by Dee Brown
With unspoken understanding, Jotham and Griffa vanished to the farther side of the great tree trunk. After brushing away dead leaves and chestnut burrs to clear a place on the sandy ground, Jerusha seated herself cross-legged and removed her morocco shoes. In the faint glow of light she was a smiling enigmatic ghost. “I love you, Dane,” she whispered, leaning forward to touch her forehead to his.
The words he meant to say stopped in his mouth. Instead of telling her that she was in his heart, too, but that he could never marry any Unega, he circled her with his arms and they lay on the sand. First he sought her lips and then their bodies pressed close together. For a moment he wished that she were Ellen Moonherrin, who needed no instruction, and then she caught his roving hand. “I’ve never—I’m only seventeen, Dane.” She drew away and sat up, frowning at him, but her fingers loosened their grip on his wrist and began caressing the back of his hand. She leaned forward and kissed him, her lips warm and yielding against his. He could feel her breasts against his chest.
A flare of light and sudden sound—the crashing of underbrush—struck their senses. Someone carrying a pine torch was prowling very close. Through the chestnut leaves Dane could see the light moving directly toward the tree. “It’s brother Isaac,” Jerusha whispered. “Looking for me!”
Without a word they scurried around the trunk. Although still locked in an embrace, Jotham and Griffa were watching the light. They stood up, and all four pressed against the chestnut trunk. When Isaac thrust his torch through the overhanging limbs on the opposite side, Jerusha moaned in Dane’s ear: “My shoes, my shoes!” But evidently her brother did not see the shoes among the leaves and chestnut burrs. He went on, stumbling through thick brush, leaving the tar scent of burning pitch pine behind.
“I must run!” Jerusha gasped. “I’ll beat him back to the wagon. If he caught me here, he’d make my flesh smart with a whipping.” Dane followed her around the tree trunk and helped get the morocco shoes back on her feet.
“Isaac knows you were gone from the wagon,” he said.
She sniffed petulantly. “If he dares say anything I’ll scold him for thinking females don’t have to answer a call of nature same as men and boys.”
At that remark Griffa started to giggle, but Jotham put his hand over her mouth. “Shut up! He’ll hear you.”
Jerusha had already ducked through the branches, and was running toward the pines. After a moment, Dane followed, walking slowly at first. Then he saw Isaac’s torch moving far to the left, and he risked trying to catch up with her. But by the time he reached his and Jotham’s blankets he knew she must already be back in the wagon with his grandmother.
The next day there was some excitement when the speechmaking was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a well-dressed white man, a government agent from Washington. The Light Horse guard escorted him and his mount in to the council bench where he presented his credentials to Going Snake. “I seek Chief John Ross,” the man said. “I was told he would be here.”
From across the table, Ross nodded to him. “What is your business, sir?”
Before the agent could reply, Creek Mary was on her feet. “Let him speak to all of us,” she said. “Let him say why he has come here, so that all may hear.”
Ross smiled. “Agreed,” he said, and motioned to the visitor to speak to the assembly.
“I am Colonel John Lowrey,” the agent said in a loud voice as he turned to face the crowd. “I thank you for granting me leave to present the views of the American government toward promoting the future peace and happiness of all our people.”
Major Ridge rapped his knuckles against the tabletop. “For whom do you speak, Colonel Lowrey?”
“For the American government, sir,” Lowrey replied, his face flushing.
“The American government is made of men, as ours is made of men and women. What man sent you?”
Hesitating a moment, Lowrey answered: “I am a personal agent for the Secretary of War.”
“Ah!” This time Elias Boudinot rose to his feet. “So you speak for Secretary John Eaton, whose mouth speaks the words of Andrew Jackson.” Boudinot’s handsome face showed anger and his voice had a cutting edge to it. “We have a report from Washington that Eaton stated publicly that it is his belief the Cherokees can no more be educated in the ways of white men than can wild turkeys. Look around you, Colonel Lowrey. Do we look to you like a flock of wild turkeys roosting in the forest?”
