the Cherokee rulers, in common with those of other tribes, had long
waged a vigorous opposition to the importation of strong drink into
their country; indeed, as far back as 1704, when holding a solemn
conference with Governor Daniel of North Carolina to form a general
treaty of friendship, the chiefs of several tribes petitioned the
government of the Lords Proprietors for a law, which was afterward
enacted (and disregarded), forbidding any white man to sell or give rum
to an Indian, and prescribing penalties for its infringement. It was not
the first time that Otasite had heard unfavorably of the influences of
"_nawohti_," which, by the way, with the Cherokees signified physic, as
well as spirituous liquor, a synonymous definition which more civilized
people have sought to apply. He was content that he and the old chief
were once more in affectionate accord, and he did not seek to interpret
the flash of triumph in Colannah's face.
For seven years! for seven years! the white "Man-killer" could not, if
he would, quit the Cherokee country. Well might the old chief's eyes
glisten! The youth was like a son to his lonely age, and Otasite's
prowess the pride of his life. And like others elsewhere he had softened
as age came on, and loved the domestic fireside and the companionship
about the hearth, hearing without participating in the hilarious talk of
the young, and looking out at the world through the eyes of the new
generation, undaunted, expectant, aglow with a spirit that had long ago
smouldered in his own; for the fierce Indian at the last was but an old
man.
Abram Varney, too, experienced a recurrence of ease. He had unwittingly
imbibed much outlandish superstition in his residence among the
Cherokees, and indeed other traders and settlers long believed in the
enchaining fascination of Herbert's Spring, and drank or refrained as
they would stay or go.
Otasite, however, was all unaware of the spell cast upon him when he
came into the chungke-yard the next day, arrayed in his finest garb, the
white dressed doeskin glittering in the sun, his necklaces of beads, his
belt of wolf fangs, his flying feet in their white moccasins--all
catching the light with a differing effect of brilliancy.
Varney watched him;--with the two eagle feathers stiff and erect on his
proud head, his two incongruous long auburn curls, that did duty as a
"war-lock," floating backward in the breeze, he ran so deftly, so
swiftly, with so assured and so graceful a gait that the mere
observation of such symmetrical motion was a pleasure. The trader had
scarcely a pulse of anxiety. Indeed, disingenuously profiting by the tip
afforded by Herbert's Spring, he was heavily backing Wyejah as a winner!
A windy day it was; the clouds raced through the sky, and their shadows
skimming over the valleys and slopes challenged their speed. The
Tennessee River was singing, singing! The mountains were as clearly and
definitely blue as the heavens. That revelation of ranges on the far
horizon unaccustomed to the view, only vouchsafed by some necromancy of
the clarified autumnal air, never before seemed so distinct, so
alluring--new lands, new hopes, new life they suggested. Wyejah's
scarlet attire, its fringes tasseled with the spurs of the wild turkey,
rendered his lithe figure strongly marked against these illusory
ethereal tints as he sped abreast with Otasite along the level sandy
stretch of the chungke-yard. And how well he played! Varney realized
this with a satisfaction as of having already won his wagers, many and
large, for Otasite would leave the nation should he be victorious, and
having drunk unwittingly of Herbert's Spring, he could not quit the
Cherokee country, although he himself was still unaware of having
quaffed of those mystic waters. Therefore defeat was obviously his
portion. Whenever the trader thought anew of his secret knowledge of
this fact he offered odds on Wyejah, and glanced at him with
approbation--at the young Indian warrior's face fiercely, eagerly
smiling, his great flattened ears distended on their wire hoops, his
dark eyes full of sombre brilliance. How well he played! and how hard
the skill of his opponent pressed him! How accurate was the aim of the
long lance of Otasite as he poised his weight on the supple tips of his
white moccasins and hurled the missile through the air; how strong and
firm his grasp that sent the circular, quartz chungke-stone, whirling
along the sand; how tirelessly his long sinewy steps sped back and forth
in the swift dashes up and down the smooth spaces of the chungke-yard;
how faithfully he was doing his best, regardless of his own preference
in the interests that he had adventured on the result! How like a Briton
born it was, Abram Varney thought, for he alone knew of Otasite's
resolution, and the significance of the game to him, that the boy could
thus see fair play between the factions that warred within him for his
future. He had staked the future on the event,--and suddenly it was the
present!
