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IN THE SOUTHERN MOUNTAINS, A HELL IS A BAD STRETCH OF LAND, a hard place to get through, a laurel thicket so vast and dense that men go in and can’t find their way out and die there. In other parts of the country, it’s the section of town with all the bars and whorehouses and gunfighters and knife fighters. Not the Hell. A hell.
That’s what the immediate future looked like it was shaping up to be. And no clear way through, at least none that I could see. No way to come out the other side feeling noble or even whole anymore. And plenty of ways to come out ashamed and disappointed in yourself for the remainder of life, with stories you wouldn’t even care to tell drunk. But there was no direction to go other than forward. Bear had set his mind and heart on staying in his mountains, and nothing could change his mind, certainly not government decrees or new lines drawn on maps or old lines erased. Mountains were home, and that was that. Bear said that every time he had been to the flatlands, he felt like he might slide off the end of the world, for there was nothing upright to stop him from the void. He said being in a place without mountains was like riding in the bed of a careening wagon without side rails.
I loved the old man and would do anything for him, and also I believed that Bear’s people had as much right to decide where they cared to live as anybody else. Maybe I should have packed up and gone to Washington for good, used my friends there to find a position. Put that Wayah Town behind me. There are many who can make new selves at a moment’s notice. Slough a skin, dismiss memory, move on. But that is not a skill I ever acquired.
If the soldiers came marching into the mountains and began collecting everyone on the Nation together and taking them off to the West, I had little faith our sheaf of inconclusive letters and vague legal papers would stop them from coming on up to Wayah and emptying our coves too, deeds or no deeds. But I kept working, tirelessly and without hope. I made the long journey to Washington and back three times during those years, each time with a stronger presentiment that all my efforts would be futile. No argument had helped the Nation. Chief Ross and the Ridges had constructed years and years’ worth of arguments, and nothing they did or said changed a thing. Sympathetic lawmakers ranted righteous opposition to Jackson and then moved on to more pressing matters. The Supreme Court rendered a decision siding with the Indians, and Jackson said, Now let them enforce it. The Court, a toothless and ultimately corrupt bunch of old men, backed down.
The Ridges and their followers stalled as long as they could, but before the axe fell they made a desperate and almost actuarial calculation to determine their best chances of personal and financial survival. Helping them in their decision was the old major’s very concrete experience, all the way back into the previous century, of fighting both for and against white men. Before white men, war of Indians against Indians was very bloody and sometimes cruel to the limits of human imagination, but it was a near relative to the ball game, a form of sport. These new white people took all the fun out of war and just won and kept winning, as if that was all that mattered. Major Ridge had seen firsthand what wonders of domination can be accomplished by the overwhelming and single-minded application of force, and finally he and his bunch of supporters conceded defeat.
One winter night in New Echota, a small roomful of wealthy Ridge men, Featherstone among them, huddled about a white paper centered on a candlelit table and autographed a secret nighttime treaty, selling all of the Nation to America under the most favorable terms they believed they could get and agreeing for all their people, without consultation, to remove to the new Indian Territories. When the group had finished putting their names to paper, one of them expressed the opinion that they had just signed their own execution warrants. And of course he was right.
The treaty, as drafted, contained a provision to allow the richest Indians to stay, keep all their holdings—land and houses and slaves—and become American citizens. Unfair, yes. But I was all for it, since it meant that Claire and Featherstone could remain at Cranshaw, and just her proximity offered hope, for time back then seemed long enough for anything to happen, even the softening of a heart inexplicably hardened against you.
When the treaty reached the White House, however, Jackson ranted against any exemptions whatsoever. He wanted all Indians gone, no matter how rich or how white, and the provision was stricken from the final document.
The Old Possum finished out his eight years and began rusticating outside Nashville, a hermit in his Hermitage but still savoring the sweep of his hand across the land even in absentia. Van Buren followed him and his Indian policies like a swimmer caught in a riptide.
