The Rosewood Casket (2 page)

SPRING 1824

The old woman had climbed the mountain to take one last look at spring, and to say good-bye to the beautiful world that she would lose when death came to take her. She had risen before dawn, as she had all her life, mindful of the Hunters, who waited with their arrows to take the souls of Cherokees they found sleeping after daybreak. Perhaps they watched her more carefully now that she was old, but she would disappoint them. She always wakened in darkness now, and she would greet the sunrise with a song of thanks to Selu, the Corn Mother, for the gift of another day in this green and holy place.

The mountain was called
Udawoguhda
—the bald mountain. Here the great Shawnee conjurer Groundhog’s Mother had fought a magical giant lizard he had encountered in his search for the serpent monster Utkena. Treeless, and buffeted by ceaseless winds, the bald mountain still slept in winter, its yellow grass unchanged by spring. But along its slope, she had seen coltsfoot flowers and the white mist of blossoming sarvice trees. She paused at the yellow flowers of a spice tree and snapped a twig, breathing its deep, heavy perfume and remembering other springs.

Now she was atop the bald mountain, and the world spread out before her. She had passed through spring and back into the heights of winter. She could see the new life flowering in the valleys, but she was beyond it here—perhaps death was like that: being able to see the world of the living, but being lost in bleakness in some other place. Smoky mountains ringed the valleys like the sides of a serpentine bowl. The ridges were cloudy to her eyes now, even on the clearest days, but she could see with her heart. She could hear the cry of birds overhead, and she knew that the hawks and the lesser birds of the north were flying home, following their own Warriors Path—the chain of mountains marked a trail that would lead them back to their far-off nesting places, now that the earth was warm again.

She wished that she could die in winter, when the loss of the earth would not be such a great sorrow to her. Even greater was the pain she felt at the thought of losing the land—the fortress of mountains and the peaceful valleys cradled within them. She had given much for the sake of the land—a husband, the lives of her kinfolk, and at last even the respect of some of her people, who called her traitor because she would not agree that fighting was the only way to keep the land. She would miss the land, more even than her family, more than the little great-grandson who played in the grass at her feet on warm afternoons.

Perhaps even her spirit in the afterlife would be denied the sight of the mountains, because soon the land would no longer belong to her people. She could see that day coming more clearly than she could see the distant mountains before her. From the valleys beyond that first ridge, trails of chimney smoke rose to mingle with the clouds—signs of farmsteads where once there had been only field and forest, and enough elk and buffalo to feed the nations of the Cherokee, the Shawnee, and the Catawba without contention and without want. She had thought that the whites could learn their custom of sharing the land, but it was not their way, although some of them, too, had loved the land. They had wanted to own bits of the earth, a parcel for each man, and with their long rifles they had killed the great herds for their skins alone, leaving the meat to rot in the fields. She supposed that it was only a different kind of love. Her people loved the land as children love a mother, but the whites’ love seemed to be the longing men felt for a beautiful and fertile woman.

She was ancient now—past eighty in a time when people were old at forty-five. Now would ordinarily have been the time that her people would honor her for her years and her wisdom by naming her the
Ghighau
—the title in Cherokee meant Beloved Woman, and it was a sign that the gods would speak through her, conveying their will to the people in the voicing of her decisions.

She smiled to think of it. She had been Ghighau now for more than sixty years.

She could hardly remember a time when she did not carry the swan’s wing, the symbol of the authority of the Beloved Woman. It had been a different world then. The bestowing of the great honor had been mingled with her grief for the loss of that young husband, whose face she could not quite call to mind in her imaginings. She remembered, though, his shining hair, worn loose and waist-length, and the single braid in front of his left ear, the sign of the warrior.

For a long time she had tried not to think of him because his memory was tangled into scenes of battle. They had been at war with the Muskogeans—the whites called them Creeks—and her husband Kingfisher was a warrior whose hatred of the invaders had so inflamed her that she went with him, accompanying the war party into the territory held by the enemy. They had gone underhill on the Warriors Path to meet their foe at the Battle of Taliwa. Even the names had changed in the years since. The land her people called “underhill” was “Georgia” to the white settlers, and now she herself was called Nancy Ward. But in those distant days, when all creation seemed young to her, the warrior’s bride had been called Nanyehi, and she had been wellborn, with a child’s grace and dignity, so people had thought her beautiful.

