The winter wore gradually away. While the snows were still on the
ground, and the eastern mountain domes were glittering white against a
pale blue sky, all adown the nearer slopes the dense forests showed a
clear garnet hue, that betokened the swelling of congregated masses of
myriads of budding boughs. Even the aspect of more distant ranges
bespoke a change, in the dull soft blue which replaced the hard
lapis-lazuli tint that the chill, sharp weather had known. For the cold
had now a reviviscent tang--not the bleak, benumbing, icy deadness of
the winter's thrall. And while the flames still flared on the hearth,
and the thumping of the batten and the creak of the treadle resounded
most of the day from the little shed-room where Odalie worked at her
loom, and the musical whir of her spinning-wheel enlivened all the
fire-lit evenings as she sat in the chimney corner, the thaws came on,
and brought the mountain snows down the Tennessee River with a great
rushing turbulence, and it lifted a wild, imperious, chanting voice into
the primeval stillness. A delicate vernal haze began to pervade the
air, and a sweet placidity, as if all nature were in a dream, not
dead,--an expectant moment, the crisis of development. Now and again
Odalie and Fifine would come to the door, summoned by a loud crackling
sound, as of a terrible potency, and watch wincingly the pervasive flare
of the great elastic yellow and vermilion flames springing into the air
from the bonfires of the piles of cane as the cleared land was
transformed from the cane-brake into fields. And soon the ploughs were
running. Oh, it was spring in this loveliest of regions, in this climate
of garnered delights! As the silvery sycamore trees, leaning over the
glittering reaches of the slate-blue river, put forth the first green
leaves, of the daintiest vernal hue, Odalie loved to gaze through them
from the door of the cabin, perchance to note an eagle wing its splendid
flight above the long, rippling white flashes of the current; or a
canoe, as swift, as light, cleave the denser medium of the water; or in
the stillness of the noon a deer lead down a fawn to drink. She was wont
to hear the mocking-bird pour forth his thrilling ecstasy of song, the
wild bee drone, and in the distance the muffled booming thunder of the
herds of buffalo. Who so quick to see the moon, this vernal
moon,--surely not some old dead world of lost history, and burnt-out
hopes, and destroyed utilities, but fair of face, virginal and fresh as
the spring itself,--come down the river in the sweet dusk, slowly,
softly, pace by pace, ethereally refulgent, throwing sparse shadows of
the newly leaved sycamore boughs far up the slope, across the threshold
that she loved, with the delicate traceries of this similitude of the
roof-tree.
"Oh, this is home! home!" she often exclaimed, clasping her hands, and
looking out in a sort of solemn delight.
"Why don't you say that in French, Odalie?" Hamish would mischievously
ask. For his researches into the mysteries of the French language,
although not extensive, had sufficed to acquaint him with the fact that
the tongue has no equivalent for this word, and to furnish him with this
home-thrust, as it were. Odalie, always rising with spirit to the
occasion, would immediately inquire if he had seen or heard of Savanukah
lately, and affect to be reminded to urge him to put himself in
preparation to be able to stand an examination in French by that
linguistic authority by conjugating the reflective verb _S'amuser_. "So
much you might, Hamish, _amuse yourself_ with Savanukah."
"I am not disturbed, now," Hamish would declare, "since we have made
interest with the family. I'd just get your friend, Mrs. Savanukah, to
intercede for me."
For Odalie had to run the gauntlet of a good deal of merriment in the
family circle because of her close acquaintance with the Indian women.
Their visits annoyed her extremely. If she went for an afternoon's talk
with Belinda Rush,--the two had become fast friends,--she deprecated
leaving her scanty store of possessions lest their dainty order be
disturbed by the Indian intruders in her absence. She dared not quit
Fifine, whom it was sometimes inconvenient to take, even though the
child's father was inside the stockade, lest she be kidnapped, so covert
and sly was their slipping in and out, for somehow they were never
discovered at the moment of entrance. Nevertheless, she treated her
Cherokee callers with such sweet patient courtesy that it is not to be
wondered that they came again and again. She gave them trifles that she
could spare, and a share of the seeds of vegetables which she had
brought with her, and this they received with real and unfeigned
gratitude, for the women were the gardeners among the Cherokees and the
tillers of the soil.
