eyes from the darkened doors of the empty houses; the weed-grown spaces
of the "beloved square," where once the ceremonies of state, the
religious rites, the public games and dances were held; the
council-house on its high mound, whence had been wont to issue the bland
vapors of the pipe of peace or the far more significant smoke emitted
from the cheera, the "sacred fire," which only the cheera-taghe, the
fire-prophets,[10] were permitted to kindle, and which was done with
pomp and ceremony in the new year, when every spark of the last year's
fire had been suffered to die out.
Cuthbert Barnett, however, always looked to see what he might,--perhaps
because he was a trifle bolder than the other stalwart pack-men, all
riding armed to the teeth to guard the goods of the train from robbery
as well as their own lives from treachery, for although the Cherokees
professed friendship it was but half-hearted, as they loved the French
always better than the English; perhaps because he had a touch of
imagination that coerced his furtive glance; perhaps because he doubted
more, or believed less, of the traditions of the day. And he
saw--silence! the sunset in vacant spaces, with long, slanting,
melancholy rays among the scattered houses of the hamlet; an empty
doorway, here and there; a falling rotting roof; futile traces of
vanished homes. Once a deer and fawn were grazing in the weed-grown
fields that used to stand so thick with corn that they laughed and sung;
once--it was close upon winter--he heard a bear humming and humming his
content (the hunters called the sound "singing") from the den where the
animal had bestowed himself among the fallen logs of a dwelling-house,
half covered with great drifts of dead leaves; often an owl would cry
out in alarm from some dark nook as the pack-train clattered past; and
once a wolf with a stealthy and sinister tread was patrolling the
"beloved square." These were but the natural incidents of the time and
the ruins of the old Cherokee town.
Little did Cuddy Barnett imagine, as he gazed on the deserted and
desolate place, that he was yet to behold the smoke of the "sacred fire"
flaring up into the blue sky from the portal of the temple, as the
cheera-taghe would issue bearing the flame aloft, newly kindled in the
opening year, and calling upon many assembled people to light therefrom
their hearths, rekindling good resolutions and religious fervor for the
future, and letting the faults of the unavailing past die out with the
old year's fire; that he was to mark the clash of arms in the "beloved
square," once more populous with the alert figures of warriors in
martial array, making ready for the war-path; that he was to hear the
joyful religious songs of greeting to the dawn, and the sonorous
trumpeting of the conch-shells, as the vanished Indians of the "old
waste town" would troop down at daybreak into the water of that bright
stream where long ago they had been wont to plunge in their mystic
religious ablutions. All this, however, the pack-men might see and hear,
to believe the tradition of the day, in camping but a single night near
the old "waste town."
And so anxious were these gay itinerant companies to see and hear
nothing of such ghostly sort that whatever the stress of the weather,
the mischances of the journey, the condition of the pack-animals, this
vicinity was always distinguished by the longest day's travel of the
whole route, and the camp was pitched at the extreme limit of the
endurance of man and horse to compass distance from Nilaque Great. For
believe what one might, the fact remained indisputable, that a decade
earlier, when the place was inhabited, strange sounds were rife about
the locality, the "sacred fire" was unkindled on the great "Sanctified
Day," the two cheera-taghe of the town mysteriously disappeared, and
their fate had remained a dark riddle.
One of these men, Oo-koo-koo, was well known in Charlestown. Both were
of influence in the tribe, but often he had been specially chosen as one
of the delegations of warriors and "beloved men" sent to wait in
diplomatic conference on the Governor of South Carolina, to complain of
injustice in the dealings of the licensed traders or the encroachments
of the frontier settlers, or to crave the extension of some privilege of
the treaty which the Cherokee tribe had lately made with the British
government.
Two white men, who had become conspicuous in a short stay in the town of
Nilaque Great, disappeared simultaneously, and the suspicion of foul
dealing on their part against the cheera-taghe, which the Cherokee
nation seemed disposed to entertain, threatened at one time the peace
that was so precious to the "infant settlements," as the small, remote,
stockaded stations of the Carolina frontiersmen were tenderly called.
