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THE STORY OF
OLD FORT LOUDON
[Illustration: "The officers expressed their earnest remonstrances."
(See page 198.)]
The Story
of
Old Fort Loudon
By
Charles Egbert Craddock
Author of "In the Tennessee Mountains," "The Prophet of the
Great Smoky Mountains," etc., etc.
With Illustrations by Ernest C. Peixotto
New York
The Macmillan Company
London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.
1899
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1898,
By The Macmillan Company.
_Norwood Press_
_J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._
Illustrations
"The officers expressed their earnest remonstrances" (see
page 198) _Frontispiece_
Facing page
"What more wonderful? What more fearful?" 16
"The canoe rocked in the swirls" 54
"And oh, the moment of housewifely pride!" 128
"Plunging through the gate and half across the parade ground" 240
Belinda and the Ensign on the moonlit rampart 252
"The men had been hastily formed into a square" 346
"He stared forward blankly at the inevitable prospect" 376
The Story of Old Fort Loudon
CHAPTER I
Along the buffalo paths, from one salt-lick to another, a group of
pioneers took a vagrant way through the dense cane-brakes. Never a wheel
had then entered the deep forests of this western wilderness; the
frontiersman and the packhorse were comrades. Dark, gloomy, with long,
level summit-lines, a grim outlier of the mountain range, since known as
the Cumberland, stretched from northeast to southwest, seeming as they
approached to interpose an insurmountable barrier to further progress,
until suddenly, as in the miracle of a dream, the craggy wooded heights
showed a gap, cloven to the heart of the steeps, opening out their path
as through some splendid gateway, and promising deliverance, a new life,
and a new and beautiful land. For beyond the darkling cliffs on either
hand an illuminated vista stretched in every lengthening perspective,
with softly nestling sheltered valleys, and parallel lines of distant
azure mountains, and many a mile of level woodland high on an elevated
plateau, all bedight in the lingering flare of the yellow, and deep red,
and sere brown of late autumn, and all suffused with an opaline haze and
the rich, sweet languors of sunset-tide on an Indian-summer day.
As that enchanted perspective opened to the view, a sudden joyous
exclamation rang out on the still air. The next moment a woman, walking
beside one of the packhorses, clapped both hands over her lips, and
turning looked with apprehensive eyes at the two men who followed her.
The one in advance cast at her a glance of keen reproach, and then the
whole party paused and with tense attention bent every faculty to
listen.
Silence could hardly have been more profound. The regular respiration of
the two horses suggested sound. But the wind did not stir; the growths
of the limitless cane-brakes in the valley showed no slight quiver in
the delicately poised fibers of their brown feathery crests; the haze,
all shot through with glimmers of gold in its gauzy gray folds, rested
on the mute woods; the suave sky hung above the purple western heights
without a breath. No suggestion of motion in all the landscape, save the
sudden melting away of a flake of vermilion cloud in a faintly green
expanse of the crystal heavens.
The elder man dropped his hand, that had been raised to impose silence,
and lifted his eyes from the ground. "I cannot be rid of the idea that
we are followed," he said. "But I hear nothing."
Although the eldest of the group, he was still young,--twenty-five,
perhaps. He was tall, strong, alert, with a narrow, long face; dark,
slow eyes, that had a serious, steadfast expression; dark brown hair,
braided in the queue often discarded by the hunters of this day. A
certain staid, cautious sobriety of manner hardly assorted with the
rough-and-ready import of his garb and the adventurous place and time.
Both he and the younger man, who was in fact a mere boy not yet
seventeen, but tall, muscular, sinewy,--stringy, one might say,--of
build, were dressed alike in loose hunting-shirts of buckskin, heavily
fringed, less for the sake of ornament than the handiness of a selection
of thongs always ready to be detached for use; for the same reason the
deerskin leggings, reaching to the thighs over the knee-breeches and
long stockings of that day, were also furnished with these substantial
fringes; shot-pouch and powder-horn were suspended from a leather belt,
and on the other side a knife-hilt gleamed close to the body. Both wore
coonskin caps, but that of the younger preserved the tail to hang down
like a plume among his glossy brown tangles of curls, which, but for a
bit of restraining ribbon, resisted all semblance to the gentility of a
queue. The boy was like his brother in the clear complexion and the
color of the dark eyes and hair, but the expression of his eyes was
wild, alert, and although fired with the earnest ardor of first youth,
they had certain roguish intimations, subdued now since they were still
and seriously expectant, but which gave token how acceptably he could
play that cherished _role_, to a secluded and isolated fireside, of
family buffoon, and make gay mirth for the applause of the
chimney-corner. The brothers were both shod with deerskin buskins, but
the other two of the party wore the shoe of civilization,--one a
brodequin, that despite its rough and substantial materials could but
reflect a grace from the dainty foot within it; the other showed the
stubby shapes deemed meet for the early stages of the long tramp of
life. The little girl's shoes were hardly more in evidence than the
mother's, for the skirts of children were worn long, and only now and
then was betrayed a facetious skip of some active toes in the blunt
foot-gear. Their dresses were of the same material, a heavy gray serge,
which fact gave the little one much satisfaction, for she considered
that it made them resemble the cow and calf--both great personages in
her mind. But she flattered herself; her aspect in the straight, short
bodice that enclosed her stout little rotund figure, and the quaint
white mob-cap that encircled her chubby, roseate face, all smiles, and
indeterminate nose, and expanded, laughing, red mouth, and white,
glittering, irregular teeth, had little in common with the mother whom
she admired and imitated, and but for the remnant of the elder's stuff
gown, of which her own was fashioned, the comparison with the cow and
calf would have failed altogether. She was not even a good imitator of
the maternal methods. Of course the days of her own infancy, recent
though they were, had long been lost to her limited memory, and a token
of the length of time that they had dwelt in the wilderness, and the
impressions her juvenile faculties had received therefrom might have
been given by the fact that her doll was reared after pappoose fashion;
on her back was slung a basket in the manner of the peripatetic cradle
of the Indian women, and from this protruded the head and the widely
open eyes of a cat slightly past kittenhood, that was adapting its
preferences to the conditions of the journey with a discretion which
might argue an extension of the powers of instinct in pioneer
animals,--a claim which has often been advanced.