Odalie herself had that strong nerve of sympathy with the springing
growths of the earth that made every turned furrow of the rich mould a
delight to her. It was not work--it partook of the nature of a pastime,
wrought for the love of it, when following her husband's plough she
dropped the Indian corn and covered it with her hoe. She loved the
soft, tender, sprouting blades, as they put strongly forth; she loved
hardly less the quickly springing weeds even as she cut them mercilessly
away with her hoe. She loved the hot sun, and the clear, fresh wind that
came rushing down the rushing river, and the delicious delicate perfume
of its waterside ferns, and the cool, sleeping shadows in the dark
mysteries of the woods, and the solemnity of the great mountains on the
eastern horizon, and the song of a thrush in mid-air above it all. And
when the clouds gathered and came the soft, soft falling of the steady
spring rain, she loved the interval it afforded for the setting of
things in order within, and once more she and Hamish and Fifine and the
cat were congregated on the buffalo rug in front of the fire, which had
dwindled to an ember kept from meal to meal, to sort treasures brought
with them in the small compass of a buffalo horn,--seeds now, the seeds
of certain simple flowers, a bulb and a root or two,--the precious roots
of an eglantine and a clematis vine. And now that the chance of killing
frosts was overpast, Odalie and Fifine were grubbing much of the time in
the ground and Hamish often came and grubbed too. The seeds were sown
and grew apace; the bulbs and roots throve; the vines began to clamber
over the support of a rude bower of saplings built above the door; and
soon when Odalie sat here beside her spinning-wheel, in her white linen
dress with its broad collar of her own hand-wrought lace, to enjoy the
cool air from the mountains, and the color of the red sunset on the
river, she had a canopy of vines above her head, and between her upward
glance and the sky, a blooming rose, faintly pink, and a bird's nest
with four blue eggs.
Captain Demere, coming in at the gate of the stockade one afternoon,
exclaimed in surprise and pleasure at the prettiness and the
completeness of this rude comfort. There was but one room in the house
with a floor; the seats were only puncheon benches with rough staves for
legs thrust through auger-holes and one or two of her befrilled
"tabourets"; the table was of like manufacture; the beds and pillows
were mere sacks filled with dried balsam fringes from the great
fir-trees, and supported on the rudest frames; but the fresh aromatic
fragrance the fir dispensed, the snow-white linen the couches displayed,
the flutter of the quaint bird-decorated curtains at the windows, the
array of the few bits of treasured old china, the shelf of precious old
books, the cluster of purple and white violets arranged in a great
opaline pearly mussel-shell from the river, in default of vase, in the
center of the wabbly table, the dainty freshness and neatness of the
whole--"This is _home_!" he declared. "I accept a new anthropological
dogma. Man is only the fort-builder--woman is the home-maker!"
"Yes," said Odalie in content and pride, surveying her treasures, as
she conducted him about the place, for he had not been here since the
completion of the improvements; "I often say that this is _home_!"
"But never in French," put in Hamish at her elbow.
Nevertheless, this did not contribute to alter Captain Demere's opinion
that the frontier was no place for women, though that would imply, with
his later conclusions, no place for home. He went away wearing in his
buttonhole a sprig of sweetbrier, which he declared again reminded him
so of home. He had not thought to find it here, and memory fell upon him
unprepared and at a disadvantage. The moon was up when he stepped into
his boat, and the orderly, bending to the oars, shot straight out into
the river. Long, burnished white lines lay upon its gleaming surface,
and looking back Demere could see beyond the shadow and sheen of the
sloping bank the cleared space, where the moonbeams fell in unbroken
splendor before the stockade, and through its open gate the log-cabin
with its primitive porch, where, young and beautiful, she sat in her
white dress in the bright light beside the silent little flax-wheel.
Home undoubtedly! As the boat headed up the river he looked moodily at
the ripples, glancing in the moonbeams, and noted with a keen new
sensitiveness the fragrance of the eglantine, reminiscent of summers
dead and gone, and life as fleeting and frail as the transitory flower.
For the news that came in these days from over the mountains was always
heavy news,--rumors of massacres, now of a single individual in some
exposed and dangerous situation, and again of settlers surprised and
overcome by numbers within the defenses of their own stanch stockade.
