No Resting Place Page 11

  But that story first necessitated a digression, reversion to yet another time long ago and to a different place, the story of yet another Cherokee, he likewise controversial, likewise legendary, he the most improbable Cherokee of them all, a real cuckoo bird this one, hatched in a foster nest and finding his way to his true flock only when fledged, one long absent from tribal affairs but now come back, a prodigal son in reverse, returning from disgrace in triumph and glory—often an amusement to The People, occasionally an embarrassment, always a puzzle, predictable only in his unpredictability, now the most famous Cherokee of them all, not even excepting the sage, the living saint, Sequoyah—a Cherokee when it suited him to be one, the leopard who could change his spots. His story would lead in time back to the one about Diwali, for in this latest, world-shaking turn of events the two—old friends—maybe even one-time, overnight in-laws, after the hospitable Indian custom—had been allies, but first: back to the year 1809 and once again to eastern Tennessee and to that same river, the Hiwassee, where, two years earlier, the traitor Doublehead had met his bloody end at the hands of Ridge, Saunders and Rogers.

  Not seen at the time for what it was, an event to change the world, to alter its very map: Sam Houston’s running away from home, aged sixteen, to become an Indian. The flight itself was not adventurous. To become a Cherokee, which to him meant to dress flamboyantly (a lifelong vanity), to dally with those dusky, dark-eyed daughters of Eve, the easygoing Indian maidens, to indulge the taste for firewater (a lifelong weakness) he already had at that age, and above all to loaf, to lie on the riverbank and read of Greek and Roman heroes and daydream, free from drudgery behind the dry-goods counter of his widowed mother’s trading post and from the ignobility of being “in trade,” so soul-soiling to him who felt himself predestined for great deeds and high places—to attain these heart’s desires all the lad had to do was paddle the few strokes across the Hiwassee. He might have swum it. There, so near, was another world.

  He was welcomed. With that casual, that almost promiscuous foster parenthood of the unprolific Cherokees, Olooteka, also known as John Jolly, chief of the village there on the opposite bank, took the youth into his home and adopted him. No doubt he was scratched and sent to water, spent his week in the asi, that would have been his one test to pass. Kalunah: The Raven, was the name he took.

  Those were the days to be an Indian! The Cherokees’ worries and woes were then but small clouds on the distant horizon. They were still themselves then. They had not yet stopped being Indians and begun aping their enemies in hopes of acceptance by them. A man’s time was spent in the manly pursuits, hunting, fishing, trapping, idling. There was no grubbing in the dirt, no hoeing of weeds, no bending and stooping to gather crops, no being yoked to a mule behind a plow, no daily tending to the wants of animals, slopping filthy hogs, relieving stupid cows of their accumulation of milk. What white men there were envied you, imitated you. A grown man’s life was a boy’s life and a boy’s life was a pampered pet’s. Young Sam Houston was not the first (indeed he was one of the last of the many, for it was so soon to end) to feel the call of that carefree, unconfined, irresponsible existence and to heed its call: to put aside moneygrubbing, social restraints, respectability, cross over his personal Hiwassee and reenter into man’s unspoiled, essential state, his original birthright.

  Three years Houston’s youthful idyll among the Cherokees lasted, three aimless, lotus-eating years before the serpent of discord got into his garden and tempted his susceptible white blood with the apple of ambition. Unsurprising, then, that at the most miserable time of his life, twenty years later, his thoughts should turn to the most blissful time of it. That, toppled from eminence, and from the all-but-certain expectation of far greater eminence, outcast, reviled, he should again seek refuge among those who had welcomed him earlier, whose men were not so demanding and whose women were not so squeamish, who took in a person, a suppliant, a wretch, in the words of that favorite hymn of theirs—second only to “Amazing Grace”—“Just as I am, without one plea.”

  Oh, what a fall was there! One day, popular governor of Tennessee, newly reelected to a second term in office, likely, almost destined, to become, with the aid of his mentor, Andrew Jackson, President, newly married at thirty-seven to a lovely daughter of one of the state’s first families, then, overnight: ruin—stark, utter ruin.

