicycles for the high jinks of it. Nothing had prepared them for the multitudes; some “Sooners” who had got there ahead of the Run, staked a claim and dared everyone else to get hopping mad about it; thousands of men sleeping on blankets laid out on the buffalo grass or in makeshift tents; everywhere the whinnying and the smell of more horses than you had ever seen outside of an army camp; the creak and clang of wheels and axles, buggies and carts. And now they were there and the locomotive too, with its crazy passengers hanging out of the cattle cars and hollering as though they could move the iron horse along quick if only they had iron whips! The line of horses and carts and men and women went on for miles. Some hundreds of soldiers had been stationed close by to make sure the Run didn't turn into some sort of lawless battle. “I casually wondered,” wrote Seth, “how they would manage to dodge the onrush; perhaps they were wondering that too.”

At five before noon, the standing troops were given an order and pointed their rifles to the sky. The idea was that a cannon stationed at the eastern end of the Strip would fire and then the troops strung out across the line would take up the report. As stopwatches moved toward noon, Humphrey managed somehow to sneak out about fifty yards in front of the crowd, between the horses and the train, and watched around 8,000 in his sight line of around two miles begin to stir with their reins and spurs. “While we stood, numb with looking, the rifles snapped and
the line broke with a huge crackling roar. That one thundering moment of horseflesh by the mile quivering in its first leap forward was a gift of the gods, and its like will never come again. The next instant we were in a crush of vehicles, whizzing past us like a calamity.”

At the end of the Run in the new townships of Enid, Perry, and Woodward, men were stationed in makeshift land offices, pen and ink and ledgers set on their trestle tables; men in little hats, their coats off for it was hot that September day. Long lines snaked out into the dirt street behind them, the “Boomers” who had made the Run, surprisingly few of them cursing or drinking or firing off, but waiting their turn to stake a claim to their 160 acres of America. Never mind that the acres were of hard-packed buffalo grass, not the kind of dirt a hoe could do anything with; they couldn't see much of it anyway, for the army of horsemen had kicked up such a storm of dust that it clouded the view, powdery dirt flying fine into the sky and down the streets of Enid, scratching the eyes of hopeful men.