All along the frontier the spirit seemed to extend, first toward the
north and then southward, and it was apparently only a question of time
when the quiet and peace that encircled Fort Loudon should be summarily
broken. Many of the pioneers, could they now have returned to Virginia
or the Carolinas without danger, would have forever relinquished their
new homes, and have set forth on their long journey without delay. But
the Cherokees about them, personally known to them and apparently
without individual animosity, seemed a slighter menace than the probable
encounter with wild wandering bands, glutted with blood yet thirsting
still for vengeance. In one of Demere's reports about this time, early
in the year 1759, he says: "We are living in great harmony here--no 'bad
talks' at all."
Again and again he and Captain Stuart, accompanied only by an orderly to
mark their sense of confidence, went to Chote to confer in a friendly
way with the king and half-king, and seek to induce them to take some
order with these depredators, and restore the peace of the border.
The great council-house at Chote was a curious circular structure,
formed of withes and willows and wand-like timbers, woven together in a
dome-like shape to the height of twenty feet, with a diameter of thirty
feet at the base; the whole was covered over with a thick coating within
and without of the deeply and richly tinted red clay of that region, and
pierced by no window or chimney or other outlet than the tall and narrow
doorway. The last time the two officers together sought the presence of
the kings in the _Ottare_ district, as the mountainous region was
called,--the towns designated as the _Ayrate_ settlements signified the
lower country,--they were received here, and Stuart, from the moment of
their entrance, knew that their mission was hopeless.
They had recently been ordered to demand the surrender to them of
certain notable Cherokees, for having been concerned in the distant
border murders, and who lived in the towns of Citico and Tellico hard
by, close at hand to both Chote and Fort Loudon. They realized that this
measure was at once displeasing and impracticable to the kings, whose
authority could not compass the surrender of their tribesmen to the
justice of the gibbet, after the expiatory methods of the English, and
who foresaw that such compliance would but provoke reprisal on the
paleface and further outbreaks.
Sitting motionless on buffalo rugs, a number of which were spread over
the floor of the room, on which the two officers were also invited to be
seated, the Indians advanced none of the equivocal statements and
doubtful promises and fallacious expectations of peace as heretofore,
but kept their eyes fixed upon the ground, while the officers once more
expressed their earnest remonstrances and made their summary demand,
implicitly obeying their orders, although this extreme and impolitic
measure was secretly deprecated by both.
The "talk" was conducted by means of the services of an interpreter, an
Indian, who stood behind the great chiefs and recited, now in Cherokee
and now in English, and always with a wooden, expressionless accent, as
if he were a talking machine and understood not a word for which he
furnished the equivalent, in deference to the great company not
permitting his mind to take part in the deeper significance of the ideas
they interchanged. He kept his eyes fixed upon the blank wall opposite,
and effaced his individuality as far as possible. But after the first
sentences of merely formal greeting, the wooden clapper of the
interpreter's tongue vibrated back and forth with Cherokee only, for the
Indian chiefs said nothing to be rendered into English. Silent and
stony they sat, looking neither to the right nor left, unmoved by
urgency, stolid to remonstrance, and only when Demere with a flash of
fire suggested that Governor Lyttleton of South Carolina, or General
Amherst the new "head-man," who was now commander-in-chief of the army,
would soon take fierce measures to retaliate these enormities, there was
a momentary twinkle in the crafty eyes of Oconostota, and he spoke
briefly. The interpreter woodenly repeated:--
"I can well believe you, for after an English treaty we have fraud and
then force and at last bloodshed."
Stuart, the sombre red shadow of the terra-cotta walls hardly dulling
the glare of his red uniform, sat looking out, quite placid and
self-poised, through the open portal at the scattered huts of the town,
at the occasional passing of an Indian's figure, at Chilhowee Mountain
in the middle distance, densely green with the dark lush growths of
summer, and beyond at the domes of the Great Smoky range, a soft velvet
blue against the hard turquoise blue of the sky. The object, however, on
which his eyes fixed most intently was the bright spot of color of the
orderly's red coat, like a buoy, one might say, against the glimmering
river, in the foreground, as he rested on his oars in the glow of the
sunset, while the little boat swung idly in the shallows.