Loud hoots and laughter drowned out Lowrey’s response. Although now quite ill at ease, he continued: “I will put plainly to you the message I was ordered to bring your principal chief, John Ross. It is now the law of this land that all Indian tribes east of the Mississippi River must remove to the west of that river. For those tribes that go in peace, the American government will pay fair recompense for personal property that must be left behind, will pay the costs of removal, and will guarantee tribal lands equal in extent to the lands abandoned. But for those tribes that resist peaceful removal, those who must be removed by force of arms, there will be no payment of any kind.”
Before Lowrey could say more, a spontaneous chant began at the front of the crowd and spread quickly to a thunderous reply: “Not one more foot of land to the Unegas! Not one more foot of land to the Unegas!”
And no sooner had the emissary from Washington mounted his horse and started away than Creek Mary was on her feet demanding that the council draw up a statement to the American government protesting the removal order. During that afternoon the papers were passed through the crowd and before nightfall more than three thousand Cherokees signed their names to the petition. It would be taken to Washington at the earliest possible date and presented to the Congress by Chief John Ross.
At their late supper in the pines that evening, Mary was in a jolly mood. She joked with Dane and somehow managed to draw him aside from the others for a moment. He never ceased being amazed at how much she knew about him. “That yellow-haired girl,” Mary said in a husky whisper. “She has the sweetness of honey. Taste the honey if you must, but remember your promise to me, Dane. Creek Mary’s blood.” Her eyes widened as she looked into his. He was not sure whether she was laughing at him or not, but he was sure she meant what she said.
That night he had no problem in deciding what he was to do about the sweet honey of Jerusha McAlpin. At bedtime her brother Isaac slept under the wagon, with his long legs thrust out below the tailgate.
Most of the Cherokees began leaving New Echota early on the morning of the last day of the council. Chief John Ross had his buggy brought up beside the council house, and the remaining company of Light Horse lounged beside their mounts, waiting to escort him home. Being a headman, the Runner remained for the last black-drink ceremony, and Opothle was busy helping with the final written draft of protest against removal that Ross and his delegation would soon be taking to Washington.
In the pine grove Suna-lee and the girls prepared a hasty noon meal while Dane and Jotham hitched the horses to the wagons. Isaac McAlpin was loading the last of the bedding when Opothle and the Runner came out of the council house and started directly toward the wagons across one of the weed-grown squares of New Echota.
Suddenly from an opening in the trees across the way, a file of six horsemen appeared, moving in a slow trot. They were white men, bearded and roughly dressed, some wearing leather dragoon caps, others wide-brimmed hats. All carried heavy-barreled flintlock rifles slung against their legs; some were also armed with pistols, long knives, and belt axes. The riders headed directly toward the wagons, their rhythm marked by the faint sound of tinkling bells. Just about the time that Opothle and Runner reached the wagons, the horsemen halted only a few yards away.
The leader of these riders had an empty socket where his left eye should have been; the healed flesh was a corrugated rubescent scar. A piece of one nostril had been bitten away in the same eye-gouging fight that had lost him his organ of sight. Long unkempt hair the color of dirty sedge grass sprayed from ben
eath his black hat brim, which drooped under the weight of several tiny bells that were bradded to the leather. Wreathed in a band around the crown was the withered skin of a rattlesnake.
“You-uns live hereabouts?” he asked. As he spoke, tobacco juice ran from the corners of his mouth. He spat, exposing gaps between yellow teeth, and then wiped his lips on his sleeve.
The Runner glanced at Opothle, who answered: “We all live at Okelogee.”
“What you doin’ so far from home?”
Opothle looked him straight in the eye. “We had business to attend here.”
“Business?” The man laughed, making the hat bells jingle, and some of his companions joined in the mirthless laughter. “What do you iggerent redskins know about business? Dressin’ up in white men’s clothes don’t make you white men. You half-breed, ain’t you?”
Opothle could not keep the disgust from his eyes, but he managed a dignified affirmative. “My father was an Englishman.”
“All dressed up like you was a gentleman, ain’t you? Well, we got word you Cherokees havin’ a meetin’ up here. If you havin’ a meetin’, it’s agin’ the law of Georgia, and we come to break it up. I reckon you heard about the Pony Guard. That’s us.”