  Whatever was the truth of the matter, nobody knew to this day. She refused to reproach him (which was taken to mean that it was something that no woman might sully her lips with), and not even in his own defense, though accused of conduct unspeakable, publicly posted as a cad and a coward, burned in effigy—not even then would Houston offer a word of explanation for their separation. Yet this silence of his, instead of being construed as honorable, chivalrous even, was resented as showing contempt for public opinion and its right to know, and as an ungentlemanly insinuation against his defenseless little wife. (She was not all that defenseless. Her hot-blooded brothers were behind much of the outcry against Houston.)

  It was rumored that he had discovered, or that she herself had confessed to him, that she loved another, and that—only eighteen—she had allowed herself to be persuaded by her ambitious family to marry the state’s most eligible bachelor against her inclinations. It was rumored that he himself had put it out that he had caught her in his rival’s embrace. It was rumored that on their nuptial night his crude frontiersman’s way with a woman had frightened and repelled the refined young lady. It was rumored that that old arrow wound sustained at Horseshoe Bend when he was little more than a boy had left him with a lifelong suppurating wound in the region of the groin which the sensitive young bride could not stomach. It was also rumored that it had unmanned him altogether. What was not rumored? It was even rumored that the monster had cynically married and heartlessly sacrificed the young lady to his ambition for empire, and his subsequent career, crowned by his current success and fame, was adduced as proof of it.

  Houston had fallen low, and, always immoderate, excessive, theatrical in everything he did, he himself dug his personal pit still deeper. He refunded his wife (“bride” would have been the better word, so short had been her tenure) home to her outraged family, resigned his governorship, renounced his American citizenship, and, disguised by a beard and traveling incognito (and dead drunk, it was said, all the way), rejoined the Cherokees, this time the ones out west (John Jolly was out there now, and he welcomed home his adopted son)—an outcast among outcasts.

  There to hide his head in shame and disgrace forevermore? To wallow in the dirt of his downfall? To white Tennessee so it seemed. For soon it was learned that he had become—this man of destiny—a frontier saloonkeeper, drinking most of the profits, gambling away the rest with his patrons, and engaging in rowdy brawls, even knocking his old foster-father to the ground in one drunken debauch, that all traces of civilization had moulted from him to be replaced by the head feathers, and the little else, of savagery, that he had gone native with a vengeance, participating in bestial Indian orgies, and lastly that he had sunk to that state in which none could be more debased: that he had become (it had to be uttered in a whisper, behind the hand) a squaw-man. She with whom he shared the blanket was Diana, daughter of John Rogers, veteran of Horseshoe Bend, and, before that, Ridge’s deputy in the bloody dispatch of the traitor Doublehead. That the said Diana was reported to be surpassingly beautiful only deepened the depravity. That she was all of about one-eighth Indian did not lessen the odium of miscegenation.

  The People, too, could correspond with one another now, thanks to Sequoyah, and from letters back home of those newly emigrated out there (the concluding message of which was nearly always “stay where you are” ) emerged a picture of Houston as a man so deep in the sulks, so resentful of those who had rejected him, as to have gone off his head, gone childish, a white man who was now a caricature of all that The People themselves had so painstakingly shed and put behind them. He went around armed with a bow and arrows. He would spe
ak only Cherokee, conversing with white men through an interpreter. His costume was an embroidered hunting shirt, fringed buckskin leggings, beaded moccasins. His long hair was braided in a queue, crowned, when not with feathers, with a turban. As self-appointed Cherokee Ambassador to the Great White Father, he had even appeared in this get-up, all six and a quarter feet of him, in the halls of Congress (where formerly he had represented Tennessee), to the astonishment, not to mention the embarrassment, of none there so much as Ross, Ridge, Agiduda and their delegation, themselves all looking like senators in their swallow-tailed black bombazine frock coats and beaver top hats.

