The Native American Experience

  “And, oh yes, the wagon we were riding in was one that Jotham and I had helped Mr. Rogers make for the United States Army.”

  25

  IT WAS MIDDAFTERNOON IN Montana. “Would you like to take a walk?” Dane asked. “This is the best time of the day for it.”

  I said that I would indeed.

  “You’ll need your coat.” He slipped on a blanket-wool vest, a wide-collared mackinaw, and a tall-crowned black hat. When we left the house he led the way along a narrow pathway the cattle had made beside the stream, his booted legs bowing as he walked. We passed a small pole-fenced corral and a sheet-iron shed and then came to a stretch of hard-packed sand where we could walk side by side. “See the green in the willows,” he said with excitement in his voice. The willows were a hundred yards away, leafless, but there was a faint tinge of green mist in the line of trees along the stream.

  “The quickest way to kill an Indian,” he said, “is to pen him up. Freedom is in our blood. I think it must have always been there. You people talk a lot about freedom, but you don’t know what it is. When you people have freedom you throw it away, you imprison yourselves.” His eyes, squinting out of the network of wrinkles in his face, sparkled with old mischief.

  “Freedom for the individual is the basis of our American credo,” I protested.

  “Freedom for individuals of your own kind is what you mean,” he replied. “You people have always wanted to shunt my people aside, confine us on some faraway barren where you cannot see us. At Ross’s Landing and other places along the Tennessee River you penned us behind log stockades higher than our heads so that you could not see us and we could not see you. It has been that way, in a manner of speaking, since that time, except now most of us are on reservations with the ghosts of stockades still between us.

  “At Ross’s Landing my family and a thousand other Cherokees struggled to stay alive for weeks under pine-pole sheds that soaked up the heat of the sun or leaked streams of rain upon us. Inside the stockade every tree had been cut so there was no shade. Most of us survived somehow on tasteless gruel given us twice each day, on foul water hauled from the river, in dirty clothing we had no way to clean, our bodies unwashed. Talasi the Runner, my father, died there unattended except by an old adanowski, medicine man, who had no curative herbs or any way of obtaining them, and could offer nothing but sacred prayers to the Maker of Breath. And Grandmother Mary grieved for her only full-blood son, barely enduring, her body growing frailer day by day. And Jerusha, half-mad because we could find no trace of our little son Pleasant; none of the soldiers would listen to our pleas for help in finding him.

  “One night Jotham lifted me to the top of his shoulders so that I could pull myself over the sharp-pointed poles, and drop to the ground below. I had some crazy idea that I might go to other stockades and find Pleasant before Jerusha lost her mind completely. But the soldiers had cut all the trees around the stockade, and I had crawled only halfway through the stumps toward the river when they opened fire on me. I stood up facing them in the half darkness, waiting for them to kill me. Instead they took me back inside and locked me in a pine-slab privy too small to lie down and where I was surrounded by the stench of excrement for I don’t know how many days.

  “For what crime were you freedom-loving Americans punishing us? The crime of blocking your path toward some mythical destiny, of refusing to take your money for our homeland and exiling ourselves to where you could no longer see us, for forcing you to force us to the Darkening Land?

  “One hot summer morning the soldiers opened the big stockade gate and passed the word to us that we should prepare ourselves to move out. Long lines of wagons were waiting, and we were packed into them like cattle into loading pens. For miles we bumped along over a road so deep in dust that our clothing, our faces, and our hair were powdered with it, our noses and eyes so filled with dust that we could barely see or breathe. We came to the river, and with soldiers still holding their guns on us we left the wagons and walked single file down to a strange sort of flotilla—four flatboats moored around a steamboat. We were marched aboard one of the flatboats, our family clinging to one another so as not to become separated. We sat in a little circle, Grandmother Mary insisting upon wiping the dust from our faces with the hem of her skirt. The sun was broiling down, our sweat turning the dust to mud on our skins and in our hair.

