by Dee Brown
“Jotham was far more upset than I was, even though living as a Cheyenne I’d grown to hate the sight of a blue uniform. Blue or gray, to me they both meant trouble and I was sorry to see my oldest son drawn into the madness.
“A few days later two big Concord coaches rolled in from the West, rocking under the weight of the army recruits who were shouting and laughing and singing. The stagecoaches stopped only long enough for Pleasant to board one of them. He gave me a quick handshake and kissed the girls and Sweet Medicine Woman goodbye. ‘When you see Rising Fawn tell her I’ll be back soon,’ he said and then climbed inside the coach. A recruit handed him a bottle of whiskey. He took a long swig, waving the bottle from the window as the coach rolled away. He was young enough then to think he would live forever. Sweet Medicine Woman was crying, but all I could do was stand there in the dust and wonder if there was a curse upon Creek Mary’s blood.
“The next to leave was Jotham. I think it was about the time of the Deer Rutting Moon when a stagecoach passenger left a St. Louis newspaper, some days old, and in it was an account of fighting in the Cherokee Nation. General Stand Watie’s Confederate Cherokees and some Texans had battled Union Cherokees, driving them into Kansas. ‘It says the fighting was at Round Mounds and Shoal Creek,’ Jotham said excitedly. ‘I think I’d better go to Tahlequah and bring our boys home. Mails must be cut off or we’d have heard of this from William.’ He was eager to see William and his family, and talked about bringing them back to the safety of Fort Carrothers.
“Griffa and Meggi wanted to go with him on the stagecoach, but he feared the horseback journey from Westport to Tahlequah would be too dangerous because of the war. ‘I’ll stay no longer than necessary to get the boys and see William,’ he promised. ‘We’ll be back here before the first snow.’
“Although Sweet Medicine Woman had been looking forward to our rejoining her people on Sand Creek for the winter, nothing on earth could have moved her from Fort Carrothers until she saw her sons return. She began counting the days.
“For the next several weeks the trading post was very quiet. The few freighting wagons going back and forth to Denver usually stopped for water and to rest horses, but there were no more immigrant wagons, and only one eastbound stagecoach in the morning and a westbound in the afternoon. For many weeks no Indians had come to trade buffalo hides. Since the ending of the Pony Express, the stock tenders and riders had left. The family, which at times had numbered more than a dozen, was now reduced to Griffa and Meggi, Sweet Medicine Woman, Amayi, Susa, and myself, and of course we counted Bibbs and Wewoka. With all the spare room in the living quarters, Griffa kept urging Sweet Medicine Woman and me to abandon our tipi for the winter and move into the trading post. It would have been much handier for me. Except when I was out hunting rabbits or game birds for meat, I spent much of my time in the trading room helping Griffa, but Sweet Medicine Woman would not give up her tipi. ‘I favor my tipi,’ she would say firmly, ‘because it is easy to keep clean, is warmer in winter and cooler in summer. Amayi and Susa all the time have fresh air and sunshine. It would not be good for them to live inside walls like a big cave that shuts out the sun.’
“Nonetheless when I was working in the trading room, Sweet Medicine Woman often came there to sit in a rocking chair by the window, sewing beads on moccasins or quilling dresses for the girls. Whenever the stagecoach from the east came, she would go to the door and look to see if Jotham and the boys were on it.
“Weeks went by, the first snow came and then blizzards, but we received no news from Jotham. I wrote two letters to William, and we waited anxiously, hearing nothing. Then one day in spring the stagecoach driver from the east handed me a letter. The covering was streaked with rain spots and a smear of dried clay, but I recognized Jotham’s scrawl and opened it at once. He was writing to me, he said, because his letter contained the saddest words he’d ever penned, and he wanted me to be the shield between the sadness and Griffa. I would have to bear my own blow and comfort Sweet Medicine Woman as best I could.
“Jotham had endured great difficulties in making his way to Tahlequah, having to pass through two armies, and was delayed for many days. When he arrived there he found the seminary closed. Most of the boys had enlisted in one of General Stand Watie’s Confederate Cherokee companies, but Little Cloud was at William’s place, he being too young for the army.
