“After our meal I said that following my long day’s ride—actually I had spent the day in the neighborhood resting up in preparation—I would excuse myself for bed early. You lighted the way. We slept little that night.
“When you said yes to my proposal the next morning I felt I had in my headdress the feathers of all those before me who had tried for the prize and lost.
“I settled your purchase price with your father. It was high, and that filled me with pride of possession. It saddened your father to lose his home’s greatest attraction.
“‘Ai! The fine young men will come no more,’ he said.
“Your hair is gray now, and thin. It was auburn then, long and thick as the tail of my horse, and watching you unbraid it to fall was all that was needed, if anything more was, to put me in the state you welcomed.”
She had led a life of ease all those many years. Nothing had prepared her for this ordeal. Yet she endured it uncomplainingly. A little, frail, old woman, she was stronger than the soldiers. They rode, she walked.
He appeared to be in a trance as he rose and went toward her—almost reverential. She looked up at him wonderingly, still lost in her daze, near sleep in her tiredness. He could not at once find the words he wanted, and during that moment of tongue-tiedness there passed over her face a look that seemed to anticipate some new trouble, maybe a criticism—she who did not know what criticism from him was, but who now felt herself to be a burden and deserving of complaints.
“You, my soul, are the bravest of the brave,” he said to her at last.
She burst into tears. Two sorts of tears, as Abel had said of his: one sort from one eye and another sort from the other. She appreciated the praise, but brave was not what she wanted to be, and praise for her bravery was to rob her of what little she had, was to remind her of her unsuitability for this grueling experience. She longed for her lost life of ease, and was ashamed of her longing, here in the midst of her companions who had never known anything but a life of hardship, and she did not know that she did indeed suffer more than they because she had theretofore suffered less. She felt herself woefully inadequate to be anybody’s soul, and her tears flowed.
They had been on the road for over two months. Ahead of them, at this rate, stretched as many more. Their pace continued at about the same. For although all were weary and none was strong, attrition had winnowed out the very weakest and left them behind, victims fallen by the wayside. A caterpillar (and in its heaving and toiling, its pauses and resumptions, the column undulated like a caterpillar) achieved more, comparing the size of their goals. They averaged, over a week, some five miles a day. That might mean ten one day, none the next. They were slow getting going after the starter’s bugle blew in the morning, not only because they were tired from the day—the many days—before, and the restless night spent on the hard cold ground, but because they were loath to move on.
But the stiff and aching bodies were unbent and stretched and the sore and swollen feet made to step, the animals were yoked and harnessed and the wheels made to turn—they too groaned—girls and boys saddled and shouldered themselves with little brothers and sisters, some recently orphaned and adopted into the family, and it was another day like another lash on that man’s bare back there in camp, except that his lashes ended with the hundredth and nobody knew how many days they were sentenced to. People avoided looking one another in the face for fear of spreading their discouragement, or of contracting others’.
Yet, having eaten their meager and monotonous breakfast, they drew from some common store the courage to get going. It was around noon usually that memories of happier times, brought on, as the feet plodded forward, by the mind’s wandering backward, triggered the tears.
Those able to walk at all walked for as long as they were able. They yielded to entreaties by the soldiers or by their neighbors in the column to take places in the wagons only when they were unable to move a step farther, and then they did so with two emotions; fear that they had reached the end, and shame that they had failed. The best way to persuade them was not to pity them but to chide them. “You are holding things up. For the sake of all, rest in the wagon for a day or so. Then you can walk again.”
The sense grew daily that they were on a treadmill, like so many squirrels in cages, not only not reaching their journey’s end, not even getting nearer to it, but actually, as their pace slowed throughout the day, falling back, as though as they moved the earth moved beneath their feet, outran them. Had they not passed this settlement, this farm, this hill once already—more than once? The country being sparsely settled, there were few signposts, markers, county or even state lines by which to gauge their progress, check their whereabouts.
“Sir, where are we?” the boy asked a soldier riding by.
He hardly expected an answer. He would not have known if he were told. It was not a question. It was a cry. He just wanted to be told that they were somewhere.
“Your guess is as good as mine, son,” the soldier replied. “All I know is we’re headed in the right direction.”
Along with the sense that you were getting nowhere, standing still, treading in place, was an equally strong sense of having left yourself somewhere far behind. Of the things you used to do, the routine things and the unexpected things that arose daily, you did none now. All you did was walk. Meals, even sleep, were nothing more than refueling stops. You were not you. You were not a person. You were an animal being herded.
Possessions became burdens, growths, sores. And not just those borne on backs but those in wheeled conveyances as well. Mired in mud, slowed or stalled by underfed and overworked oxen and mules, many were abandoned. Those with nothing to their names to have to carry were the best off. The Reverend Mackenzie writes that never before had he so fully appreciated the adage that it was hard for a rich man to get to heaven.
And a heaven their destination now seemed to be, as blissful, as unattainable. By the end of the day that land of darkness, land of death had become the land of heart’s desire.
