Serene Caddoes: Chowawhana, Quinahiwi, Red Bear, White Antelope.
Pawnees with their eyes always watching you: Sky Chief, Pita-Leshar, Kokaka, Dusty Chief.
Kiowas — they were real men, and yet curious men: Satanta (White Bear), Satank (Sitting Bear), Little Mountain, Thunder Man, One Braid, Stiff Neck, Guibadai (Appearing Wolf), Light Hair, Big Tree, Eagle Tail, White Cowbird, Poor Buffalo, No-Shoes, Kicking Bird (Tene-Angopte — Striking Eagle was really his name), Timbered Mountain, Lone Wolf, Gotebo, Funny Man. The Kiowas were all funny men, but no one ever called them women. They could whip their numbers in anything.
It was with such Plains Indians that Hannali lived his other life — in the off-season weeks and months and years — for much more than half a century. He learned a dozen Plains tongues, he learned hand talk, he learned custom and medicine. He went to war with the Plains Indians and feasted with them. He taught them smithery, and what they taught him was more intangible and intricate.
There was Indian in Hannali that could never be satisfied with the settled life, with a single world, or half a dozen worlds. But some of the nations in him made satisfying contact with the nations of the Plains.
Buffalo meat piled high as a man in rows fifty feet long!
Comanche scalps fresh on poles before Cheyenne lodges!
Five hundred ponies taken in one night's raiding!
They smoke and they talk, and the Big Man is among them. Who else has taken the pipe from the lips of Timbered Mountain? Who else has passed it to Jim Pockmark?
Who else knew them all?
CHAPTER SEVEN
1.
Luvinia, Marie d'Azel, Salma. Kill the big Choctaw! The Whiskey Decade.
In the spring of 1831, Hannali had three daughters born posthumously, as it were — after the termination of his marriages. These were:
Luvinia, of Martha Louisiana.
Hazel (Marie d'Azel), of Marie DuShane.
Sally (Salina), of Natchez.
Natchez had named Salina from the place of her own birth — Salina (Grand Saline), the salt seeps of the Grand or Neosho River.
This was all the family that Hannali would have for that generation. In the later Territory days there was some mystery about this family, and people wondered just what were the relationships. There was confusion of surnames which were not yet fixed with the Choctaws, or with any Indians. The Choctaw blacks still used the patronymic form (the first name of the father becoming the last name of the child), so Martha Louisiana called her children Luvinia Hannali and Travis Hannali, rather than Luvinia and Travis Innominee. Marie DuShane had become a single word in the family, and she was never called simply Marie; but outsiders still heard a family name in it. And the Louisiana of Martha Louisiana — though part of a double given name — also had the sound of a surname. So visitors wondered about the status of the strange triple family, and the Innominee themselves never bothered to clear it up.
But the explanation as given here, coming from one of the grandsons, is the correct one. There had been three marriages of whom no one could say which was the true one. These three had all been terminated in a stormy family showdown, and thereafter the persons lived as one continent kindred.
The main thought of Hannali Innominee that spring (1831), as the spring before and the spring before that, was to plant corn for the Trail Indians. There were difficulties.
One was the sod busting itself, the first plowing of the land that had never been broken. The grass roots were a thousand years old and so heavily entangled that they refused to be parted. The sod was so tough that it could be used for durable building blocks — earth and fiber one foot thick and unyielding. Most of the early Territory houses were sod houses.
Hannali had the best mule in the world, a big black animal named Mingo. When he saw the second best mule in the world, Catoosa, a white mule belonging to a Creek Indian, he had to buy it. For the most stubborn sod, Hannali used both mules. But mostly he used one till it was weary, and then the other. And Hannali himself worked eighteen hours a day.