Not again did either of the chiefs speak. Demere flushed with anger as
sentence after sentence rang out in English, now from Stuart's lips, now
from his own,--cogent, persuasive, flattering, fruitless; repeated by
the interpreter in Cherokee, and followed by a blank pause. Finally
Demere rose, and with a curt phrase of formal farewell, to which neither
of the chiefs responded, bowed angrily, and walked out, pausing near the
entrance to wait for Stuart, who with blandest ceremony was taking his
leave,--saying how much he hoped there would be no interruption to the
kind friendship with which the great men had personally favored them,
and which they so highly valued; and how earnestly he desired to express
their thanks for the interview, although it grieved him to perceive that
the chiefs felt they could say so little on the subject that had brought
him hither. He could not have bowed with more respectful formality if he
were quitting the presence of General Amherst himself, the cocked hat in
his right hand sweeping low as he made his obeisance; but he could
detect in both faces no change of expression, except that the eye of
Oconostota twinkled with derision or anger or pleasure--who can say? He
left them sitting motionless there in the deep red dusk reflected down
from the terra-cotta walls, and the interpreter, looking as wooden as
his voice sounded, standing bolt upright behind them.
Stuart did not comment on the character of the audience vouchsafed as,
shoulder to shoulder, he and Demere took their way down to the boat,
where the young soldier awaited them. He only said, "I have been uneasy
about that orderly all the time for fear our presence here did not
protect him, as he was not on the ever-sacred soil of the 'beloved city
of refuge'--Chote--old town. I wished we had taken the precaution of
ordering him ashore. Affairs are near the crisis, Paul."
They seated themselves, and the young soldier pulled out from the shore,
Demere, both angry and cast down, realizing as he had not heretofore the
imminence of the peril to the settlement.
Dusk was upon the river; stars began to palpitate elusively in the
pallid sky; shadows mustered thick along the bank. Suddenly a sound,
sharp, discordant, split the air, and a rifle-ball whizzed past between
the two officers and struck the water on the further side of the boat.
The unarmed orderly seemed for a moment as if he would plunge into the
river.
"Steady--steady--give way," said Stuart. Then to Demere, who had his
hand on his pistol, and was casting a keen glance along the shore
preparatory to taking aim,--"Why do you return the fire, Paul? To make
our fate certain? We should be riddled in a moment. I have counted
nearly fifty red rascals in those laurel bushes."
Why the menace was not repeated, whether the skulking braves feared the
displeasure of their own authorities, or the coolness of the little
group extorted their admiration, so quick to respond to an exhibition of
stoical courage, no further demonstration was offered, and the boat was
pulled down the five miles from Chote to Fort Loudon in better time
perhaps than was ever made with the same weight on that river. The
landing was reached, to the relief even of the phlegmatic-seeming
Stuart.
"So ends so much," he said, as he stepped out of the boat. "And I go to
Chote--old town--no more."
But he was destined one day to retrace his way, and, sooth to say, with
a heavier heart.
The season waxed to ripeness. The opulent beauty of the early
summer-tide was on this charmed land. Along the heavily-wooded mountain
sides the prodigal profusion of the blooming rhododendron glowed with a
splendor in these savage solitudes which might discredit the treasures
of all the royal gardens of Europe. Vast lengths of cabling grape-vines
hung now and again from the summit of one gigantic tree to the ground,
and thence climbed upward a hundred feet to the topmost boughs of
another, affording ambush for Indians, and these darkling coverts began
to be craftily eyed by the soldiers, whose daily hunt for the provisions
of the post carried them through many dense jungles. Everywhere the
exquisite mountain azalea was abloom, its delicate, subtle fragrance
pervading the air as the appreciation of some noble virtue penetrates
and possesses the soul, so intimate, so indissoluble, so potent of
cognition. It seemed the essential element of the atmosphere one
breathed. And this atmosphere--how light--how pure! sheer existence was
a cherished privilege. And always on this fine ethereal medium came the
echo of woe; blended with the incense of the blooming wild grape seemed
the smell of blood; the rare variety of flame-tinted azaleas flaring on
some high, secluded slope showed a color reminiscent only of the burning
roof-trees and stockades of destroyed homes. Peace upon the august
mountains to the east, veiling their peaks and domes in stillness and
with diaphanous cloud; peace upon the flashing rivers, infinitely clear
and deep in their cliff-bound channels; and peace upon all the
