No Resting Place (19 page)

Of those who got to The Territory to tell their tales, one group spoke of being rescued by a team sent out when they failed to keep a rendezvous and finding them stranded and huddling in a swamp, and their hundred horses—it must have looked like an equestrian statue foundry—standing too deeply in the stiff mud to topple over, though frozen dead for days. Of making camp, and, after dark, the hindmost stragglers limping in to report leaving behind on the trail the bodies of relatives unburied at the roadside, dead of exhaustion, exposure, hunger and of the diseases that struck and raced through them as through a single body. Yet so destitute was the condition of those left behind, their homes and farms taken from them, that, knowing all this, they still flocked to leave for the north each winter like misdirected birds.

The Creeks of Alabama had farther to travel than the Choctaws, and the going was inch by inch. Survivors told of making five miles, and often less, in a long day because of having to stop half a dozen times to warm the children at fires. Their comfort was short-lived, and their wailing soon resumed, for they were returned to lie on the frozen tents covering the wagon beds. Infants were carried by mothers and fathers taking turns like the parents of incubating eggs to share the warmth of their bodies. They trudged for days at a time in snow up to their calves, crying in pain with every step, their unattended tears freezing to their cheeks.

There being no time in such pressing cold to bury the dead, the bodies were barely covered over with brush. The living learned not to look back. While they were still in sight, the buzzards that blackened the skies overhead were already settling to their work, and just as often they were driven from their prize by the ever-present packs of wolves which, at night, serenaded their future fare with hungry howls.

Born businessmen, the Chickasaws held out for, and got, a good price for their choice lands in Mississippi and Tennessee, and saw to it that payment was in cash, not in another of those promises of tribal annuities every one of which had been defaulted upon. A proud, regal, overbearing people, longtime exacters of tribute from other tribes, breeders of fine horses, and of daughters renowned for their beauty, they were the elite of the Indian world. When they went west it was at a favorable time of year, and they went not as prisoners overseen by government guards, not fed on government handouts. The Chickasaws went west at their own pace, they paid their own way. They paid through their high-held, hawkish noses the piratical prices for furthering them along the route which their style of travel and their air of superiority invited, and the high and mighty Chickasaws, as susceptible to the white man's deadly epidemic diseases as their humblest red brothers, arrived in The Territory as debilitated, as decimated in numbers, as poor, and as broken-spirited, as the lowliest of the low.

Only one of the tribes, the Seminoles of Florida, had fought. Vastly outnumbered, disadvantageously armed, poorly provisioned, they had fought the United States Army for twelve years. Seminole women had fought alongside their men, and just as fiercely, murdering their infant children so as not to be hampered by them nor given away by their cries. They might be fighting yet but for an act of deceit and treachery in violation of the fundamental rule of civilized warfare. Invited, under a flag of truce, to a conference on peace proposals, their chief, the resourceful and inspiring young field commander, Osceola, was seized and put in prison, where he soon died, as hostage for the surrender of his followers.

Of the forty thousand of the four tribes deported so far, some ten thousand had perished on the way.

That first day they traveled through territory familiar to them. Here they had lived and worked and courted, had visited relatives and friends, had explored as children, had hunted and fished and trapped, gone nut-gathering, berry-picking. The very houses, or their ashes, that some of them had been driven from, had been born in, they passed. Of these some were now occupied by white squatters. From them the occupants came out to watch the Cherokees' exodus, some to pelt them with stones and hoot them on their way. Even so, it was land with associations that urged them to linger, not leave. Their steps lagged that day. At the end of it they had accomplished less than ten of the hundreds and hundreds of miles that stretched before them.

That first day's march gave a bitter foretaste of all that were to come. With its end came the heart-sickening realization that it was only the first—the first of how many? It was not long; after months of inactive confinement, they must be toughened gradually. Even so, it was wearying, particularly to those who were leaving the most behind, not the most in material possessions but the most in time spent and memories accumulated, like Agiduda and Grandmother. In camp that evening the boy went to fetch water for them. There at the wagon he met the Mackenzies.

