Читать книгу Trail of Broken Promises - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 10

THE COLONISTS WERE in a dilemma. They were frightened of the Indians. They did not trust the Indians. They believed themselves to be superior to the Indians. But, in reality, the colonists were their own worst enemy.

During the French and Indian War, Colonel George Washington dispatched Nathaniel Gist into the Cherokee villages to drum up support for the British army. Gist not only found volunteers, but some say he also stayed around long enough to father a baby boy who would be known as Sequoyah.

Without the Indian alliance, Washington always said, the Army of England could not have triumphed. The Cherokees received their reward, but not the one they were expecting. Some colonists stumbled across a few braves in a Virginia countryside, became nervous, then scared, and massacred all twenty-four of them.

The Cherokees exploded with anger and vengeance, taking a few scalps, burning a few homesteads, even running the British out of Fort Loudon. Lord Jeffrey Amherst fled for his life, and he would say, with his head bowed in disgrace, “I must own I am ashamed, for I believe it is the first instance of His Majesty’s troops having yielded to the Indians.”

Finally, the Cherokees asked for peace, and the British were only too glad to give it to them. Again, the Cherokees were rewarded. Between 1768 and 1775, they signed three treaties and immediately lost all of the lands north of Georgia and east of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Old Tassel, the Cherokee Chieftain, shook his head and said sadly, “The truth is, if we had not lands, we should have fewer enemies.”

And so it was.

By the autumn of 1785, the tribe possessed hope that their troubles were at an end. The United States had outlined the Cherokee boundaries and had forbidden any of their own citizens from trespassing past those border lines, written in blood.

The land was sacred and it belonged to the Indian. That was law, and the Cherokees walked away with the Treaty of Hopewell to prove it. There before them were the white men’s own holy words: “The hatchet shall be forever buried.”

As Nancy Ward, a niece of Chief Attacullaculla, had told the American commissioners:

You having determined on peace is most pleasing to me, for I have seen much trouble during the late war. I am old, but I hope yet to bear children, who will grow up and people our nation, as we are now under the protection of Congress and shall have no more disturbance. I speak for the young warriors I have raised in my town, as well as for myself. They rejoice that we have peace, and we hope the chain of friendship will never more be broken.

The chain of friendship was made with cheap metal, and even cheaper words. It had been molded with ambition and linked with lies.

Congress, in 1789, was still holding fast to the treaty, promising that “the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars.” Congress had not yet felt the growing pains of a nation, stuffed with too many people and even more greed. The Chickamaugans loomed as its only stumbling block in the way of peace. These renegade Cherokees had been the last holdouts, the last warriors to defy American rule. But even they buckled under the military muscle of a new nation, leaving fifty of their braves dead and scalped upon the highland slopes of North Georgia and Tennessee. At the 1794 conference in Telico, Little Turkey, who had followed Old Tassel to the helm of the Cherokees, rose, proud that his people would now be able “to live so that we might have gray hairs in our head.” He stood and said, “Our tears are wiped away, and we rejoice in the prospect of our future welfare, under the protection of Congress.”

The tears would come again.

For happiness would not live in the house of the Cherokees forever, or even for a decade or two.

White men never kept their word to a savage.

In 1803, the United States purchased the sprawling territory of Louisiana, and President Thomas Jefferson found himself wondering what to do with all of that land. It was valuable. It was vast. And, for the moment, it apparently was vacant.

Jefferson smiled. The decision was so easy for him.

The colonies were becoming crowded. Farms were jammed against each other. Settlers shared the same fence posts. Trails kept twisting and turning, tying one settlement to another, and land – Lord, there was so much of it – was rapidly becoming scarce, and empty land was vanishing before their very eyes. It was, as one farmer said, downright suffocating.

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 needed a leader, a man of honor, and they turned to Red Eagle. He was heartbroken. But he did not refuse them. Red Eagle stood and walked silently out of the chokafa.

Death would follow where he led it.

Red Eagle, on a hot August day in 1813, rode through the swamp and cane fields toward Fort Mims. The battle would not last long, he reasoned. The fort was much too strong. His warriors would attack, then fall back, then go on home where they belonged.

Red Eagle was not a worried man.

He would bravely perform his duty.

The battle, he knew, was lost before the first shot had been fired.

From behind the walls, a drum roll signaled the noon hour. Red Eagle nodded. And his screaming, yelling Red Sticks, their faces black, their arms yellow, swarmed down upon the stockade fortress.

The prophets danced.

Gunfire exploded across the Alabama countryside.

Red Eagle was aghast. He saw that the front gates had been left open.

