The Native American Experience

by Dee Brown

  “She always took me along on these journeys, to carry things for her and look after the horses. She wanted the Cherokees to put into writing their unwritten Blood Law which condemned to death anyone who sold Cherokee land or accepted bribes for ceding land. She also wanted them to hold elections the way the whites did, and let everybody vote for a single tribal chief. Her choice was ‘Little John’ Ross. ‘He may have Unega blood,’ she would say, ‘but his heart is all Cherokee.’

  “On one of her speaking journeys she met Sequoyah, and gave him no rest until he agreed to come along with us to Okelogee. You may have heard of Sequoyah. Not long ago the whites over in California named a certain kind of tree for him. He invented a Cherokee syllabary, so that for the first time our people could write and read in their own language. He was about Mary’s age, and had a badly crippled leg. She told me that the way he dressed reminded her of the Long Warrior—an old-fashioned turban, a checked matchcoat, beaded belt, jeans, and buckskin leggings. Every time we stopped on the way home he would light up a long-stemmed pipe, puffing with such spirit that he surrounded himself in a cloud of smoke. I took a great liking to Sequoyah. He smiled often, talked in a soft voice, and before we reached Okelogee he taught me how to write and read sentences in Cherokee. He somehow discovered that the Cherokee spoken language had eighty-six different sounds, or syllables, and so he made eighty-six written characters, one for each sound. Sequoyah’s syllabary was easier for me to learn than written English because as soon as I knew the eighty-six characters I could start writing and reading in Cherokee. I heard him tell Mary that he had left his wife. She had burned all his papers because she thought he was practicing witchcraft. In a way, I suppose he was.”

  17

  WHILE DANE WAS ENTERING the first painful years of adolescence, a time when he and most of his friends began abandoning breechflaps to wear the white man’s trousers, the Cherokees at last adopted a written constitution modeled after that of the United States. To further prove that they were as advanced as their troublesome neighbor nation, they established an elected legislature which began passing laws for the collection of taxes, issuing of licenses, building of roads, regulation of liquor sales, support of schools, and all the other things that the white men did through their governments. They elected Creek Mary’s choice, John Ross, their principal chief. By special decree they declared that any individual Cherokee negotiating the sale of land to the whites without consent of the elected council would be guilty of treason and suffer death.

  In Okelogee there were also swift and radical changes. After the Long Warrior was killed at Horseshoe Bend, the council chose Qualla to be their headman, but Qualla died in his sleep one night and the people turned to Talasi the Runner to guide them. Perhaps they knew that he would be well advised by his mother, Creek Mary.

  It was she who was most insistent that Okelogee have a school for its young people who could no longer attend the white men’s schools in New England. A log schoolhouse and an adjoining dwelling were built a short distance up the Little Singing Stream from the town, and with the assistance of John Ross they found a willing teacher who called himself a Methodist missionary.

  Early in the Moon of Black Butterflies, the Runner and Dane drove over to Ross’s Landing on the Tennessee River in one of Opothle’s farm wagons to meet missionary Isaac McAlpin and his wife Harriet. With the McAlpins was an unexpected third person, Isaac’s young sister Jerusha. The missionary explained that his sister was an orphan and had no home other than with him and his wife. Although Jerusha and her additional baggage crowded the wagon, Dane was secretly pleased by her presence. He had never seen so fair a young girl in his life. Most of the Scots girls were dark-haired and dark-eyed, but Jerusha was blonde, her skin like porcelain, her eyes light blue. Her hair, the color of ripened wheat, was cut short and parted severely in the middle, leaving her delicate translucent ears exposed to view. Three or four curls hung over her forehead.

  Two seats had been fitted into the wagon, Isaac McAlpin riding up front with the Runner, and Harriet McAlpin and Jerusha occupying the second seat. Dane had to adjust himself as best he could among the trunks and boxes in the rear. He could not keep his eyes off Jerusha and she, becoming aware of this, often turned her head, flirting with bold looks and smiling lips and making occasional trivial remarks in her high soprano voice about the fine weather and the landscape.