  A broken man, a finished man, and stories of him (his platform the dirt-floored barroom of that low grogshop of his, lost in the middle of nowhere) drunkenly declaiming to his audience of drunks that he would yet make his triumphant reappearance on the world’s stage, the tastelessness of his having had his portrait painted, on one trip back east, in a Roman toga, standing barefoot amid the ruins of ancient Carthage, as Caius Marius, the exile who made a comeback, only added to the image of failure that of foolishness.

  Now that this has-been, this down-and-outer, this laughingstock had led a handful of backwoodsmen to victory over a disciplined army and drawn upon the map of the world a vast new nation and been acclaimed its President, it was said that the whole thing had been a smoke screen all along, a calculated, incredibly farsighted and devilishly clever charade.

  Those who said that Houston had had something in the back of his mind as long ago as seventeen years, when he advised his old friend Diwali to leave The Territory and migrate to Texas, were crediting the man with foresight that amounted to divination. But Houston always had an unrestrained imagination, boundless ambition, and there was before him the historical example of another daring dreamer; he would not have been the first man to let his thoughts wander westward, and Texas was worth keeping an eye on. It was just about the size for the size of him. From the Rio Grande to the Canadian border it stretched, from Louisiana to the Pacific, almost unpopulated, totally ungovernable from a capital a world away of a government only recently emancipated from Spain and still just learning to crawl. To do a friend a good turn by pointing him to this new land of opportunity was to have credit to draw upon, should the need ever arise.

  And a powerful friend this one was, chief now of some two thousand, who, since he blazed the trail with his fugitive little band, had emigrated west and joined him. Over the years since his moving to Texas, Houston had seen to it that he had steadily grown in power by sending him Indians from all the dispossessed tribes. These were no longer disposed to fight one another there in territory big enough for them all, and more. There they could bury the tomahawk, smoke the peace pipe. They knew at long last who their common enemy was. They had come to number nearly twenty thousand. All this might suit the still nebulous designs of that downfallen but determined self-styled Indian, Sam Houston. He had his own reasons for hating whites.

  When the time was ripe a provocation had to be found sufficient in the eyes of the world to make a man give up the governorship of a state, the almost certain succession to the presidency of all the states, for a prize greater than these: a vast country all his own, he its first citizen. What but the disappointment—cause withheld, no discussion permitted, put whatever construction you liked upon that silence—of a failed marriage? It was over poor little Eliza Allen, a pawn in his plans, that Houston had heartlessly advanced, while intimating that he himself was the injured party.

  But why so elaborate, so indirect a way to the prize he perceived? According to this script it was because he was not the first to perceive that prize, there had been that other man, and his case was cautionary; it was to avoid the mistakes of his predecessor that Houston had done things in his devious way. Long before him, Aaron Burr also had studied those vast uncolored areas on the map and dreamed of an empire in the west. For his plotting and scheming Burr had been charged with interference in the internal affairs of a friendly foreign nation, the same nation whose affairs Houston intended to interfere in: Mexico. This, under the laws of the United States, was treason, and for that high crime Burr was arrested and brought to trial. For lack of evidence, he was acquitted, but that put an end to Burr’s dream.

  Now, treason against the United States was a charge that could be brought only against a citizen of that country. Once over that hurdle, the moves in Houston’s intricate game, including that opening sacrificial pawn, poor little Eliza, all fell into place. And so Houston renewed and strengthened those ties with the Cherokees formed when he was a boy on the banks of the Hiwassee.

  It was in alliance with Diwali’s army of mixed red warriors, some eighteen hundred strong, that Houston had won his unforeseeable victory at San Jacinto. Not by their fighting alongside him but by their staying out of the fight: that was how they had aided him.

  The Mexican authorities had encouraged the emigration of Indians from the United States to Texas. The province was spacious, sparsely settled. These were people disenchanted, to say the least, with Mexico’s mighty, and increasingly expansionist-minded, neighbor to the east. They were pastoral, peaceable, unlike the wild Comanches, the Apaches. They were a counterbalance to Austin’s Anglos. Not only were they welcomed—now with the growing restiveness of those Anglos, they were promised that, should rebellion break out, and, with their help, be put down, they would be granted indisputable title to the lands they occupied in east Texas. They had every reason to side with the Mexicans. What secured their nonintervention in the war was Houston’s old friendship with Diwali—his being a Cherokee himself.

