East of the Mississippi, the pole ceased its journey and stood still, planted firmly in unbroken ground. The tribes would move no more. Those who stayed with Chactas tilled the soil. And those who rode with Chikasa became hunters and fighters with raven black hair and large dark eyes.
The women dressed themselves in skins, sewn together by fishbone needles and deer sinews, wrapping themselves in buffalo calf hides when the winds grew cold and the frost gnawed at the earth. They gathered firewood and cleared the land, bringing home grapes, plums, wild onions, persimmons, walnuts, blackberries, pecans, and hickory nuts for the table.
The men had no time for a garden. They were warriors who wore breechcloth when the sun baked the woodlands, but used the shaggy hides of deer, bear, panther, otter, and beaver – the fleshy side out – to face the snows of winter.
They hung ornaments from their noses and ears, shaved the sides of their heads, soaked the crests of their scalps with bear grease, and carefully plucked the hair from their faces with tweezers fashioned from clam shells.
The Chickasaws worshiped Abalibnli and saw him in the sun and the clouds, even in a clear sky. For he who looked down from the clear sky had made all mankind from the dust of the mother earth, and the warriors swore to lay them all back into the dust again.
If a Chickasaw was killed, his death must be avenged. The warriors sought blood for blood, and they sought it often. It was the only way to chase away the ghosts of those slain in battle, the spirits who came to haunt them until a life had been laid down for a life.
One grave always begat another.
Dying, ironically, was a way of life.
The warriors found sanctification in an odd concoction of button snakeroot, and they drank it to purge themselves.
They heard old Chieftains encouraging them to be strong of heart, keen in sight, fleet of foot, to be cunning as a fox, sleepless as a wolf, agile as a panther.
The braves ate venison to make them swift, not trusting in the flesh of a clumsy bear at all.
With eagle feathers draped around their head and shoulders, the Chickasaws rode off to battle. It was their only chance for glory, and they found many glorious days.
James Adair, a trader, wrote that in a long chase, they would run “for two or three hundred miles, in pursuit of a flying enemy, with the continuous speed and eagerness of a staunch pack of blood hounds, till they shed blood.”
There were not many of them, never more than 4,500.
And they clung faithfully, desperately, to Mississippi, to the Old Fields.
The French feared them. The Chickasaws wanted to exterminate them and wash French blood for a sacred ground. In the 1740s, the Choctaws tried.
And the white men wondered just how long the savages could hold on to the land that held the sanctified graves of their dead.
For too many years, the agents of an American government
kept bringing fancy words in beautiful treaties as they sought to remove their Five Civilized Tribes from their homelands. The promises and guarantees within the treaties were easily made and easily broken.
Five Civilized Tribes Museum
Muskogee, Oklahoma
Chapter 6: Battle With the Devil
THE COLONISTS WERE in a dilemma. They were frightened of the Indians. They did not trust the Indians. They believed themselves to be superior to the Indians. But, in reality, the colonists were their own worst enemy.
During the French and Indian War, Colonel George Washington dispatched Nathaniel Gist into the Cherokee villages to drum up support for the British army. Gist not only found volunteers, but some say he also stayed around long enough to father a baby boy who would be known as Sequoyah.
Without the Indian alliance, Washington always said, the Army of England could not have triumphed. The Cherokees received their reward, but not the one they were expecting. Some colonists stumbled across a few braves in a Virginia countryside, became nervous, then scared, and massacred all twenty-four of them.
The Cherokees exploded with anger and vengeance, taking a few scalps, burning a few homesteads, even running the British out of Fort Loudon. Lord Jeffrey Amherst fled for his life, and he would say, with his head bowed in disgrace, “I must own I am ashamed, for I believe it is the first instance of His Majesty’s troops having yielded to the Indians.”
Finally, the Cherokees asked for peace, and the British were only too glad to give it to them. Again, the Cherokees were rewarded. Between 1768 and 1775, they signed three treaties and immediately lost all of the lands north of Georgia and east of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Old Tassel, the Cherokee Chieftain, shook his head and said sadly, “The truth is, if we had not lands, we should have fewer enemies.”
And so it was.
By the autumn of 1785, the tribe possessed hope that their troubles were at an end. The United States had outlined the Cherokee boundaries and had forbidden any of their own citizens from trespassing past those border lines, written in blood.
The land was sacred and it belonged to the Indian. That was law, and the Cherokees walked away with the Treaty of Hopewell to prove it. There before them were the white men’s own holy words: “The hatchet shall be forever buried.”
As Nancy Ward, a niece of Chief Attacullaculla, had told the American commissioners:
You having determined on peace is most pleasing to me, for I have seen much trouble during the late war. I am old, but I hope yet to bear children, who will grow up and people our nation, as we are now under the protection of Congress and shall have no more disturbance. I speak for the young warriors I have raised in my town, as well as for myself. They rejoice that we have peace, and we hope the chain of friendship will never more be broken.
The chain of friendship was made with cheap metal, and even cheaper words. It had been molded with ambition and linked with lies.
Congress, in 1789, was still holding fast to the treaty, promising that “the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars.” Congress had not yet felt the growing pains of a nation, stuffed with too many people and even more greed. The Chickamaugans loomed as its only stumbling block in the way of peace. These renegade Cherokees had been the last holdouts, the last warriors to defy American rule. But even they buckled under the military muscle of a new nation, leaving fifty of their braves dead and scalped upon the highland slopes of North Georgia and Tennessee. At the 1794 conference in Telico, Little Turkey, who had followed Old Tassel to the helm of the Cherokees, rose, proud that his people would now be able “to live so that we might have gray hairs in our head.” He stood and said, “Our tears are wiped away, and we rejoice in the prospect of our future welfare, under the protection of Congress.”
The tears would come again.
For happiness would not live in the house of the Cherokees forever, or even for a decade or two.
White men never kept their word to a savage.
In 1803, the United States purchased the sprawling territory of Louisiana, and President Thomas Jefferson found himself wondering what to do with all of that land. It was valuable. It was vast. And, for the moment, it apparently was vacant.
Jefferson smiled. The decision was so easy for him.
The colonies were becoming crowded. Farms were jammed against each other. Settlers shared the same fence posts.