In the year before the Army arrived, the members of the Ridge bunch began leaving the plantations they had built, the mills and ferries and stores and printing presses, and pulled out to the West, taking a few of their house slaves with them but leaving most to follow later. Some of the paler among the rich Indians might have been tempted to cross out of the Nation and melt into the surrounding white populations, but the bordering states, Georgia in particular, were vigilant in arresting fugitives of whatever blood degree and deporting them to the West under conditions suitable only for convicts.
Major Ridge and his wife chose to travel out to the new Nation by riverboat, quickly and uneventfully. Boudinot and young Ridge and their Yankee wives made a happy jaunt of it. They trotted to the new Nation in fine carriages drawn by strong healthy horses. Even under such leisurely conditions, their trip took a mere month, the young couples enjoying the fine dry weather of a southern October and the spectacular change of colors and fall of leaves as they crossed Tennessee and rolled through the Ozarks. It being fashionable among gentlemen at the time to be naturalists, Boudinot and young Ridge noted in their journals the passing varieties of wildlife and plant life. They even took time from their journey to visit the Old Possum at his Hermitage, which, when I heard about the visit, struck me as being not entirely required by the etiquette of the situation. And the more I thought about it and imagined their conversation, the more disturbed I became. But the Possum always had something about him that moved many folks his way, like the wind pushed them or gravity pulled them in his direction.
Back on the Nation, Chief Ross fumed and litigated on against America and, of course, denied the legitimacy of the Ridge agreement, rightfully pointing out that the Ridges had no authority to sell even an acre of Nation land to a non-Indian and had in fact committed a capital crime in doing so. When Ross’s efforts all continued to come to nothing, he soon began striking deals of his own to have America pay him, by the head, to move all the people to the West by overland routes. Vast caravans of Indians and slaves, accompanied by soldiers and missionaries, emptying the old Nation and filling the new one. America took Ross’s low bid and got what they paid for. The trail where they cried.
LIKE MAJOR RIDGE, Featherstone chose—in his words—to eschew the toilsome overland route to the new Nation in favor of the more comfortable water passage, where one might eat dinner at a cloth-covered table and take a morning shit through a buttock-shaped hole in a sternward outhouse overhanging the passing brown river face all a-churn from the turning paddle wheel. Contrary to his wishes, Claire remained behind to pack their belongings. Clattering silver service, footed trays and platters, tiny salt bowls, and endless flatware. Wedgwood dinnerware and Murano crystal cocooned in yellow straw. Many shelves of books and bureaus of folded clothes laid rectangle by rectangle in wooden crates. Her goal was to be done and gone before the soldiers came.
The night before his departure, Featherstone built a midnight blaze of his collected works of taxidermy, a nightmare bonfire on the lawn. Generations of dusty animals large and small combusting quick as fat-pine kindling, their blank faces looking out of the fire, scenting the spring air with an autumnal odor like burning the bristles off a butchered hog. The next morning Featherstone set out for the West on a sort of middling-quality horse which he planned to sell at the river before embarking. His only baggage was a pair of bulging saddleba
gs filled with dress clothing, all the way down to gloves scented with frangipani for the riverboat salons and a great deal of cash with which he planned to begin life anew. When the poor Indians arrived, he’d be there waiting to profit like most of the other rich Indians.
No argument had worked for the Indians on the Nation, not even the white ones, and I didn’t expect anything to work for Bear’s brown people either. But Bear had put his hope in a fistful of deeds, and his faith never wavered. At that time we had Bear’s thousand acres, which he owned outright, and my more extensive land, which I controlled mainly through a series of notes and IOUs as interlocked and tangled and messy as an old weathered osprey nest. I held one of my tracts by such convoluted means that a second mortgage on a prime field hand figured prominently in the deal. I lived in fear that if one twig was pulled from it, the whole nest would collapse and fall to the ground. But it held and grew.
Bear kept close watch over all the dealings, and at one point he asked if I knew what the difference between us was.
—No, I said.
