DURING THE LAST WEEKS of that summer of 1830, only a few sprinkles of rain fell, and on a certain day in early autumn an observer standing on the highest point of the Sleeping Woman could have marked the location of all trails to New Echota by lazy streamers of red dust lifting into the windless air above the trees. It seemed that every living soul in the Cherokee Nation was bound for the capital to learn what their leaders could tell them of their future. They came in wagons, in buggies, on horseback, and on foot across many miles of mountains and valleys. Some may have feared but none could accept the dreaded probability that this great gathering in defiance of the laws of Georgia and the demands of the President of the United States might be the last time they would ever see their elected council assemble in the roughhewn capital of this doomed democracy of the American Indians.
At sunrise two of Opothle’s wagons left Okelogee loaded with nine passengers, blankets, bedding, tenting cloth, and foodstuffs to last three or four days. They started with Opothle and his wife Suna-lee, his daughter Priscilla, and Jotham in the first wagon, and the Runner, Mary, Dane, Isaac and Jerusha McAlpin in the second. At every stop, some of the young people would exchange places in the wagons, and when the going was slow on upgrades, they would get out and walk.
Before that morning of departure the families held long discussions about who was to stay in Okelogee and who was to go to New Echota. The Runner’s wife, Walina, being shy and not caring for crowds, begged to remain at home to harvest her late summer garden. William wanted to go, but Opothle asked him to stay behind to look after the house, the livestock, and their black slaves. Of late, Opothle had been worried about reports of white riders from the south who called themselves Georgia Pony Guards. Pretending to be official keepers of the peace, the Pony Guards raided prosperous Cherokees and stole cattle, horses, and slaves. They had never come as far north as Okelogee, but Opothle warned William to keep a sharp lookout for strangers, and to make certain the slaves brought the livestock into the barns every night.
“Would that you could go to New Echota,” Opothle told him. “John Ross asked that we bring our sons and daughters so that they may hear and remember what is decided, and can then tell it to their sons and daughters. The fate of our nation may be decided at this council. Each of us will try to remember what is said and tell you what we have heard.”
Because the mission school was closed for the New Echota council, the Runner invited Isaac McAlpin to attend as an observer. Soon afterward, with Dane’s willing assistance, Jerusha managed to join the pilgrimage. If Harriet McAlpin desired to go or resented being left alone, she gave no clear indication of either. On the morning of departure, Harriet gave Isaac a quick farewell kiss on his cheek, but her bright penetrating eyes were fixed entirely upon Jerusha, who lifted her skirt to climb boldly into the wagon and place herself close beside Dane among the piles of bedding. Harriet cleared her throat loudly and sighed with exasperation as she watched the wagon roll away.
The two wagons reached New Echota shortly before sundown, and by the time they found a camping place in a pine grove, built a cooking fire, and brought water from the ever flowing spring around which the new capital had been located, darkness was upon them.
During the early evening, friendly visits were made back and forth among the families whose wagons and campfires ringed the broad level area from which they hoped would rise one day a capital worthy of the Cherokee Nation. There was no dancing or music; the occasion was too solemn for celebration. Yet all were dressed in their best clothing, the women and girls in bright-colored calicos, many of the men wearing Anglo-American shirts and trousers and an occasional beaver hat, but most still favored moccasins over the stiff uncomfortable trading-post shoes. Here and there was an old man in a deerskin or blanket tunic with a red sash around his waist and a blue cotton handkerchief fashioned into a turban, as in the old days.
After suppers were finished and chores completed, hundreds of young people walked around the entire circle of campfires. Dane and Jerusha and Jotham and his sister Priscilla were soon joined by Griffa McBee, one of the half-blood Scots girls who had recently begun attending Isaac McAlpin’s school. Their progress was like a slow circling dance, and the firelight reflected on the moving figures lent a romantic air to the autumn night. Jerusha walked very close beside Dane, her body touching his in secret little caresses.
“How handsome the Cherokees are tonight,” she whispered. “Especially you, Dane. When will we be married? So we can be together like this always!”
Before he could say a word, Mary’s accusing face materialized out of the dim light, fading away when Jerusha’s quivering mouth touched his ear: “I would like to sleep on the ground with you this night, instead of in the wagon with your grandmother,” she said.
That was always the arrangement when the Cherokees traveled by wagon; the women and girls slept on the wooden beds of the vehicles, with tent cloth draped across the sideboards to shield them from dew or rain and give them some privacy. The men and boys slept where they chose, sometimes under the wagons or sheltered by tent canvas beneath the trees.
Next morning a yellow sun in a smoky sky promised another cool day. For the first time, they could see clearly the beginnings of New Echota—a huge log council house, a courthouse, four stores and trading posts, the printing shop of the Cherokee Phoenix, and six dwellings, some with brick chimneys and clapboard sides.