The cat evidently realized the fact that it was a domesticated creature,
that naught was possible for it in these strange woods but speedy
destruction by savage beast or man, and that decorous submission became
a cat promoted to the estate of a juvenile settler's baby. The cat was
as silent and as motionless during the halt as the rest of the party,
looking out watchfully over the shoulder of the little three-year-old,
who, with perfect and mute trust, and great, serene eyes, gazed up at
the face of her father, nothing doubting his infinite puissance and
willingness to take care of her. When he spoke and the tension was over,
she began to skip once more, the jostled cat putting out her claws to
hold to the wicker-work of her basket; the two had ridden most of the
day on one of the packhorses, their trifling weight adding but little to
the burden of the scanty store of clothing and bedding, the cooking and
farming utensils, the precious frying-pan and skillet, the invaluable
axe, hand-saw, auger, and hoe,--the lares and penates of the pioneer.
There were some surveying-instruments, too, and in the momentary
relaxation of suspense the elder of the brothers consulted a compass, as
he had done more than once that day.
"I thought I heard something," said the boy, shouldering his rifle and
turning westward, "but I couldn't say what."
"Ah, _quelle barbarie_!" exclaimed the woman, with a sigh, half
petulance, half relief.
She seemed less the kind of timber that was to build up the great
structure of western civilization than did the others,--all unfitted
for its hardships and privation and labor. Her gray serge gown was worn
with a sort of subtle elegance hardly discounted by the plainness of the
material and make. The long, pointed waist accented the slender grace of
her figure; the skirt had folds clustered on the hips that gave a sort
of fullness to the drapery and suggested the charm of elaborate costume.
She wore a hood on her head,--a large calash, which had a curtain that
hung about her shoulders. This was a dark red, of the tint called Indian
red, and as she pushed it back and turned her face, realizing that the
interval of watching was over, the fairness of her complexion, the
beauty of her dark, liquid eyes, the suggestion of her well-ordered,
rich brown hair above her high forehead, almost regal in its noble cast,
the perfection of the details of her simple dress, all seemed infinitely
incongruous with her estate as a poor settler's wife, and the fact that
since dawn and for days past she had, with the little all she possessed,
fled from the pursuit of savage Indians. She returned with a severe
glance the laughing grimace of the boy, with which, despite his own fear
but a moment ago, he had, in the mobility of the moods of youth,
decorated his countenance.
"If it were not for you, Hamish," she said to him, "I should not be so
terrified. I have seen Indians many a time,--yes,--and when they were
on the war-path, too. But to add to their fury by an act of defiance on
our part! It is fatal--they have only to overtake us."
"What was I to do, Odalie?" said Hamish MacLeod, suddenly grave, and
excitedly justifying himself. "There was that red Injun, as still as a
stump. I thought he was a stump--it was nearly dark. And I heard the
wild turkey gobbling,--you heard it yourself, you sent me out to get it
for supper,--you said that one more meal on buffalo meat would be the
death of you,--and it was nearly dark,--and--gobble--gobble--gobble--so
appetizing. I can hear it yet."
With an expression of terror she caught suddenly at his hand as he
walked beside her, but he petulantly pulled away.
"I mean _in my mind_, Odalie,--I hear it now _in my mind_. And all of a
sudden it came to me that it was that stump up on the slope that was
gobbling so cheerful, and gobbling me along into gunshot.[1] And just
then I was in rifle range, and I fired at the same minute that the stump
fired, or the turkey, whichever you choose to call him--What is the
reason, Sandy, that Injuns are so apt to load with too little powder?"
he broke off, speaking to his brother. "The turkey shot straight--his
ball dropped spent just at my feet."
"_Quelle barbarie!_" exclaimed Mrs. MacLeod, catching his hand
again--this time to give it a little squeeze--impressed with the
imminence of the boy's danger and their loss.
But Hamish was quite as independent of caresses and approval as of
rebuke, and he carelessly twisted his hand away from his sister-in-law
as he cocked his head to one side to hear the more experienced hunter's
reply.
"Because their powder is so precious, and scant, and hard to come by,
they economize it," said Alexander MacLeod, as he trudged along behind
the packhorses, guarding the rear of his little party with his rifle on
his shoulder.
"The turkey would better have economized his meat this time," said the
boy, swinging round his belt to lift the lid of his powder-horn and peep
gloatingly in at the reinforced stores. "He was economical with his
powder, but extravagant with his life; for that turkey will gobble no
more."
He gobbled a brisk and agitated imitation of the cry of the fowl, and
then broke off to exclaim, "_Quelle barbarie!_--eh, Odalie?"