  “I was sitting there beside Jerusha, both of us too miserable to speak, when a yellow flop-eared hound came slinking along the side of the flatboat. ‘Dila!’ we both shouted. At the sound of our voices, the hound raised its head and turned away from us, its tail between its legs. I scrambled to my feet, watching the dog sneaking toward the end of the flatboat. And there was Griffa McBee, a red bandana around her head, and in her lap was Pleasant.

  “Grabbing Jerusha’s hand, I pulled her after me, stumbling along over outstretched feet, ignoring the angry grunts of those we stepped upon. I thought Jerusha would squeeze Pleasant to death when she bent down and put her arms around that delighted little boy.

  “We learned that the soldiers had found Pleasant and his dog on the road, fortunately placing him in the same wagon with the McBees, and they had been taken to a stockade not ten miles from where we were. The army officers could easily have found him for us, but they made no effort to do so.

  “Anyway, the recovery of Pleasant made the heat of that torrid day bearable to us. Many people on our flatboat fainted under the burning sun, others became very ill. Although the steamboat and flatboats were filled with Cherokees, the flotilla remained motionless all through the afternoon. Rumors passed back and forth, but no one knew the reason why we did not leave the landing. As the sun sank low in the sky, soldiers began lining up on the bank and we were ordered to file off the boats and get back into the wagons. All through the night the wagons kept rolling between the river and the stockade, returning us to the imprisonment we had thought was behind us forever.

  “Not until some days passed did we learn the reason for this. Because of the long summer drought the water in the river had fallen so low that boats could no longer descend. We would have to wait until enough rain fell to raise the water level. We also learned that other parties of Cherokees, as many as three thousand, had been taken on ahead of us down the Tennessee to the Ohio and Mississippi, and up the Arkansas to Indian Territory.

  “By this time Chief John Ross had somehow brought the scattered members of his council together, and when they received reports that hundreds of our people had died on the crowded boats, Ross petitioned General Winfield Scott to grant the Cherokee council permission to manage the passage of our people to the West. The council proposed that we travel overland in wagons, in this way shortening the distance by many miles. Although General Scott agreed to the plan, his soldiers kept us penned in the stockades for several more weeks.

  “The weather continued hot and dry. Our drinking water was filled with river slime. Swarms of blueflies bit us by day and mosquitoes attacked us by night. Most of us fell ill of dysentery and fevers. Poor Walina! She was the gentlest of us all, grieving in her blanket every night for the Runner, but never complaining. She was the next of our little family to die, perhaps from a broken heart, perhaps from the sickness that afflicted us all. Some soldiers followed us out to the burying ground, where Jotham and I dug a hole beside my father’s grave. We wrapped Walina in her blanket and covered her with earth. Fifty graves were there before we left that stockade, most of them children and old people. Grandmother Mary could not understand why the Maker of Breath chose Walina and the Runner while she and old Stalking Turkey were left to burden the young. There were only five of us left—Mary, Jotham, Jerusha, Pleasant, and I—six, if we counted Stalking Turkey, who had attached himself to us.”

  We had climbed a low sandhill, and Dane stood there looking back at his cabin with a strong cold wind blowing the plaits of his hair. “I have not thought of those things for many a moon,” he said. “It was a bad time, but we learned there how to endu
re all the other bad times that were to come. But there were some good times, too, some good times. I was then only twenty-four years old.”

  Book Two

  The Westerners

  26

  LATE IN THE MOON of Black Butterflies (September 1838) the first detachment of a thousand Cherokees left a stockade on the Hiwassee River and began moving westward. A small unit of soldiers accompanied the wagon train, but only as observers. Chief John Ross and his council had organized this forced migration of a nation into parties of about one thousand, each to leave four days behind the other. With the approval of the War Department, General Scott granted an allowance of sixty-five dollars per person, a bargain for the American government, for from this fund the Cherokee council had to purchase cooking utensils, rations, clothing, blankets, wagons, and horses needed for the journey.

  One wagon and team and six riding horses were allotted to each fifteen persons, and each wagon train was headed by a conductor, who was usually a Cherokee town chief. To assist him, he had a wagonmaster, a blacksmith, a commissary to manage the food supply, a medicine man to care for the sick, and a few members of the old Cherokee Light Horse to act as police.