Therefore the Governor of South Carolina, now a royal province,--the
event occurred during the incumbency of Robert Johnson, who having acted
in that capacity for the Lords Proprietors, well understood the menace
of the situation,--busied himself with extreme diligence to discover the
subsequent movements of the two white men, whose names were Terence
O'Kimmon and Adrien L'Épine, in order to ascertain the fate of the
cheera-taghe, and if evilly entreated, to bring the perpetrators of the
deed to justice.
With a long, unguarded, open frontier such as his province presented to
the incursions of the warlike and fierce Cherokees, who, despite their
depopulating wars with other tribes, could still bring to the field six
thousand braves from their sixty-four towns, the inhabitants of which
were estimated at twenty thousand souls, he was by no means disposed to
delay or to indulge doubts or to foster compatriot commiseration in
meting out the penalty of the malefactors. The united militia of South
Carolina and Georgia at this time numbered but thirty-five hundred rank
and file, these colonies being so destitute of white men for the common
defense that a memorial addressed to his majesty King George II. a
little earlier than this event, bearing date April 9, 1734, pathetically
states that "money itself cannot here raise a sufficient body of them."
The search for the suspects, however, although long, exhaustive, and of
such diligence as to convince the Indians of its sincerity of purpose,
resulted fruitlessly. The government presently took occasion to made
some valuable presents to the tribe, not as indemnity, for it could
recognize no responsibility in the strange disaster, but for the sake of
seeming to comply with the form of offering satisfaction for the loss,
which otherwise the Indians would retaliate with massacre.
Nilaque Great with this cloud upon it grew dreary. The strange
disappearance of its cheera-taghe was canvassed again and again,
reaching no surmise of the truth. Speculations, futile as they were
continuous, began to be reinforced with reminiscences of the date of the
event, and certain episodes became strangely significant now, although
hardly remarked at the time; people remembered unexplained and curious
noises that had sounded like muffled thunder in the deep midnight, and
again, scarcely noted, in the broad daylight. The "sacred fire" remained
unkindled, and sundry misfortunes were attributed to this unprecedented
neglect; an expert warrior, young and notably deft-handed, awkwardly
shot himself with his own gun; the crops, cut short by a late and
long-continued drought, were so meagre as to be hardly worth the
harvesting; the days appointed for the annual feasts and thanksgiving
were like days of mourning; discontents waxed and grew strong.
Superstitious terrors became rife, and at length it was known at
Charlestown that the Cherokees of Nilaque Great had settled a new place
farther down upon the river, for at the old town the vanished
cheera-taghe were abroad in the spirit, pervading the "beloved square"
at night with cries of "_A-kee-o-hoo-sa! A-kee-o-hoo-sa!_" (I am dead! I
am dead!) clamoring for their graves and the honors of sepulture due to
them and denied. And this was a grief to the head men of the town, for
of all tribes the Cherokees loved and revered their dead. Thus when
other cheera-taghe kindled for the municipality the "sacred fire" for a
new year it was distributed to hearths far away, and Nilaque Great,
deserted and depopulated, had become a "waste town."
A fair place it had been in its prime, and so it had seemed one
afternoon in June, 1734, when for the first time the two white strangers
had entered it. Mountains more splendid than those which rose about it
on every hand it would be difficult to imagine. The dense, rich woods
reach in undiminished vigor along the slopes covering them at a height
of six thousand feet, till the "tree line" interposes; thence the great
bare domes lift their stately proportions among the clouds. Along these
lofty perspectives the varying distance affords the vision a vast array
of gradations of color,--green in a thousand shades, and bronze, and
purple, and blue,--blue growing ever fainter and more remote till it is
but an illusion of azure, and one may believe that the summits seen
through a gap to the northeast are sheer necromancy of the facile
horizon.
In the deep verdant cove below, groups of the giant trees common to the
region towered above the stanchly constructed cabins that formed the
homes of the Indians, for the Cherokees, detesting labor and experts in
procrastination, builded well and wisely that they might not be forced
to rebuild, and many of the distinctive features of the stout frontier
architecture were borrowed by the pioneers from aboriginal example. Out
beyond the shadows were broad stretches of fields with the lush June in
the wide and shining blade and the flaunting tassel. The voices of women
and young girls came cheerily from the breezy midst as they tilled the
ground, where flourished in their proper divisions the three varieties
of maize known to Indian culture, "the six weeks' corn, the hominy corn,
and the bread corn." A shoal of canoes skimmed down the river, each with
its darting shadow upon that lucent current and seeming as native, as
indigenous to the place as the minnows in a crystal brown pool there by
the waterside--each too with its swift javelin-like motion and a darting
shadow. Sundry open doors here and there showed glimpses of passing
figures within, but the arrival of the strangers was unnoticed till some
children playing beside the river caught sight of the unaccustomed
faces. With a shrill cry of discovery, they sped across the square,
agitated half by fright and half by the gusto of novelty. In another
moment there were two score armed men in the square.