  Not until the next day, after the new arrivals were installed in their log dwelling adjoining the schoolhouse, could Dane have given any description at all of the other two McAlpins, whom he had scarcely glanced at during the wagon journey. Isaac was a gaunt man, with a long bony nose through which he seemed to talk. His face was spotted with enormous overlapping freckles; his hair was a faded red. His wife Harriet was short and plump, with bright little penetrating eyes that looked everywhere at once. She was spare of speech, making her opinions felt mainly by slight clearings of the throat, barely audible sighs, and movements of her shoulders.

  A few days before the mission school was to open, the McAlpins were invited to the council house one evening to meet the Cherokees of Okelogee and answer any questions that might be raised about the school. Dane accompanied his grandmother, and as soon as she was seated in her usual place on one of the benches near the council fire, he climbed to the highest of the slab seats to join his cousin Jotham and other boys of his age group. In the council house they were not allowed to talk loudly, laugh, or engage in any sort of rowdiness. He sat there in silence, watching the single narrow entrance, hoping that Jerusha would come with her brother and sister-in-law.

  Jerusha did come with the McAlpins, and Dane watched her moving behind them in a long white dress, seeming to float like a summer cloud. The Runner seated Isaac and Harriet on the council bench, motioning Jerusha to the upper seats. She climbed slowly, her eyes searching the unfamiliar faces, and then through the gloom and smoke she saw Dane and smiled. He shifted uneasily, not knowing whether to smile in acknowledgment. He stood up when she reached the top row. “May I sit here?” she asked in her soft musical voice. He nodded, giving Jotham a shove with one leg to make more room on the slab.

  She sat on the end of the slab, so close that he could feel her breath against his cheek. “You are the only young person I know in Okelogee,” she said. She smelled of some kind of strange spice. Not knowing what to say, Dane introduced Jotham to her.

  “Do you have white blood?” she asked Jotham directly.

  “My father and mother both have white blood,” Jotham replied in a tone that he felt was grave enough for conversation in the council house.

  “But Dane is full-blood Cherokee,” she said, touching Dane’s forearm with her fingers and drawing them along his coppery skin.

  “Cherokee and Creek,” he corrected her.

  “I would not know the difference,” she said, and coughed slightly. “The smoke is dreadful up here. Why are there no windows in this old building? But you have no windows in your houses, either, do you?”

  Dane had never thought about the absence of windows in the Okelogee houses, but while he was trying to offer some explanation, Jotham remarked with pride that his family had windows in their house, and that his father had given the frames for the windows in the McAlpin house and school. Below them, faces were turning in their direction. Their voices had grown too loud, and down by the council fire the Runner had risen to his feet and was speaking in Cherokee about the McAlpins and the mission school.

  When Isaac McAlpin began talking in English, Mary acted as interpreter, translating his phrases into Cherokee. After he finished, she announced that anyone in the council house could ask questions about the school. The immobile audience sat silent.

  “Hear, now,” she declared cheerfully. “Then I will start. Isaac McAlpin, you come to us as a Methodist to teach our children. We know nothing of Methodists, but we know of Presbyterians who have a church beyond the Sleeping Woman, and they talk much about their God. Will you teach our children of your Meth
odist God?”

  “There is but one God,” McAlpin replied.

  “Our God is Esaugetuh Emissee, the Maker of Breath,” Mary said.

  McAlpin’s freckled face reddened as he groped for words. “Whatever you may call God,” he said seriously, “he is the same God. The Maker of Breath is God. In our school, we shall read daily from the Scriptures, the Holy Bible. We shall teach Christian morals to your children.”

  “Our children do not lie or steal, and they respect their elders,” Mary responded in her huskiest voice. “We want you to teach them how to do sums so they will not be cheated when they must deal with the white people. We want you to teach them how to read and write. We want you to teach them of the great world around us. We want you to teach of what has happened before they came into this world. We want you to teach them to be proud they are Cherokee. When you have done these things, you may teach them Christian morals and read from your Scriptures.” She made a little bow to McAlpin, and turned her gaze around the crowded tiers of seats to see if anyone else wished to speak.

  From the council bench the Stalking Turkey arose. His blind eye seemed fixed in a fierce stare upon McAlpin. His hair was streaked with gray, but he stood erect as a young warrior. “Does the Unega, McAlpin, come to us from heaven?” he asked.