  The stockade in which Creek Mary and her family were imprisoned was one of the last to be organized for travel. Not until the Frost Moon of early November were enough wagons and horses assembled there to begin the journey. In a chilly gray dawn they were ferried across the river and assigned their wagons, horses, and equipment. Their conductor was Chief Salali from Coosawatie, and by noontime he and his assistants had moved the wagons into line and informed the able-bodied men and women what their special duties would be on the journey. Without ceremony the train was then started on its way.

  Jotham somehow managed to find the McBees, a rather large family, and persuaded them to share a wagon and riding horses with Creek Mary’s people. Although the McBees had lived near Okelogee for several years, Mary had never more than exchanged greetings with old John McBee, a taciturn beetle-browed Scot. “Why do you,” she asked him now, “a white man free to go anywhere you please on this earth, choose to share the miseries of the dispossessed Cherokees?”

  McBee’s bright eyes opened wide in surprise, and he rubbed the gray stubble of beard on his long bony jaw. “The choice had not entered my mind, madam,” he replied.

  “You could have gone with the others, taken money from the Unegas as my half-blood son did. You could go separately now as a white man with your family. Could it be that you are a dull-witted man, John McBee?”

  “Aye, that I could be. Also it might be a matter of loyalty, madam. Loyalty to my children mothered by my Cherokee wife, to my wife’s people who have accepted me as one of them.”

  She stepped forward and gripped the thick muscle of his upper arm. “I am glad you are the captain of our wagon, John McBee.”

  For the first time he smiled, and then he bowed his thanks to her.

  Griffa was of course the McBee that Jotham was interested in, but he was not to see as much of her as he had hoped for on this journey. He and Dane, being among the few blacksmiths in the train, were assigned to the farrier detail and spent many of their daytime hours riding up and down the line of march to assist the wagonmaster. After the first few days of travel, they often worked until bedtime over a portable forge purchased from the army—shoeing horses, mending harness, and repairing damaged wagons.

  John McBee drove their wagon, with his Cherokee wife seated beside him, while Mary, Jerusha, Pleasant and his hound, and Griffa and the younger McBee children made themselves as comfortable as they could among the blankets in the rear. The older McBee boys and the Stalking Turkey used the riding horses. The first two days were warm and sunny, and relief from long imprisonment eased the sadness of leaving their homeland. But when they reached the Cumberland Mountains, a steady autumn rain began falling. Canvas had to be fastened over the bows, giving those inside the wagons a feeling of confinement again.

  After a few hours in the cold drenching rain, the Stalking Turkey hitched his horse to the rear of their wagon and climbed inside. Mary made him remove all his wet clothing and wrap himself in two blankets, but the old man’s toothless jaws continued trembling for a long time.

  The mountain roads were rough and difficult. Singletrees snapped frequently on the hard pulls, and sometimes teams had to be unhitched from the rear wagons and brought to the front to aid in pulling the forward wagons over the steepest passages. They had been told that the distance to Indian Territory was eight hundred miles and that the train must travel fifteen miles each day if they hoped to reach there before the Ice Moon of January. In the Cumberlands they averaged only four or five miles between sunrise and sunset.

  At last they struggled out of the mountains to find that heavy rains and the passage of a preceding detachment of Cherokees had turned the road to Nashville into a quagmire. When they reached the broad Cumberland River at Nashville, the ferryman not only refused to accept Chief Salali’s treasury notes, he demanded to be paid in gold and doubled the usual rates for each wagon crossed. The train was delayed half a day while Salali and his aides searched out a Nashville banker, who made a handsome profit for himself by heavily discounting the paper notes. The Cherokees suspected that the ferryman and the banker were in league with each other, but they were not surprised at being fleeced in the hometown of their archenemy, President Andrew Jackson, and they knew it would be a waste of breath to protest.