At Taliwa the fighting had been fierce. She had chewed her husband’s bullets so that they would cause great, tearing wounds in the Muskogeans’ flesh. When Kingfisher was shot and lay dying beside her, she hardly had time to think about courage. She thought, later, that it must have been both anger at her husband’s killers and fear for her own life that made her lunge from behind the big chestnut tree, pick up Kingfisher’s gun, and run screaming toward the enemy, shooting and hitting what she aimed at.

They won the battle. Perhaps the sight of a raging woman warrior charging their ranks had caused the enemy to hesitate for just a moment too long. Or perhaps both sides believed that the Spirit Warriors must be fighting alongside this girl to make her shots ring true and to keep her unharmed in the heat of battle.

The Cherokee fighters went home with high praise for the young woman who had fought well, and when the decades-old war with the Muskogeans ended soon after, the tribal council at Chota and the clan spokesman declared that young Nanyehi should become the Ghighau.

The young girl’s honor had become a mature woman’s burden, for the world itself had become a shapechanger these days, and the advice of the Ghighau could now mean life or death for all of the people. She sat next to the council fire, and by raising the swan’s wing, she could pass judgment or overrule decisions made by the entire council. What if the gods who spoke through her were mistaken? Surely these alien white settlers were strange, even to them.

The whites had signed a treaty, promising to leave the hunting lands to the Indians. No settlers would make farms in the mountain hunting lands. They swore it in words on a piece of paper. But Nanyehi had taken one of the whites for her second husband, a trader called Bryant Ward, and Nanyehi became Nancy. People said that Ward had married her because the Cherokee refused to let a white trader stay long in their land unless he married into the tribe. Well, perhaps the Ghighau had married the Irishman in order to understand the ways of the whites. He was not a young man or as handsome as Kingfisher—and most important, he did not respect females as her people did. He had a strange idea that women should be like servants, and he thought that the Creator had wished such a thing. How Selu must have smiled at that! Bryant Ward and the Ghighau had a child, Elizabeth, but the union did not last.

Nancy Ward learned much from this husband, however. She learned that his tribe numbered as many as all the trees on all the mountains, while the Cherokee were few. The whites, with their guns and their horses, and their strange ways, would not go away some day, as the Muskogeans had done. Between the whites and the Cherokee it was not war; it was water falling upon stone. The stone is hard and ancient, yes; but the ceaseless water eventually wears it away. Nancy Ward knew that fighting the tide of settlers would only kill her people needlessly, and still the stream of whites would come. She counseled living in peace with the newcomers.

Learn their ways, she would say, each time the Red Chief argued for war. Learn to spin, to plow. She herself studied the trading practices of the white settlers. She studied farming and acquired horses and a herd of cattle.
If we become as they are, they will accept us, and we can all live in peace
, she reasoned.

The meeting at Sycamore Shoals in March of 1775 told her that she was wrong, but she did not want to believe it. More than a thousand Cherokee, led by the great chief Little Carpenter and his son Dragging Canoe had camped beside the Watauga River at Sycamore Shoals, in the heart of the white settlement area. Daniel Boone was there, speaking for those of his people who wanted to claim the lands to the west. He had explored the far country, and, speaking through mixed-breed interpreters, Boone and his men explained that they wanted to buy the land.

They brought six wagonloads of trade goods and spread them out on blankets, inviting the Cherokee to take what they wanted in exchange for possession of that far-off place.

The younger warriors were bewitched by the woolen goods and the glass beads, and even more so by the rifles and cases of whiskey offered in the bargain. They fingered the goods, murmuring to one another, “Why not sell the western land to these men? After all, it does not belong to us. Let us sell them the sun as well, if they want it.” And they laughed. What fools would give good rifles and blankets to pay for something that cannot be bought, that the Cherokee did not have to give? Why not take the white man’s offerings and promise them whatever words they wished to hear in exchange? Where was the harm in words?