A wild clamor of excitement, of applause, rose up from the throats of
the crowd in the natural amphitheatre, clanging and clattering in long
guttural cries,--all intensified by a relish of the unexpected, a joy in
a new sensation, for Wyejah had never before been beaten, and Otasite
was the victor at chungke.
Abram Varney felt his heart leap into his throat, then sink like lead;
Colannah, triumphant, knowing naught of the subtler significance of the
contest, joyful, aglow with pride, rose up in his splendid feathered
mantle, standing high on the slope, to sign to the boy his pleasure in
the victory. The sunlight fell, glittering very white, on the young
fellow's doeskin garb, his prickly belt of fangs, his bare chest with
the blue warrior's marks, the curls of his auburn scalp-lock tossing in
the wind. He had seemed hitherto stoical, unmoved by victory as he would
have appeared in defeat; but Varney, eager to get at him, to combat his
resolution, knew that he was stunned by the complications presented by
this falling out of the event. He visibly faltered as his eye met the
triumph and affection expressed in Colannah's quivering old face. He
could not respond to its congratulation. He dropped on one knee
suddenly, bending low, affecting to find something amiss with one of his
moccasins.
Wyejah, too, could seem unmoved by victory, but indifference to defeat
was more difficult to simulate. He had in the first moment of its
realization felt the blood rush to his head; despite his strong nerve
his hand trembled; the smile of placidity which it was a point of honor
to preserve became a fixed grin. Several other young braves had come
into the yard, and were idly tossing the lance at the great
chungke-pole--as a billiardist of the civilized life of that day might
pocket the balls with a purposeless cue after a match. Wyejah, too, had
cast his lance aslant; then he idly hurled the chungke-stone with a
muscular fling along the spaces of the white sand. His nerve was shaken,
his aim amiss, his great strength deflected. The heavy discoidal quartz
stone skimmed through the air above the stretch of sand, and striking
with its beveled edge the kneeling figure on the temple, the future of
the victor at chungke became in one moment the past.
The trader could only have likened the scene that ensued to the moment
of an earthquake or some other stupendous convulsion of nature. In the
midst of the confusion, the wild cries, the swift running figures, the
surging of the crowds into the chungke-yard that obliterated the wide
glare of the sun on the white sand, he made good his escape. He knew
enough of the trend of Cherokee thought to be prescient of the fate of
the scapegoat. Colannah in the first burst of grief he knew would blame
himself that he should have tempted fate by the mystic draught from
Herbert's Spring to hold here that bright young form for seven years
longer. How sadly true!--for seven years Otasite would remain, and seven
to that, and, alack, seven more, and forever! Soon, however, the natural
impulses of the Indian's temper, intensified by long cultivation, would
be reasserted. He would cast about for revenge, remembering the first
suggestion of the departure of Otasite, and from whom it had emanated.
But for the English trader and his specious wiles, the old chief would
argue, would Otasite have thought of forsaking his foster nation, his
adopted father, for the selfish, indifferent British, the "Goweno" at
Charlestown, who cared for him nothing? The trader it was who had
brought this calamity upon them, who had in effect, by the hand of
another, administered the fatal draught. Seek for him!--hale him forth!
--wreak upon him the just, unappeasable vengeance of the forever
bereaved!
The old trader had evinced an instinct in flight and concealment that an
animal might envy. No probable hiding-place he selected, such as might
be known or divined--a cave, the attic of his trading-house, the cellar
beneath--all obvious, all instantly explored. Instead, he slipped into a
rift in the rocks along the river-bank. Myriads of such crevices there
were in the tilted strata--unheeded, unremarked, too strait and
restricted to suggest the idea of refuge, too infinitely numerous for
search. There, unable in the narrow compass to turn, even to shift a
numbing muscle of his lean old body, in all the constraint of a standing
posture, he was held in the flexure of the rock like some of its
fossils,--as unsuspected as a ganoid of the days of eld that had once
been imprisoned thus in the sediment of seas that had long ebbed
hence,--or the fern vestiges in a later formation finding a witness in
the imprint in the stone of the symmetry of its fronds. He listened to
the hue and cry for him; then to the sudden tramp of hoofs as a pursuing
party went out to overtake him, presumably on his way to Charlestown,
maintaining a very high rate of speed, for the Cherokees of that period
had some famously fine horses.