  1800! As many as Santa Anna’s own troops—but with this difference between them: they were far more warlike because they were far more motivated. Driven there from lands much loved, and having lived there long enough now to love this place, with nowhere else to flee to, they would make this their last stand; what was Texas to those peons impressed into the dictator’s ranks? Had the confederated Indians fought alongside the Mexicans that day at San Jacinto, as self-interest suggested they should, the outcome would surely have been reversed. It was their neutrality that made the difference. Houston, too, had promised them title to their land should the rebellion be decided in his side’s favor, but in gambling on that the Indians were taking a mighty big risk. The Texans were odds-on losers.

  All this Agiduda learned at that meeting of Ross’s cabinet. From Texas had come an emissary empowered by Houston and Diwali to offer the Cherokees a home, to urge them to come out en masse to the new country, their country, the only one headed by one of theirs. An all-Indian country, outside the reach of the United States. There they could preserve their old ways. They were welcome. They were wanted. They were needed. For no sooner had Santa Anna been released from captivity and repatriated than he broke the pledge which had gained him his freedom and began raising an army to invade and reclaim Texas, and vowing to punish every Texan with summary execution. With their help he could be repulsed. The whole world knew what warriors the Cherokees were!

  God knew, by then the Cherokees needed a home to go to! For this was after the government in Washington, in order to get around Ross’s stubborn immovability, had taken the simple expedient of deposing him from office and appointing Ridge as The People’s negotiator. Yet to this emissary from the white red man for whom time had stood still for the Cherokees since his boyhood, the cabinet members could only listen politely and with straight faces. What an irony! Here was this imitation Indian, Houston, urging them to preserve their way of life when that way of life was long a thing of the past, hardly a memory. Warriors? The Cherokees? Maybe those of them out west, cut off from the encroachment of the whites, the teachings of the missionaries, the blandishments of creature comforts, the things that softened a man, no part of the Cherokees’ self-transformation, maybe they still lived in the old tribal way, dancing the Green Corn dance, playing the bloody, the murderous stick-ball game, maybe they were still warriors, but to the ones in the east, now so w
orldly, so mock-white, these things were quaint and curious, childlike if not childish. Texas, even more remote, was more daunting than The Territory; what was expected of them that they do to win their place there, fight for it, was the very tactic they had always rejected here.

  Said John Ross to Agiduda before the meeting broke up, “David, you look like a man smiling to keep from crying.”

  Agiduda surveyed Ross from his sandy crown down to his small feet—a survey that took but little time considering the distance to be covered. “I was just trying, John,” he said, “to picture you in nothing but a breechclout, a feather in your hair, and war paint on your face.”

  “And yourself? What about it, David, lad? The unspoiled wilds of Texas, where the buffalo still roam and the alligators enliven your morning dip. Fresh trophies on the old scalp pole. Stewed puppy in the cook pot. You’d take to that life, wouldn’t you?”

  “Ugh,” said Agiduda.

  It was not the Indian grunt of assent, it was the white grunt of distaste.

  The Ridges, long in favor of going but lingering on in hopes of persuading the others all to go with them, had gone at last. They did not go on foot. They went, for most of the way, by steamboat. Twenty dollars a head was the cost to the government of transporting the volunteer Indians on the open deck, but for the Major and his family stateroom passage was provided at a cost of some three hundred. This too was chalked down, to be remembered.

  The Ridges were only being sensible, facing up to reality, and you told yourself that you ought to stop being foolish and follow their example. The day was almost upon you. Yet, like those people who put off making a last will and die intestate because they cannot face death, you made no preparations. How prepare yourself for a life that you had no wish to live, or care how you were transported to the place that you knew as the land of death? The slower the pace you went at the better. In your hopelessness, suffering and the prospect of suffering came to have a perverse appeal for you. You dared your enemies to do their worst for all the world to see and shame. In this there was some small measure of revenge.