heavily-leaved shadowy forests to the massive westward range, level of
summit, stern and military of aspect, like some gigantic rampart! But
the mind was continually preempted by the knowledge that in the south
were murder and despair, in the east were massacre and pillage, that
rapine was loosed upon the land, and that this external fixity of calm
was as unstable as the crystalline sphere of a bubble to collapse at a
touch. Every ear was strained to a whisper; the express from over the
mountain was met afar off by stragglers from the settlement, and came,
delivering by word of mouth such news as he personally possessed, before
his package was rendered up to the officers at the fort. Every heart
seemed subject to the tension of suspense except such organ as might
serve Captain Stuart for the cardiacal functions. He appeared wholly
engrossed in perfecting the details of battalion drill, and the
attention of the garrison was concentrated on these military maneuvers;
even the men of the settlement, especially the rattling single men, were
drawn into these ranks, the garrison not being strong enough to furnish
the complement desired. In their buckskin hunting-shirts and leggings,
with their muscular, keen activity, their ready practice, and their
suppleness in handling their rifles, the pioneers made what he was
pleased to call "a very pretty body of fencibles." His praise and their
evident advance in proficiency gratified them, although the tactical
arts of war in the heavy growths of this wild and rocky country were at
a discount, since the defeat of that martinet and military precisian,
General Braddock. Thus the afternoon drill at the fort became of
increasing public interest, and afforded the social opportunity of a
rendezvous for the whole settlement; and despite the growing
disaffection of the Cherokees, now and again groups of Indian spectators
appeared at the gate.
Stuart's tact never deserted him; one day when ordering a knot of
pioneers near the sally-port to "fall in"--for he himself drilled the
fencibles--he motioned too, with his imperious gesture, to half a dozen
braves who were standing hard by, as if he made no difference between
them and the other civilian neighbors. One moment of astounded doubt,
then they "fell in" as front-rank men, evidently infinitely flattered
and marvelously quick in adapting the manual exercise they had often
witnessed. Now and again there was an expression of keen interest on
their stolid faces, and more than once when woe befell the effort to
ploy the battalion into double column to form square and the movement
became a contortion, they laughed out gutturally--that rare Indian mirth
not altogether pleasant to hear. And as they went home in the red sunset
to Citico, and Great Tellico, and Tennessee Town and Chote, from along
the river banks came their harsh cries--"Shoulder firelock!" or
"Fa'lock," as they rehearsed it. "Feex Bay'net! Pleasant A'hms!"
It became evident that they rehearsed their learning, suiting the action
to the word, once too often,--for they returned no more. Whatever might
have been the advantage of their acquiring the secret of the military
maneuvers from so competent and patient an instructor as the
condescending Captain Stuart, the powers that were at Chote had no mind
to expose their stalwart young braves to the winning wiles of that
magnetic commander, and permitting them to acquire among the troops,
perchance, a personal regard for the officer and an _esprit de corps_ in
addition to a more available military spirit. If he had had a scheme and
the scheme had failed there was no intimation to that effect on the
imperturbable exterior he maintained.
It had always been known that Captain Stuart was somewhat fond of the
pleasures of the table, and he suddenly developed a certain domesticity
in this regard. He desired to experiment on the preserving of some
"neat's tongues,"--as he politely called those of the buffalo,--and for
the sake of this delicacy utilized a floorless hut, otherwise
unoccupied, at the further end of the whole enclosure, as a smokehouse.
Often smoke was seen issuing thence, but with this understanding it
created no surprise. Sometimes the quartermaster-sergeant and two or
three other non-commissioned officers were seen pottering about it. Now
and again Captain Demere stood at the door and looked in. One day it
chanced that Hamish, who had secured two tongues, desiring to offer them
as a small tribute, came up close to him, in his deft, noiseless
deerskin buskins, before Captain Demere was aware. As he turned and saw
the boy, he instantly let the door in his hand fly back--not, however,
before the quick young fellow had had a dissolving view of the interior.
A fire smoked in the center of the chimneyless place, half smothered
with stones that constituted at once a hearth and protection from the
blaze, but one flickering shred of flame revealed not only the tongues
which Captain Stuart coveted, but rows of haunches and saddles of
venison and bear hams, and great sections of buffalo meat, as well as
pork and beef.