—Seems to be, there’s two kinds of men in this new world the white people are making. Ones with payments and ones without. You’re a man with payments.
The year before the Removal, Bear and I between us could fairly accurately claim control over about ten thousand acres. It was a fraction of what our holdings would become a decade later, but enough to form a confusing principality, existing outside the Nation and inside the state. With inhabitants of unclear citizenship and all possible degrees of blood, but so remote from the state capital that nobody in government much cared who we were or what we did way out in our doleful coves.
Just to see what might happen, I sent a carefully worded claim of state citizenship for all of Bear’s people to the appropriate department down in the capital. The response was worded in such exquisite bureaucratic cant that it took me three readings to decipher its meaning. The best I could tell, my claim was not accepted, but neither was it rejected.
Though Bear and I had sat up late nights for years planning the future—hoping and despairing over it, resolving to fight against it all we could—most of the people didn’t at all understand what immediate threat of losing their homeland they now lived under. The doings of the larger world, even Jackson’s will to put an end to Indians east of the Mississippi, seemed as distant and uninteresting as wars conducted by the King of Siam. A lot of our people had never been farther from their own farms than the top of the most distant ridge they could see. They were like everyone else; all they truly knew was locked in the body. The diameter of their world was tightly drawn, just as it was for most of their white neighbors, and its topography was confined to the coves and ridges and watercourses they had seen with their eyes and walked with their legs. Whatever larger geography they held in mind was theoretical. So the distance to the West was entirely abstract, as was the length of time it might take to traverse such unimagined space and the danger that might wait along the way.
DURING THE MONTHS leading up to the Removal, letters and reports flew back and forth between Washington and the earliest representatives of the Army. And on both ends of the transaction, I had ways to get hold of scrivener’s copies. A case in point:
Memoir Relative to the Cherokee Nation within the Limits of N. Carolina and its Immediate Vicinity, by W. G. Williams, Capt, U.S. F. Grs. Febry 1838.
Preparatory to a Report based upon the data procured by Instrumental Survey, it occurs to me that you may be pleased to be made acquainted with a few particulars in regard to the country in which we are operating; and which have come to me, in the form of memoranda, through the notes of the assistants under me and from my own observation. In a country like this and at a season the most unpropitious for surveying operations, it is natural to suppose many difficulties have been encountered.
In pursuance of my instructions, I will advert to such circumstances as may pertain to an estimate of the resources of the Indians of this district, in the hypothesis of an attempt on their part to evade the stipulations of the Treaty in reference to removal. Previously to entering upon this as a question of numbers, physical strength, interest in the country they inhabit, their means of subsistence & ca. I will remark briefly what has occurred to me as to the moral disposition of the Indians in relation to this subject.
Poor, ignorant of economy of time, or money, cultivating the soil for a base subsistence, they prefer the chase of the deer or deer idleness to more useful employment. It is but natural to suppose that the love of home is a paramount sentiment with the Indian whose range of ideas is too limited to stimulate him to enterprize beyond his immediate vicinity and who is moreover attached to the grave of his ancestors by feelings of superstitous veneration. This natural sympathy is kept alive by the appeals of those interested in their opposition to a removal and by the representation made to them of any thing but advantage in such an arrangement. Influential Chiefs and some white residents among them, stimulated by sordid views and either feeling or pretending to feel for their situation encourage every proposition adverse to their own true interest and the wishes of the U.S. Government.
Under such circumstances the result of our observations is that the great mass of the Indians in this section of the country are decidedly hostile to emigration, and what is to be lamented, the hope of remaining is kept alive by false representation to a degree that is truly surprising. It is, therefore, to be regretted that these delusions of false hopes will only be dashed to the ground at the very period when it will be necessary to carry out the conditions of the treaty, and it is much to be feared that, referring to general principles of human nature, an irritation of feeling may grow out of their sudden disappointment and incite them to acts of desperation. Had the conviction been fully and universally impressed upon their mind that they must go, they would long since have accommodated themselves to the idea and been prepared to meet their destiny.
