The Heathen School

by John Demos

  Invariably, visitors came away impressed. One described the house as “an elegant painted mansion”; another compared it to “manors of old.” Flanked as it was by the store and its various satellite structures, it struck a pair of touring officials as “the home of the patriarch, the scene of plenty and hospitality.” Indeed, they concluded, “the Ridge … went forward in the march to improvement until his farm was in a higher state of cultivation and his buildings better than those of any other person in that region, the whites not excepted.”16

  Almost certainly, John Ridge and his Cornwall bride Sarah (Northrup) lived in his father’s house following their arrival from the North sometime in the spring of 1824. (A contemporary source has them occupying “an apartment by themselves.”)17 This must have preceded the renovation that John would subsequently claim to have supervised “before we left them.” Meanwhile, at more or less the same time, John was building his own house, roughly six miles to the northeast, beside a spring called (in Cherokee) Tanta-ta-rara or (in translation) Running Waters. The estate itself has been identified the same way, from that day to the present.

  I approach it from what is now known as the Calhoun Road. It stands very much by itself and can be seen from at least a quarter of a mile away. Its frontal presentation is not unlike that of the Major Ridge house. A wide main door, neatly framed by an overhanging porch, with paired windows on either side of the ground floor and a matching arrangement for the upper story: Here, in short, is the essence of Georgian symmetry and, at the same time, another example of “the New England style.” The back includes a large L-shaped addition. There are two brick chimneys and twenty-five windows.

  There is also a problem right now. The house is privately owned, and fully occupied; access is doubtful at best. My knock on the front door brings no response. I prowl somewhat furtively through the surrounding yard in order to view the building from all sides. But there is no way of gaining entrance. Instead, I must settle for the written report of a recent National Park Service site visit, with extensive photographs from both inside and out. The design of the rooms is as one might expect: front foyer, living room, dining room, den, kitchen—all on the first floor—with bedrooms overhead. There is fine detail work around the several fireplaces, handsome ceiling trim, and attractive paneling on all the doors. Taken altogether, it does seem an appropriate venue for a highly prosperous, New England–educated Cherokee chief.18

  There are also some personal and official impressions of the house recorded not long after Ridge’s own time. Here is a description left by his son, who lived at Running Waters as a child: “I remember it well—a large, two-story house, on a high hill, crowned with a fine grove of oak and hickory, a large clear spring at the foot of the hill, and an extensive farm stretching away down into the valley, with a fine orchard on the left.” The son also recalled an adjacent building, “some 200 yards distant,” where, at his father’s invitation, a woman teacher from New England conducted school for local young-folk.19

  This is an adequate overview, but it lacks specific details. Some of the latter can be gleaned from a different source—government documents pertaining to the process of “removal.” In Ridge’s case, three are of special importance. An 1832 land survey carried out by the state of Georgia—preliminary to a lottery for transferring Cherokee properties to white citizens—shows a square plat of 160 acres, plus a “field of 40 acres,” all marked “John Ridges”; included in the middle is a rough sketch of a sizable residence.20 This, however, was far from the entirety of John’s holdings; a Cherokee census taken in 1835 lists a great deal more. Included there are two farms (Running Waters, and another at a place called Turkey Town, a dozen miles farther south) with 350 acres under cultivation, producing an annual yield of 6,500 bushels of corn (evidently the chief crop), plus a main house and sixteen outbuildings (kitchen, corncribs, smokehouses, chicken house, stables, and so on); five orchards containing 615 fruit trees; twenty-one slaves, housed in two separate cabins; and several additional structures at an adjacent “council ground.” In addition, John owned a ferry—for crossing the Coosa River—at the second of his farms. The same section of the census shows the properties of forty-two other men living nearby; John’s total far surpasses all the others.21

  A final set of valuations, made the following year, brings the residence itself into sharper focus. Its basic shell was two stories high, built of hewn timbers, on a foundation of “neat stones,” creating a footprint of fifty-one by nineteen feet, with three brick chimneys; there was also at the back a more recent single-story addition of thirty-one by twenty feet. Inside, “both floors [were] neatly laid,” the upper story “ceiled,” and “the whole neatly chinked and plastered.” There were twenty-four “large glass windows” and six fireplaces (one with a “brick baker” [oven] attached).22 All of this makes a close fit with what can be seen today: exactly the same footprint (including the rear addition), similar overall appearance, almost the same number of windows, and the same number of chimneys (subtracting one known to have been taken down in the mid-twentieth century).