  McAlpin replied that he did not come from heaven, but was born on earth as were the Cherokees. He had come to Okelogee from the north, he said, from Pennsylvania.

  “If he does not come from heaven,” the Stalking Turkey continued, “how can he tell us what God would have us do?”

  With a sigh, McAlpin replied that he had studied the word of God in the Bible, a copy of which he held up for all to see.

  “The Maker of Breath gave books to the Unegas,” the Stalking Turkey said. “He gave the Cherokees the bow and arrow. We should be satisfied to hunt for a living. We have taken the white man’s clothes and trinkets. We have beds and tables like him. Some of us have books—and cats. All this is bad for us. The Maker of Breath is angry, and the wild game is leaving our country.”

  Some of the older Cherokees made soft sounds of agreement, but the Stalking Turkey knew he was expressing the opinion of only a few. No one spoke in his support, and no one in the crowd had other remarks to make or questions to ask.

  Mary sat down, and the Runner took her place before the council fire. “Our hearts are good and straight,” he said, and made a sign that the council was ended.

  For Dane and Jotham, attending the mission school was a new and exciting adventure, and the presence of Jerusha McAlpin added allurement to an unaccustomed discipline that otherwise might have quickly become tedious. About thirty pupils were enrolled, their ages ranging from six to seventeen. For the first time in their young lives, most of the boys wore trousers instead of breechflaps. As Dane and Jotham were among the older group and were the only Cherokees who already knew how to read and write English, Isaac McAlpin placed the two boys with Jerusha in the rather complicated instruction schedule that he had to maintain in his one-room school. The three were therefore thrown together much of the time, Jerusha flirting first with one and then the other whenever she was sure that she was not being observed by the watchful eyes of her older brother.

  At the midmorning recess periods, when the pupils were released for a few minutes to run and shout in the schoolyard, the three fell into the habit of seating themselves against the trunk of a large beech tree. From there they would disdainfully observe the childish actions of the younger pupils, and Jerusha would tantalize first Dane and then Jotham with remarks meant to make each think that he was favored above the other.

  One day Jotham was absent from school because he had to assist his older brother, William, in rounding up a herd of cattle that had strayed, and for the first time Dane was alone with Jerusha at the recess period. He was uneasy because of this intimacy, and was made even more so by her first remark. “What are your feelings toward me, Dane?” she asked in the voice that seemed always to surround him with enchantment.

  He was unable to find words to respond to such a direct question, and she went on: “You think I like Jotham more than I like you, but I do not. When we are older, I am going to be your wife.”

  He was stunned because he had never allowed his dreams to go beyond fantasies of holding this ethereal female creature in his arms, of mating with her as men did with women, an act that as yet he knew little about. In his elation he risked looking into her pale blue eyes, and then suddenly the face of Creek Mary rose up between them, and he could hear his grandmother’s throaty voice denouncing him for his faithlessness: Child of my son, never look upon the daughters of the Unegas. Keep Creek Mary’s blood always red.

  “I cannot marry you,” he said, the words seeming to force themselves painfully from his mouth. “I can marry only a full-blood of my people.”

  He feared that she would take offense, but she only laughed gaily, reaching out with one hand to tousle his thick hair. “You’ll see,” she said. “Our children will have glossy black hair like yours and cornflower eyes like mine.”

  After school was out that day, and on into the evening until he went to bed, he could not escape the persistent image of Jerusha McAlpin. She haunted his dreams, and the next morning he avoided his grandmother out of some strange dread that she would read what was in his thoughts.

  When Jotham came by on the way to school, everything was quickly changed. Jotham walked in an uncharacteristic strut, and he had much to tell in loud conspiratorial whispers. The previous day after he and his brother William had recovered their strayed cattle, they had ridden their horses back by Moonherrin’s Mill. Old Jack Moonherrin was not at home, but his four daughters were, and they had invited the brothers to stop. In the course of the visit, the two older daughters had taken Jotham and William into the mill loft. William had been there before, but it was the first time for Jotham, and he described the adventure in graphic detail to Dane. “I’m going back again right after school,” Jotham said, “and you are going with me.”