The boy understood in an instant, for the hunters from the fort provided
day by day for the wants of the garrison from the infinite reserves of
game in the vast wilderness without; these were preparations against a
state of siege, kept secret that the garrison might not be dispirited by
so gloomy a prospect, possibly groundless, and the settlement with its
women and children affrighted. Hamish, with a caution beyond his years,
affected to see naught, made his little offering, and took his way and
his speculations homeward. There he was admonished to say nothing of the
discovery; it was very proper, Sandy thought, for the garrison to be
prepared even against remote contingencies.
Hamish dutifully acquiesced, although he could but feel very wise to
know the secret workings of Captain Stuart's subtle mind and divine his
hidden plans, when that officer seemed to grow gravely interested in the
development and resources of the country, in which he had no share save
the minimum of space that the ramparts enclosed. He speculated adroitly
about mineral wealth in gossiping with the groups of settlers at the
gates after the drill. He told some strange stories that
Atta-Kulla-Kulla had recounted of the vestiges of previous vanished
inhabitants of this country--of certain evidences of ancient mining
ventures where still lay curious outlandish tools; he felt certain of
the existence of copper and lead, and he believed most faithfully too in
the proximity of gold; for his own part, he declared, he thought the
geological formation indicated its presence. These themes, transferred
to the great hall, served to fill it with eager discussions and clouds
of tobacco smoke, and to detain the settlers as long as the regulations
would admit of the presence of visitors. As to iron and other minerals,
the springs indicated iron ore beyond a doubt, and he inquired earnestly
had any one ever tried to obtain salt by the usual primitive process of
boiling and evaporation at the big salt-lick down the river? Thus nobody
was surprised when Captain Stuart and the quartermaster and a detail of
soldiers and a lot of big cauldrons were reported to be actively engaged
in the effort to manufacture salt down at the lick. No necessary
connection was apprehended between the circumstances when four
packhorses came over the mountain laden with salt, for even after that
event Captain Stuart continued the boiling and stirring that went on
down at the lick.
Hamish wondered how long he would care to keep up the blind, for the
need of salt for the preservation of more meat had by this last
importation been satisfied. Perhaps Stuart himself felt it a relief when
one day it chanced that some buffalo bulls met at the salt-lick,--as if
by appointment,--and the battle that ensued among them was loud and long
and stormy. So numerous were the contestants, and so fiercely did the
conflict wage, that the officer and his force were compelled to climb to
a scaffold built in one of the gigantic trees, used by the settlers who
were wont to wait here for the big game and fire down upon them without
the danger of being trampled to death.
This battle had other observers: a great panther in the same tree
crouched on a limb not far above the soldiers, and sly and cowardly as
the creature is, gazed at them with a snarling fierce distention of
jaws, plainly unaware of any weapons that could obviate the distance,
and counting on a lingering remnant of the party as evidently as on the
slain bison to be left on the ground when the battle should be over. Now
and again came a glimpse of the stealthy approach of wolves, which the
tumult of the conflict had lured to the great carcass of the defeated.
Although the salt-makers waited in much impatience through several hours
for the dispersal of the combatants, and were constrained to fire their
pistols almost in the faces of the wolves and panthers, Captain Stuart's
chief emotions seemed expressed in admiring the prowess of a champion in
the fight, whom he identified as the "big _yanasa_[I] that was the pivot
man of the wheeling flank," and, on his return, in guying the
quartermaster on the loss of the great cauldrons, for their trampled
remains were unrecognizable; but indeed, this worthy's countenance was
lugubrious enough to grace the appellation of chief mourner, when he was
apprised of the sad ending of the salt-making episode, for he loved a
big kettle, as only a quartermaster or a cook can, in a country in which
utensils are small and few and not to be replaced.
That Stuart felt more than he seemed to feel was suspected by Demere,
who was cognizant of how the tension gave way with a snap one day in the
autumn of that year of wearing suspense. Demere looked up with a
changed face from the dispatches just received--the first express that
had come across the mountains for a month, having dodged and eluded
bands of wandering Indian marauders all the way.
"Governor Lyttleton has taken the field," he said.
"_At last!_" cried Stuart, as in the extremity of impatience.