  Perhaps, too, we might try putting the Ridges—the family itself—back inside. The 1835 census records the following under “occupants.” Males under eighteen, four; females under eighteen, two. These would have been the children—John Rollin, Susan, Flora, Aeneas, Herman, Andrew, in that order—their actual ages ranging from eight years to a few months. (But there should have been seven. Where was Clarinda, the Ridges’ disabled daughter?) On another line just above: males over eighteen, one, and females over eighteen, one—obviously the parents, John and Sarah. A separate category, pertaining to race, mentions six “half breeds”—again the children—and one “full-blooded,” which must have meant John. Sarah, evidently, was overlooked in this latter accounting, though the family total was put at “eight Cherokees.” All in all, one has the sense of a snug, and still expanding, household.23

  We have no full-on description of Sarah in these years, but about John a newspaper account from 1832 is quite specific: “J. Ridge [is] rather tall and slender in his person, erect, with a profusion of black hair, a shade less swarthy, and with less pronounced cheekbones, than our western Indians. His voice is full and melodious, his elocution fluent, and without the least observable tincture of foreign accent or Indian.”24 There is, as well, John’s portrait, painted a few years earlier by the artist Charles Bird King. He sits at a table with quill pen poised over a sheet of foolscap—this to denote his calling as a writer, a negotiator, a man of affairs. His dress matches the part: He wears a rather formal buttoned coat over a ruffled shirt with a high collar. His skin is pale, though ruddy around the cheeks. The “profusion” of his hair is evident, his lips are full and a little pinched around the edges, his nose long and straight. But it is his eyes that center the whole: They express—how to put it?—a certain distance, a wistfulness, a kind of inward resignation. Though still a quite young man (mid-twenties), he has the look of one who has experienced much, thought hard, felt deeply. It is perhaps a stretch to connect these qualities with his time in Cornwall. But they would, for certain, be needed and tested in the years that lay just ahead.25

  PART FOUR

  FINALE

  • CHAPTER SEVEN •

  American Tragedy: Renascence and Removal

  Removal” lies at the heart of the story we commonly tell about Indians in the nineteenth century. At first glance, removal and the grand project of “civilizing” heathen peoples appear to be opposites. Yet on the deepest level, they were joined—were, indeed, different expressions of the same impulse. For the civilizing process imposed a complete renunciation of traditional lifeways; as such, it was another form, a cultural form, of removal. In the case of Indians, it meant essentially this: Let them become farmers instead of hunters, Christians instead of pagans, cultured in the manner of white people instead of “savage.” Then maybe—just maybe—they can be absorbed into the national mainstream. However, by the 1820s and 1830s, many whites had al
ready given up on that possibility—at best it seemed impractical; at worst, dangerous—and were coming to favor actual physical removal. Just drive them out, send them far away—across the Mississippi River at least—and leave them entirely to themselves. (And then let us have their land.)1

  One way or another—through either kind of removal—the native presence would be finished; hence the increasingly prevalent trope of “the vanishing Indian.” To be sure, this supposed “vanishing” was cause for regret, even guilt, among a certain portion of whites, mostly “benevolent” reformers on or near the East Coast. Farther inland, and especially among those living close to the frontier, neither regret nor guilt would be much in evidence. There, the prevalent attitude could be reduced to a single phrase: Be gone! That suggests another, much sharper term—drawn from our own twenty-first-century world—to replace the more neutral-sounding removal. In short, “ethnic cleansing.”2

