Okla Hannali

by R. A. Lafferty

  Hannali took them completely at poker. They were like little boys in his hands. The complete poker-face guising over the quaking body chuckle is disconcerting, and there is no beating clay-footed luck. Hannali took those gentlemen till they had not a bill nor a coin left.

  But, curiously, the gentlemen stopped playing when they were cleaned, and they seemed displeased. They seemed not to know that under the bottom of the barrel there is always another bottom.

  “The night is young,” said Hannali, speaking French now that they had all come to a riper friendship, “is no use to call the night at an end the sun has only barely come up I play for mules I play for seed corn I play for pecans haven't you wives or hogs to put on the line I play for land who'll open with forty acres of bottom I go eight dollars American an acre of good land I play for Negroes I play for good yoke oxen I play for hides I play for somebody's wife my brother says it's time I got a wife I play for mortgage deed to town house I play for French boots I play for horses or cattle why should we stop play tonight the sun is not high hot yet.”

  But the gentlemen would not play with Hannali any longer. They were not the by hokey sports they had seemed. One of them, showing some exasperation, got a bung starter from behind the bar and coming up behind Hannali he gave him a terrific clout over the head with it.

  But Hannali did not keel over from the blow as a Frenchman or an ox would have done. Instead, he chuckled with pleasure, got himself a bung starter, sat down astraddle a bench, and motioned the gentleman with the first bung starter to join him.

  The gentleman was puzzled, and he appeared nervous over the whole business. Hannali explained it to him. This was a game the Choctaws played, he said. Two men would sit facing each other astraddle a log, and would begin to thwack each other over the head with such light clubs as these. They would begin with easy blows, as the gentleman had done, and gradually hit harder and harder till one of them called it quits.

  But that gentleman had already called it quits. He said that he had promised his wife to be home early, and he left at once though the sun was not hot yet. He was pale and twitchy when he left.

  The other gentlemen held a new conference among themselves. Then they told Hannali that they would give him a parting drink, the finest ever made. They fixed it up — a compendium of all great liquors and additives — and gave it to Hannali in a trophy cup that was as deep as a boot. Hannali drank it off, and he beamed all over his forceful face.

  He looked at them. They looked at him. Hannali did not know the etiquette of parting, but his father had once told him that simple manners are always the best. He bowed to them and walked out, with his fiddle and carbine asling, with his clasp knife in his belt, and his gold and dice in his pockets.

  The men followed him surreptitiously into the streets. He did not fall, and the knockout drops they had given him would have felled a blue-eyed ox.

  “They are by damn gentlemen,” said Hannali to himself, “every by hokey one of them is a gentleman how can they be so good to a stranger I bet even their little boys are gentlemen to be so kind to one who hardly have no friend at all in town to a clay-foot Indian not hardly housebroke they make me feel like a king they are so good to me.”

  The several Chocs were in New Orleans about three weeks, transacting various business and waiting for a boat that should take them up to St. Louis. Pass Christian Innominee, then a resident of the city, aided them all in various ways; and Hannali discovered that his brother had become an important man. Pass Christian could play the ruffle-throat silk stocking Frenchman, or he could still be the Choctaw. He was rich, more than merely Choctaw rich.

  Hannali was baptized in New Orleans on that visit in 1828. His brothers, Pass Christian and Biloxi, had been baptized in early childhood, but the French priests did not come into the deep Choctaw country often. If you missed the priest, you missed him for many years. For Christian name he took Louis.

  Hannali considered himself a member of the Church all his life, as his family had been for a hundred years before his birth. But it was mostly the Church of Silence to which they belonged. For nearly half a century — until 1874 — he would have the opportunity of seeing a priest no more often than every five or ten years.

  However, it is not true, though he often excused himself by it, that he was uninstructed in morals. When he acted infamously, he would sometimes tell himself that it was because he was a poor clay-foot Indian who knew no better. But it was a lie. He had received sound instruction from his father Barua.

  2.

  Hatched out of a big egg. Peter Pitchlynn and Levi Colbert. Pardoning your Reverences, it is not worth a damn.

  Hannali Innominee, Silvestre DuShane (on the expedition because he had been in the new country before), and several others of the Choctaws now ascended the Mississippi by steamboat to St. Louis. On the river voyage, the deck companions of Hannali Innominee and his friends were many of them rafters and keelboatmen from Missouri and Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and points farther distant. There were French river rats who had come down from St. Louis and beyond. There were French-breed Indians who had formerly been employed at the heavy work of dragging and poling boats upstream and who still followed the river trade after the coming of steam. Some of these worked their passage upriver on the steamboat itself. Others worked for passage fare on the wood lots between boats. The streamboats ran on wood — mostly on pine.

  There is nothing like the smell of burning pine at night to bring out the song and story in men. The big Choc fiddler and storyteller was at home with the rough men of the boat, and some of his tunes may still be making the rounds on the river.

  The steamboat was named the Caravan. Its brothers on these runs (for riverboats are male, whatever be sea ships) were the Phillip Pennywit, the Rodney, the Lamplighter, the Harbinger, the North St. Louis, and the Choctaw. We considered lying a little and giving it out that Hannali and his party went upstream on the Choctaw. But it is a true account we hew to, and the boat they went on was the Caravan.