The man turned his head, the sun glistening off the rattlesnake scales on his hat. He fixed his one eye on Jerusha. “Who’s that white gal?”
“She’s my sister,” Isaac McAlpin answered. “I’m schoolteacher at the Okelogee mission.”
The man nodded. “I reckon you knowed you got to have a permit from the Governor of Georgia to live among these Godless red niggers. You got that permit on you?”
Isaac shook his head.
The Pony Guard leader took a twist of tobacco from his pocket and bit into it. He grinned at a pimply-faced rider with a wispy chin-beard, who was on his left. “Cyrus, you reckon we oughta take this here schoolteacher back to Milledgeville?”
Cyrus jerked a thumb toward the council house. “Looky there.”
The Cherokee Light Horse in their blue tunics were formed into a rank facing the wagons, obviously concerned by the presence of the Georgia Pony Guard.
“Goddamned red rantallions,” the one-eyed man growled.
“Let’s give ’em a chase,” the pimply-faced Cyrus said.
“Hellfire, they’s two of them to one of us. When it’s t’other way around, we’ll take ’em.” He looked at Isaac McAlpin. “Next time I see you, schoolteacher, you better have that permit. I ain’t got no use for a white man let his little sister mess around redskins. Let’s go!” He wheeled his horse, his five companions following quickly, and they filed off in the same slow trot toward the woods from which they had come.
“Rabble!” Mary shouted after them. “The scum cods should all be hanged from the nearest tree.”
Chief John Ross’s buggy, with the Light Horse following smartly behind, left the road and angled toward them across the open ground. Ross pulled his team to a halt and stood up. “They made threats, I suppose?”
“The threats were addressed mainly to me,” McAlpin replied.
“The leader of that gang is a murderer and a thief,” Ross said. “Name of Suggins. His men call him One-Eye Jack. With the laws of Georgia behind him and no law on our side, he’s a dangerous threat to us. We must show him a wide berth until we can secure some protection from the American government.”
“We must prepare to defend ourselves from such marauders,” Opothle declared.
“He may have marked you,” Ross said, “and you’ll be traveling much of the way by night. Six men of the Light Horse will escort you home to Okelogee.”
20
“WE RETURNED TO OKELOGEE without any trouble,” Dane said, “but Uncle Opothle did not waste any time organizing a local Light Horse to protect us from such as One-Eye Jack Suggins and his Pony Guard. Maybe those Georgia bullies heard about Okelogee’s Light Horse and stayed away, but more likely it was our remote location, maybe it was the nearby presence of Moonherrin’s Mill and the Scots families that saved us for a while. Anyway, every day or so we would hear about trouble in other Cherokee towns, no longer just stolen horses and cattle but barn- and fence-burnings, and then when people began to fight back they were beaten and taken off under arrest for resisting the Georgia laws. One day we heard they had arrested Elias Boudinot for publishing reports about these raids in the Cherokee Phoenix.
“Not long after that, One-Eye Jack Suggins and his marauders came back into our lives. They didn’t ride in on the main trail from the south, where our Light Horse kept a regular watch. They slipped in from the west, following the Little Singing Stream down out of the hills, and surrounded the schoolhouse, about twenty of them this time. It was Friday afternoon, and Isaac McAlpin had the younger pupils lined up for their spelling bee while we older ones were busy studying words for our turn. I heard hoofbeats outside, but paid no attention until the door flew open at our backs and the jingle of little bells sounded behind me. I knew it was Suggins before I turned around, dreading to look upon his monstrous face. He had a big trace chain slung over one shoulder and was grinning like some wild beast of the forest. Five or six men came in with him, their pounding boots making the floor shake as they marched down on poor pale-faced Isaac.
“ ‘You’re under arrest, schoolteacher,’ Suggins said. He looped the trace chain around Isaac’s neck and clipped it fast like a dog collar.
“ ‘I have a teaching permit from the Governor of Georgia,’ Isaac protested.