  Removal—in the straightforward sense of relocation—had been part of American history from the settlement years onward. In its earliest phase, it was irregular, haphazard, ad hoc, and closely tied to warfare. Thus, in seventeenth-century Virginia, sporadic outbursts of violence (especially in 1622 and 1644) between white settlers and the so-called Powhatan Confederacy led to a treaty confining local Indians to a small part of the territory previously theirs. Farther north, in New England, a similar outcome followed the conclusion of the Pequot War (1637) and King Philip’s War (1676). In Carolina, after defeat in a bloody conflict with colonists (1713), thousands of Tuscarora Indians migrated north to join the Iroquois Confederacy.3

  As time passed, the transfer of lands and the movement of native peoples could also be accomplished peaceably, through a combination of formal purchase, negotiation, and government pressure. This was repeatedly the case, for example, in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, where Shawnees and Delawares ceded one large tract after another, by deed or treaty, before moving on to what is now eastern Ohio. In the 1740s and 1750s, the Ohio country itself became a scene of contest between colonists and native tribes—until the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) secured major Indian land cessions and established a new “line of settlement” roughly following the course of the Ohio River. Here, the Delaware (or Lenapi, as they originally called themselves) were directly involved once again. Indeed, the story of this particular group, spreading across many generations, was especially remarkable for serial removals. After relocating from Pennsylvania to Ohio, the Delaware would go on to Indiana (Treaty of Greenville, 1795), to Missouri (several more treaties, 1818–26), to Kansas (1829), and finally to Oklahoma (1850s and 1860s). One might well say that removal became central to their very identity.4

  At the start of the nineteenth century, the vast territory obtained through the Louisiana Purchase appeared to open new avenues for removal. And the process itself became more organized, more systematic, with governmental authorities—at both federal and state levels—increasingly in charge. Thomas Jefferson, as president and prime mover for the Purchase, was especially active this way. In 1804, Congress formally authorized him to negotiate with “Indian tribes owning lands on the east side of the Mississippi [to] exchange lands [for] property of the United States on the west side.”5

  The results of such initiatives were profound. To the north, there began a complex process of relocating various tribes in the vicinity of the Great Lakes: Chippewa, Ottawa, Pottawattamie, Wyandotte, Menomenie, Winnebago, Sioux, Fox, Sac (among others). The overall direction of this movement was from the east side of the lakes (especially the Michigan Territory) to the west side (Wisconsin, which had also gained territorial status), and then to sites fully across the Mississippi. In the meantime, too, some native groups had moved to Wisconsin from much farther east—for example, Iroquois from upstate New York, and the Stockbridge (Massachusetts) Mahicans.6

  But it was in the Southeast that removal would have its most dramatic enactments—and would most fully approximate ethnic cleansing. There, what were known as “the five civilized tribes”—Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee—remained relatively well entrenched into the early nineteenth century. However, a series of treaty-based land cessions, begun long before, had eaten away much of their territorial base. Then, in the 1830s, all five were subject to federally mandated relocation in the newly designated Indian Territory (what is today the state of Oklahoma). Some ten thousand Choctaws were forced from their homes in Mississippi between 1831 and 1833. The migration of the Chickasaw from southern Alabama was spread out over a longer period, roughly 1837–50. The Creek mounted a strong resistance, but even so they were driven out (also from Alabama) during a three-year stretch, starting in 1834. The Seminole fought removal with extreme tenacity, retreating from their original settlements along the coast of Florida to its swampy interior, from where they conducted sporadic guerilla warfare against federal troops, lasting well into the 1850s. Most were eventually put to flight or killed, but enough remained to support several reservations, which are part of Florida to the present day.7

  And then, the Cherokees—the most famously removed group of all. Considered whole, theirs is a story of remarkable, but doomed, achievement. As such, it shadows, on a vastly grander scale, that of the Foreign Mission School—high hopes, valiant effort, leading to eventual tragic defeat.