  Throughout the following day the train was trailed by a band of Tennessee ruffians. Having been warned to beware of land pirates when they reached the Ohio River, Chief Salali assigned a double guard over the night camp. The horse thieves knew, however, that Cherokees were forbidden to carry arms, and soon after dark they raided several corrals, firing on the defenseless guards and racing away with about thirty of the best animals. One Cherokee guard was killed, several others suffered wounds.

  The following morning the train could not move for lack of horses, losing another precious day while Chief Salali and his wagonmaster rode through the countryside to seek replacement horses from farmers who might have animals to sell. After a long search they found only one horse dealer in the area. His prices were exorbitant because he knew the Cherokees would have to pay what he asked in order to move their wagons. Although most of the horses that Salali bought were the same animals that had been stolen from them the previous night, he and his wagonmaster confined their bitter comments to the Cherokee language. Aliens in a land that once belonged to their grandfathers, they were growing accustomed to being exploited. But their allotted funds were vanishing rapidly, and they had six hundred miles yet to travel.

  In Kentucky they met the tollgaters, wolfish white riffraff who placed chained logs across the narrow road in front of their cabins. These cabin dwellers called the obstacles “tollgates,” refusing to lift the logs by their chains until each wagon paid a toll.

  Near Hopkinsville came the first threat of early winter, a bleak rainstorm that changed to sleet and froze to the wagon canvases. During the night a wet snow fell over the encampment. When Mary awoke at first light and looked out the rear of the wagon, she cried aloud at the sight of the sleeping men snow-shrouded under their blankets. The camp resembled a ghostly burying ground of white mounds. By the time the wagons began rolling, the snow was melting, the roads becoming so deep in mud that wheels sank to their axles.

  For several nights after that the muddy ruts froze into stone-hard furrows. Morning travel was so rough that many of the old people and children preferred to walk in the shivering cold rather than endure the rough shaking of the wagon beds. By noontime the mud usually thawed into a morass again. But after they crossed the Ohio River into Illinois the thawing stopped, the temperature never rising above freezing.

  The night the train halted near the town of Jonesboro, Illinois, the commissary informed the conductor that all their beef was gone and that the salt pork and cornmeal rations would have to be cut in half if they were to last anothe
r week. Thirty miles away at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, additional supplies were supposed to be waiting for them, but delays had thrown the train two weeks behind its planned schedule, and no one could be certain how much food would be there.

  Taking one of the empty commissary wagons, Chief Salali and his aides drove into the town and found a merchant who saw an opportunity to rid himself of a consignment of wormy bacon by selling it to the Indians for a good profit.

  At breakfast the next morning, Pleasant refused to eat the slice of bacon given him because of its bad smell, but the others forced themselves to chew and swallow the meat. Their meal was interrupted by two white strangers, one claiming to be a sheriff who said that a gray riding horse assigned to their wagon belonged to his companion.

  “This is certainly a mistake,” John McBee cried indignantly. “We have brought these horses from Tennessee, from beyond the Cumberland Mountains.”

  “He’s lying, sheriff,” said the other white man. “That gray one is my horse.”

  Mary added her usual colorful expletives to the objections, and she sent Dane and Jotham riding off in opposite directions to find Chief Salali, but before the boys returned the two white men had taken away the horse. McBee knew that in their eyes he was as much a Cherokee as his wife, and he also knew that the white men were quite aware that for dispossessed Cherokees there was no recourse to the law in Illinois or any other state. He counted himself lucky that they had claimed only one horse; for the remainder of the journey one of his older boys would have to walk or ride in the crowded wagon.

  Three days later, traveling in the bitterest weather yet encountered, they reached the bank of the Mississippi River. About a hundred Cherokees, the tag end of the train that had preceded them, were camped there with a dozen wagons. Instead of a mighty flowing stream the river was choked with tumbling fragments and sheets of ice. Across on the Cape Girardeau bank a ferryboat was locked in the frozen mass. They learned from the encamped Cherokees that two days earlier their detachment’s passage across the Mississippi had been halted by darkness, and during that night the ice had come down from the north, trapping the ferryboat.