"Now hould yer tongue still, an' I'll do the talkin'," said one of the
white adventurers to the other, speaking peremptorily, but with a suave
and delusive smile. "If yez weren't Frinch ye'd be a beautiful
Englishman; but I hev got the advantage of ye in that, an' faix I'll
kape it."
He was evidently of a breeding inferior to that of his companion, but he
had so sturdy and swinging a gait, so stalwart and goodly a build, so
engaging a manner, and so florid a smile, that the very sight of him was
disarming, despite the patent crafty deceit in his face. It seemed as if
it could not be very deep or guileful, it was so frankly expressed. It
was suggestive of the roguish machinations of a child. He had twinkling
brown eyes, and reddish hair, plaited in a club and tied with a thong of
leather. His features were blunt, but his red, well-shaped lips parted
in a ready, reassuring smile, and showed teeth as even and white as the
early corn. Both men were arrayed in the buckskin shirt and leggings
generally worn by the frontiersmen, but the face of the other had a
certain incongruity with his friend's, and was more difficult to
decipher. It looked good,--not kind, but true. It had severe pragmatic
lines about the mouth, and the lips were thin and somewhat fixedly set.
His eyes were dark, serious, and very intent, as if he could argue and
protest very earnestly on matters of no weight. He would in a question
of theory go very far if set on the wrong line, and just as far on the
right. The direction was the matter of great moment, and this seemed now
in the hands of the haphazard but scheming Irishman.
"If it plaze yer honor," said O'Kimmon in English, taking off his
coonskin cap with a lavish flourish as a tall and stately Indian hastily
garbed in fine raiment of the aboriginal type, a conspicuous article of
which was a long feather-wrought mantle, both brilliant and delicate of
effect, detached himself from the group and came forward, "I can't spake
yer illigant language,--me eddication bein' that backward,--but I kin
spake me own so eloquent that it would make a gate-post prick up the
ears of understanding. We've come to visit yez, sor."
The smile which the Hibernian bent upon the savage was of a honeyed
sweetness, but the heart of his companion sank as he suddenly noted the
keen, intuitive power of comprehension expressed in the face of the old
Indian. Here was craft too, but of a different quality, masked, potent,
impossible to divine, to measure, to thwart. The sage Oo-koo-koo stood
motionless, his eyes narrowing, his long, flat, cruel mouth compressed
as with a keen scrutiny he marked all the characteristics of the
strangers,--first of one, then deliberately of the other. A war captain
(his flighty name was Watatuga, the Dragon-fly, although he looked with
his high nose and eagle glance more like a bird of prey), assuming
precedence of the others, pressed up beside the prophet, and the
challenge of his eyes and the contempt that dilated his nostrils might
have seemed more formidable of intent than the lacerating gaze of the
cheera-taghe, except that to an Irishman there is always a subtle joy
even in the abstract idea of fight. The rest of the braves, with their
alert, high-featured cast of countenance, inimical, threatening,
clustered about, intent, doubtful, listening.
Adrien L'Épine had his secret doubts as to the efficacy of the bold,
blunt, humorous impudence which Terence O'Kimmon fancied such masterful
policy,--taking now special joy in the fact that its meaning was
partially veiled because of the presumable limitations of the Indian's
comprehension of the English language. The more delicate nurture that
L'Épine obviously had known revolted at times from this unkempt
brusquerie, although he had a strong pulse of sympathy with the wild,
lawless disregard of conventional standards which characterized much of
the frontier life. He feared, too, that O'Kimmon underrated the extent
of the Cherokee's comprehension of the language of which, however, the
Indians generally spoke only a few disconnected phrases. So practiced
were the savages in all the arts of pantomime, in the interpretation of
facial expression and the intonation of the voice, that L'Épine had
known in his varied wanderings of instances of tribes in conference,
each ignorant of the other's language, who nevertheless reached a
definite and intricate mutual understanding without the services of an
interpreter. L'Épine felt entrapped, regretful, and wished to recede. He
winced palpably as O'Kimmon's rich Irish voice, full of words, struck
once more upon the air.
