The Native American Experience

by Dee Brown

  Holding his nervous horse with a tight rein, the Runner scanned the long line of Cherokees, searching for the Long Warrior. A sudden outburst of yelling drew his attention back to the stockade. Through clouds of powder smoke he saw Jackson’s soldiers scaling the barricade. A few minutes later as fleeing Red Sticks gathered on the river rim of the peninsula, the Cherokees and mounted riflemen opened a heavy fire upon them. Afterward the Runner learned that the Creeks had fastened canoes along their side of the river, but the Cherokees had swum underwater and pulled most of them away. Now the only means of escape for the Creeks was to leap into the river, where they became easy targets with no means of defending themselves.

  For a few moments the Runner felt light-headed, intoxicated by the crackle of musket fire, the shouts of exultation and pain, the smell of acrid smoke that hung over the earth and river, the swift flow of men killing and dying. For that brief spell of time he wanted to be a part of the madness; he felt that he must lend himself to the fury of bloodletting; he must risk his life as the others were risking theirs.

  And then he saw his father in the river, water reaching to his barrel chest, his white hair like silver under turban and deer tail. He was urging his warriors to follow. He seemed intent upon reaching the peninsula itself, for what reason the Runner could not guess. Jackson’s blue-coated Regulars were already there, killing what few Red Sticks remained in the gullies and potholes.

  Relaxing his reins, the Runner set his horse in motion through a thicket of budding willows. When he glanced at the river again he saw the Long Warrior floating in the water. At first the Runner thought his father was swimming, but he was moving too swiftly, his body tumbling in a narrow current. The Runner slapped his horse into a lope, grazing tree trunks as he splashed along the muddy bank, watching his father’s white hair bobbing until it swirled into a shore eddy. There it joined a dozen dead men turning in a circle of bloody foam, their naked limbs intermingled. All around the bend many other bodies were lodged against logs and brush. If any Creek warriors had survived that deadly fire of the Cherokees and mounted riflemen, they were nowhere in view.

  The Long Warrior was dead, a musket ball in his brain. From somewhere, Qualla suddenly appeared to help pull the body ashore. “A long time ago,” Qualla said, “the Stalking Turkey saw this in a dream. It was foretold.” The Runner had always thought of his father as the tallest of men, a giant image from childhood, but now in death he seemed shrunken and unshielded. Qualla built a fire and they sat beside the dead man through the night, saying nothing.

  At dawn Jackson’s army began moving out toward the south to pursue what remnants were left of Menewa’s Red Sticks. As the mounted frontiersmen departed, some of them halted long enough to drag dead Creeks from the river, taking long strips of skin from the bodies to be dried and used for belts and bridles.

  As soon as there was enough fight, the Runner swam across to the peninsula and found an ax. He then searched for a cedar tree, chopped it down, and hewed out the center. After placing the Long Warrior in the cedar log and covering him with his blanket, he and Qualla held a ceremony over the fire, praying to the Maker of Breath and then extinguishing the fire with water to symbolize death. As no rocks were nearby to cover the log, they dug a hole in the sand and buried the Long Warrior on the high bank of the river.

  Because there had been no women or children inside the Creek fortifications, the Runner guessed that they must have been in concealment somewhere near, but he did not know whether or not they had followed the fleeing Red Sticks. Nor was he certain that his mother was with them. Taking opposite directions, he and Qualla started circling outside the area of battle. He had not ridden a hundred yards through the late-morning mist when he saw several women struggling in swamp mud below a dome of high ground. They showed fright at his approach, and he called out: “Amayi, the Beloved Woman. Have you seen her?” One of them pointed toward the high ground.

  He found two women beside a badly wounded man and he was about to ask where his mother was when he suddenly recognized her as one of the women in disheveled mud-spattered clothing. Her hair was matted and tangled. “Talasi!” she cried, and ran toward him, repeating his name over and over, embracing him as he dismounted.