In camp at night they had nothing to say to one another. Not just because of fatigue but because, except for their being a few miles farther along the road, it was another day like all the rest, alike now even in their accidents and alarms, and as for death, it was their pied piper. They would have buried, or have left unburied, another half dozen or so. They swallowed their meal and sat for a while staring into the fitful fire before falling asleep.
To sleep sitting was better than to sleep lying. Less of the body came in contact with the ground that way.
The snow that came out of a black sky in midmorning one December day was the first ever seen by many of the children, even some of those almost out of childhood. None of the parents had ever seen it in this quantity. For them it had been a rare delicacy, to be gathered, sweetened with honey and eaten. This now was nature in a mood unknown to them.
The snow came a-slant, borne on a driving north wind, striking full in their faces. Blinded by it, they lost sight of all but those nearest them, feared getting separated and lost. Unused as they were to such weather, they would have shivered if booted and dressed in woolens and furs. They wrapped themselves in their blankets.
Bit by bit as the snow deepened, their footfalls, the crunch of the wagon wheels, grew muffled, and this silence, the spectral trees, the whitened landscape made them feel that they had left this world and entered another one, had become the ghosts of themselves. These were the approaches to that land of death in which they must try to make a new life. They mourned for the one they had lost, and their wails were blown back in their mouths.
The pace of the march slowed steadily, ran down like an unwound clock, finally in late afternoon stopped dead. In a spot without shelter they made camp.
When the Fergusons straggled in that evening the boy fetched water from the wagon and put it to heat on the fire. He unlaced his grandmother’s moccasins and unwound the rags that wrapped her calves. Her feet, blue with cold, were a mass of bliste
rs, fresh and old, all rubbed raw. While they soaked the boy rubbed them. They puckered and swelled in the warm water.
He tucked her into her blanket, bathed his grandfather’s feet, then put him to bed. Their sleeping bodies sought each other’s warmth. To get into his place between them the boy had to squeeze.
Sometime later in the night he woke to see his grandfather huddled beside the fire. He had put his blanket over the two of them.
Now the ambulance wagons, in which the occupants were pitched about on the rutted roads and the pathless prairies like seasick passengers on waves, could no longer hold all those too enfeebled to march. Death, though working overtime, did not cull them out fast enough. They toppled and fell like dominoes by the roadside. Soldiers, giving up their mounts, hoisted them into the saddle and walked, leading by the bridle reins. Those in the rear of the procession, the old, the slow, the sick, were brought down as is the weakest of a herd by a beast of prey. Stalking them was cholera. Dr. Warren and his young assistant dispensed calomel.
Of the buzzards hovering high overhead like kites there seemed at times to be one for each and every marcher. They took their places as did the people on command from the conductor in the morning and there they hung daylong, moving at the people’s pace, and when that slowed, dropping expectantly a notch lower in the sky. By night they settled to roost in trees nearby, in such numbers that by morning their droppings had whitened the trunks. There was no stopping the mind from thinking of what those droppings were composed of.
For now the weather was often too cold, the ground frozen too hard, the necessity to keep moving too urgent, and the number of dead too great to bury them all, or sometimes any of them all. They were left covered with brush—to Cherokees the ultimate desecration.
Robbed of the opportunity to observe their customs, even the most hallowed, their tribal tie was unraveling. They were becoming brutalized. If they ever reached their goal (and the saying “If we ever get there we’ll all be dead” had ceased being funny), and established a new life, how purge themselves of their dishonor and shame, essential to making a fresh start?
The tribal tie was being frayed in another way as well. It had kept them in step, it had kept them in chorus, but now as the party progressed through lengthy stretches of unsettled and thus inviting country, as they got farther from the home they could not return to, yet were still far from the destination they feared, people dropped out of the march to seek their private fortunes. They were not officially missed, not pursued. From the outset all had refused to be mustered. No roll was called. Heads were not counted. Captain Donovan relied upon their bond to one another to keep them together.
That bond was strong, but it was being tested as never before, and even it was not unbreakable. And so you might awake one morning to find that the person, or the family, alongside whom you had marched these many miles, with whom you had shared the fire, had made off in the night. It was a measure of their misery that these desertions were not condemned but accepted and forgiven. In the tribe they found their individuality and their collective identity, and they pitied the defector and feared for him, as a driven herd might mourn for a maverick lost and left behind on the trail. Yet each was a decimation of their numbers and a discouragement to the general spirit. What would become of the lone stray? But then, what was to become of them all?
Debilitated and dispirited as they were, Captain Donovan drove them onward. Riding up and down the straggling column, he urged, “Push on, folks! Don’t waste your strength in tears.”
They pushed on, but still they cried.
They were being pursued by a pack of diseases, and when cholera, the leader of the pack, had taken its toll it was followed by typhus. Though to keep going was all but impossible, to stop was impossible. They desperately needed rest and recuperation, but there was no resting place, no shelter.
Meanwhile, with the seasonal shortening of the days, as night fell earlier, as the sun rose later, as they steadily weakened, as the need for fires made them stop early so that wood sufficient for the long night could be scavenged, their progress slowed daily. This slowness made it more imperative that they push on if any of them were to reach their still distant destination.