“After leaving William’s, Jotham tried to find the company that Swift Eagle and Young Opothle joined, but no one could tell him in which regiment it was, so he had to travel from camp to camp, up the Arkansas and down the Verdigris until he learned that Stand Watie had taken all his soldiers over into Arkansas to prepare for a big battle. Jotham reached the Cherokees’ baggage camp only a day after they marched north toward Fayetteville. The next day he heard cannon firing all through the afternoon, and a courier he met along the road told him a battle was raging around Elkhorn Tavern.
“Before Jotham could get there, he was stopped by thousands of Confederates—Texans, Arkansans, and Cherokees—retreating from the Union soldiers. He finally found a Cherokee officer, an old acquaintance, who took him to Stand Watie. Not until after the Cherokees reassembled at their baggage camp, and company counts were made, was Jotham told that Swift Eagle and Young Opothle were probably among the dead. Their commander, a lieutenant who had been wounded, said the Cherokees were trying to hold a hill called Pea Ridge when they came under heavy cannon fire. Many of his men had been torn to pieces, their bleeding bodies scattered over the slope. If the two missing boys were not among the wounded, they were surely dead.
“Jotham could not rest until he went to Pea Ridge and looked over the place where the cannon fire had torn up the earth, but Union soldiers had already buried the bodies and pieces of bodies of the Cherokees who died there. He then went back to William’s and to Tahlequah, hoping the boys might have found their way back to the Nation, but no one had seen or heard of them.
“He closed the letter by saying that he was joining Stand Watie’s army himself to avenge his son and my son, and that he hoped I would take care of his family and the trading post until he returned. He was sure the Union soldiers could be beaten by summer.”
Dane stopped, laughing a bitter laugh at the remembrance of that long-ago time. “What fools we humans be!”
39
AFTER SWIFT EAGLE AND Young Opothle enlisted in the Cherokee Confederate company, they marched with others of their classmates to a camp on the Arkansas River. There a thick-bodied Unega with long curly hair and an enormous beard, and mounted on a white horse, addressed them. He told them he was General Albert Pike and that he commanded all the armies of the Indian Territory. He promised they would soon be given horses and uniforms and better guns, but for the time being they would have to soldier in what clothes they wore and use the old muzzle-loaders that had been issued to them. “You are fighting in the cause of freedom,” he told them. “With your white brothers, you will drive the Yankee oppressors from your land.”
For several weeks the Cherokees drilled in formations and fired by commands, and then they were marched off on foot to the east with a line of baggage wagons clattering in their rear. At a place called Cross Hollow in Arkansas they joined a camp of Texans, and learned that the Texans had intercepted the shipment of gray uniforms that was meant for them. When a herd of horses was driven in from Fort Smith, the Texans also took the horses. During the next few days hundreds of Creeks, Chocataws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles arrived at the baggage camp, some mounted, some on foot, all wearing miscellaneous clothing that varied from tribal dress to trading-post shoddy.
One morning all the companies were formed into ranks, and General Albert Pike and Chief John Ross arrived in an open buggy to lead them northward to battle an invading Union army. General Pike was wearing a fringed jacket and wide-brimmed hat with bright-colored feathers in its band. John Ross wore his usual black suit and black stovepipe hat, and the expression on his face was that of a man who had been captured
and disarmed.
For three days Swift Eagle and Young Opothle marched through rain and melting snow, with nothing to eat but parched corn and rancid pork. Young Opothle, whose body had grown plump like his mother’s, could barely keep up with his company. The shoes they had given him to replace worn-out moccasins rubbed his feet raw, and he limped first on one foot and then the other. Swift Eagle felt sorry for him, carrying his rifle and knapsack most of the way through the Boston Mountains. On the evening of the third day, the Cherokees were ordered to build fires and roll in their blankets, but at midnight they were awakened and told to leave their fires burning brightly while they marched off along a narrow road with wet flakes of snow falling in their faces.
Soon after the eastern sky paled, they heard their first sounds of the enemy off through the woods—a blaring of bugles, a furious beating of drums, and a rumble of artillery wheels. When the Cherokees came suddenly out upon the edge of a field of withered cornstalks, they saw masses of infantrymen in blue marching steadily toward them. Far behind the blue lines, puffs of white smoke formed, shrieks of hurtling metal filled the sky, and the earth shook with thunder.