  The wounded man was Menewa, the other woman his wife. Menewa had been knocked down by a sword when the soldiers overran the stockade. Although his arm bled badly, he had lain still, hoping to be passed by as dead, but a soldier shot him in the head, the bullet passing through his mouth, tearing away several teeth. When he recovered consciousness it was dark. He crawled to the river, floated downstream, and then dragged himself across the mud to the high ground.

  While Mary was telling the Runner about this, she saw something in his face that made her stop. “What is it, Talasi?” she demanded.

  “The Long Warrior,” he said. “Qualla and I buried him by the river.”

  He read the pain in her eyes before they closed. “He took the wrong pathway,” she whispered. “But he was a warrior and did all the good he could as he saw it. He taught me how to laugh at the world no matter how hard things may be.”

  She sat down on a hummock of grass, breathing deeply. “You have come for me, have you not, my little Runner? But now there is no reason for me to go. Soon there will be no place for any of us. The Creeks will lose their homeland first, and then it will be the turn of the Cherokees. The most unyielding of the warriors are all dead now, or so torn in flesh like Menewa here they may never fight again.” She looked up at the sun showing itself like a pale moon through the lifting fog. “Perhaps the Long Warrior is luckier than we. He is in the Country of the Spirits. They say it is always fair weather there, that one is never hungry. May he live in a warm and pleasant country of pure waters and every species of wild game. No, Talasi, there is no reason for me to go back with you. I shall stay here with the bones of the Long Warrior until the Maker of Breath claims me also.”

  The Runner kneeled in front of her, putting his hands on her shoulders. He was still slightly afraid of her, disturbed because he had seldom seen tears in her eyes before. “Creek Mary’s blood is not here,” he said. “It is in Okelogee. You have a new grandson.”

  Her eyes brightened at once. “Sehoya’s child? My first full-blood grandson!”

  “You must see him,” he said.

  “Yes, I must see him. I will go back with you, Talasi, if you will let me name this boy.”

  He nodded.

  “Oh, Talasi, you do not know how my bones ache. I have grown old and foolish. I want to see my full-blood grandson and I am lonesome for the Sleeping Woman.”

  16

  “HORSESHOE BEND,” DANE SAID, “was the American Indians’ Waterloo.” He smiled one of his quick sardonic smiles. “I was told that by Mr. Teddy Roosevelt, your President. More Indians fought and were killed at Horseshoe Bend than in any other battle in the long history of warfare between your people and my people.”

  I confessed that I had never heard of Horseshoe Bend.

  “No,” he said, “the schoolbooks don’t tell about Indian history. For us it was the turning point, the beginning of the end. Mr. Roosevelt and I, we talked about that one time when he was out here on a hunting trip. If Andrew Jackson had not destroyed the Red Stick Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, Mr. Roosevelt said, then he would have been ordered back to Nashville by the Governor of Tennessee and ended up as a forgotten frontiersman, and his name would not be in the schoolbooks either. But with the help of his Cherokee allies he destroyed the Red Sticks and that was his turning point. He became a great hero to the border settlers, went on to the Battle of New Orleans to become a greater hero, and because he promised the settlers he would drive all the Indians west of the Mississippi River and open our lands for them, they made him their President.

  “Without his Cherokees there on the riverbank at Horseshoe Bend, Andrew Jackson would have won no victory. Most of the Red Stick Creeks would have got away to fight another day.”

  “So the Cherokees created
their own engine of destruction by making General Jackson a hero?”

  “Of course they thought then that they were gaining his undying friendship, making sure that the Cherokee Nation would endure as an ally of the United States. The best of the young Cherokee warriors were there at Horseshoe Bend. The Ridge, who was a major like my grandfather, and ever afterward called himself Major Ridge, was there, and Junaluska and Going Snake, and so was the great John Ross and several other Scots half-bloods. After Andrew Jackson betrayed them, turned upon them, they bitterly regretted what they had done. Old Junaluska said if he had known that Jackson would drive the Cherokees from their homes he would have killed him that day at the Horseshoe. And at least a hundred times in my youth I heard my own father, the Runner, curse himself as a blockhead for saving Jackson’s life that day. If he had let that stalking Creek put a tomahawk in Andrew Jackson’s skull the Indian people would have been rid of their most powerful enemy.