  The places that are now towns along the river were then three felled trees and a cabin. What are now cities might then have had a dozen cabins. It is seldom realized of how short a period was the antebellum South west of the Appalachians.

  Baton Rouge was old, but its feature was still the fort on the bluffs, not the landing below. And the fort no longer guarded anything.

  Natchez was still called Fort Rosalie by the whites, but Natchez by the Indians. The Indian name would win out, the only battle the Indians ever won over the whites along that stretch of the river.

  Vicksburg had been named Fort Nogales (Walnut Fort) by the Spanish, and Walnut Hill by the English. But as a proper town it was only three years old.

  Memphis, “on the fourth or lower Chickasaw Bluff,” was only two years established as a town.

  Cairo was ten years old and predicted by her boosters to become the great city of the rivers, but St. Louis would beat her out. Cape Girardeau had French roots and was thirty-five years old. She also aspired to be the great city, but she would miss it.

  St. Louis had already accepted the mantle. She was hatched out of a big egg and was already a metropolis in spirit. She was awkwardly situated, one hundred miles too high on the river for the Ohio branch, fifteen miles too low for the Missouri. There was no reason to build a city there, but she was built and thrived. What makes a leader of cities is no more known than what makes a leader of men.

  It was in St. Louis that the exploratory party assembled — Choctaws from Mississippi and Alabama, Chickasaws from Mississippi and Alabama and Tennessee, Creeks from Georgia and Alabama and Florida. There were Cherokees present, but they were there unofficially and against tribal declaration and we do not know their names. There were no Seminoles known as such. They seem to have commissioned other Indians to observe for them. The Seminoles still swore that they would never move.

  Peter Pitchlynn of the Choctaws and Levi Colbert of the Chickasaws were the leading I
ndians of the party. Young Peter Pitchlynn would serve the Choctaw people in many capacities until thirty-six years later (in 1864) when he would be elected chief of them in a time of their worst disaster, and after the title Chief was almost meaningless. The somewhat older man Major Levi Colbert (he held the title from the American Army in the War of 1812) will not be greatly involved in our account.

  Hannali Innominee received an education by his trip to New Orleans and up the river to St. Louis. He now received another education by his association with the notables (Indian, white, and breed) who made up the Exploration party. Hannali's father Barua had associated with notables, as had the educated brother Pass Christian. But Hannali was country green at the thing.

  There were forty-two men in the party. Most were important and very competent men, and they had come to contribute to a decision as to the future of the Five Indian Nations. The only one who has given any written account of most stages of it was a Baptist missionary named Isaac McCoy who spent a lifetime working among Indians.

  They went south and west overland from St. Louis, with mule-drawn wagons, two jaunty buggies that broke down in the rough country, and most of the men on horseback. They came to the Three Forks of the Arkansas River (near present Muskogee, Oklahoma) in November of 1828.

  They were then deep in the “new country.” They had just crossed most of what would be the Cherokee District and were onto the edge of the future Creek District.

  They saw a strikingly beautiful country, and it hurt them to say — as Peter Pitchlynn said it sadly — as Reverend Isaac McCoy mumbled it out of his long face — as Hannali Innominee growled it kicking a rock — “This isn't very good country.”

  They had come down through the Ozark Mountains using both the converging valleys of the Verdigris and the Neosho. They had seen the meadows with breast-high grass just turning brown, and had followed the sycamore and cottonwood creeks. They had come on sumac bush trees that barked like coyotes from the color in them. They saw the folded rocks above and below them, and the wonderful rivers.

  “One can't eat district,” said Peter Pitchlynn, meaning that one cannot eat scenery.

  “It is fair to the eye,” said Colbert, “and, pardoning our Reverend, it is not worth a damn.” The major actually cried in his disappointment. He was one who had urged the removal. He had said that the federal government could be believed that the new land would be of equal value to the fine farm land for which the Indians had traded acre for acre. He had pledged his honor and his manhood that the government could be believed, and now he said that he had lost both.

  It was Hannali who had pointed out to them as they came down from the north that the lush grass grew out of very shallow and rocky soil. They dug and sampled, and it was the same in the very richest meadows. There was surface rock and subsurface rock, and ten inches down they always came to solid limestone. Geologists call it the Big Lime, and very few of the overlying acres would ever tolerate a plow. It could be pasture land and hay land, but never plowland or cornland.

  The men of the party told each other how well the corn would grow in the river bottom lands, but they had to admit how narrow those bottom lands were, so shut in by bluffs and layered rocks. They visited the valley of the Illinois River. They went back up the Verdigris River and up the Arkansas. Hannali Innominee was joyed to find pecans; that was like coming home. But pecans are not enough.

  They rode west for five days and came to prairies. It was wonderful grassland, but they knew with sorrow that it would be very indifferent cornland. They had no way of knowing that it would be the best wheatland in the world. The southern Indians hardly knew the name of wheat.