For upon the massacre of all the inmates of a strong station, carried by
storm, in addition to other isolated murders up and down the frontier,
the royal governor of South Carolina had initiated a series of
aggressive measures; asked aid of North Carolina, urged Virginia to send
reenforcements and provisions to Fort Loudon (it being a place which
from its remote situation was very difficult at all times to victual,
but in the event of a Cherokee war entirely cut off from means of
supply), and by great exertions succeeded in mustering a force of eight
hundred militia and three hundred regulars to advance into the Indian
country from the south. The vigor and proportions of this demonstration
alarmed the Cherokees, grown accustomed to mere remonstrance and
bootless threats. They had realized, with their predominant military
craft, the most strongly developed of their mental traits, that the
occupation of all the available forces of the government in Canada and
on the northwestern frontiers crippled the capacity to make these
threats good. Thus they had reveled in a luxury of fancied impunity and
a turbulent sense of power. Now they were smitten with consternation to
perceive the cloud upon the horizon. Suddenly the privileges of trade
which they had forfeited,--for they had become dependent on the supplies
of civilization, such as ammunition, guns, tools, blankets, etc., and
certain stores in transit to them had been, by Governor Lyttleton's
instructions, intercepted by Captain Coytmore, the commandant at Fort
Prince George;--the opportunities of a strong alliance that they had
discarded; the advantageous stipulations of the treaties they had
annulled; all seemed precious when annihilated by their own act.
The Upper towns and the Lower towns--the _Ottare_ and the _Ayrate_--met
in solemn conclave at Chote to consider the situation.
Fort Loudon, hard by, maintained quiet and keen watch and strict
discipline. The drums beat, the bugles sounded for the measured routine.
The flag waved in the sunshine, slipping up to meet the dawn, fluttering
down as the last segment of the vermilion disk slipped behind the dark,
level, rampart-like summit of the distant Cumberland range, and the
sunset-gun boomed till the echoes blared faintly even about the
council-chamber at Chote, where the warriors were gathered in state.
Whether the distant thunderous tone of that potent force which the
Indians admired, and feared, and sought to comprehend beyond all other
arms of the service, the artillery, suggested anew the untried menace of
Lyttleton's invasion of their country with a massed and adequate
strength; whether they had become desirous now to regain those values of
trade and alliance that they had thrown away in haste; whether their
repeated reprisals had satiated their greed of vengeance for their
comrades, slain on the return march from aiding the defense of the
Virginia frontier; whether they were inspired only by their veiled
deceit and savage craft, in which they excelled and delighted, and which
we now call diplomacy, exercised between the enlightened statesmen of
conferring and Christian nations,--whatever motive urged their decision,
no gun barrel was sawed off, an unfailing preparation for battle, no
corn pounded, no knife whetted, no face painted, no bow strung, no
mysterious scalp-dance celebrated--the Cherokees were not upon the
war-path!
A deputation of their "beloved men" went to forestall the martial
advance of the Carolinians--Oconostota, the "great warrior," with his
many wrinkles, and his crafty eye, and his port of meaning that heralded
events; and Atta-Kulla-Kulla, of whom all had heard, whose courage was
first of the brain and then of the hand, whose savage instincts were
disciplined by a sort of right judgment, an intelligence all independent
of education, or even of that superficial culture which comes of the
observation of those of a higher and trained intellect; and also
Willinawaugh, fierce, intractable, willing to treat for peace, to be
sure, but with a mental reservation as to how far it might serve his
purposes. Savanukah was of the delegation, doubtful, denying, with a
dozen devices of duplicity; he could not at times understand the English
he spoke fairly well, and the French, in which he could chaffer smartly
and drive a bargain, nor even the Cherokee, for which he kept a deaf ear
to hinder a settlement he deprecated with the hated English--invaluable
at a council was Savanukah! Of the number, too, was Tennessee Warrior,
who fought, and did nothing but fight, and was ready and willing to
fight again, and yet again, and to-morrow! He was always silent during
the conferences, studying with successive scowls the faces of the white
men. He knew nothing about numbers, and did not yearn to handle the
match, and make the big gun howl; he had but to paint his face, and whet
his scalp-knife, and load his firelock, and blaze away with as deadly an
aim as a pioneer's. What need had the Tennessee Warrior for diplomacy?
If there was to be any fighting the Tennessee Warrior would rejoice in
going along to partake. If there was to be only diplomacy, and diplomacy
were long continued with peace unbroken, then the white men and the red
men might be sure of one thing--of hearing the Tennessee Warrior snore!
