No Resting Place

by William Humphrey

  He had been the Moses of more tribes than those of the Israelites, red refugees from America come to join him in the Mexican province of Texas. With Houston’s help, and under the altered circumstances, he had succeeded in doing what the great Tecumseh had tried earlier and failed to do. From Tennessee by way of Louisiana came the Coushattas. From Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, with a stop for a generation in Indiana before being driven farther west, came the Delawares. Driven from Wisconsin, the Kickapoos had settled in Illinois, only to be driven from there. The Quapaws came from Missouri. The Caddoes were native Texans, and the Tamocuttakes and the Utangous had been here for so long they had forgotten where they were from. The Alabamas had left behind them in their homeland nothing but their name. The Choctaws, the Yowanis and the Biloxis came from Mississippi. The Shawnees, Tecumseh’s tribe, had sided with the British in the last war, and had been driven by the victors from their home in Tennessee. The Cherokees had helped the Americans win that war, yet they were here now too.

  But though he had brought his people across Red River and through the wilderness to this land of milk and honey, even here his Pharaoh, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, had pursued him. Now, instead of fleeing further, he was going to stand and fight, and on the eve of the battle a vision had come to him. In the course of nature, it was time for him to die—long past time; it was not dying that he regretted so much—although he did regret it; what he regretted more was that he would have liked as his last act on earth to lead his people, all the tribes, back across Red River to their promised land. That was no land of milk and honey, as he knew from having lived there, but it was promised to them, and this was now taken from them. Their presence there might have tipped the balance toward peace among the feuding Cherokees.

  That vision vouchsafed to him of his own end had freed his spirit from his body and enabled it to venture into the future which he would not live to share. He had thought that here he had escaped from that Egypt of his called America. Instead he had seen it advance steadily throughout his long life until even here it had caught up with him. The first waves of that white flood, felling the forests, breaking the land, exterminating the game in its path, had reached even here. He saw in his vision that the way he had lived his free and unfenced life could never again be done. There were too many people and not enough room. The whites littered like possums. There was fast approaching a time when even in a place as vast as Texas the Indian would occupy an impermissible amount of space. Through scribes, he had communicated with Chief John Ross, and he understood, not in all its details but in essence, something of the new age and of The People’s efforts to adapt themselves to it. The lands of milk and honey were the ones the whole world wanted, but a man could learn to love any spot on earth as long as it was his, and his to leave to his. Give the Indians a land of briers and nettles, and then maybe they might be left alone at last.

  His old—or rather, his young—friend Kalunah had revolutionized their world, yet the country he had created was not the refuge for his dispossessed red brothers that he had envisaged, rather it was the latest in a long series of lands for grab beckoning to the outcasts of Europe and to adventurers from the states. Those now coming here in wave upon wave did not share Houston’s affection for Indians; they were the same ones, even the very generation, who had driven them from their homes in the east. Texas was now another America. Houston may have dreamed of an empire, a blend of white and red, like the roses of the Trace, but the Americans who had followed him down that very road were those whose grandfathers had thrown off one king and those Europeans escaping from theirs. They established a republic. They made Houston their President. They limited his term in office to two years. Upon the expiration of that term they replaced him with the man of his own creation—there that day on the battlefield of San Jacinto. He brought with him from his native Georgia his hatred of all Indians, Cherokees in particular.

  The young braves chose to fight. Perhaps some even believed they would win. Others were doubtful about the outcome; it was just that after being driven so far there came a time to make a stand. Among them were not more than a handful who had ever fought, but they were determined to fight now, and he, a man of eighty-four, whose last engagement with an enemy had been before their grandfathers were born, was to lead them in battle.

  Truth was, he had thought at the time when he was asked to remain neutral in the war against the Mexicans that Houston overvalued his neutrality. Kalunah was living in another of his youthful memories, that of the Cherokees as ferocious warriors. They had been, but they were no more. They had last fought with Jackson, alongside young Houston—much good had it done them!—but that was long ago; men were now fathers who were infants then. He had accepted Houston’s gratitude and his gifts, and his copy of their treaty, and had felt that he was cheating the man—certainly that the man was cheating himself. His followers, the Indians, were brave enough, no doubt, but they had become farmers, cattlemen, sheepherders, family men—in all but color, white men; inexperienced as they were in war, their very valor would cost them their lives. They had lived in peace. Now they were to do battle with the soldiers who just three years ago, outnumbered three to one, had slaughtered Santa Anna’s Mexicans. And to lead them they had chosen their oldest man—the Indian veneration of age, their belief that every additional year conferred that much more wisdom. How untrue that was nobody knew better than he. He had seen more than most men but most of what he had seen had been more of the same. They had chosen him because he was the wisest of them all. In his wisdom he had counseled them against fighting, and they had chosen him to lead them in the fight.