Mims burned. The fort lay in ashes.

No one escaped the sound and the fury. Soldiers and settlers, women and children, blacks and Indians lay where they fell.

The prophets danced.

The warriors howled.

And Red Eagle, in the shroud of an early-morning fog, began burying the dead, all five hundred and fifty-three of them, in the plowed dirt between the potato rows. In the faces of the dead, he saw his own.

Andrew Jackson lay in the bed of his Tennessee home, his left shoulder shattered by a bullet, the aftermath of an ill-fated duel. He was pale, ashen. But he could not forget the carnage at Fort Mims. He was a hard man. He did not forgive easily. Jackson swore: “By the Eternal, these people must be saved.”

During the moon of the roasting ears, Andrew Jackson turned his horse toward Alabama. He would not face Red Eagle alone. The Cherokees left their farms to join his mission of revenge. After all, they had become Americans too, and the peace was theirs to uphold.

Eight hundred marched with Jackson, including The Ridge, John Ross, Charles Hicks, and a half-breed who walked with a limp, a man they called Sequoyah. From the Creek Nation came Gen. William McIntosh and an army of warriors to fight against their own people and blow away the cloud of war that the Red Sticks had hung with blood above their heads. The Choctaws filed in from the west.

The chase was on.

The Red Sticks were on the run.

The troops of John Coffee, Jackson’s vanguard, cut down a hundred and eighty-six of them at Tallussahatchee. Coffee reported that the Creeks “met [death] with all its horrours, without shrinking or complaining. Not one asked to be spared, but fought as long as they could stand or sit.”

Davy Crockett remembered. “We shot them like dogs.”

They left Tallussahatchee in burned ruins. The ashes spread with the winds. The ground stained with the blood of the Red Sticks would never be sacred again. Vengeance belonged to the man riding with a military sword. Vengeance belonged to Jackson. He would carry a grudge for a long time.

The Red Sticks fled beyond the sanctuary of the swamps as Jackson drove relentlessly toward them. His men broke ranks at Talladega, and Jackson snapped, “I’ll shoot dead the first man who makes a move to leave.”

The ranks closed.

At Horseshoe Bend, Red Eagle would make his stand.

He would run no farther. His fate would be decided on a March 27 morning in 1814. And one hundred acres of Alabama bottom land would soak up the blood of Andrew Jackson’s revenge. The Red Sticks stood behind their earthen ramparts, screaming and taunting, daring the militia to march across that open field, laughing at the troops that did not come.

From behind them, John Ross swam the river and quietly pulled away the Creek canoes. Six hundred of his Cherokee soldiers climbed inside and, slipping across the Tallapoosa, attacked the Red Sticks who did not see them until the rain of gunfire fell around their shoulders.

Major Lemuel P. Montgomery charged as the Creeks suddenly found themselves trapped in a deadly crossfire.

The laughter stopped.

Sam Houston battled his way across the field and fell with an arrow in his leg. A private jerked it out, and Houston fought on until a bullet slammed into his shoulder and, at last, he grew too weak to pull the trigger of his rifle.

Around him erupted the gunshots, the howling, the screams of three thousand men. Around him were the groans and the curses and the praying of the dying. Houston would recall, “Not a warrior offered to surrender, even while the sword was at his breast.”

Flames spit out of the thicket. The Red Sticks turned to the river to escape. But as Coffee wrote, “Few ever reached the bank, and that few was killed the instant they landed.”

Andrew Jackson himself reported, ‘The enemy was completely routed. Five hundred and fifty-seven were left dead on the peninsula.”

Red Eagle lived. He walked a broken man to Jackson’s tent and said solemnly, “I can oppose you no longer. I have done you much injury. I should have done you more, but my warriors are killed. I am in your power. Dispose of me as you please.”

“You are not in my power, “ Jackson barked. “If you think you can contend against me in battle, go and head your warriors.”

Red Eagle – only one-eighth Indian, a man called Bill Weatherford – paused and gazed for a moment out across the elysian fields of slaughter. “There was a time when I could have answered you,” he replied. “I could animate my fighters to battle, but I cannot animate the dead.” He paused again, then continued, “I have nothing to request for myself, but I beg of you to send for the women and children of the war party who have been driven to the woods without an ear of corn . . . Save the wives and children of the Creeks and I will persuade to peace any Red Sticks remaining in my nation.”

For Andrew Jackson, the war was at an end.

He shook Red Eagle’s hand and turned away. He would never forget the bend, shaped like a horseshoe, in the Tallapoosa River “The carnage,” he would say, “was dreadful.”

And so it was.

And the Creeks called him The Devil.