He was an excellent selection to go to a council. Then there was Bloody
Fellow, Eskaqua, who had scant need of vermilion, so sure he was to
paint himself red in another way. And Tus-ka-sah, the Terrapin of
Chiletooch, and old Abram, Ooskuah, of Chilhowee, and Otassite, the
Man-Killer of Hiwassee, and old Tassel, Rayetaeh of Toquoe,--about
thirty-five in all,--went in a body to Charlestown to negotiate for
peace, and some of them signed. These chiefs who signed were Oconostota,
Atta-Kulla-Kulla, Otassite, Kitagusta, Oconnocca, and Killcannokea.
The day on which they set forth Captain Stuart and Captain Demere,
themselves in council in the great hall at Fort Loudon, heard the news
of the departure of the delegation on this errand, looked at each other
in amazement, and fell into bursts of laughter.
Had their sense of triumph been such as to find joy in reprisal they
might have relished the fact that the anxieties, the secret fear, the
turmoil of doubt, which Oconostota had occasioned to them, were returned
to him in plenitude on his arrival in Charlestown. Governor Lyttleton
had not yet set out, but the military forces summoned forth were
already entered upon their long and toilsome march from various distant
districts to the appointed rendezvous at Congaree, and thither the
commander of the expedition felt that he must needs forthwith repair to
meet them. "I did not invite you to come here," he said to Oconostota,
and despite the remonstrance of the delegation, and doubtless thinking
he could treat with the savages to more effect at the head of an armed
force invading their country, he postponed hearing their "talk" till he
should have joined his little army, but offered them safe-conduct in
accompanying his march. "Not a hair of your head shall be touched," he
declared.
Returning thus, however, almost in the humiliated guise of prisoners, in
fact under a strong guard, accompanying a military force that was
invading Cherokee soil, comported little indeed with Oconostota's pride
and his sense of the yet unbroken power of his nation. The coercions of
this virtual captivity extended to the stipulations of the treaty
presently formulated. While ratifying previous pledges on the part of
the Indians to renounce the French interest, and providing for the
renewal to them of the privileges of trade, this treaty required of them
the surrender of the murderers concerned in the massacres along the
frontier; pending the delivery of these miscreants to the commandant at
Fort Prince George, and as a guarantee of the full and faithful
performance of this compact, the terms dictated the detention at the
fort, as hostages, of twenty-two of the Cherokee delegation now
present.[10]
Oconostota himself was numbered among the hostages to be detained at
Fort Prince George until the surrender of the Cherokee murderers, but
the representations of Atta-Kulla-Kulla, who was at liberty, compassed
the king's release, urging his influence with his nation and the value
of his counsels in the British interest for the restoration of peace.
The little band of Cherokees, helpless among overwhelming numbers, was
hardly in a position to openly withstand these severe measures proposed,
and consequently the treaty thus signed on the 26th day of December,
1759, might have been expected to prove of but slight cohesive
properties. The hostages remained of necessity at Fort Prince George;
the few Indians of the unfortunate embassy who retained their freedom
began to scatter, sullen, fierce, disconsolate, to their towns; the
army, already discontented, mutinous, and eager to be gone because of
the devastations of the smallpox in a neighboring Indian village, and
the appearance of that disease among a few of the volunteers, set out
upon its homeward march, without striking a blow, from an expedition
that cost the province the sum of twenty-five thousand pounds sterling.
Oconostota and Willinawaugh, sitting together on the ground, in the
flickering sunlight and the sparse wintry shadows of the leafless woods,
looking like two large rabbits of some strange and very savage variety,
watched the rear-guard file over the hill in the narrow blazed way that
seemed a very tolerable road in that day. When the last man had
vanished, they listened for a long time to the throb of the drum--then
the sound was lost in the distance; a mere pulsing in the air continued,
discriminated by the keen discernment of the Indians. At last, when not
even a faint ripple of sound-waves could be felt in the still
atmosphere, Oconostota keeled over suddenly and laid his ear to the
ground. No vague reverberation, no electrical thrill, no stir of atom of
earth striking against atom; nothing! The army was gone! The two savage
old rabbits squatted again upright and seemed to ruminate on the
situation. Then, as if with a single impulse, they looked at each other
and broke into sudden harsh gutturals of triumphant laughter.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote I: Buffalo.]