"Me godson, the Governor o' South Carolina," Terence O'Kimmon resumed,
lying quite recklessly, "sint his humble respects,--an' he's that swate
upon yez that he licks his fingers ter even sphake yer name! (Pity I
furgits ut, bein' I never knew ut!)"
Although possessing an assurance that he could get the better of the
devil, "could he but identify him," as O'Kimmon frequently said, he felt
for one moment as if he were now in the presence. Despite his nerve the
silence terrified him. He was beginning to cringe before the steady
glare of those searching eyes. It was even as a refreshment of spirit to
note a sudden bovine snort of rage from the lightsome Dragon-fly, as if
he could ill bridle his inimical excitement.
The adventurers had not anticipated a reception of this sort, for the
hospitality of the Indians was proverbial. Credentials surely were not
necessary in the social circles of the Cherokees, and two men to six
thousand offered no foundation for fear. O'Kimmon had such confidence in
his own propitiating wiles and crafty policy that he did not realize how
his genial deceit was emblazoned upon his face, how blatant it was in
his voice. But for its challenging duplicity there would hardly have
arisen a suggestion of suspicion. Many men on various errands easily
found their way into the Indian tribes when at peace with the British,
and suffered no injury. Nevertheless as the wise Oo-koo-koo looked at
O'Kimmon thus steadily, with so discerning a gaze, the Irishman felt
each red hair of his scalp rise obtrusively into notice, as if to
suggest the instant taking of it. He instinctively put on his coonskin
cap again to hold his scalp down, as he said afterward.
"Why come?" Oo-koo-koo demanded sternly.
"Tell the truth, for God's sake!" L'Épine adjured O'Kimmon in a low
voice.
"I'm not used to it! 'T would give me me death o' cold!" quavered the
Irishman, in sad sincerity, at a grievous loss.
"_Asgaya uneka_ (White man), but no Ingliss," said the astute Indian,
touching the breast of each with the bowl of his pipe, still in his hand
and still alight as it was when the interruption of their advent had
occurred.
"No, by the powers,--not English!" exclaimed the Irishman impulsively,
seeing he was already discovered. "I'm me own glorious nation!--the
pride o' the worruld,--I was born in the Emerald Isle, the gem o' the
say! I'm an Oirishman from the tip o' me scalp--in the name o' pity
_why_ should I mintion the contrivance" (dropping his voice to an
appalled muffled tone)--"may the saints purtect ut! But surely, Mister
Injun, I've no part nor lot with the bloody bastes o' Englishers either
over the say or in the provinces. If I were the brother-in-law o' the
Governor o' South Carolina I'd hev a divorce from the murtherin'
Englisher before he could cry, 'Quarter!'"
Oo-koo-koo, the wise Owl, made no direct answer.
"_Asgaya uneka_ (White man), but no Ingliss," he only said, now
indicating L'Épine.
"Frinch in the mornin', plaze yer worship, an' only a bit o' English
late in the afternoon o' the day," cried O'Kimmon, officiously, himself
once more.
"French father, English mother," explained L'Épine, feeling that the
Indian was hardly a safe subject for the pleasantries of conundrums.
"But his mother was but a wee bit of a woman," urged O'Kimmon; "the most
of him is Frinch,--look at the size of him!"
For O'Kimmon was now bidding as high against the English aegis as
earlier he had been disposed to claim its protection, when he had
protested his familiarity with the Royal Governor of South Carolina. In
an instant he was once more gay, impudent, confident of carrying
everything before him. He divined that some recent friction had
supervened in the ever-clashing interests subsisting between the
Cherokee nation and the British government, and was relying on the
recurrent inclination of this tribe to fraternize with the French. Their
influence from their increasing western settlements was exerted
antagonistically to the British colonists, by whom it was dreaded in
anticipation of the war against a French and Cherokee alliance which
came later. Oo-koo-koo, complacent in his own sagacity in having
detected a difference in the speech of the new-comers from the English
which he had been accustomed to hear in Charlestown, and animated by a
wish to believe, hearkened with the more credulity to an expansive
fiction detailed by the specious Irishman as to their mission here.