Everyone was expected to attend the speeches, which began soon after breakfasts were finished, although the crowd—formed in a wide semicircle facing the council house—was so immense that not half the listeners could hear what was said. Around the fringes of the assembly, two companies of Cherokee Light Horse, wearing blue blanket-cloth tunics, kept a lookout for stragglers and strangers. This cavalry guard had been organized by Major Ridge to keep the peace, and its strength was increased for the council.
Old Going Snake was chosen speaker for this council. Dressed in a frock coat and wearing the cockaded hat given him by Andrew Jackson at Horseshoe Bend, he used his voice like a trumpet: “The Unegas in their greed for our land are like the cougars we see in the forests, with slain deer all around them, so filled with meat they can scarcely drag their bellies across the ground, yet never satisfied, always wanting more. We hold this country from our ancestors. We have a blood right to it. We call on the Maker of Breath, of Earth, Sky and Weather to witness what we do here and help us choose what is best for our people.”
The speeches continued through the morning. Many great leaders of the Cherokees made statements, including Major Ridge, his son John who had been educated in New England, editor Elias Boudinot, and his younger brother Stand Watie. Opothle spoke in favor of another appeal through the white men’s courts, but he also advised that the people of each town organize a local Light Horse company to defend themselves from marauding Georgians who under the new state law could no longer be brought to court by Cherokees for assaults on their persons or theft of their property. When it came Mary’s turn to speak, the listeners rose to their feet, crowding closer to hear her words.
“I speak for the women of our people,” she cried, “for those who endured pain to bring all of you into this world, the women who cultivate our land, who grow the food that sates your hunger. Who, more than we women, knows the value of our lands? I speak to the men: Your mothers, your wives, your sisters, your daughters beg of you not to part with any more of our land, but keep it for our children. The Maker of Breath placed us here to live in peace, but we women have borne and raised up warriors to defend us in our villages. Do not behave like a craven dog that carries its tail on its back but when frightened drops it between its legs and runs. Our lives are in the hands of the Maker of Breath. He gave to our ancestors the lands we live upon. We are determined to defend them, and if it is His will, our bones shall whiten on them, but we will never give them up. Not one more foot of land to the Unegas!” Not one more foot of land to the whites! the crowd began chanting. Not one more foot of land to the whites! The sound rolled across New Echota like the low thunder of a summer storm.
After the noon rest, Dane and his companions would have preferred wandering off into the surrounding woodland, but except for Jerusha McAlpin none would have dared being caught leaving the council grounds. When the crowd was reassembling in the afternoon, Jotham and Griffa McBee somehow became separated from Dane, Jerusha, and Priscilla. Long before the last oration was finished, Jerusha was asleep, her head resting against Dane’s shoulder with Prissie looking on disapprovingly.
When they all met again at their camping place, the sun was still an hour high. While Suna-lee and the girls began preparations for supper, Jotham touched Dane’s shoulder and motioned for him to move away from the wagons. “Do you think you could persuade Jerusha to slip out of the wagon tonight?” he asked in a cautious whisper.
Dane felt a sudden dryness in his mouth. “I will ask her.” He was eager for a night adventure, yet he feared that what might happen would draw him into a permanent commitment to Jerusha.
“Griffa says she’ll come out if Jerusha will,” Jotham said.
The arrangement was made while they were eating dinner in the twilight, Jerusha becoming so animated that Dane feared she would arouse everyone’s suspicions. At bedtime, which came soon after the campfire died to coals, the two boys took their blankets a few yards back in the pines from where their fathers and Isaac McAlpin bedded under a wide tent cloth slung over a tree limb. Wide awake with expectancy, the boys waited until the sounds of deep and regular breathing came from the tent. Then they left their blankets and crept deeper into the woods, to their prearranged rendezvous—a large chestnut tree with low-hanging branches.
“Suppose the girls don’t come?” Dane said, half hoping they would and half hoping they would not.
“Griffa will. Jerusha may be afraid.”
A rustle in the dry undergrowth and a snapping of twigs announced the approach of someone. Although there was no moon, the starlight revealed a feminine form moving uncertainly toward them.
“Griffa!” Jotham called out in a loud whisper.
“No, it’s me, Jerusha.” She laughed with sudden delight at finding them so easily.
“Keep your voice low,” Dane warned her. She was still wearing the red dress with the neat white collar she had worn that afternoon. She seemed to float right out of the starlight to fling her arms around his neck and kiss him on the lips. “Your dear grandmother,” she said. “I think she may have seen me slip my nightgown over my clothes, but she went right to sleep, breathing a soft little snore. All I had to do was slide out of the wagon.”
A few minutes later Griffa was there, almost startling them with her sudden appearance. Jotham pushed the low limbs of the chestnut aside. It was like entering a tent, the dancing leaves dimming the starlight and making the distant campfires flicker like fireflies.
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 beneath 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.”