Straining his senses--all unnaturally alert--he distinguished, as the
afternoon wore on, the details of the preparations for the barbarous
sepulture of the young Briton. Now and then the cracking of rifle-shots
betokened the shooting of his horses and cattle and all the living
things among his possessions--a practice already in its decadence among
the Cherokees, and later, influenced by the utilitarian methods of
civilization, altogether abandoned. Swift steps here and there
throughout the town intimated errands to gather all his choicest effects
to be buried with him, for his future use. To this custom, it is said,
and the great security of the fashioning of the sepulchres of the
Cherokees, may be attributed the fact that little of their pottery,
arms, beads, medals, the more indestructible of their personal
possessions, can be found in this region where so lately they were a
numerous people; for the effects of the dead, however valued, were never
removed or the graves robbed, even by an Indian enemy. The Cherokees
rarely permitted the presence of an alien at the ceremonies of the
interment of one of the tribe; but Varney in times past had seen and
heard enough to realize, without any definite effort of the imagination,
how Otasite, arrayed in his most gorgeous apparel, his beautiful English
face painted vermilion, would be placed in a sitting posture in front of
his house, and there in the sunlit afternoon remain for a space, looking
in, as it were, at the open door. Presently sounded the wild
lamentations and melancholy cadences of the funeral song; the tones rose
successively from a deep bass to a tenor, then to a shrill treble,
falling again to a full bass chorus, with the progression of the mystic
syllables, "_Yah! Yo-he-wah! Yah! Yo-he-wah!"_ (said to signify
"Jehovah"). This announced that the funeral procession, bearing the
body, was going thrice around the house of the dead, where he had lived
in familiar happiness these many years, and beneath which he would rest
in solemn silence in his deep, deep grave, covered with heavy timbers
and many layers of bark, and the stanch red clay, maintaining a sitting
posture, and facing the east, while the domestic life of homely cheer
would go on over his unheeding head as he awaited the distant and
universal resurrection of the body, in which the Cherokee religion
inculcated a full and firm faith.
The sun went down, and through all the night sounded the plaints of
grief. Late the moon rose, striking aslant on the melancholy Tennessee
River, full of deep shadows and vaguely pathetic pallid glimmers. A wind
sprang up for a time, then suddenly sank to silence and stillness. A
frost fell with a keen icy chill. Mists gathered, and the day did not
break,--it seemed as if it might never dawn again; only a pallid
visibility came gradually upon clouds that had enshrouded all the world.
The earth and the sky were alike indistinguishable; the mountains were
as valleys, the valleys as plains. One might scarcely make shift to see
a hand before the face. Through this white pall, this cloud of nullity,
came ever the dolorous chant, "_Yo-he-ta-wah! Yo-he-ta-weh!
Yo-he-ta-hah! Yo-he-ta-heh!_" as in their grief and poignant bereavement
the ignorant and barbarous Indians called upon the God who made them,
and He who made them savages doubtless heard them.
Creeping out into the invisibility of the clouded day, Abram Varney had
not great fear of detection. The mists that shielded him from view
furthered still his flight, for his footsteps were hardly to be
distinguished amidst the continual dripping of the moisture from the
leaves of the dank autumnal woods. At night he knew the savages would be
most on the alert. They would scarcely suspect his flight in the broad
day. Moreover, their suspicions of his presence here were lulled;
craftily enough he followed after the horsemen who fancied they were
pursuing him--they would scarcely look for their quarry hard on their
own heels. He experienced no sentiment but one of intense satisfaction
when, as invisible as a spirit, he passed his own trading-house, and
divined from the sounds within that the Indians were busy in sacking it,
albeit a greater financial loss than seems probable at the present day;
for the Indian trade was a very considerable commerce, as the accounts
of those times will show. The English and French governments did not
disdain to compete for its monopoly with various nations of Indians, for
the sake of gaining control of the savages thereby, in view of supplies
furnished by the white traders vending these commodities and resident in
the tribes.
