No Resting Place (8 page)

All night long, undeterred by the rain that had begun and now had turned the roads into sluices, they kept coming. Places were found for them by firesides and food shared with them, and all who could be were crowded to sleep inside the tents and the covered wagons; even so, many spent the night in the open, including John Ross, who refused all offers of shelter. When day broke the following morning there stood revealed the largest gathering of Cherokees ever assembled. Five thousand strong they were. Or was it five thousand weak?

Beneath the vast open-sided shed and outside among the dripping trees people clustered for low-toned conversations, the women along with the men, for they were not excluded from tribal deliberations as were the women of other tribes; on the contrary, their opinions and advice were sought.

The children, too, were there: little pitchers, big ears. They had been sent off to find others to play with but they soon drifted back to their bases. A word, one essential to their striking up acquaintance and getting on with one another, was now missing from their vocabulary, whether they spoke English or Cherokee, or both. It was the word most often on children's lips. The word was “let's.” It was with this word that play was begun, projects proposed, it was the “open sesame” to the world of make-believe; now none but the youngest of Cherokee children had any heart for play, and while they might all long to escape into make-believe, the real world was too much with them. They had had to assume worries that fitted them as did their parents' clothes when they put them on for fun. They had been hearing of these worries since their earliest years. Indeed, they were often the first to hear of them, for in many families the child had to interpret the latest news for parents who spoke no English. Thus when the meeting was gaveled to order, these miniature members of the tribe stood to listen along with their elders, and just as gravely.

On the speakers' platform, on one side of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, sat Major Ridge, looking like an elderly lion with his grizzled mane and his fixed, fierce frown, and on the other side sat little Johnny Ross,
Tsan Usdi
, also known affectionately by his childhood pet name,
Guwisguwi:
Swan Song, with that equally fixed faint smile of his. A figure of towering authority, every inch of him, the one looked; few inches of anything much at all, the other. Lowrey too was there, as were Ridge's son John and his nephew Elias Boudinot.

The business of this gathering was to hear the government's latest—and last, sternly warned the Commissioner—offer to them. It was four and a half million dollars—up from three and a half, owing to the good offices of the Ridges. This for twenty million acres of prime farm and forest land, spread over five states, and for their houses and improvements standing thereon.

Not only was this a good offer, they themselves knew—who better than they?—what their alternative to accepting it was. Thereupon the Commissioner went into a recitation of their woes. Squatters had overrun them, had settled on their lands, stolen their crops, their herds, their livestock. Their fences had been torn down, their barns and houses broken into, burglarized. Traders had corrupted them with whiskey, gamblers had cheated them. They had been falsely arrested. They had been bullied, beaten, hunted like wild animals, murdered in cold blood. The list was long indeed of the Cherokees' tribulations which the government, represented by the Commissioner, was sworn to protect them against.

Major Ridge's speech was, in substance, an echo of the Commissioner's, though it seemed the other way around, for Ridge was original in style, he was eloquent. He spoke in Cherokee, his only tongue. He was a master of it, the nation's greatest orator, perhaps its greatest ever, and to them, as to all Indians, oratory was an intoxicant. They nodded now, they swayed, they rocked, they grunted. But when he concluded by saying that their only hope was to leave their homeland and go beyond the Father of Waters, they stood still and silent.

Ross's Cherokee was rudimentary. As only a portion of his people understood English, for many of them their leader spoke to them always through an interpreter. However, nothing much was lost in translation, for it had no style to begin with. And anyway, in what Guwisguwi had to say on the subject of their removal there was never more variation than in the song of the swan.

“Very well, then,” said the Commissioner when Ross sat down, “without further ado, all those in favor of accepting this treaty, signify by saying aye.”

Not a voice was heard—not even a Ridge's. While thousands of pairs of eyes, like so many double-barreled shotguns, watched, they exchanged warning glances one with another. The two hundred-odd whom they had induced to go west were already out there. Left to uphold their point of view in the old country were they themselves and hardly anybody else. The framer and the one enforcer of the law against the sale of tribal land knew what would have happened to anybody who piped a note to puncture that thunderous silence, or even so much as cleared his throat to do so.

Jackson's man on the spot was one Schermerhorn—John F., formerly a Presbyterian preacher, now pursuing the more lucrative trade of Commissioner of Indian Affairs, known to the Cherokees as
Skaynooyanah
, a nickname always good for a snicker: the Devil's Horn. He it was who had deceived the Seminoles into signing a document which, when it was explained to them that with it they had thereby conveyed to the United States their native Florida, agreeing to vacate it and emigrate to the west, had sparked the lively little war now waging down there, with the palefaces getting the bloody hell beat out of them in those malarial mangrove swamps where the Indians rose up, struck, then sank from sight like their brothers the alligators. As regarded Cherokees, there was scarcely a one of any standing in the tribe whom Skaynooyanah had not attempted to bribe. Upon the failure of his mission in Tennessee he ordered the nation, every living head of them, to convene again, this time in New Echota, Georgia, theretofore the place of all places forbidden to them to assemble in because it was nothing short of their shrine, the former capital of their short-lived, now outlawed, government, for ratification of the treaty. One man, one vote; and to make sure they exercised their democratic right and responsibility, he ruled that all who failed to appear be counted as having voted in favor. Thus, adding the two hundred-odd who showed up on the appointed day to the eighteen thousand who stayed away, the Cherokees, whose feeling for their homeland equalled that of the Jews for theirs, elected unanimously to relinquish it and be herded en masse to the place known to them always as the Land of the Setting Sun, Land of Darkness, Land of Death.