  While the Chief prepared that night for tomorrow’s battle, Dr. Ferguson, with Noquisi’s help, prepared for it too. He also had blades to sharpen: those of his scalpels. He filed the points of his surgical needles, dampened catgut for sutures to make it supple. With the saw he used for amputations he cut lath into strips for splints. While he packed his saddlebags with whiskey, laudanum, forceps, tourniquets, cauterizing iron—supplies the packhorse had ported down from The Territory—Noquisi rolled bandages. Father and son together would be the campaign’s medical corps.

  Now it was time for the boy to go to bed.

  “Agiduda?” said Noquisi.

  “Sgilisi?” said the Chief.

  “We are going to lose, aren’t we?”

  “It is in God’s hands.”

  “Ai!” said Noquisi to himself. “We are going to lose.”

  Next morning the old Chief found that many of those who had been so hot for blood had made their private peace and stolen away in the night. He was not much surprised. Nothing could surprise him much anymore. He was wryly amused. They had elected him, unanimously, against his will, to lead them, and then had deserted him. Now instead of the fifteen to eighteen hundred he had reckoned on, he estimated that he could field maybe half that number. That would still make his force about equal to the enemy’s, according to his scouts’ reports, but being less well-armed, they needed superior numbers.

  Dressed and painted for battle, with dyed feathers in their hair, slit-eyed, hawk-nosed, the warriors of the different tribes looked like an aviary of rare and colorful birds of prey in full plumage. The shaven heads of the Kickapoos, painted red, were like the bald domes of vultures; the contours of their jaws were striped white. The Caddoes, from whose ears hung pendants that stretched the lobes, and from some of whose noses hung silver plates that had to be lifted aside for every bite they ate, blackened their faces all over. The Delawares looked as though their chins were smeared with their enemies’ blood. Down to their mouths the faces of the Yowanis were solid red, their jaws were vertically striped with white. The Shawnees painted round red spots on their cheeks and chins. Many had stripped down to breechclouts and had greased their bodies to make them slippery to hold in hand-to-hand combat. In the heat of this hottest day in even the old Chief’s memory, all glistened with sweat.

  They bore long guns, mostly old flintlock ri
fles but some few more modern percussion-cap-and-ball rifles, and many carried pistols, with powder horns and beaded pouches, for bullets and wads, slung from shoulder straps. Some carried bows and, on their backs, quivers of arrows. Few were mounted, most were on foot. These forest-dwelling eastern Indians had no tradition as cavalrymen.

  The Chief rode a sorrel horse with four white-stockinged feet and a white patch on its forehead that looked like war paint. The old man sat as erect as though he were cast in bronze. His varnished black hat shone, his red vest blazed, his long sword glinted. Tied to the pommel of his saddle was the tin box containing his treaty with the Texans. Perhaps he thought of it as his last will and testament, and hoped that when it was found on him and read it would gain his followers their rightful heritage, after all.

  Out of the woods on the far side of the battlefield, a quarter of a mile away, the Texans issued like birds from their roosts. They, too, were mainly foot soldiers. In their lead rode their mounted officers. They dubbed themselves “Rangers” since their defeat of the Mexicans three years earlier, and while at San Jacinto they may have been an undisciplined assortment of erstwhile civilians, following that victory they had shaped themselves into a formidable fighting force, self-confident, proud, with a strong sense of esprit de corps.

  Their officers were now within range to be identified. The old Chief was flattered by their ranks and reputations. They took him seriously. There was Vice-President Burnet, Secretary of War Johnson, Adjutant General McLeod, General Rusk, the fast-rising Colonel Burleson—all their big men except the biggest one of all, the one who had ridden to his eminence on horseback: Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. Although ridding the country of Indians was his top priority, and this was the occasion he had created to do so, he was noticeable by his absence today. No doubt he was occupied with weightier affairs of state. Or perhaps he had been taken with the inspiration for another of those poems of his which so tickled Houston by their unintended humor.

  Noquisi, watching from the woods in which he and his father had set up their field hospital, and on the margin of which the Indian forces were ranged, was surprised to see how formal a thing a battle was, at least as the curtain rose. The opposing sides might have been dancers at a ball advancing to square off with their partners and waiting for the music to strike up. They approached, both waiting for the other to fire first. It was as though the two players of the game of checkers were disposing their pieces on the board and deliberating their opening moves.