Out of the woods to their right swept the Texans, screaming like wild panthers, and then from the left came the Cherokee cavalry with General Stand Watie on a glistening bay, turning to face the Cherokee infantrymen, beckoning them to follow. To Swift Eagle it was as if General Watie’s piercing wide-set eyes had searched him out, and it was Swift Eagle who led the charge of his company, starting a war cry that was more Cheyenne than Cherokee, a cry of defiance out of his belly and lungs and vocal cords. Ahead of him through galloping horses and a spray of mud he saw the blue lines falter and break, the Union infantrymen fleeing in disorder.
On across the muddy field Swift Eagle ran, dashing up a slope to where Cherokee cavalry were milling around an abandoned battery of cannons. Dead Union gunners lay around the cannons in grotesque positions. No one seemed to know what to do next. The Cherokee officers shouted commands, but few obeyed. Swift Eagle joined his comrades in searching the pockets of the dead Bluecoats, but he found nothing worth keeping. Suddenly from a low ridge to their left more Union cannons began booming, sending shot whistling in their direction. The Cherokees scattered, fleeing back across the cornfield to the cover of the woods. While their officers were trying to form them into ranks again, another wave of blue-clad infantrymen came charging across the field. Their concerted rifle fire rattled like sleet popping against a tight tipi cover. The Cherokees yelled their war cry, ran forward a hundred paces, fired together, and retreated to the scrub oaks to reload.
Gradually the Cherokees became disorganized, withdrawing deeper into the woods. General Pike on his white horse kept riding back and forth, waving a sword at them, bellowing angrily, and then after a while he and Stand Watie led them off along the road they had marched over during the night. When they came to a slope, they left the road and climbed through blackjack oaks to the top. “You will hold this high ground,” General Pike ordered. “Do or die!” They were on Pea Ridge.
Through the afternoon they watched the opposing cannons duel until the fields and woods below were covered with folds of smoke. Then night fell, but they were not allowed to build fires against the deepening cold. Through hours of fitful sleep they heard the voices of cursing men, the racket of moving wagons and artillery.
At dawn a cannon blast shook Swift Eagle wide awake. It was from the Confederate artillery down near Elkhorn Tavern, but the Union batteries replied with a mighty roar, one big gun after the other booming like rolling thunder. Far below the Cherokees, shattered blackjack oaks flew into the air, disintegrating into splinters. The next barrage was closer, and to Swift Eagle, who watched in frozen fascination, the advancing destruction below him was like the crushing footsteps of an invisible giant moving relentlessly closer. And then off to his left a screaming projectile burst upon the Cherokee line, throwing him to the ground. When he got to his feet he saw his companions running or crawling down the back slope. He followed Young Opothle and the others, angling to the right, stopping only long enough to peer up through the brown leaves of a blackjack at bloody legs and headless torsos of young Cherokees strewn among rocks and leaves. He fled with the others down the slope to the road, right into a platoon of Union infantrymen carrying bayoneted rifles. “Drop your arms!” a startled sergeant yelled at the Cherokees, but they had abandoned their muzzle-loaders on the slope, and had only their knives to surrender.
They were marched quickly to the rear, where a Union colonel examined their motley clothing, especially the moccasins, with distasteful curiosity. “Did you scalp our men?” he demanded.
There were eleven Cherokees, all very young, all privates, all too frightened to answer except Swift Eagle. “No, sir,” he said.
The colonel ordered their wrists tied behind their backs, and for two days and two nights they marched bound that way, following a line of wagons filled with wounded and dying soldiers. Swift Eagle and Young Opothle did not know that this was the same road over which, a score of years before, their fathers had traveled from the East in wagons filled with sick and dying Cherokees.