  “Only Grandmother Mary saw the truth at the time, and what was to come in the future. She knew the meaning of Horseshoe Bend and was resigned to dying there, but after the Runner brought her back to Okelogee she was soon full of fight again. She always gave me credit for reviving her spirits.”

  “You were the Runner’s and Sehoya’s firstborn child, then?”

  “And their only child. Sehoya died of the ‘great chill’ soon after Mary and the Runner came back to Okelogee, and Mary had to take care of me. As you know, she named me for that young Danish sea captain who brought his ship up the Savannah River before she met John Kingsley. Until I was four or five years old I thought Creek Mary was my mother. After my father took a new wife, Walina, I was told to call her ‘mother,’ and Mary became ‘alisi’ or ‘grandmother.’ But I was always closer to Mary than to Walina. We all lived in the house that had been Mary’s and the Long Warrior’s, although Mary gave its ownership to Walina. Opothle wanted Mary to come and live with his family in his richly furnished house with its black servants, but she would not leave the Little Singing Stream and the wonderful view of the Sleeping Woman.

  “It’s strange how old memories of people get mixed up with little things. The first object that I remember was Mary’s neckpiece, that Danish coin. On warm summer days she wore only a skirt, leaving her breasts bare as all Creek women did before the white men came and shamed them into covering their bodies. Her breasts were round and firm as a young woman’s until quite late in her life. She would sit with me in the shade of the arbor, holding me on her lap, singing or talking, sometimes laughing in that deep-toned way of hers until I would join in. And I remember that Danish coin always there between her naked breasts. She also had an hourglass that the Long Warrior had brought her from Nashville. She would let me hold it, watching the white sand drop grain by grain until I went to sleep.

  “And to this day when I smell dried fruit—peaches or apples—or hear the sound of buzzing wasps, Grandmother Mary’s face is always there before me. Every summer from the Little Ripening Moon to the Big Ripening Moon she would get peaches and apples from Opothle’s orchard, slice them up and put them to dry on the roof, where they drew great swarms of lazy wasps.

  “As soon as I began to talk Cherokee, she taught me Creek words and English words, every day a few new words, telling me over and over again that words are what give us power, that without words we are nothing, we do not exist. She also never let me forget that I had the blood of Creek Mary in my veins, that I was her only full-blood descendant. ‘Sogonisi,’ she would say, ‘child of my son, someday you must take as your mate another full-blood. Never look upon the daughters of the Unegas, not even the half-bloods. Keep Creek Mary’s blood always red.’

  “But like most of us, her thoughts were not always in harmony. One day she told me the story of the Lady of Cofitachequi, a Georgia Creek who welcomed the Spanish explorer De Soto. ‘She was a Beloved Woman of my people,’ Mary said, ‘and her warriors carried her in a chair decorated in many colors to meet the Aniskwani, the Spaniards. She took a necklace of pearls from her neck and gave it to De Soto, and like the evil white man that he was he repaid her by raiding Cofitachequi and taking all the pearls he could find in the town. And then he seized the Lady and carried her off with him on his marches. Not until many days afterward did she escape to return home and later bear De Soto’s child. From the Lady of Cofitachequi my father was descended, and so you see I have the blood of the Aniskwani in my veins.’ Well, the next time Grandmother Mary warned me that I must keep her blood red by taking a full-blood for my wife, I reminded her about that Spanish blood she carried. Oh, but she was angry at me, so angry that she emptied a cup of water on my head. ‘You little whiddler,’ she shouted. ‘That was just a story. Don’t you know truth from story?’

  “No matter how bad I was, she never punished me by caning as the Scots people did their children. Instead she would try to make me look ridiculous in the eyes of others for whatever it was I had done. Her keenest punishment of all was to refuse to touch me, or talk to me, so that I would fear she had lost her affection for me. That pained me much more than a switch or cane ever could have.