Recollections of the items and values of his invoices, afflicting to
Varney's commercial spirit, threaded his consciousness only when again
safe in Charlestown. He reached that haven at last by the exercise of
great good judgment. He realized that another party would presently be
sent out when no news of capture came from the earlier pursuers; he
divined that the second expedition would take the Chickasaw path, for
being friendly to the British, that tribe would naturally be thought of
as a refuge to an Englishman in trouble with the Cherokees; therefore
Varney, lest he be overtaken on the way, avoided with a great struggle
the temptation, mustered all his courage, and adopting an unprecedented
expedient, turned off to the country of the Muscogees. These Indians,
always more or less inimical to the colonists, bloodthirsty, cruel,
crafty, and but recently involved in a furious war against the
Cherokees, were glad to thwart Colannah in any cherished scheme of
revenge, and received the fugitive kindly. Although but for this fact
his temerity in venturing among them would have cost him his life, they
ministered to his needs with great hospitality, and forwarded him on his
way to Charlestown, sending a strong guard with him as far as Long Cane
settlement, a little above Ninety-Six.
Wyejah also made his escape. Appalled by the calamity of the accidental
blow, he "took sanctuary." In the supreme moment of excitement he flung
himself into the Tennessee River, and while eagerly sought by the
emissaries of Colannah in the woods, he swam to Choté, "beloved town,"
the city of refuge of the whole Cherokee nation, where the shedder of
blood was exempt from vengeance. As years went by, however, either
because of the death of Colannah, or because time had so far softened
the bereavement of the friends of Otasite that they were prevailed upon
to accept the "satisfaction," the presents required even from an in
voluntary homicide, he was evidently freed from the restricted limits of
the "ever-sacred soil," for his name is recorded in the list of warriors
who went to Charlestown in 1759 to confer with Governor Lyttleton on the
distracted state of the frontier, and being held as one of the hostages
of that unlucky embassy, he perished in the massacre of the Cherokees by
the garrison of Fort Prince George, after the treacherous murder of the
commandant, Captain Coytmore, by a ruse of the Indian king, Oconostota.
Abram Varney never ventured back among "the Nation," as he called the
Cherokees, as if they were the only nation on the earth. Now and again
in their frequent conferences with the Governor at Charlestown, rendered
necessary by their ever-recurrent friction with the British government,
he sought out members of the delegation for some news of his old
friends, his old haunts. Not one of them would take his hand; not one
would hear his voice; they looked beyond him, through him, as if he were
the impalpable atmosphere, as if he did not exist.
It was a little thing,--the displeasure of such men--mere savages,--but
it cut him to the heart. So long they had been his friends, his
associates, as the chief furniture of the world!
He busied himself with the affairs of his firm at Charlestown, but for a
time he was much changed, much cast down, for he had a sense of
responsibility, and his conscience was involved, and although he had
sought to do good he had only wrought harm, and irreparable harm. He
grew old very fast, racked as he was by rheumatism, a continual reminder
of the stern experiences of his flight. He had other reminders in his
unquiet thoughts, but he grew garrulous at a much later date. Years
intervened before he was wont to sit in front of the warehouse, with his
stick between his knees, his hands clasped on the round knob at its top,
his chin on his hands, and cheerily chirp of his days in "the Nation."
The softening touch of time brought inevitably its glamours and its
peace; his bleared old eyes, fixed on the glittering expanse of the
harbor, beheld with pleasure, instead of the sea, the billowy reaches of
that mighty main of mist-crested mountains known as the Great Smoky
Range, and through all his talk, and continually through his mind,
flitted the bright animated presence of the victor at chungke.
THE CAPTIVE OF THE ADA-WEHI
Attusah was obviously an impostor. Many, however, had full faith in his
supernatural power, and often he seemed to believe in his own spectral
account of himself.
"_Tsida-wei-yu_!" (I am a great ada-wehi![6]) the young warrior would
cry with his joyous grandiloquent gesture, waving his many braceleted
right arm at full length as he held himself proudly erect.
"_Akee-o-hoosa! Akee-o-hoosa!"_ (I am dead). Then triumphantly, "And
behold I am still here."