The time: late at night. The scene: the home of Elias Boudinot, Ridge's nephew, in the former Cherokee capital, New Echota. Guests are expected, nineteen of them, they will arrive momentarily, yet the house is in darkness except for the parlor, and this is lighted by only a single candle and the flickering of the fire in the fireplace. Gatherings of more than two Cherokees are outlawed in Georgia; however, that is not the reason for the secrecy of this one—rather the opposite. This one is so hugger-mugger because it has the blessing of the state authorities. For those stealing their way here the night holds dangers far more to be feared than the Georgia Guard. These men will arrive on foot, singly, glad to get indoors, and yet they will not welcome one another's company, for, with one exception among them, each must suspect the other's motive in being here, and fear that his own is similarly suspected. They will one and all be anxious to get the business over with that they are here to do, and disband and again go off each on his separate way into the night, grateful for the cover of darkness.

It was said to be Ridge's son John who first changed course. He was now as fanatically in favor of removal as he had formerly been opposed to it. His present attitude was perhaps most clearly evidenced in the name given to his newborn son: Andrew Jackson Ridge. No fear did the west hold for him. He would have been out there ere now were it not that he was determined that everybody else go along with him. To see that they did so was what he, the first of the guests to arrive, was here at his cousin's house this December night to do.

At least one among those participating would talk about the gathering afterwards, and for publication. As reported in an area newspaper, after reading the treaty aloud while the Indians sat in the shadows smoking their pipes, the Reverend Schermerhorn laid it on the candlelit table. For some time longer the Indians smoked on. None was eager to be the first signer. Presently, one named John Gunter rose and went over to the table. (It was mere coincidence that the measure used by land surveyors was known as Gunter's chain.) Taking up the pen, Gunter dipped it in the ink, saying, “I am not afraid. I will sell the whole country.”

And so he did, and so did they all. Twenty men, twenty puppets, appointed to represent their nation by the government they were treating with, but unaccredited by their own people, sold the land that had been theirs since before their records of themselves began, the resting place of their ancestors, the land of a people to whom every tree, every rock, every least animal, every insect had a soul and was a fellow creature, land so alive, so sacred, they went down on their knees and begged its forgiveness before cutting a furrow in it.

As to which of them had talked, a good guess would be Andrew Ross. He would have been unashamed of his part in the transaction. Sad, fearful of the consequences, but unashamed. He was the one who would have had no misgivings about having done his selfless, inescapable, if unpleasant, duty. He was the one among them who would have harbored no suspicions of the purity of the others' motives, for he judged them by his own. To the diehards, the holdouts—and that included nearly the entire Cherokee nation—what they were doing would be an unforgivable betrayal. As John's brother, Andrew Ross would be the hardest of all to forgive. His very own blood brother! On no other ground but that of a principled difference of view could he ever again have looked John in the face—or for that matter, any other man, red or white. He would forevermore be known by the company he had kept; imperishable parchment he was about to put his name to, the name of his family, of his ancestors and his offspring. He dared not believe but what the rest were as personally disinterested as he was in the transaction.

Let his not be the last name to be affixed, looking as though he had hesitated, had feared, had scrupled to put it there. In fact, it headed the list, for he wrote it in the space Gunter had left blank above his. He was a brave man to do what he was doing, but he had needed a reckless fool to embolden him. The others all needed Andrew Ross. That name, so little to be expected, so out of place in that company, was the imprimatur which that document had to have on it were it to be anything more than a scrap of sheepskin.

It was further reported, though not in print yet just as widely circulated, that as his “X-His Mark” dried on the page, Major Ridge was overheard to say, “I have signed my death warrant.”

A petition to Washington was circulated to protest that the Treaty of New Echota signed by the Ridge party did not represent the will of the people. The petition contained fourteen thousand signatures. It was scoffed at by some because it was shown to include the signatures of dead people and of babes in arms. But what was wrong with that? The spirits of the dead lived on, and they grieved at the prospect of separation from their loved ones. As for the babes, were they not affected, were they not to be represented, were they to have no say just because they could not yet write? They would have signed if they could. As they could not, it was their parents' bounden duty to sign for them. The petition was ignored. Back from Washington came the order to proceed with the provisions of the treaty and prepare for the removal of the Cherokees.

Now it was the eighth day and outside the
asi
the sun was rising. To the best of his ability, the old man's tale was told. Awaiting Noquisi was the world he had detailed. Things had come to this—remarkable fulfillment of Indian prophecy!: their homeland had been sold out from under them by none other than Major Ridge, the man who wrote the law against doing what he had done and enforced it the one time ever with his own bloody hand, and now the Cherokees must prepare themselves to be uprooted and moved west to the land of the setting sun, the land of darkness, leaving behind them the bones of their ancestors, there to settle in deep discord. Even into the Fergusons' own family, as into the nation's first family, the Rosses, the division extended. It all but paralyzed his old tongue to say it, but his own son, his Abel, Noquisi's father, was of that party, Ridge's party.

Actually father and son were of one mind on the matter, or rather both were of the same divided mind, and when they argued it was not with each other but each with himself. This heated their exchanges, for no opinion is more exasperating to a person than one of his own which he finds himself unable to defend. Add to this the frustrated longing to be convincingly refuted in the opinion one is espousing and the self-dissatisfaction is compounded. The hearts of both men were with Ross, the minds of both with Ridge.

Recently the final blow had fallen, the ultimate irony: the earth itself, that Cherokee earth so precious to them that despite the missionaries' teaching it still spoke to them through every rock, every brook, every leaf of every tree a tongue, had betrayed them. Precious indeed! Buried in its bowels, unknown to them, and only now, at the worst possible time, brought to light, the element that the white man coveted most, that drove him raving, murderously mad, that brought out the very devil in him: gold. The misery foretold of old, they, man and boy, had lived to see and to feel.

Magnified by his spectacles, the tears brimming, the old man's eyes glistened in the light of the dying fire, overflowed to mingle with the sweat of his face.