He looked at his sister-in-law with a roguish eye, as he travestied the
tone and manner of her favorite ejaculation, which he was wont to call
the "family oath." For indeed they had all come to make use of the
phrase, in their varying accent, to express their disaffection with the
ordering of events, or the conduct of one another, or the provoking
mischance of inanimate objects,--as the gun's hanging fire, or the
reluctance of a spark to kindle from flint to make their camp-fire, or
the overturning of a pot of buffalo soup, or bear stew, when the
famished fugitives were ready to partake in reality of the feast which
their olfactory nerves and eyes had already begun. Even the little girl
would exclaim, "_Quelle barbarie!_" when thorns caught her skirts and
held her prisoner as she had skipped along so low down among the
brambles and dense high cane, that one must needs wonder at the
smallness of Empire, as expressed in her personality and funny cap,
taking its westward way. "_Quelle barbarie!_" too, when the cat's
culture in elegant manners required of maternal solicitude a smart box
on the ear. And if the cat did not say "_Quelle barbarie!_" with an
approved French accent, we all know that she thought it.
"So much better for the soul's health than swearing," Hamish was wont to
say, when Odalie showed signs of considering the phrase a bit of
ridicule of her and her Frenchy forbears.
Her grandfather had been a Huguenot refugee, driven out of his country
by the religious persecution about the time of the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, seventy odd years previously. Her father had prospered
but indifferently in the more civilized section of the New World, and
had died early. There his daughter had met her young Scotchman, who was
piqued by her dainty disdain of his French accent, which MacLeod had
recklessly placed on exhibition, and was always seeking to redeem the
impression, finally feeling that he must needs improve it by having a
perfect Mentor at hand. He had brought from the land of his birth, which
he had quitted in early years, but few distinctive local expressions,
yet a certain burr clung to his speech, and combined as incongruously as
might be with his French accent. She evidently considered the latter
incurable, intolerable, and always eyed him, when he spoke in that
language, with ostentatious wonder that such verbal atrocities could be,
and murmured gently in lieu of reply--"_Quelle barbarie!_" He found his
revenge in repeating a similar slogan, one that had often been as a
supplement to this more usual phrase,--"_Partons pour la France
aujourd'hui, pour l'amour de Dieu!_" It had been urged by her
grandmother in moments of depression, and Odalie, born and reared in the
royal province of South Carolina, had always the logic and grace to
wince at this ungrateful aspiration to return to France,--the dear
France that had been so much too hot to hold them. For the family had
rejoiced to escape thence with their lives, even at the forfeiture of
all that they possessed.
This jesting warfare of words had become established in the MacLeod
household, and often recurred, sometimes with a trifle of acrimony.
Little they thought how significant it was to be and how it should serve
them in their future lives.
The sun was going down. Far, far purple mountains, that they might never
have seen but for that great clifty gateway, were bathed in the glory of
the last red suffusion of the west; the evening star of an unparalleled
whiteness pulsated in the amber-tinted lucidity of the sky. The
fragrance of the autumn woods was more marked on the dank night air. One
could smell the rich mould along a watercourse near at hand, the branch
from a spring bubbling up in the solid rock hard by. Odalie had seated
herself on the horizontal ledge at the base of one of the crags and had
thrown back her hood, against which her head rested. Her large eyes were
soft and lustrous, but pensive and weary.
"Rest, Odalie, while Hamish and I make the fire, and then you can fix
the things for supper," her husband admonished her.
It was the first time that they had halted that day, and dinner had been
but the fragments of breakfast eaten while on the march. There had been
a sudden outbreak of the Cherokee Indians which had driven them from the
more frequented way where they feared pursuit,--this, and the fate of
the brave who had sought to lure Hamish to his death last night with
the mimicry of the gobbler, and was killed in consequence himself. They
could not judge whether he had been alone or one of a party; whether his
body might be discovered and his death avenged by the death or capture
of them all; whether he had been a scout, thrown out to discover the
direction they took, and his natural blood-thirstiness had overmastered
his instructions, and he must needs seek to kill the boy before his
return with his news.
With this more recent fear that they were followed they had not to-day
dared to build a fire lest its smoke betray to the crafty observation of
the Indians, although at a great distance, their presence in this remote
quarter of the wilderness, far even from the Indian war-path, that,
striking down the valley between the Cumberland range and the eastern
mountains, was then not only the road that the Indians followed to
battle, but the highway of traffic and travel, the only recognized and
known path leading from the Cherokee settlements south of the Tennessee
River through this great uninhabited park or hunting-ground to the
regions of other Indian tribes on the Scioto and to Western Virginia.
Now, however, rest and refreshment were necessary; even more imperative
was the need of a fire as a protection to the camp against the
encroachments of wild beasts; for wolves were plentiful and roamed the
night-bound earth, and the active panther, the great American cougar,
was wont to look down from the branches of overhanging trees. The horses
were not safe beyond the flare of the flames, to say nothing of wife and
child. Therefore the risk of attracting observation from Indians must be
run, especially since it was abated by the descending dusk. The little
treacherous smoke escaping from the forest to curl against the blue sky
need not be feared at night. The darkness would hide all from a
distance; as to foes lurking nearer at hand, why, if any such there
were, then their fate was already upon them. With the stout heart of the
pioneer, Alexander MacLeod heaped the fagots upon the ground and struck
the flint and steel together after giving the officious little Josephine
a chance to try her luck with the tinder. Soon the dry dead wood was
timidly ablaze, while Hamish led the horses to the water and picketed
them out.
Odalie's eyes followed the boy with a sort of belated yet painful
anxiety, thinking how near he had been to parting with that stanch young
spirit, and what a bereavement would have been the loss of that blithe
element from their daily lives.