Another difficulty was the fencing. To build fences that are deer high, buffalo strong, and hog tight takes endless heavy labor; and barbed wire was a little more than forty years unborn. Hannali built miles of sod fences, rock fences, rail fences. Some of his fences can still be found in Pittsburg and Haskell counties of Oklahoma — standing up like walls of China in the bosky country. A dozen houses in the region have been built from the stones that Hannali carted in and built into his fences, and they've been using up his rail fences for firewood for a hundred years. Hannali was a mule for work.
The Trail Indians, coming mostly in the years 1832 and 1833, didn't call for Hannali's advertised free corn. The Indians stopped just inside the borders of their new country and would go no farther. They selected the poor lands of the eastern edge, too tired to travel three days more to better land. They were sick and weary, and one fifth of them had died on the removal. Hannali boated his corn down to Fort Coffee to give it to the starving Indians, but he wasn't permitted to do so.
Government distributors and licensed traders had been buying corn from Quapaw and Osage and McIntosh Creek Indians for fifty cents a bushel and selling it to the Trail Indians for three dollars. They would allow none of this free business. They moved to kill the big Choctaw.
Hannali escaped with his skin. He left his boat and his corn there and fled on foot where men on horses couldn't follow. Three good Indian trackers were put on his trail, but at a certain point they refused. As dogs will usually track a bear till they are onto him, but sometimes they will halt and tremble on the trail of a particularly savage beast, so did the trackers refuse to close on this animal.
It would be given out later that Hannali had killed three men on his breakaway near Fort Coffee, but this was false. The men said to have been killed were always men unknown or of made-up names.
It was no big event to Hannali, but he wouldn't allow himself to be killed while there were things needing doing. He sent out cautious word where he would make his next landing, at Round Mountain Landing twenty miles upriver from Fort Coffee. He gave away twenty barge loads of corn there in two years.
But something had happened to the Trail Indians. These were not the strong Choctaws of the old country, not the tall Creeks and the fine Cherokees. They were beaten animals when they came off the removal trail, and they had given up hope. The men of them were on the drink in a horrifying manner. Though starving, they would lie drunken all day; then, rising up, they would trade off their last pot or bushel or sell their last daughter as slave for another jug of spirits.
It is said that the Indians had no experience with alcoholic drinks before the coming of the white men, and that therefore they had no control. But, at this time, they had had experience with the white men and their alcohol for three hundred years; and before that they had had their own alcohol, corn beer, and cordial drinks from choke cherries and sand plums — though not strong spirits.
The Indians had been proper drinkers for centuries. They made joyous and selective use of the tricky old animal, and drunkards among them were few.
This degradation was a new thing — drinking to exorcise their unbearable misery. They had lost their country, their lives were uprooted, and death had struck nearly every family of them. It was then that the winged serpent turned into a venomous snake. They traded their last possessions and their manhood for the hasty whiskey sold them by profiteers along the way. It was the Whiskey Decade, the 1830s in the Territory, though it was over in far less than ten years. Missionaries were frantic over it, and some serious Indians considered the situation hopeless. Who can rebuild nations out of drunken animals?
A few of them saw it clearly, and one of them was Hannali.
“It is only the troubles they are snake-bit it is only a passing thing,” he said, “give it three years and it will be gone they will wake up one morning and see that they are still alive they will
see the sun and the grass they will build houses and farm the land give it three years and it will be gone.”
2.
Green turban and red turban. Count in his castle. Piano, loom, and eyeglasses.
Just how civilized were the Choctaws on their coming to the new country? Were they brownskin frontier white men, or were they still feral Indians?
There is a sketch of the Choctaws made by George Catlin in the 1830s, just after their coming to the Territory. It is of the Choctaw Eagle Dance, and it shows them painted and naked, hopping around in a circle, and they look wild. But that was a ceremony, a show put on for the visiting painter. How did they go daily? How did Hannali look when he went about his business?
Well, he wore cowskin boots and buckskin trousers both of his own fabrication. He wore a woven cotton shirt and a blanket over that on cold days, both from the talented loom of Martha Louisiana. Usually he wore a green turban, wound Creek-Indian fashion, on his head. This was not to make a splash of color. The Creeks wore red turbans, and the Choctaws wore green.