In regard to the locale of the Indians in the mountain district much may be said in its adaptation to their mode of warfare and for the purposes of concealment. It would appear obvious that if they could provision themselves in these fastnesses of nature, and possessed arms and ammunition, they would be enabled to oppose every formidable resistance to any attempt to dislodge them, for it must be considered that they have the range of not merely the mountain region within the territory now occupied by them but that of a very extensive bed of mountains, so sparsely inhabited by whites as to offer them a secure and inaccessible shelter from invasion and yet a fertile field for their predatory incursions.
It would appear obvious from the nature of the ground, that the most effectual mode of reducing Indians would be by compelling them to come in by the pressure of want and privation. To effect this object it would be necessary to secure the vallies in which their farms are situated and seize at once the grain, cattle & swine they may have on hand, on the slightest exhibition on their part of a hostile intention and the immediate occupation of these vallies could place us in the attitude to carry this plan into effective operation. They would thus be driven to the mountain fastness, where it is true, they would be almost inaccessible to attack, but at the same time they would be destitute of provisions and the necessary appliances of war. They would be obliged to have recourse to hunting for food and could not therefore embody to any extent and might be met by small detachments whenever they emerged for purposes of procuring the provision by hunting, necessary to their existence.
They are very illy provided with arms and ammunition. It is thought that there are not more than 400 rifles among them, and those for the most part useless or in bad repair. They have bows and arrows and an implement called the blowgun, which they use for the purpose of killing small game, at which they are expert. This might be regarded as contributing some what to their resources in that respect.
I herewith send a sketch of the country above referred to in which the principal points are laid down with accuracy and very different in position from that exhibi
ted on previous maps we have been able to procure.
I am, Sir, with respect
W. G. WILLIAMS CAPT. U.S. Top Ensgn.
THE SOLDIERS FELL on the land like calamity. Down by the river, on an expanse of flat ground, they razed away a vast canebrake in a conflagration that looked for a short span of minutes like the end of the world. Red fire and black smoke rose to the top of the sky, and for two days grey twists of cane ashes kited on the wind and then rained down on Valley River. For days after that, all you could hear was the ringing of axes as the soldiers cut and limbed pine trees. Teams of yellow oxen snaked the straight trunks out of the woods. When the soldiers had a great heap of timber, enough to build a whole settlement of cabins, they dug a huge rectangular trench and sank the butts of the pine trunks and erected them each by each like a giant pale fence to make a palisade, the logs with the bark still on but white and sharp at the tips as trimmed pencils. Two bark-roofed blockhouses projected from the walls at opposing corners like crude bastions from which you could fire down upon attackers on either of the two sides they each commanded. Loopholes opened high in the walls, which suggested the existence of banquettes inside to stand on and move from one loop to another to fire. A sally port opened on the side of the square they considered the front.
From up the hill at the trading post, looking down across the river, there was a dream geometry to the place. A flat of bottomland cut to red mud by men and horses, the unbroken brown face of a broad river running straight and then curving away, green mountains rising in steep pitches to the four cardinal directions. The log fort sitting dark and squat in the middle like a lump of black wax impressed with the seal of fate.
From that point forward, everything changed entirely in the village. The enlisted men were let out only on rare occasions, and then they would cross the river in rowing boats and climb the hill and pay whatever price was asked for any kind of brownish popskull liquor whatsoever, as long as it was vaguely reputed to be Barbados rum or Tennessee whiskey. The officers, though, seemed to have a considerably greater scope of personal freedom. Most days of the week, they hung about my trading post. The officers drank all the Moët’s and Macallan’s Scotch that could be kept coming by the wagonload up the roads from Charleston. There was, understandably, a considerable markup, and the officers seemed compelled to announce that they could buy it back in New Jersey for half that price. I taught the young clerk minding the till to say, Well, maybe you’d better go back to New Jersey then. At least the wooden wine cases made fine bookshelves when stacked in a staggered fashion along the walls of the store’s sleeping room.