"_Quelle barbarie!_" she exclaimed suddenly. "_Quelle barbarie!_"
Perhaps her husband realized her fatigue and depression and was willing
to put his French accent on parade for her amusement; perhaps it was for
the sake of the old flouting retort; he theatrically rejoined without
looking up, "_Partons pour la France aujourd'hui, pour l'amour de
Dieu._"
And Josephine, taking the cat out of its basket and kissing its whiskers
and the top of its head, was condoling with it on its long
restraint:--"_Quelle barbarie, ma poupee, quelle barbarie, ma douce
mignonne,_" she poutingly babbled.
Alexander MacLeod paused to listen to this affectionate motherly
discourse; then glanced up at his wife with a smile, to call her
attention to it.
She had not moved. She had turned to stone. It seemed as if she could
never move again. A waving blotch of red sumach leaves in a niche in the
dark wall of the crag hard by had caught her notice. A waving blotch of
red leaves in the autumnal dusk,--what more natural?
What more wonderful? What more fearful?
There was no wind. How could the bough stir? There was no bough. The
blotch of color was the red and black of a hideous painted face that in
the dusk, the treacherous dusk, had approached very near and struck her
dumb and turned her to stone. It had approached so near that she could
see its expression change as the sound of the words spoken about the
fireside arose on the air. Her mental faculties were rallying from the
torpor which still paralyzed her physical being; she understood the
reason for this facial change, and by a mighty effort of the will
summoned all her powers to avail herself of it.
Alexander MacLeod, glancing up with a casual laugh on his face, was
almost stunned to see a full-armed and painted Cherokee rise up suddenly
from among the bushes about the foot of the cliff. Standing distinctly
outlined against the softly tinted mountain landscape, which was
opalescent in its illumined hues, faint and fading, and extending his
hand with a motion of inquiry toward Odalie, the savage demanded in a
lordly tone,--"Flinch? Flanzy?"
As in a dream MacLeod beheld her, nodding her head in silent
acquiescence,--as easily as she might were she humming a tune and hardly
cared to desist from melody for words. She could not speak!
The Cherokee, his face smeared with vermilion, with a great white circle
around one eye and a great black circle around the other, looked not
ill-pleased, yet baffled for a moment. "Me no talk him," he observed.
[Illustration: "What more wonderful? What more fearful?"]
He had never heard of Babel, poor soul, but he was as subject to the
inconvenience of the confusion of tongues as if he had had an active
share in the sacrilegious industry of those ambitious architects who
builded in the plains of Shinar.
"But I can speak English too," said Odalie.
"Him?" said the Cherokee, "and him?" pointing at Alexander and then at
Hamish--at Hamish, with his recollection of that dead Indian, a
Cherokee, lying, face downward, somewhere there to the northward under
the dark trees, his blood crying aloud for the ferocious reprisal in
which his tribe were wont to glut their vengeance.
"Both speak French," said Odalie.
The Indian gazed upon her doubtfully. He had evidently only a few
disconnected sentences of English at command, although he understood far
more than he could frame, but he could merely discern and distinguish
the sound of the admired "Flanzy." Odalie realized with a shiver that it
was only this trifle that had preserved the lives of the whole party.
For even previous to the present outbreak and despite the stipulations
of their treaties with the English, the Cherokees were known to have
hesitated long in taking sides in the struggle between France and Great
Britain, still in progress now in 1758, for supremacy in this western
country, and many were suspected of yet inclining to the French, who had
made great efforts to detach them from the British interest.
"Where go?" demanded the chief, suspiciously.
"To Chote, old town," she averred at haphazard, naming the famous
"beloved town, [2]city of refuge," of the Cherokee nation.
He nodded gravely. "I go Chote,--travel with white man," he remarked,
still watchful-eyed.
The shadows were deepening; the flames had revealed other dark figures,
eight braves at the heels of the spokesman, all painted, all armed, all
visibly mollified by the aspect that the dialogue had taken on,--that of
an interpreting female for a French husband.
"What do--Chote--old town?" demanded the chief.
"Buy furs," said Odalie at a venture, pointing at her husband.
The Cherokee listened intently, his blanket drawn up close around his
ears, as if thus shrouded he took counsel of his own identity. The
garment was one of those so curiously woven of the lustrous feathers of
wild-fowl that the texture had a rich tufted aspect. This lost
manufacture of the Cherokee Indians has been described by a traveler in
that region in 1730 as resembling a "fine flowered silk shag."
"Ugh!" muttered the chief. "Ugh!" he said again.
But the tone was one of satisfaction. The buying and shipping of peltry
was at that date a most lucrative business, furs bearing a high price in
all the markets of the world, and this region bade fair to be one of the
large sources of supply. The Indians profited by selling them, and this,
too, was the magnet that was beginning to draw the hardy Carolina
hunters westward, despite the hazards. At no other industry elsewhere
could commensurate sums of money be earned without outlay beyond a rifle
and ammunition and a hunter's cheap lodgement and fare. The Indians
early developed a dependence on the supplies of civilization,--guns,
ammunition, knives, tools, paints, to say nothing of fire-water, quickly
demonstrating their superiority to primitive inventions, and this
traffic soon took on most prosperous proportions. Thus, although the
Cherokees resented the presence of the white man upon their
hunting-ground in the capacity of competitor, and still more of
colonist, they were very tolerant of his entrance into their towns and
peaceful residence there as buyer and shipper--one of the earliest
expressions of middleman in the West--of the spoils of the chase, the
trophies of the Indian's skill in woodcraft. Although the British
government, through treaties with the Cherokees, sought a monopoly of
this traffic as a means of controlling them by furnishing or withholding
their necessities as their conduct toward the English colonists on the
frontier might render judicious, many of the earlier of these traders
were French--indeed one of the name of Charleville was engaged in such
commerce on the present site of the city of Nashville as early as the
year 1714, his base of supplies being in Louisiana, altogether
independent of the English, as he was then one of the traders of Antoine
Crozat, under the extensive charter of that enterprising speculator.