  Less than a year past, Jack Moonherrin had hauled his mill wheel and grinding machinery over the mountains from somewhere in Carolina, setting up on a swift-running descent of the Little Singing Stream about a mile beyond where the new schoolhouse was later built. He had brought with him four half-blood daughters, but no wife, and the girls assisted in husking corn ears and shelling the grain which he ground into meal. Moonherrin had expected most of his trade to come from the Scots and their half-blood descendants, but the Cherokees also found it convenient to bring their corn to the mill, giving the miller a share of their grain in exchange for the quickly ground meal.

  In the meantime a considerable number of rumors about Moonherrin had spread around Okelogee. It was said that he had killed his Cherokee wife and was asked to leave Carolina. It was also said that he secretly made a kind of tafia from corn that was much stronger than rum, and that sometimes he and his daughters got drunk and sang and laughed and danced all through the night. From time to time, Moonherrin would load his wagon with bags and casks and drive away to trade in the villages east of the Sleeping Woman. He never took his daughters along on these journeys, which lasted for several days. It was during these times that the older boys of Okelogee discovered the availability of the Moonherrin daughters, visiting them usually under cover of darkness.

  And so it was that Dane on that one day in late autumn expunged the persistent image of Jerusha McAlpin from his mind, replacing it with the tawny vision of one of the Moonherrin girls. In reality he found Ellen Moonherrin to be ill shaped, and coarser than any of the Cherokee girls he knew. But she was patient, jolly, and instructive, and he was grateful to her for initiating him into the secret pleasures of conjoining males and females.

  Next day, to Dane’s dismay, Jerusha returned to his inner vision, this time with more urgency than ever before. When he glanced secretly at her in the schoolroom, he wondered if she had the fleshly passion of Ellen Moonherrin. How soft were her thighs, how t
hick was her bush? Unlike the wiry black tuft of Ellen Moonherrin, her golden hairs there surely would be as fine as the down on a young eagle’s breast.

  A wooden ruler rapped sharply against the top of his head, and the nasal voice of Isaac McAlpin ripped his vision apart. “Come to attention, young man! I shall repeat the question only once again.”

  18

  OLD DANE’S BEEF STEW was balanced with exactly the right amounts of tender cubes of meat and juices and herbal flavors, surpassing anything in that line the renowned chef at Willard’s Hotel in Washington ever offered his admiring public. On the other hand, the buffalo tongue was a bit tangy for my overcivilized palate, and my wise host somehow knew that. “Tongue is better eaten raw, fresh after the kill,” he said almost apologetically as I nibbled at what was meant to be a rare epicurean treat. “I can barely remember now how my Cherokee stomach revolted at raw tongue and liver when I joined the Cheyennes for my first buffalo feast.”

  We dined at a folding table that extended ingeniously from beneath the cabin’s east window, giving us a splendid view of the enormous landscape, the distant flat-topped butte, and the high blue sky. “It’s strange what a person remembers from days long gone by. Little snatches of words said by others, sudden expressions on people’s faces, scenes in the mind like frozen pieces of time. In those days when I was more sensitive to blooming life, I was aware of great events taking place around me, but I did not think of them as affecting me. They were things to be dealt with by my elders, leaving me free to roam the woods, compete at ballplay, learn the secrets of the flesh.

  “There was much talk about the building of a capital for the Cherokee Nation. New Echota, it was called, and the Cherokee leaders saw it as their Washington City. The new town was only a day’s journey from Okelogee, and I remember my father’s enthusiasm for its future, how he described its broad streets and predicted a day when New Echota’s crude log buildings would be changed into the permanence of brick and stone. I remember Grandmother Mary’s keen excitement when my father brought home from New Echota a first copy of the Cherokee Phoenix. Buck Watie, or Elias Boudinot as he called himself then, was the editor, and the newspaper was printed in both English and Cherokee, from type especially made to use Sequoyah’s syllabary. This was the first newspaper published by any Indians in America, and it contained news of our nation, texts of new laws passed by our legislature, and occasional pieces meant to whet our interest in learning, civilization, and politics. We all were very proud of the Cherokee Phoenix because it symbolized more than anything else the success of our efforts to become so much like the Anglo-Americans that they would stop thinking of us as being savages. We thought they would want us to stay where we were on our ancestral lands, a good-neighbor nation exactly like them, and that there would be no more talk about moving the Cherokees west of the Mississippi River.