The thing most demoralizing was the incidence of children’s deaths—a Herod’s hand laid upon their newborn. Each and every dead child was mourned by all as a common loss, a threat to their continuation. The seed of the nation was planted in holes by the roadside, never to bear. Day after day, step after weary step, they plodded on, but to what? Not just to exile, but to extinction? They knew well that entire tribes had been extinguished. And even as they grieved over this decimation of their young, many were determined to bring no more of their kind into a world so hostile to them, to pass on the curse they were under. So they told the Reverend Mackenzie, appealing to him to explain what they had done to bring down upon them the wrath of God. He replied with “Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven,” and with “Those whom He loved He chastened and scourged.”
The Reverend Mackenzie was embarrassed to think now of his fatuity in supposing that he might be an inspiration to these people; it was they who were the inspiration to him. He was awed by their courage, their patience, their singleness of purpose and solidarity one with another.
Heroes, martyrs, saints, he would call them in his diary. He tells of marching amid a constant chorus of wails and groans from a people as devoid of hope for deliverance as the damned in Hell. Then among them first a single voice, then others, then all would hymn their thanks to God for His Amazing Grace. There was a note of query and almost a note of reproach in the Reverend Mackenzie’s observation “Lord, you never had more devoted servants than these.”
Suffering seemed to stiffen them, adversity to spur them. The Reverend Mackenzie tells of burying the young wife of a man whose father he had buried just days earlier, and of the man’s then shouldering his bedroll and marching on with a step no less determined than before—if anything, rather more so.
He believed that he was witnessing a mass miracle, one being reenacted daily, a demonstration of the unflagging faith and trust that God in His greatness was able to inspire. It compared to the martyrs unflinchingly facing the lions in the Roman arena, to an entire nation of Jobs, never doubting, though tested without precedent or parallel. These were truly the Chosen People, wandering in the wilderness. The Reverend Mackenzie’s question was, Did He who had chosen them know what they were enduring? No place on earth was godforsaken he knew, but there were times, especially at night, with the cold winds and the hungry wolves intermittently howling and the horde of vultures roosting in the nearby trees, their dreadful droppings audible, when it was hard to sense His presence here.
Yet the unconverted were as courageous, as persevering, as helpful to their companions in misery as the members of his congregation. Endurance and patience were not confined to those of the faith. The Reverend Mackenzie’s creed underwent another change for the worse. He offered not God nor his bishop nor his diary any apology for his deviation from doctrine. At mass gravesites, unmarked for lack of time, he gave Christian burial to all, converted and pagan, shriven and sinner alike. The gospel had not been rejected by these souls, it had never reached them, in part because of the language barrier, in greater part because of the interdiction by the government of Georgia. Were they to be made to suffer, after all their earthly woes, the fires of hell in eternity because of their deprivation, their ignorance, their innocence? They were like those Cherokee children whose parents had signed their names to that petition to Washington against removal: they would have signed it if they could. That petition had been rejected by the one to whom it was addressed, but he was a man—and a hardhearted one. The Reverend Mackenzie’s petition was to God. A jealous god, to be sure, so self-described, but a merciful one, a forgiving one. Works, not faith, were the path to salvation, and these souls had worked! The path they had traveled was straight and narrow! They would n
ever reach its end in The Territory. They must find a resting place, one more hospitable than this bleak one which, in its frozen state, often refused to receive even their mortal remains.
To heaven’s gate they would wend their way instinctively as to their cote, as sure of shelter as lambs. There they would meet their master and would thank Him for deliverance from their fellowman. He was jealous but He was not petty. He would not insist on inspecting them each and all to see that they bore His brand. A flock without a shepherd, then and there they would be purified like a sheep sent through the sheep-dip and passed through the gates into the fold.
“At least, Lord,” he ended his prayer, “make a place for them in that purlieu of yours, limbo. After what they have been through, to them it will seem like heaven.”
To his young friend and acolyte the Reverend Mackenzie spoke so many times of his people’s patience that at last the boy grew annoyed with him for his simplicity. He was still one of them. He was still white, after all. Not only for the tongue but for the Indian mentality he needed an interpreter. Even an adopted Cherokee ought to have been better at thought-reading. In any and every mind of all those around him he would have found burning the same bowl of sacred fire, all kindled at the same source. What now impelled them, and to which each new woe was an added goad, was not meek acceptance, not blind faith, not hope of reward in some life to come; it was wrath. Enlightened by a boy, the Reverend Mackenzie learned that the lure now drawing them toward their promised land was the exaction there of revenge Old Testamental in its stark severity. The Cherokees were on the warpath.
“This is a good day to die.”
Some Cherokees lived to say that more times than one but for most it was said just once in a lifetime. It was held in reserve until that day declared itself indisputably. Knowing this, those hearing it did not gainsay it. It was said in submission, to placate death so that one’s spirit might rest peacefully, not forever contend against its fate. Best that it be said where one was born and had lived and would have kindred spirits close by, but wherever it was said would be one’s resting place; peace must be made with it, acceptance. When living relations came to commune they would find tranquility.
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