“ ‘That don’t matter no more,’ Suggins replied. ‘The law says no more teachin’ by whites to these red niggers.’ He jerked on the chain and pulled Isaac after him across the schoolroom and out the door. We all sat or stood where we were, dumb and terrified. Out a window I saw Harriet McAlpin almost flying across the schoolyard, but before she could reach Isaac, one of the big bearded Pony Guardsmen cut her across the shoulder with his whip and she fell to the ground. Off went the whole bunch then at a trot right through Okelogee, Suggins dragging Isaac running and stumbling along by the trace chain. The two Cherokee Light Horse on watch south of the town had no time to give an alarm. All they could do was get out of the way of those bully boys when they came riding by with Isaac on the chain.
“My father called a council at once and sent messengers off to New Echota and Ross’s Landing, but we all knew there was little we could do for Isaac McAlpin. Before the council ended late that night we heard that white schoolteachers and missionaries and even some blacksmiths were being arrested in Cherokee towns all around us. Next morning we learned that Pony Guards had ambushed Chief John Ross and tried to kill him, but Ross had managed to escape.
“Suggins and his men made Isaac McAlpin walk all the way to Lawrenceville settlement, where there was a Georgia courthouse. His neck was rubbed raw and his feet bleeding when they locked him in a jail with several other teachers and missionaries. One of those frontier Georgia courts sentenced them all to four years at hard labor in a prison camp for consorting with us Cherokees, which showed how slow-witted those whites were. They didn’t have the sense to know that every one of the missionaries was backed up by churches through the North and East and even in Georgia itself. As Grandmother Mary said, the Pony Guards were so thickheaded they’d have lost their arses if they’d been loose. When the churches heard about the treatment of their missionaries they stirred up a storm and sent lawyers by the dozens into Georgia. Even the American government took notice because these were white men, not Indians, being oppressed. They rushed cases through the courts and pretty soon that Supreme Court chief named Marshall declared that Georgia had no right to imprison the missionaries, and that the whole set of laws against the Cherokees was null and void. He said that Georgians had no rights in the Cherokee Nation without our consent.
“I can tell you there was much celebrating in the Cherokee towns when we heard the good news. But of course it did not last. As I have said, Indians never had much luck with your courts of law. And we forgot about our powerful
enemy, Sharp Knife Andrew Jackson. It was Elias Boudinot who brought us the bad news from Washington. President Jackson had let it be known that he would never enforce the decision of the Supreme Court. If the Cherokees wanted to live peaceably, old Sharp Knife said for the hundredth time, we’d have to move west of the Mississippi River.
“Of course when the Governor of Georgia found out about that he kept the missionaries in jail a while longer and turned the Pony Guard loose on us again. And on top of that his legislature passed some new laws against us. They sent surveyors out to mark off the Cherokee lands into one-hundred-and-sixty-acre plots, which were to be given out to white settlers through a kind of lottery. They would draw numbers, you see, and if the number of the plot they drew had a Cherokee house on it, they got the house too.
“For a while that summer, the woods and meadows around Okelogee were filled with surveyors with their axes and chains, blazing trees and marking numbers on the blazes with black paint. They left the Rogers family and Moonherrin’s Mill alone, but they marked off Opothle’s farm and the little place where my father, the Runner, dug up the ground every spring for Walina to grow the finest corn and melons. Even the schoolhouse and the McAlpin house where Harriet and Jerusha continued to live after Isaac was arrested were included in the survey.
“I suppose the lottery survey was the last blow to the hopes of many Cherokee leaders. Some of those who had fought the hardest to keep our lands now gave up completely. The Ridge family, Elias Boudinot, and his brother Stand Watie, they all said if the President of the United States was so vile a man that he would not enforce the laws of the country he governed then we would be better off living as far away from such a lawless country as we could get. Chief John Ross, however, stood fast, believing that time was all we needed, that if we could hold out until Sharp Knife Jackson was no longer President, then the Cherokee Nation would survive. ‘If Jackson will give us no protection in Georgia,’ he told us again and again, ‘how can we expect him to keep his word and protect us in the West?’