At the edge of Springfield they were ordered to halt beneath a great oak that shaded the road. The ambulance wagons rolled on, and they waited for hours, thirsting for water, hungering for food. At last they heard a slow solemn drumbeat, and out of a dusty street came a squad of blue-uniformed horsemen. On foot behind them was a straggling formation of white Confederate prisoners, their gray uniforms soiled by dust and caked mud. As soon as the prisoners passed the oak tree, the Cherokees were shoved into line behind them.
To the monotonous drumbeat, they walked wearily into the main street of Springfield, where spectators lined the wooden sidewalks, staring with silent curiosity at the prisoners in gray, jeering and cursing the young Cherokees in their shabby clothing.
In Springfield that day was Corporal Pleasant McAlpin, dressed in a trim blue-and-yellow cavalry uniform issued to him soon after he was attached to the headquarters of General Samuel R. Curtis for special courier service. On his way from the Elkhorn Tavern battlefield, Corporal McAlpin had passed the train of wounded and the Cherokee prisoners, but he galloped past so swiftly that he saw them only as a blur of plodding humanity. Long before the Cherokees reached Springfield, Corporal McAlpin delivered his saddlebag of messages from General Curtis to the Union quartermaster and was told that replies would not be ready until early the next morning. When the parade of prisoners entered the main street, Corporal McAlpin, bored by hours of inaction, had just walked out of the Red Star Saloon, yawning.
He saw Young Opothle first, his head drooping in misery as he limped along, and just beyond him was Swift Eagle, dust-coated, taller than Pleasant remembered him, but there was no mistaking that proud Frenchman’s nose he had inherited through his mother. Pleasant started to call to them, but thought better of it and followed along the sidewalk. He was surprised to see a mounted Union sergeant ride in between the white prisoners and the Cherokees, halting the Indians beside a gray stone building, the Springfield jail. The uniformed prisoners marched on to the slow drumbeat, toward a stableyard, while the sergeant dismounted to accept the jail key from a waiting civilian and then one by one he herded the eleven Cherokees into the cramped quarters of the jail, cutting the ropes on their wrists as they entered.
Pleasant stopped at the end of the wooden sidewalk, puzzled, uncertain as to what was happening. He crossed to the other side of the street and watched the sergeant lead his horse around to the rear of the jail. The civilian jailer brought out a narrow bench. The sergeant returned and said something to the jailer, who laughed and then turned and walked briskly away into the town. The sergeant sat on the bench, leaning against a rifle held between his knees.
Pleasant strolled easily toward the sergeant. “Guard duty?” he asked.
The sergeant nodded, shifting his chewing tobacco so that it made a lump in one of his cheeks. “Wild redskins,” he said
.
“I reckon they won’t be paroled and exchanged like the white prisoners,” Pleasant remarked casually.
“Nah. I heard the colonel say we’d be takin’ ’em north. Goin’ to parade ’em through towns to show our folks how the Rebs are usin’ scalpin’ savages to fight agin’ us.”
“Serves them right,” Pleasant said, giving the sergeant a half salute. “See you in town, maybe, sergeant.”
As soon as darkness fell, Pleasant took his horse from the stables and rode along the street past the jail. Two soldiers were now on duty, replacing the sergeant. Pleasant turned into a narrow alleyway down the street from them, dismounted in the shadows, and crept back to the edge of an empty storehouse, where he could hear the guards talking. He waited patiently as Lean Bear had taught him to wait when they were raiding stage stations in Kansas. Except for the voices of the guards the town was quiet. At last one of the guards stood up, stretched, and said: “I’m going up the street to the crapper.” His companion mumbled something as the guard walked away. Pleasant went to his horse and led it quietly to the rear of the jail where the guards’ two horses were hitched to a rail. The animals snorted and stamped their feet while Pleasant fastened his mount beside them. He then moved along the edge of the jail wall.
The guard was no more than six feet from him, his head bent forward. Pleasant slipped out his pistol, balanced it in his hand, but then returned it to its holster and took a knife from a belt sheath. In one quick lunge he had his knife arm under the guard’s chin, but the man’s neck was thick and muscular. The guard struggled, sounds breaking from his squeezed vocal cords, and Pleasant knew that he must kill him. Releasing his hold, he pulled the knife blade quick and hard across the guard’s throat until the man fell forward, blood gurgling as his lungs gasped for air.