On very sunny days he wore a wide-brimmed manufactured felt hat. When important persons came to visit, he wore his canary-colored topper, and put on gloves. But was he a civilized farmer, or was he still wild Indian when he followed Mingo behind the plow and carried a long bow asling?
He didn't carry the bow because he was a wild Indian, but because he could fill the pot with it cheaper than with a rifle. He shot turkeys and rabbits with it as he went about his eternal plowing and fencing. He shot coyotes — all Indians ate dogs, and coyotes are dogs — and buck deer, geese, ducks, and coons. He had to be a good shot or the bow would be no advantage to him. It takes an hour to make an arrow in all its components, and if he missed often or lost arrows, it would not be cheaper than shooting a rifle.
Then he couldn't be called a wild Indian with a painted face? Let us not go too fast there. He painted his face about once a month, livid-red or chalk-white, usually after a dream telling him to.
But at least he wasn't a howling wild Indian? Sure, he was a howling Indian. He was a Choctaw, and the Chocs are Indians who have fun with noise. Who can refrain from answering the wolves and coyotes when they sound? Who but a dead man does not whoop a hundred times a day?
Hannali was a farmer, a blacksmith, a boatbuilder, a commercial shipper, a ferryman, a pork salter, a tanner, a miller, the founder of an estate that was a town. He was a count in his castle in the medieval setup of the Choctaw Nation. He was a banker, after he had a steel safe brought up the river from New Orleans. He was a carpenter and stonemason, a gunsmith and harness maker, a wainwright, cooper, fletcher, distiller, and brewer. He was a merchant with the first mail-order establishment in the Territory. He brought the first sheep and goats into the Moshulatubbee. He operated sawmills and quarries. He was a civilized man who sometimes painted his face and body and whooped and hollered with the loudest of them. He was a rude illiterate, but in five years' time he would no longer be that. He was the master of his own culture, and that is to be civilized.
Very early in his Territory years, Hannali began to send downriver for merchandise for his friends and neighbors. He assembled catalogues of the stores in New Orleans, and accepted produce for payment. His shipments were landed for him on the Arkansas River near present Tamaha, just below the Canadian River branching. He would go down and bring them up by keel boat, or send his boaters to do it. For his clients, he shipped down corn and pecans by the boatload.
He soon operated an unchartered bank, with Marie DuShane setting up a regular ledger of accounts and keeping them accurately. He paid and received interest, and had more gold on hand than any Indian in the Territory except the Chickasaw Pitman Colbert. And Colbert, according to true legend, had needed six mules and a specially built wagon to bring his gold from Mississippi to Doaksville in Oklafalaya.
With one of the first cargoes consigned up the river to him — after the change in his marital arrangements — Hannali brought three gifts, the things most desired by the three women. They were a piano for Marie DuShane, a manufactured loom for Martha Louisiana, and a pair of eyeglasses for Natchez.
Natchez didn't need glasses. She could count the mites on a hawk a mile in the air and the microbes on the mites. She had once seen a rich Cherokee lady wearing eyeglasses, and she wanted them more than anything else.
All three of the women used the loom. Each, on occasion, wore the eyeglasses. Only Marie DuShane played the piano at first. She played like a Frenchie — the little tunes she had learned as a child at school. Then she tired of the instrument.
Martha Louisiana knew who the piano was when she first saw it — it was a person and not a thing to her. She played it like an elemental. Educated visitors later said that she played with genius, nor did they say this out of kindness; they were such as disapproved of a Negro woman being so mysteriously in the heart of a family.
3.
Come to the mountain. Seven hundred years old and blind. Oklafalaya was a magic word. Who summons by dream?
At the tail end of winter, after Hannali had been in the Territory for onto four years, he awoke one morning from a charismatic dream. It was the dream of the mountain Nanih Waiya, not that of the great mound that was built by hands in the Mississippi country, but of the older mountain of which the mound was the memorial. The last of the Choctaw magic men called to Hannali in the dream — “Come to the mountain.”