  Indeed, by 1825, the Cherokees were widely considered “the most civilized tribe in America.” This description included both a salute to all they had accomplished and the seeds of their destruction. “Civilization” remained the official goal. But success with the goal might undermine other interests crucially important to whites. Success would mean accepting them, on equal terms and with equal rights. Success would mean competing with them for valuable resources. Success would mean including them as partners on the route to America’s “manifest destiny.” Was the country at large ready for all that?

  When colonial settlement began, there would have been little reason to single out Cherokees for special notice. Their interior location—on either side of the spine of the southern Appalachian Mountains—meant that contact with white newcomers did not begin until almost the end of the seventeenth century. The land they controlled was substantial, a roughly rectangular expanse of 350 by 300 miles. But their numbers were not particularly impressive—perhaps twenty thousand at that point. They differed from their nearest neighbors, the Creeks and the Choctaws, in language and lineage; they were Iroquoian (with ancestral roots far to the north), the neighbors Muskogean. Otherwise, they did not stand out.8

  Their lifeways followed the pattern of most groups native to the region. They subsisted on a mix of hunting (deer and other wildlife), gathering (roots and berries), and hoe-based agriculture (especially corn, beans, and squash). Men were the hunters, women the farmers. They lived in largely autonomous town communities—perhaps sixty in all—each one organized around a council house and a central plot of ceremonial ground. Local populations were crosscut by the lines of seven traditional clans. Family organization, including residence and descent, followed matrilineal principles; mothers played a notably strong role. Property, especially land, was held in common. Everyday experience followed a code of cooperation and consensual decision making; group interests superseded those of the individual. Their engagement with the world around them expressed a deep and rich spirituality. Encounters with nonhuman forces, as manifest in dreams, visions, and ghostlike presences (“little people”), were expected and were accorded high value; elaborate ritual enactments (such as the annual Green Corn Festival) affirmed their links to the natural environment. It is perhaps too easy to view traditional Indian cultures as being uniquely “in balance”; but for the early Cherokees, that impression seems strong.9

  It seems strong, at any rate, in contrast to what came next. Regular interaction with whites, starting in the 1690s, would prove fundamentally disruptive. The first of several major impacts was epidemic disease. Cherokees, like virtually every Indian group, succumbed in huge numbers to the unfamiliar mic
robes carried by Europeans; smallpox, typhus, measles, and other such illnesses struck them again and again, at irregular intervals. Partly from this cause, their total population shrank, over the course of a century, by at least half.10

  Warfare had a similar effect. The French and Indian War (1755–63) found Cherokees directly engaged, first on the English side, then on the French; in response, invading armies of frontiersmen laid waste to more than a dozen of their towns. The Revolutionary War (1776–83) proved even more destructive. The Cherokees stayed loyal to the empire, preferring to take their chances with a distant monarchy rather than nearby (and increasingly hostile) white settlers. Within weeks of the war’s opening, they launched a series of raids on the Carolina interior. But soon the tables were turned; “patriot” forces counterattacked and inflicted a region-wide slaughter. Even after the official Peace of Paris (1783), guerilla warfare continued in and around the Cherokee heartland. As a further result, the tribe became divided into “upper” and “lower” towns. It was the latter group that went on with the fight, until a final treaty was made in 1794.11

  Moreover, time after time the Cherokees were obliged—cajoled, bribed, forced—to yield ground in the face of advancing white (English) settlement, part of a larger process described by historians as “settler colonialism.” Some of this was formalized in negotiated land cessions (no fewer than seven within one sixteen-year period, 1768–84); the rest involved outright expropriation. The center of their remaining holdings moved unevenly toward the south and west—which meant increased proximity to Spanish and French territorial possessions. By century’s end, there were European occupiers on every side.12