The French had exerted all their suavest arts of ingratiation with the
Cherokees, and as the Indians were now on the point of breaking out into
open enmity against the English, the idea of a French trader in furs,
which Odalie had suggested, was so acceptable to the Cherokee scheme of
things, that for the time all doubt and suspicion vanished from the
savage's mind. Vanished so completely, in fact, that within the
half-hour the chief was seated with the family-party beside their
camp-fire and sharing their supper, and the great Willinawaugh, with
every restraint of pride broken down, with characteristic reserve cast
to the winds, speaking to the supposed Frenchman, Alexander MacLeod, as
to a brother, was detailing with the utmost frankness and ferocity the
story of the treatment of the Indians by the Virginians, their allies,
in the late expedition against Fort Duquesne. The Cherokees had marched
thither to join General Forbes's army, agreeably to their treaty with
the English, by which, in consideration of the building of a fort within
the domain of their nation to afford them protection against their
Indian enemies and the French, now the enemies of their English allies,
and to shelter their old men and women and children during such absences
of the warriors of the tribe, they had agreed to take up arms under the
British flag whenever they were so required. And this the Cherokees had
done.
Then his painted, high-cheek-boned face grew rigid with excitement, and
the eagle feathers bound to his scalp-lock quivered in the light of the
fire as he told of the result. His braves hovered near to hear, now
catching the broad flare of the flames on their stalwart, erect forms
and flashing fire-locks, now obscured in the fluctuating shadow. The
pale-faced group listened, too, scarcely moving a muscle, for by long
familiarity with the sound, they understood something of the general
drift of the Cherokee language, which, barring a few phrases, they could
not speak.
There had been only a very bloody skirmish,--since known as "Grant's
defeat,"--but no fight at Fort Duquesne, not even a formal defence of
the works. The French had surely forgotten General Braddock! They had
forgotten the fleeing red-coated _Unaka_[A] soldiers who, three years
before, had been beaten near there with such terrible slaughter, and
their chief warrior, the great Braddock, himself, had been tamed by
death--the only foe that could tame him!--and lay now somewhere in those
eastern woods. He pointed vaguely with his hand as he spoke, for
Braddock's grave had been left unmarked, in the middle of the military
road, in order that, passing over it without suspicion, it might not be
rifled and desecrated by those savage Indians who had fought with such
furious efficiency in the French interest.[3]
Willinawaugh paused, and all his braves muttered in applause "Ugh! Ugh!"
To the warlike Cherokee the event of a battle was not paramount. Victory
or defeat they realized was often the result of fortuitous circumstance.
Courage was their passion. "We cannot live without war," was their
official reply to an effort on the part of the government to mediate
between them and another tribe, the Tuscaroras, their hereditary
enemies.
But upon this second attempt on Fort Duquesne the British had only to
plant their flag, and repair the dismantled works, and change the name
to Fort Pitt. For in the night the French had abandoned and fired the
stronghold, and finally made their escape down the Ohio River. In all
good faith, however, the Cherokees had marched thither to help the
Virginians defend their frontier,--far away from home! So far, that the
horses of a few of the warriors had given out, and finding some horses
running wild as they came on their homeward way through the western
region of Virginia, these braves appropriated the animals for the
toilsome march of so many hundred miles, meaning no harm; whereupon a
band of Virginians fell upon these Cherokees, their allies, and killed
them! And his voice trembled with rage as he rehearsed it.
For all her address Odalie could not sustain her _role_. She uttered a
low moan and put her hand before her eyes. For he had not entered upon
the sequel,--a sequel that she knew well;--the sudden summary
retaliation of the Cherokees upon the defenseless settlers in the region
contiguous to the line of march of the returning warriors,--blood for
blood is the invariable Cherokee rule!
Never, never could she forget the little cabin on the west side of New
River where she and her adventurous husband had settled on the Virginia
frontier not far from other adventurous and scattered pioneers. They had
thought themselves safe enough; many people in these days of the western
advance relied on the community strength of a small station, well
stockaded, with the few settlers in the cabins surrounded by the
palisades; others, and this family of the number, felt it sufficient
protection to be within the sound of a signal gun from a neighboring
house. But the infuriated homeward-bound Cherokees fell on the first of
these cabins that lay in their way, massacred the inmates, and marched
on in straggling blood-thirsty bands, burning and slaying as they went.
So few were the settlers in that region that there was no hope in
uniting for defense. They fled wildly in scattered groups, and this
little household found itself in the untried, unfrequented region west
of the great Indian trail, meditating here a temporary encampment, until
the aggrieved Cherokees on their homeward march should all have passed
down the "Warrior's Path" to their far-away settlements south of the
Tennessee River. Then, the way being clear, the fugitives hoped to
retrace their journey, cross New River and regain the more eastern
section of Virginia. Meantime they were slipping like shadows through
the dark night into the great unknown realms of this uninhabited
southwestern wilderness, itself a land of shadow, of dreams, of the
vague unreality of mere rumor. Some intimation of their flight must have
been given, for following their trail had skulked the Indian whom Hamish
had killed,--a spy doubtless, the forerunner of these Cherokees, who,
but for thinking them French, would have let out their spirits into the
truly unknown, by way of that great mountain pass opening on an unknown
world. If the savages but dreamed of the fate that had befallen their
scout!--she hardly dared look at Hamish when she thought of the dead
Indian, lest her thought be read.
