Someone would have to go.
And Thomas Jefferson certainly did not want to make his own people mad.
A lot of them already were. Many colonists had moved in next door to the Indians, then complained long and loud because they looked up on morning, and, God forbid, there were Indians living next door to them. A Pennsylvania farmer said with animosity:
A wild Indian, with his skin painted red, and a feather through his nose, has set his foot on the broad continent of North and South America; a second wild Indian with his ears cut out in ringlets or his nose slit like a swine or a malefactor also sets his foot on the same extensive tract of soil. . .What do these ringed, streaked, spotty and speckled cattle make of the soil? Do they till it? Revelation said to man, “Thou shalt till the ground.” This alone is human life . . . What would you think of . . . addressing yourself to a great buffalo to grant you land?
The land surely belonged to the farmer, the colonists said. It surely belonged to them, the white men, the rightful owners. They were adamant about driving the Red Man off the ground that had held the Red Man’s gardens and graves for centuries.
Jefferson, long regarded as the champion of human rights, had called the Indians a “useless, expensive, ungovernable ally” as early as 1776. A decade later, however, he pledged that “not a foot of land will ever be taken from the Indians without their own consent.”
Yet, by 1790, Jefferson had reasoned that the United States, if it paid attention to the fine print, did actually have two legal options of taking land, which, lawfully or at least morally, did not belong to it.
The country could go to war.
Or it could make treaties, even if it had to go to war to get them signed.
By owning those valuable, vast, and for the moment, vacant lands of Louisiana, America at last had a place to send the Indians. It had a depository for the Red Man. Going to a new and open range would simply lead the wayward tribes a step closer to the godliness of civilization. He was sure of it.
The journey west would indubitably be for the Indian’s own good – a peaceful and honorable thing to do. At least that’s what Jefferson wrote to Andrew Jackson. It was a good salve for his conscience, whether the president believed it or not.
He and Gen. William Henry Harrison by 1809 had managed to talk the Delaware, Piankashaw, Sauk, Fox, Wea, Potawatomi, and Kaskaskia tribes out of millions of acres of land in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. The difference between talking and stealing depended on which side of the table a man sat. The Indians, as always, sat on the wrong side.
Jefferson was moving them all to his latest creation – an Indian Territory.
The exodus had begun.
Into the land of the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creek, and Cherokees rode the “Flying Panther,” Tecumseh, the son of a Shawnee Chief. He was the warrior. His brother, half-blind, was the prophet. They came together as a messiah to call for the gathering of all Indian tribes into a common band to guard the lands that God had given them, that broken treaties were stealing away.
Tecumseh rose up, his face glazed with the sweat of summertime, as five thousand crowded around to hear his words. He stood firm and erect, a man of dignity and destiny. And as Lewis Cass, who would someday be secretary of war, remembered, his “language flowed tumultuously and swiftly, from the fountains of his soul.”
“The Great Spirit gave this land to his Red children,” Tecumseh said. “He placed the white man on the other side of the great waters, but the white man was not satisfied with their own, but came over to take ours from us.”
The Red Sticks – the wild and reckless Creeks – nodded.
The Ridge, a Cherokee Chieftain, frowned. He could hear the thunder of war in the Shawnee’s oratory, and he wanted none of it. He and his people only wanted to find peace in the land that bore the footprints of their fathers and of their children.
Tecumseh raged on. “Accursed be the race that as seized our country and made women of our warriors,” he snapped. “Our fathers from their tombs reproach us as slaves and cowards. I hear them now wailing in the winds . . . the spirits of the mighty dead complain. Their tears drop from the wailing skies. Let the white race perish. They seize your land, they corrupt your women, they trample on the ashes of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven.”
And the Red Sticks raged with him.
The Ridge fought for attention.
No one listened.
He raised his voice, but his words were drowned out in the passion and the frenzy that Tecumseh had hurled across the southland.
“My friends,” The Ridge warned, “the talk you have heard is not good. It would lead us to war . . . and we would suffer; it is false; it is not a talk from the Great Spirit.”
The Prophet, the shadow in Tecumseh’s bold footsteps, had screamed that those who turned their back on his master’s admonitions would be condemned by the gods to die. The Ridge was unafraid. “I stand here and defy the threat,” he barked. “Let the death com upon me. I offer to test this scheme of imposters.”
The Ridge stood.
And he did not die.
The gods did not touch him.
But a band of Cherokees, inflamed by Tecumseh’s call for a trail of blood, attacked the Ridge and almost beat him into a grave not yet dug but awaiting the corpse of anyone begging for peace when the rumors of war crouched like shadows in the darkness.
The Ridge is a heretic, the Prophet shouted. He is a disbeliever, and disbelievers must pay a great and terrible price.
It had been ordained.
A hailstorm would come out of the heavens, the Prophet warned. And all who stood with the Ridge would perish. Come, he said to the Cherokees, come with me to the mountaintop where we will watch his destruction and escape the wrath that falls upon him.
Hundreds followed him back to the highlands, to an ancient and timbered peak that would save them. They waited. They watched with contempt.
No hailstorm came.
The Ridge did not perish.
And, at last, they all finally shrugged and walked back down out of the mountains again, meeker but wiser men.
The Red Sticks simmered.
They knew their chance would come, and they were in no hurry. They looked on but kept their distance as Americans in 1812 again battled the British. It was not their fight. It was not their war. Their rifles remained silent, their long knives in their belts, their anger buried deep inside them.
But suddenly, at Burnt Corn Creek in Southern Alabama, the Americans attacked a small band of Creeks, led by Peter McQueen, who had been given “a small bag of powder for each of ten towns and five bullets to each man” by the Spanish governor as “a friendly present for hunting purposes.” An odd collection of disorganized American soldiers ambushed the Creeks as they bedded down for the night and chased them into the swamps.
The force from Fort Mims began looting Indian rifles and shotguns, fishing hooks and hunting knives, even stealing the colored cloth that McQueen’s band had bought in Pensacola for their wives. The creeks had turned their backs on war, but war sought them out. Death stalked them.
The time had come for the angry Red Sticks to strike, and they moved swiftly.
Red Eagle had asked for calm, but his plea fell on deaf ears. He warned his people, “Do not avenge Burnt Corn. Civil War will only weaken us.”
In the darkness of the Creek chokafa, the warriors quickly voted to fight. Still they