They were awaiting the coming of certain pettiaugres from New
Orleans,--a long journey by way of the Mississippi, the Ohio, the
Cherokee, and the Tennessee rivers,--with a cargo of French goods
cheaper than the English. They designed to establish a trading-post at
some convenient point, out of reach of the grasping British, and thus to
compete with the monopoly of the Cherokee commerce which the English
government sought to foster. And then, to furnish a leaven of truth to
this mass of lies, he detailed, with such a relish as only an Irishman
can feel in a happy incongruity, that the French, having no market in
old France for deerskins, the chief commodity of barter that the Indians
possessed, disposed of them to ships of the British colonies, from New
York and elsewhere, lured thus to New Orleans, in exchange for English
cloths and other British manufactures, which the French then
surreptitiously furnished to the Indians of the British alliance,
underselling them on every hand.
"The intellects of the Frinch are so handsome!" cried O'Kimmon, the
tears of delighted laughter in his eyes. "Faix, that is what makes 'em
so close kin to the Oirish!"
Albeit the Cherokee treaty with the British forbade the Indians to trade
with white men of any other nationality than the English, these
professed aliens were promised protection and concealment from the
British government, and the pretext of their mission served to
countenance their lingering stay.
Soon their presence seemed a matter of course. The Indians had recurred
to their methods of suave hospitality. The two strangers encountered
only friendly looks and words, while affecting to gratify curiosity by
peering into all the unaccustomed habitudes,--the preparation of food,
the manufacture of deerskin garments, the care of the sick, the modeling
of bowls and jars of clay, in which the Cherokees were notably expert as
well as in the weaving of feather-wrought fabrics and baskets, the
athletic games, the horse-races, the continual dances and pantomimic
plays,--and were presently domiciled as it were in the tribe. Of so
little note did they soon become that when they gradually ceased these
manifestations of interest, as if familiarity had sated their curiosity,
it seemed to occasion no comment. They were obviously free to rove, to
stay, to live their lives as they would without interference or
surveillance.
Nevertheless, they still maintained the utmost caution. Sometimes,
idleness being no phenomenon, they would lie half the day in the shade
on the river-bank. The Tennessee was shrunken now in the heated season,
and great gravelly slopes were exposed. The two loiterers were
apparently motionless at first, but as their confidence increased and
the chances of being observed lessened, L'Épine, always dreading
discovery, began to casually pass the gravel and sand through his
fingers as he lay; sometimes he idly trifled with the blade of a hoe in
a shallow pool left by the receding waters, while the jolly Irishman,
now grave and solicitous, watched him breathlessly. Then L'Épine would
shake his head, and the mercurial O'Kimmon groaned his deep despondency.
Once the Frenchman's head was not shaken. A flush sprang up among the
pragmatic lines of L'Épine's face; his dark eyes glittered; his hand
shook; for as he held out the hoe, on its blade were vaguely glimmering
particles among the sand.
Later the two adventurers cherished a small nugget of red, red gold!
This find chanced below a bluff in a sort of grotto of rock, which the
water filled when the river was high, and left quite dry and exposed as
it receded in the droughts of summer.
Whether the two strangers were too much and too long out of sight;
whether attention was attracted by certain perforated dippers or pans
which they now brought into assiduous use, but which they sought to
conceal; whether they had been all the time furtively watched, with a
suspicion never abated, one can hardly say. They had observed every
precaution of secrecy that the most zealous heed could suggest. Only one
worked with the pan while the other lay motionless and idle, and
vigilantly watched and listened for any stealthy sign of approach. They
fully realized the jealousy of the Indians concerning the mineral wealth
of their territory, lest its discovery bring hordes of the craving white
people to dispossess them. This prophetic terror was later fulfilled in
the Ayrate division of the tribe, but to the northward, along the
Tennessee River, they sedulously guarded this knowledge. Traditions
there are to the present day in the Great Smoky Mountains concerning
mines of silver and lead, and of localities rich in auriferous gravel
which are approximately ascertained, but which the Cherokees knew
accurately and worked as far as they listed;--they carried their secret
with them to the grave or the far west.