She wondered what had become of her neighbors; where had they gone, and
how had they fared, and where was she herself going in this journey to
Chote,--a name, a mere name, heard by chance, and repeated at haphazard,
to which she had committed the future.
This fresh anxiety served to renew her attention. Willinawaugh, still
rehearsing the griefs of his people, and the perfidy, as he construed
it, of the government, was detailing the perverse distortion of the
English compliance with their treaty to erect a great defensive work in
the Cherokee nation--the heart of the nation--to aid them in their wars
on Indian enemies, and to protect their country and the non-combatants
when the warriors should be absent in the service of their allies, the
English. Such a work had the government indeed erected, on the south
bank of the Tennessee River, mounted with twelve great cannon, not five
miles from Chote, old town, and there, one hundred and fifty miles in
advance of Anglo-American civilization, lay within it now the garrison
of two hundred English soldiers!
Odalie's heart gave a great bound! She felt already safe. To be under
the protection of British cannon once more! To listen to an English
voice! Her brain was a-whirl. She could hear the drums beat. She could
hear the sentry's challenge. She even knew the countersign--"God save
the king!"--they were saying that to-night at Fort Loudon as the guard
turned out;--she did not know it; she never knew it; she was only sure
of it!
Willinawaugh had never heard of the agriculturist who sowed dragon's
teeth and whose crop matured into full-armed soldiers. But he acutely
realized this plight as he detailed how the Cherokees had protested, and
had sent a "talk" (letter) to the Earl of Loudon, who had been at the
time commander-in-chief of the British forces in America, setting forth
the fact that the Cherokees did not like the presence of so many white
people among them as the two hundred soldiers and the settlers that had
gathered about the place. The military occupation made the fort a
coercion and menace to the Cherokee people, and they requested him to
take away the soldiers and relinquish the fort with its twelve great
guns and other munitions of war to the Cherokee nation,--to which
suggestion the Earl of Loudon had seemed to turn a deaf ear.
Alexander MacLeod, deliberating gravely, realized that under such
circumstances the fort would ultimately be used against the English
interest that it was designed to foster, by reason of the ever-ready
machinations of the French influence among the Cherokees. The fort was
evidently intended to afford protection to the Cherokees, but only so
long as they were the allies of the English.
Much of the night passed in this discourse, but at length Willinawaugh
slept, his feet toward the fire, around which the other Indians, all
rolled in their blankets, like the spokes of a wheel about a hub, were
already disposed. Alexander MacLeod had been nearly the last man to drop
out of the conversation. He glanced up to note that Odalie sat still
wide awake with her back against the trunk of a great chestnut-oak, her
eyes on the fire, the child in her arms. They exchanged a glance which
said as plain as speech that he and Hamish and she would divide the
watch. Each would rest for two or three hours and watch while the others
slept. It behooved them to be cautious and guard against surprise. The
recollection of that dead Indian, lying on his face in the woods miles
to the north of them, and the doubt whether or not he belonged to this
party, and the sense of vengeance suspended like a sword by a hair,--all
impinged very heavily on Hamish's consciousness, and in his own phrase
he had to harry himself to sleep. Alexander, realizing that, as the
ablest of the family, he was their chief means of defense, betook
himself to much-needed repose, and Odalie was the only waking human
being in many and many a mile. Now and again she heard far away the
hooting of an owl, or the scream of a panther, and once, close at hand,
the leaves stirred with a stealthy tread and the horses snorted aloud.
She rose and threw more lightwood on the flaring fire, and as the flames
leaped up anew two bright green eyes in the dusk on the shadowy side of
the circle vanished; she saw the snarl of fierce fangs and no more, for
the fire burned brilliantly that night as she fed the flames, and far
down the aisles of the primeval forest the protective light was
dispensed. Above were the dense boughs of the trees, all red and yellow,
but through that great gate, the gap in the mountain wall, she could
look out on the stars that she had always known, keeping their steadfast
watch above this strange, new land. So accustomed was she to nature that
she was not awed by the presence of the somber, wooded, benighted
mountain range, rising in infinite gloom, and austere silence, and
indefinable extent against the pallid, instarred sky.
She began to think, woman-like, of that home she had left; in her mind
it was like a deserted living thing. And the poor sticks of furniture
all standing aghast and alone, the door open and flapping in the wind!
And when she remembered a blue pitcher,--a squat little blue jug that
had come from France,--left on a shelf by the window with some red
leaves in it to do duty as a bouquet,--so relieved was she now of her
fears for the lives of them all that she must needs shed tears of regret
for the little blue pitcher,--the squat little blue jug that came from
France. And how had she selected so ill among her belongings as to what
she should bring and what leave? Fifine had a better frock than that
serge thing; it would not wear so well, but her murrey-colored pelisse
trimmed with the sarcenet ribbon would have added warmth enough. If it
were not such a waste of goods she would make over her paduasoy coat for
Fifine, for she loved to see a small child very fine of attire. But
precious little time she would have for remodeling the paduasoy coat,--a
primrose-tinted ground with dark red roses, that had been her
"grand'maman's" when new. "I wonder if I expected to live always in a
hollow tree, that I should have left that pair of sheets, new ten
hundred linen, the ones that I have just woven," she arraigned herself
indignantly, as she mentally went over the stock in the pack. "And did I
think I should be so idle that I must bring instead so much spun-truck
so as to weave others. To think of those new linen sheets! And then too
that lovely, quaint little jug--the little squat blue jug that came from
France!"