Hannali told his women that he would be gone for two or three days. He took a sack of corn hominy and a little jerked buffalo, put some mule whiskey in his saddle bags, took his bow and rifle and fiddle, and mounted horse and rode south to find the mountain. He had painted his face — but only lightly — with streaks of green and orange.
Nanih Waiya was the leaning mountain. It would not be a particularly high mountain, nor grand for its sheerness and a suddenness of aspect. It was only a magic mountain.
As he rode south in the morning, Hannali was joined by other Choctaws, as he knew that he would be. Within a dozen miles he was joined by his cousin John T, by Albert Horse, by Inchukahata, by others — some twenty of them. All, of course, had had the same dream, and they rode without question on the journey.
In the afternoon they overtook a white boy riding a light pony. The white boy was frightened of them, but they spoke to him kindly and put him at his ease. He was about fourteen years old, and he said he was riding down to Oklafalaya. He mispronounced the name, but he said it with reverence. He was a pale boy with watery eyes; he was from Missouri; and his name was Robert Pike.
In American writings of before the year 1850, one will several times come on this enchantment of the name. Oklafalaya, Okla Falaya was a magic word. This was when the name Oklahoma was still thirty years uncoined, and Oklafalaya came near to giving its name to the whole Territory. In the popular mind it was an indescribably wild place, like an Africa in the middle of us.
It was the Indian land with wild mountains and forests. It was the land of the giant buffalo (though there were few buffalo east of the Kiamichi River in Oklafalaya itself); it was the land of the great bear (and it was); the land of panthers and real wild Indians.
They told the boy that he could ride with them, and that nothing could happen to him while he was in their company. They told him that they were going right to the border of Falaya.
“Are the Indians in Oklafalaya as kind as you?” the boy asked. He was afraid of wild Indians, but he had to go to the wild Indian country.
“No they are not,” said Albert Horse, “they are our cousins and very like us but not such well seeming men they would not say ride along with us young boy they will likely say we will cut your ears off you young pup we haven't eaten boys' ears for a week.”
“Will they harm me? Will they kill me?”
“They will not do either of those things they will only scare you till your liver melts but don't let them scare you.”
“No, I won't let them scare me,” said
Robert Pike.
“They will have big knives they will whoop and holler and roll their eyes but remember they are laughing inside you laugh too.”
“Yes, I will. I'll laugh at them.”
“They will likely not cut your ears clear off,” said John T, “they will cut them only half off and maybeso they will grow back again almost right just keep saying to yourself I won't let this hurt me even if it kills me a lot of times it doesn't hurt much to have your ears cut off if you keep saying that no no boy can't you see that we are laughing inside too we are also jokers the men in Oklafalaya would no more hurt you than we would they are our kindred and nearly as fine people as ourselves.”
They killed a young buck for late dinner. They seared the meat and ate it near raw. Hannali, for it was his kill, gave the buckskin to the boy and instructed him how to dress it. Hannali played the fiddle for all of them as they rode rapidly through the afternoon. They covered sixty miles that day and arrived at their destination while there was plenty of sun left, for they had all started very early.
They had come down the Jacks-Fork of the Kiamichi. They skirted the Sansbois Mountains and now came to where the Winding Stair Mountains curled around from the east and the Kiamichi Mountains loomed distantly in the south. They began to climb into a complex of the Winding Stairs — first on horse, then tied their animals and went up on foot. These were not high mountains, but were curiously curled mountains alive with color. None of the men had any doubt where they were going.
The rocks assumed odd forms as the afternoon sun picked them out. There was a rock above them that looked like a graven Indian man; they pointed and went up. One rock had looked like a buffalo, but the likeness melted away as the angle of shadow changed. One rock had looked like a woman bending over grinding corn, and then it had looked like nothing but a rock. But the image of the graven Indian did not change.
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