  “In some ways she also had to take the place of my Uncle Opothle. Being my only uncle, Opothle was duty bound to teach me to hunt, but he seldom had the time for such instructions. He tried to teach me how to play anetsa and other games of ball, but he was awkward and my father took over. I played with the Bird clan boys, but was never good enough for the Okelogee teams. After my father brought Walina to live with us as his second wife, Grandmother Mary found time to teach me to hunt. As she often boasted, Mary could shoot as well as any of the men, with a muzzle-loader or her old flintlock pistol. She was fair with the bow and arrow, but after she taught me what she knew about shooting arrows, I soon surpassed her in distance and aim and seldom missed a deer after I’d got it in my sight. This seemed to please her. ‘The old ways of deer hunting are the best,’ she said. ‘Gunpowder is the white man’s curse upon us.’ She taught me never to kill an animal without begging its forgiveness, and never to kill if we did not need the meat.

  “Those were the happiest times of my life until I met Sweet Medicine Woman, but that was a long time afterward and many long miles from Okelogee.” He stretched his arms, stood up, and stamped his feet. “Old bones.” He squinted out the window. “Sun’s high and I’m hungry. Time to eat.”

  “Perhaps I should go back into Dundee,” I said.

  “Nothing to eat there. And your train east won’t be coming till about dark. I got plenty beef stew and some smoked buffalo tongue.”

  “Buffalo tongue? I thought the buffalo were all gone.”

  “They’re coming back. Cheyennes keep a secret herd down on the Lame Deer. Only white man ever killed one of our buffalo was Mr. Teddy Roosevelt. All he wanted was the head.”

  “I’d like some buffalo tongue and a bowl of your stew,” I said. “And I want to hear the rest of Creek Mary’s story.”

  He brushed a red-flowered calico curtain aside and went into a little pantry, returning with a big pot and an ancient rawhide parfleche that contained the buffalo tongue. After he had worked over the coals in the fireplace, he put the stew to going and sat cross-legged with his back to the heat.

  “I said I was happy growing up in Okelogee, but I knew that the older people often were not. They talked over the heads of us youngsters much of the time about Andrew Jackson’s betrayals, about agents trying to bribe Cherokee leaders in their unending greed for our lands, about white settlers getting thicker and thicker around us. But their greatest fear was of the government, which never stopped trying to persuade the Cherokees that they should move beyond the Mississippi River. The same things were happening to the Creeks, and helped bring the two tribes together again after the old wounds of Horseshoe Bend.

  “The Cherokees were so fearful of being forced out of their homelands that they decided to become as much like the white people as they could. The chiefs kept working away to form a government with written laws, but the
y could not agree on whether they wanted to continue as a separate nation or become a state like Georgia or Tennessee. They invited missionaries to come in and start churches, and some of the more prosperous began to send their children north to New England schools.

  “One of the liveliest memories of my youth was going on horseback with Grandmother Mary over to Oothcaloga Town to welcome the first students home from New England. Almost a thousand Cherokees gathered to see them arrive and hail them as heroes. All I could talk about on the way home to Okelogee was going to school in New England as soon as I was old enough.

  “I never went, however. You see, two of the students fell in love with white daughters of the New Englanders, married them, and brought them back to the Cherokee Nation. They were Major Ridge’s son, John, and Buck Watie, who later changed his name to Elias Boudinot to please an old gentleman of that name who befriended him. Now, it was perfectly all right for white male missionaries to take Cherokee girls for wives, but it did not set well with those New England church people for dark-skinned male Cherokees to mate with their pure-blooded lily-white daughters. No sir, they were mortified. After John and Buck made off with those Yankee girls, the New England churchmen closed their schools to Cherokees and opened little mission schools in the Cherokee country. This kept their daughters safe from the rest of us Cherokee boys who had set our hearts on going north to school.”

  With a laugh that was almost a cackle, Dane turned to stir the stew. “Well,” he said, “I suppose they were like Creek Mary, they wanted to keep their blue blood pure. But in those times Mary was a good deal more concerned with saving the Cherokee Nation than her blood. She went around to all the neighboring towns, making speeches in the councils and talking to any who would listen. She ended every speech by shouting: ‘Not one more foot of land to the whites!’ And her listeners would usually repeat the words after her in a kind of chorus, several times. It became the Cherokee slogan.