Oh, no; Odalie was not at all lonely during the long watch through the
night, and did not lack subjects of meditation. The time did not hang
heavily on her hands!
It hardly seemed that an hour had passed when Hamish, in obedience to
some inward monition, turned himself suddenly, looked up, stretched
himself to a surprising length, then sat up by the fire, motioning to
her to close her eyes.
His face was compassionate; perhaps he saw traces of tears about her
eyes. He could not know why she had been weeping, or he might have
accounted his sympathy wasted. For Hamish looked upon crockery as
inanimate and a mere manufacture, yet endowed with a perverse ingenuity
in finding occasions to come into disastrous contact with a boy's
unsuspecting elbow, and get itself broken and the boy into disgrace. He
had his gentle interpretation of her sorrow, and motioned to her, once
more, to close her eyes, and pointed up at the skies, where Orion was
unsheathing his glittering blade above the eastern mountains--a warning
that the night was well-nigh spent and a chill day of early December on
the way. And it seemed only an inappreciable interval of time before
Odalie opened her eyes again, upon a crimson dawn, with the rime white
on the sparse red and brown leaves and bare boughs; to see breakfast
cooking under Hamish's ministrations; to see Fifine washing the cat's
face with fresh water from the spring--very cold it was, as Fifine
herself found it, when it came her turn to try it herself and cry
"_Quelle barbarie!_"--to see the Indians getting a party to horse to go
back and search for one of their number, who had become separated in
some way; to see poor Hamish's face pale with fear and consciousness,
and then harden with resolution to meet the worst like a man.
At length they set forth in the frosty dawn of a new day, changing their
route and making their progress further southward along untried ways she
had never thought to travel. The sun came grandly up; the mountain
range, wooded to the summit, flaunted in splendid array, red, and
yellow, and even purple, with the heavy growths of the sweet-gum trees,
and their wealth of lingering foliage. Here and there, along the
heights, grim crags showed their beetling precipices, and where the
leaves had fallen, covering great slopes with russet hues, the bare
boles and branches of the forest rose frosted with fine lace-like
effects. Sometimes, with a wild woodland call and a flash of white foam,
a cataract dashed down the valley. The feeding deer lifted their heads
to gaze after the party with evanescent curiosity and then fell to
quietly grazing again: they had not known enough of man to acquire a
fear of him. Sometimes arose the bellowing of distant herds of buffalo,
filling the Cumberland spurs and coves with a wonted sound, to which
they have now long been strangers.
Wild turkey, quail, wild duck, wild geese, the latter already beginning
their southward migration, were as abundant, one might say, as leaves on
the trees or on the ground. There were trout of the finest flavor in
these mountain streams, and one might call for what one would for
dinner. If one cared for sweets there was honey in the honeycomb in
almost any hollow tree, where the wild bees worked and the bear
profited; and for fruit and nuts there were the delicious amber
persimmons, and the sprightly frost grapes, and walnuts and hickory-nuts
and chestnuts galore.
The march was far swifter now than the rate that the settlers had
maintained before the Indians had joined the party, and the little girl
was added to the burden of one of the packhorses, but Odalie, light,
active, with her native energy tense in every nerve, and with every
pulse fired by the thought that each moment carried her nearer to the
cannon of Fort Loudon and safety, kept step valiantly with the
pedestrians. Willinawaugh sat at his ease on his horse, which was
somewhat jaded by long and continuous marches, or perhaps his patience
would not have sufficed to restrain him to the pace of the pioneers and
his own unmounted followers. A grave spirit of amity still pervaded the
party, but there was little talk. Odalie relegated herself to the
subservient manner and subordinate silence befitting a squaw; MacLeod,
restricted to the French language and his bit of Cherokee, feared that
his interest might lead him beyond the bounds of the simulation their
safety required; Hamish was silent, too, partly tamed by the halt which
they now and then made on rising ground, when the chief would turn his
keen, high-nosed profile, distinct upon the faint tints of the blue
mountains beyond, his eagle feathers on his scalp-lock blowing back
against the sky, and cast a sharp-eyed glance over the landscape to
discern if perchance the search party, from which they had separated,
was now coming to rejoin them. These frequent halts were discontinued
after two days, when the Indian saw fit to change his proposed line of
march, and the rest of his party, if following, could hardly be expected
to also deviate from the agreed plan and overtake them.
They had hitherto proceeded down a valley, between clifty mountain walls
on the one hand, and a high, steep, frowning ridge on the other, running
with the same trend in unbroken parallelism. Now it suited Willinawaugh
to turn his horse's head straight up these seemingly inaccessible
slopes; and without exchanging a glance or venturing a comment his
fellow-travelers obediently followed his lead, conscious of the sly and
furtive observation of his tribesmen and even of Willinawaugh himself,
for the suspicion of the Indian never seems quite allayed but only
dormant for a time. He noted naught that could excite it afresh,
although it was only by the toil of hours that they could surmount the
obstacles of great rocks, could find a deer-path through the dense
jungle of the laurel, otherwise impenetrable, could cross foaming
mountain torrents so swift and so deep that more than once it seemed
that the packhorses, with Odalie also mounted now for the ford, must
succumb to the strength of the current.