Attusah had gone unscathed through that bloody campaign of 1761 in which
the Cherokees suffered such incredible rigors. After their total defeat
at Etchoee the Indians could offer no further resistance to the troops
of Colonel Grant, who triumphantly bore the authority of the British
king from one end of the Cherokee country to the other, for there was no
more powder to be had in the tribe. The French, from whom they had hoped
a supply, failed them at their utmost need, and now those massive crags
of the Great Smoky Mountains, overhanging the Tennessee River, no longer
echoed the "whoo-whoop!" of the braves, the wild cry of the Highlanders,
"Claymore! Claymore!" the nerve-thrilling report of the volleys of
musketry from the Royal Scots, the hissing of the hand grenades flung
bursting into the jungles of the laurel. Instead, all the clifty defiles
of the ranges were filled with the roar of flames and the crackling of
burning timbers as town after town was given to the firebrand, and the
homeless, helpless Cherokees frantically fleeing to the densest coverts
of the wilderness,--that powerful truculent tribe!--sought for shelter
like those "feeble folk the conies" in the hollows of the rocks.
Thus it was that Digatiski, the Hawk, of Eupharsee Town, long the terror
of the southern provinces, must needs sit idle, forlorn, frenzied with
rage and grief, in a remote and lofty cavity of a great cliff, and
looking out over range and valley and river of this wild and beautiful
country, see fire and sword work their mission of destruction upon it.
By day a cloud of smoke afar off bespoke the presence of the soldiery.
At night a tremulous red light would spring up amidst the darkness of
the valley, and expanding into a great yellow flare summon mountains and
sky into an infinitely sad and weird revelation of the landscape, as the
great storehouses of corn were burned to the ground, leaving the hapless
owners to starvation.
His pride grudged his very eyes the sight of this humiliation, for
despite the oft-repeated assertion of the improvidence of the Indian
character, these public granaries, whence by the primitive Cherokee
government food was dispensed gratis to all the needy, were always full,
and their destruction meant national annihilation or subjugation. After
one furtive glance at the purple obscurities of the benighted world he
would bow his head, and with a smothered groan ask of the ada-wehi,
"Where is it now, Attusah?"
The young warrior, half reclining at the portal of the niche, would lift
himself on one elbow,--the glow of the little camp-fire within the
recess on his feather-crested head, his wildly painted face, the twenty
strings of roanoke passed tight like a high collar around his neck,
thence hanging a cascade of beads over his chest, the devious arabesques
of tattooing on his bare, muscular arms, the embroideries of his
buckskin raiment and gaudy quiver,--and searching with his gay young
eyes through the stricken country reply, "Cowetchee," "Sinica,"
"Tamotlee," whichever town might chance to be in flames.
Doubtless Attusah realized equally the significance of the crisis. But a
certain joyous irresponsibility characterized him, and indeed he had
never seemed quite the same since he died. He had been much too
reckless, however, even previous to that event. Impetuous, hasty,
tumultuously hating the British colonists, he had participated several
years earlier in a massacre of an outlying station, when the Cherokees
were at peace, without warrant of tribal authority, and with so little
caution as to be recognized. For this breach of the treaty his execution
was demanded by the Royal Governor of South Carolina, and reluctantly
conceded by the Cherokees to avert a war for the chastisement of the
tribe. Powder must have been exceedingly scarce!
Attusah was allowed to choose his method of departure to the happy
hunting-grounds, and thus was duly stabbed to death. He was left
weltering in his blood to be buried by his kindred. The half king,
Atta-Kulla-Kulla, satisfied of his death, himself reported the execution
to the Carolina authorities, and as in his long and complicated
diplomatic relations with the colonial government this Cherokee chief
had never broken faith, he was implicitly believed.
Whether the extraordinary vitality and vigor of the young warrior were
reasserted after life had been pronounced wholly extinct, and thus his
relations were induced to defer the obsequies, or that he was enabled to
exert supernatural powers and in the spirit reappear in his former
semblance of flesh,--both theories being freely advanced,--certain it is
that after a time he returned to his old haunts as gay, as reckless, as
impetuous as ever. He bore no token of his strange experience save
sundry healed-over scars of deep gashes in his breast, which he seemed
at times to seek to shield from observation; and this he might have
accomplished but for his solicitude that a very smart shirt, much
embroidered and bedizened with roanoke, should not suffer by exposure to
water; wherefore he took it off when it rained, and in swimming, and on
the war-path. He manifested, too, a less puerile anxiety to escape the
notice of Atta-Kulla-Kulla and other head men, who were supposed to be
well affected at that time to the British government. This he was the
better enabled to do as his habitat, Kanootare, was the most remote of
the Cherokee towns, his name, Attusah, signifying the "Northward
Warrior."