  They went back down the Arkansas to the Three Forks. They went below the Forks to the place where the Canadian River joins in from the south and west.

  Once more they studied the country and sighed, “This isn't very good land.”

  Though I be exiled from my own state for setting it down, I must agree that they were right. This beautiful eastern third of Oklahoma, from the Ozark Mountains and their striking valleys down to the Boston Mountains and the Sansbois and the really heart-filling Winding Stair Mountains, on down to the Kiamichi Mountains and the streams that run out of their flanks to the Red River, this country, pardoning your Reverences, is not worth a damn.

  3.

  I will marry the girl I forget her name. From Canadian River to False Washita. A bad report on the land.

  Silvestre DuShane had learned the location of certain cousins of his in the Territory. With Hannali Innominee, he rode up the south Canadian River from its Arkansas River junction. They had ridden near a day when Hannali reined his pony, dismounted, and hobbled the animal.

  “Why do you stop now?” asked Silvestre. “From my information, the place should be very near and possibly just around the bend.”

  “I know yes it is around the bend I smell the French and Shawnee smoke though for a moment I thought it was Quapaw smoke smell but from my information here is my place right here,” Hannali said, and he cut a big stake. He whittled a flat surface on it. He carved the letters of his name on that surface and the year 1828. Then Silvestre had to show him how to form the month, for “Novembre” has many of the more difficult letters of the alphabet in it, and Hannali was not fully literate.

  “Here I will build my house here I will live my life,” said Hannali, “it is a no damn good country but this place is less no damn good than other land we have ridden over here is only fifty yards from the river and my landing will be at the bottom of the hill this is the river that goes all the way west they have a map that shows it is another one but the map is lie I will be back in the springtime and settle here all my life a man has to settle somewhere.”

  Hannali drove his stake. Then he mounted horse and rode with Silvestre. Around a bend of the Canadian River, and not two hundred yards from where Hannali had driven his stake, were the cabins and trading post of Silvestre DuShane's kindred.

  Alinton DuShane was an old French-Shawnee. His daughter was Marie. There were a dozen other persons at the post, but they were dependents and employees, not of the family.

  Silvestre and Hannali were not overly welcome. Alinton DuShane had once quarreled with his cousin, the father of Silvestre, and when Alinton quarreled with a man it was forever.

  The post did not do well, and Alinton said sourly that he was ready to give it up in disgust and die and have done with it. There wasn't much that he traded any more, or much that he grew. Not twice a month would a flatboat or a canoe come to his landing.

  Hannali asked Alinton DuShane one thing and had his answer. The maps were liars and Hannali was right. This Canadian River and not the Red River to the south was the river that went all the way west. By this river the Frenchmen had used to boat to within a day's portage of Santa Fe, and Alinton had been the last one of them to do it.

  “I will do it again all the way to the Santa Fe when I come back several years after I come back,” said Hannali, “when I come back in the springtime I will take charge of everything.”

  And they looked at him without comprehending him.

  There was a lull. Hannali positioned his fiddle and began suddenly to play. He gave them a loud Choctaw scraping, much worse than he usually played. The hosts were shocked at the violence of the noise.

  “Can you play Femme et Chatte?” Marie DuShane asked hopefully.

  Hannali went into a real rouser of a tune. If that wasn't the tune, it was what that tune should be like.

  “That isn't Femme et Chatte,” said Marie DuShane.

  “What is not everybody know,” explained Hannali still fiddling, “is that that girl had two cats and this is the tune of the brindled one.” But Marie DuShane didn't appreciate it.

  The father and daughter did not put themselves out too much for the two travelers. They regarded themselves as the last Frenchmen left in this particular world, and they had no interest in the first Choctaws. Time was when Alinton DuShane had been in
terested in everything. Now he was an old man, and that time was past.

  Marie DuShane, the child of his old age, was sullen and closed. The daughter of a white mother and a part-white father, she was above these dirty travelers. So the conversation did not go well.

  At dark (for they were not asked to stay), Hannali and Silvestre mounted horse again to leave the sorry place. But Hannali turned in the saddle and spoke as an afterthought:

  “In the springtime I will be back to take over the post I will live here and wait a season before building my own Big House I will run the business and let you be able to die with a dear mind old man I will marry the girl I forget her name be you get things ready for the springtime girl see you plant much corn old man the poor Indians who come will need it next year they will not have any money to pay you you must have corn for them in the spring I will be back.”

  They rode off, Hannali and Silvestre.

  “I have never killed a man,” said old Alinton DuShane. “I had hoped to be spared that in my life. But the oaf, if he return, will not have Poste DuShane.”

  “Better a bear or a boar than that lout,” said Marie DuShane. “He will never have Marie DuShane.”

  Hannali and Silvestre rode through the night and came to the main party at sunup. And the men of the party went about their business of exploring. They were in the bear mountains and the buffalo hills that they had for their new inheritance.

  They examined the land to the south for a month. They all realized now — (what the worldly of them had always known) — that the north-south distance was about a third of that represented to them, and that the undisputed domain of the Plains Indians was much closer than they had been told. Three quarters of the land for which they had traded their southern acres did not exist.