At length the party stood upon the summit, with a dozen wild outliers of
the Cumberland and the intervenient coves below their feet; then came a
vast spread of undulating country to the eastward, broken here and there
by parallel ridges; and beyond rose mountains brown, and mountains
purple, and still further, mountains blue; and still beyond and above,
a-glimmering among the clouds, so high and so vague, apparently so like
the gossamer texture of the vapor that one could hardly judge whether
these congeners of the very heavens were earth or sky, mythical peaks or
cloud mountains--the Great Smoky Range. In the wide, wide world below,
noble rivers flowed, while aloft, like the gods on Olympus, it seemed
the travelers could overlook the universe, so vast as to discount all
theories of measurement, and mark its varying mood. So clear and limpid
was the air that trivial incidents of that great scene were asserted
despite the distance, and easily of note,--a herd of buffalo was
distinguishable in an open, trodden space about a salt-lick; a fleet of
canoes, like a bevy of swallows, winged along the broad surface of the
largest of these splendid streams, called the Tsullakee (Cherokee) as
Willinawaugh informed them, for these Indians never used the sound
represented by our letter R. In the phonetically spelled words in which
it seems to occur the sound is more accurately indicated by the letter
L. A notable philological authority states that the English rendering of
the word "Cherokee" and others of the language in which the letter R
appears is derived from the mistaken pronunciation of neighboring tribes
and of the French, who called the Tsullakee[B]--_La riviere des
Cheraquis_.
Odalie could not refrain from asking in what direction was Chote,
"beloved town, city of refuge." She had the art to affect to interpret
for her husband, but she could not keep the light from her eyes, the
scarlet flush of joyful expectation from her cheek, when the savage,
with a sweeping wave of his pipe-stem, indicated a region toward the
southeast on the banks of a tributary (the Little Tennessee) of that
broad and splendid river, which was now running crimson and gold and
with a steely glitter, reflecting the sunset, in the midst of the dusky,
dull-blue landscape, with the languor of evening slipping down upon it.
There it lay in primeval beauty,--the land of hope. Oh, for the spirit
of a soothsayer; for one prophetic moment! What did that land
hold,--what days should dawn upon it; what hearthstones should be
alight; who should be the victor in the conquests of the future, and
what of the victim?
But they loved this country--the Cherokees; their own, they said, for
the Great Spirit gave it them. They even sought to associate with those
splendid eastern mountains the origin of the Cherokee people by the
oft-reiterated claim that the first of their race sprung from the soil
of those noble summits or dropped from the clouds that hover about the
lofty domes. And now Willinawaugh broke from the silence that the lack
of a common tongue had fostered, and despite that embargo on the
exchange of ideas he grew fluent and his enthusiasm seemed to whet the
understanding of his listeners, who could realize in some sort the
language that they could not speak. They caught the names of the great
landmarks. The vast range, on an outlier of which they pitched their
camp, as insignificant in proportion as an atom to the universe, he
called the Wasioto Mountain, and one of the rivers was the Hoho-hebee,
and others were the Coot-cla, the Agiqua, the Canot, the Nonachuckeh.
Hamish remembered these names long after they were forgotten by others,
and the re-christened Clinch and Holston and French Broad flowed as
fairly with their uncouth modern nomenclature as when they were
identified by as liquid musical syllables as the lapsing of their own
currents; for never did he lose the impression of this night;--never
faded the mental picture of the Cherokee chief, the war-paint, vermilion
and black and white, on his face as he sat before the fire, the waving
of the eagle-feathers on his tufted scalp-lock blotting out half the
dull-blue landscape below, which had the first hour of the night upon
it, and the moon, blooming like a lily, with a fair white chalice
reflected in the dark deeps of the Tsullakee River. And in this hour
while Odalie reached out with all tender, tremulous hope to the future
the savage told of the past.
Of the past,--mysterious, mythical. Of the strange lack of tradition of
this new world that was yet so old. For here, in the midst of the
Cherokee hunting-ground,--the whole country was but a great uninhabited
park heavily stocked with game, the Cherokee settlements being merely a
fringe upon its verges,--were vestiges of a previous population;
remains of works of defense like forts; fragments of pottery and other
manufactures; unfading allegorical paintings high on the face of
inaccessible cliffs; curious tiny stone sarcophagi containing pygmy
bones, the mysterious evidence of the actual existence of the
prehistoric "little people";[4] great burial mounds, with moldering
skeletons, and caves entombing mummies of splendid stature and long
yellow hair, evidently placed there ages ago, still wearing ornaments of
beads and metals, with remnants of strange fabrics of fibers and
feathers, and with weapons befitting a high rank and a warlike race. And
who were they? And whence did they come? They were always here, said
Willinawaugh. So said all the Cherokees. They were always here.
And whither did this unknown people go? The Indian shook his head, the
flicker of the fire on his painted face. They were gone, he said, when
the Tsullakee came. Long gone--long gone!
And alas, what was their fate? Odalie looked about at the violet night,
at the white moon and the dun shadows, with an upbraiding question, and
the night was silent with a keen chill fall of a frost. This was no new
world into which they were adventuring. It had witnessed tragedies. It
held death. It sealed its lips and embodied oblivion. Oh, for the hopes
of the future,--and oh, for the hopes of the dead and gone past!
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote A: White.]
[Footnote B: It is known now as the Tennessee River.]