“But, man,” said Agiduda, “you don't have to do this. You are not one of us.”

“I am if you will have me,” said the Reverend Mackenzie. “I'm certainly not one of
them
. I got the call to go. I hope to be useful.”

Thereupon Agiduda adopted them both into his clan. The boy said to them, “Please, sir, please, ma'am, from now on call me Noquisi. But only when there's nobody but ourselves to hear.”

Later that evening Agiduda said, “Saints, my child, are all fools, bless them. Now don't go telling him I called him that. ‘Saint' I mean. The ‘fool' part he wouldn't object to.”

They were not linked by collars and chains but it was as though they were. In the morning when the starter's bugle blew and those in the lead took the first forward step, the lurch was felt all along the line.

This was after they had been issued their daily ration of salt pork and cornmeal from the commissary wagons and allowed time to cook them.

Fire was obtained from wagons in which they were kept burning day and night in pots and pans. Some of these were true
tusti
bowls, replicas of the one in which
Diyunisi
, the Water Beetle, first fetched fire, preserved from olden times and handed down in the family, the holiest of household vessels, snatched up to be taken with them when they were seized in the roundup. Along the route the children were the tenders of the fires. They minded their duty with the seriousness of little priests and priestesses, knowing well that the fires were sacred, that The People's continuation depended upon them, that their very name,
Tsalagi
, or Cherokee, as the whites called them, meant “the fire-bringers.” They gathered sticks from the roadside, then scampered to catch up with the train. In the night, while the children slept, the adults took turns feeding the fires. Being the blessing of all, they were the care of all. Even to those for whom the old tribal customs had lost their religious significance, these symbolic fires were now a common bond. One at least must still be burning when they reached their distant destination. In the village council houses to be built there the fires would be kindled with fire from the old country, and would burn until ceremoniously extinguished at their first
Ah tawh hung nah
in exile. That would mark the end of the old life and the commencement of the new. In the meantime they ate their meals cooked over fires kindled in common, one big family.

Ultimately the search-and-seizure operation, the roundup of the Cherokees, although thorough, allowing few to escape, had been so haphazard that now on the march were people in all stages of dispossession, of preparedness. Depending upon whether the U.S. Army, by far the more lenient, or the more disinterested, of the two, or the Georgia State Militia had been their captors, depending upon the humaneness of the officer in charge of the squad, some prisoners indeed came with nothing but the clothes on their backs while others came in buckboards, in oxcarts, in wagons drawn by teams of their former plow horses containing everything they owned. Some had a train of slaves to bear on their backs their owners' worldly goods. Some rode saddle horses, with colts accompanying dams, some were followed by faithful dogs. The work animals had grazed outside the stockade during the detention time, the dogs fed on scraps from the soldiers' mess. They could be heard whimpering as their owners spoke to them through the tall pointed pailings.

For the very old, the very young, the weak, of body and of mind, for nursing mothers and for women big with child, for the lame, the blind, places were provided in army wagons. They would have been better off walking, if only they could have, so rough was the ride on the uneven road—where there was a road. Children took turns riding in the wagons, resting their legs for an hour, then yielding their places to others like them and trotting alongside.

Light would be just breaking when the day began with the bugler's sounding of reveille. In those early days on the road progress must be made in the relative cool of the morning. The heat of midday slowed, often stopped them altogether, prostrating even the fittest. They rose, stiff and sore, from their bedding grounds, hastily cooked and ate their breakfast rations, and readied themselves for the starter's bugle. The sound of getting under way, overtopping the first creak of the wagon wheels and the rumble of their beds, was a groan of reluctance uttered in a single concerted voice.