The older chiefs had agreed to sign the document, fearing to deny the young warriors the rifles and spirits they were determined to have. Sign or face revolt within the ranks, the chiefs had reasoned. But old Oconostota, the war chief, warned the whites that his people made no claim to the lands beyond the Cumberlands. They were giving away what was not theirs to give, he cautioned the settlers. Even so, Dragging Canoe had argued against the treaty, saying that if the whites were given the land in Kentucky, they would some day want the land in between as well—the land of the Cherokee. He stamped his foot in rage when the whites asked for a “path grant,” permission to make a road through Cherokee territory so that they could reach their newly bought lands in Kentucky. “We give you from this place!” he said, pointing west.

Finally the agreement was signed, and the path grant was given, but as the two sides parted, Oconostota shook the hand of Daniel Boone, and told him, “We have given you a good land, my brother, but I believe that you will have much trouble settling it.”

Dragging Canoe waited, and his anger grew.

One year later—spring of 1776—the whites were in a war with England. Knowing of the Cherokees’ distrust of the settlers, the British approached them. If they and the other tribes of the federation would take the British side in the fighting, they could drive the settlers from their lands. “Your lands will be returned to you,” the Englishmen promised.

The leaders gathered at Chota to discuss this plan: the Shawnee, the Delaware, the Mingo, the Iroquois, and the Mohawk. Many of the elders spoke against this plan for war.

“Do not do this,” said Nancy Ward. “We are beginning to learn to live together in peace.”

But Dragging Canoe scoffed at the old men who could no longer fight, and at the Ghighau, an old woman who had even married a white man once. Only he could guard the ways of his people, he said. “There is nothing left but the bloody path.”

Years had passed now, and she still wondered if she had done the right thing. Was she a traitor to her people, as Dragging Canoe had called her, or did she save many lives and prevent worse tragedy?

She had meant well. She had meant to stop the slaughter of both Cherokee and whites, and yet many died. She had meant to forge a peace between the two peoples that would allow them to share the land, so that the Cherokee might stay in the mountains of their ancestors. But that would not happen. Although she would not live to see her people in exile, she knew that the day would not be long in coming. Now it was too late for war: the whites outnumbered the stars, and their armies were invincible. Had they not twice won in war against their British masters? What chance would the Cherokee have against such might? The days when Dragging Canoe could dream of victory were gone. They might yearn to go back to a time when the land was theirs, but not even the bravest young warrior believed that such a thing could be. Their sun was setting. The old woman was glad that she would not live to see the night.

Nancy Ward—Nanyehi—was old. Soon she would go to the Darkened Land, her soul traveling westward to the lands of the dead to begin its afterlife. The Cherokee nation, too, would be traveling westward soon, moving on to new lands to begin a new life as a people, as more settlers poured into the mountains needing acreage for their crops and their livestock. Gold had been discovered in the mountains underhill. The white men prized gold even more than they loved land. It would not be long now.

She must go, and her people must go. Now the new race would have the forests and the mountains beloved of Selu and Kanati. It was their time. But their time, too, would pass. She knew that someday the settlers’ descendants would lose the land as well. Then they would know the sorrow of leaving a place that was part of you. She wondered what manner of people would come after them.

CHAPTER ONE

Curiosity is natural to the soul of man.

—first words of
The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone,
John Filson, 1784

Dying cost nothing and could be done alone; otherwise, Randall Stargill might have lived forever. As it was he turned loose of life by inches. In a span of months he narrowed his gyre from the woods and pastures of his hunting days to the yard and garden patch surrounding the small white-frame house. Then the brisk winds of autumn confined him to the back porch and, finally, to the sofa in the square of parlor in front of the old black-and-white television. The wild tabby cats, who lived in the otherwise empty barn, subsisting on field mice and table scraps, grew tired of the meager handouts that came at irregular intervals and went elsewhere. Randall called to them a time or two after that, then forgot them.