They enjoyed one regular day's rest a week. In their rigid observance of the Sabbath, the Reverend Mackenzie took satisfaction, but it was a mixed satisfaction. Pagans and Christians both, the former as adamant as the latter, refused to move a step on Sunday. The others spent the day in communion with the Great Spirit; for the converted the Reverend Mackenzie conducted Holy Communion. The rite only. He preached them no homily. He felt that to these brave and hard-pressed people he had nothing to say. They needed no exhortation. God's holy words, not his. He had become acutely conscious of the color of his skin—though among his flock were many as fair as he. All the more reason for holding his tongue. They saw that he was voluntarily enduring their hardships. Did that not do a bit to expiate for his race? Or did they merely think that he was a paleface fool to endure on his own what they were condemned to endure? Did they perhaps censure him for making his little wife accompany him on this comfortless mission? These self-questions he enunciates in his diary.

The bandanas masking their lower faces as they marched made them look like an army of bandits. The dirt road, following months of unbroken drought and searing summer heat, was powdery. The water wagons with their tin dippers to drink from were spaced at intervals along the line; still they choked and were blinded by the dust raised by hundreds of marching feet, the hooves of the horses and the oxen, the wheels of the wagons. It was like groping their way through the smoke of a fire, and the coughing and hawking were incessant. Hard as it was to break the old taboo, they were forced repeatedly to do it and spit out their souls upon the ground, to be trodden upon by those at their heels.

They were out of reach now of the state militiamen. Those convoying them were soldiers carrying out orders, not zealots. There were no whips nor prods, no shouts nor curses. On the contrary, their guards were as considerate of their welfare as circumstances allowed.

Still, there was a long, long way to go, and they must take advantage of the weather. This heat was bad, but the coming cold, already overdue, would be worse. For their own good a pace must be kept up.

As the fittest and the less fit and the least fit and the unfit were sorted out and separated, the column straggled like an old animal whose hindquarters are failing it. And now that sense of their being yoked together ran not from the lead to the rear but from the rear to the lead. All were restrained by the pace of the slowest, the very young and the very old, and those with one or another of these on their backs, like Aeneas or else like St. Christopher, and when one of their number faltered, all felt the check, as though they were chained together.

They tried to keep up their spirits by talking as they trudged along. They soon found that they had nothing to say. Memories of home were a subject to avoid, their recent detention in the camp an experience to suppress, their present existence no occasion for conversation, the country they were passing through nothing for them to remark upon but merely something to put behind them, and of their destination they felt only dread. They were not travelers seeing the sights. They were more like workhorses with blinders plowing an endless row. Yet to do nothing but plod daily like dumb animals was to fear becoming one, forgetting how to speak, losing your mind. They marched to the slow measures of “Amazing Grace” and “Just As I Am.” Over and over again in their two tongues they told themselves that they were wretches who had been saved, were lost but now were found, were blind but now could see—that they were coming at the bidding of the Lamb of God.

Meanwhile, as they strained toward their remote goal, how many of them, Noquisi wondered, knew of the prophecy made by the wise men of the tribe—so far remarkably fulfilled—that even there they would find no resting place, but would be driven all the way to the western waters?

He felt the isolation and the oppression of being young and being the bearer of a burdensome truth, one affecting them all, that his trusting elders did not know.

Noquisi—or as he was soon known to them, Tad—short for Tadpole—another of the many names his eventful early life would confer upon him before he settled down to Amos Smith—was not the only one to serve as the soldiers' interpreter whenever one was required, whenever something untoward occurred, an accident, a breakdown, a person's sudden collapse, but he was the one most often sought out. He was nimble in both tongues, he was bright, and he was small. To his added weight no horse objected. He could be lifted with one hand and swung up to ride behind the saddle and quickly transported to the scene.

It was while riding behind him, holding on around his waist, and hearing him mutter to himself, that Noquisi got to know something of Captain Donovan, the caravan's commandant. It was from the Captain's grumbling and cursing that he got an inkling of the muddleheadedness of those who had projected this operation, the bureaucrats far from the scene in Washington, and even further from a sense of reality, of their blithe confidence that all factors would comply with their paper plans, that hundreds of people of all ages and conditions could be led as one, and that he, Captain William Donovan, to whom the experience was as novel as that of Moses in the wilderness, would know exactly how to solve any unexpected hitch that might arise as though he had a field manual.