  The beginning and the end of the battle were all that Noquisi was able to relate to his grandson having seen, because from the first the Indian casualties were so heavy that he and his father were too busy attending them to look up from their work. The old Chief chose his moment when the Texans were fully exposed on the prairie to open fire, then rush them. Like a volley of arrows he loosed his warriors. The boy heard the crackle of gunfire and the screams of the wounded. He saw men reel and fall, saw others spin around and double over in pain, clutch at themselves, at their arms and their legs and their midriffs, saw the shock and stunned surprise of flesh struck and invaded by bullets. On the bare bodies of those of his side he saw blood burst forth like messy, misapplied war paint in inappropriate places. Then the ones who could do so began limping and staggering to the field hospital in the gulch below the line of fire just inside the woods.

  After that the boy heard the gunfire in bursts and the silence while weapons were reloaded for another round. Mainly what he heard as he sponged wounds while they were probed for bullets and dirt, and passed the gut and the silk thread for suturing them and the saber cuts was, “Tourniquet. Scissors. Forceps.” Finally the gunfire grew sporadic, like the fading thunder of a passing storm. The patient on whom they were working died from loss of blood. Father and son peered over the bank of their gulch.

  Long after his warriors had fled for cover, the old Chief fought on. When he gave the command to retreat he was almost alone on the field, engaging the enemy single-handedly. Of the hundred and more dead and dying, no more than half a dozen were Texans. His own men lay like spent arrows that had missed their mark.

  Now by drawing their fire while his few remaining men made good their retreat, he was commanding his enemies. He was playing with them, playing upon them, playing to them. Every bullet aimed at him missed one of his men. It was to his enemies that his life mattered; to him it meant nothing. His battle now was not with Texans; they were merely the henchmen of his mortal enemy. He would lose this contest; all men did; there was no indignity in it. He would have in his defeat the triumph of dictating the terms of his surrender.

  Already bleeding from several wounds, his horse now received a fatal one. In its fall the Chief was thrown, thereby losing his hat and sword, but clutching the box containing the treaty with Houston. One of the few Indians remaining on the field dashed in and snatched it from him like the next runner in a relay race being passed the torch. The Chief rose, took a few steps, then fell, shot in the back. He lifted himself and sat facing his foes.

  “This is a good day to die!” he cried.

  Two Rangers came running. The first one to reach him, disregarding the other’s shout not to shoot, put the muzzle of his pistol to the old man’s forehead and fired. At point-blank range, the shot could hardly be heard.

  Other Rangers on the run reached the spot while the body still sat upright. One of them toppled it face down with his foot, and with his bowie knife slit in half the red silk vest. Then while he skinned and sliced the corpse’s back in strips the width of harness straps, another one, lifting the head by its hair, circumscribed the scalp with a cut and peeled it from the skull.

  By the time Amos Smith I told his grandson about it, sixty-odd years later, the biggest battle ever fought on Texas soil was forgotten.

  The Texans withdrew to the shade of the woods on the opposite side of the battlefield, taking with them on horseback their wounded and their few dead. Once they were out of gunshot range, a party of Indians, stripped to the skin to show that they concealed no weapons on them, ventured onto the field. They were not fired upon. The Fergusons, father and son, worked on the wounded they brought in, most of whom, injured beyond help, died on their hands. The dead were left where they lay on the field. To the survivors’ grief must be added the shame of leaving them unburied. There were too many of them, and there was not time. The Texans’ victory was so conclusive they had not bothered to follow up on it by pursuing their enemies in retreat, but in the morning they would return to confirm that what they had won was not just a battle but a war, and that the Indians, to the last and least one, were on the road, fleeing the country.

  From village to village, from farm to farm, word of the outcome of the battle was relayed, and all day long the women and children and the old men streamed in to join the defeated warriors. All through the night they chanted their dirge of defeat. At daybreak they scattered in coveys like birds flushed from cover.

  There was not safety but rather danger in numbers now. Alerted by hoofbeats, shouts, gunshots, the band would scatter, every man for himself, then later regroup like a covey of quail finding one another again, often by imitating the whistle of the quail. As water seeks its own level, so the Cherokees sought their trail of roses. Some strayed so far from it as to be long unable to get back, others had been too closely pursued to dare to move. Afraid to build fires for fear of giving away their whereabouts even when they had anything to cook, afraid for the same reason to shoot game, they went without eating for days.

  Their route was all too familiar. They had blazed it, cleared it, decorated it, for twenty years had traveled it to visit relatives and friends in The Territory. They might have found their way by smell alone, and sometimes at night, along stretches near settlements to be avoided, they did.

  They were entering Sulphur River Bottom now. The Rangers called off their pursuit when they were satisfied that they had achieved their objective. They had not done so quite as thoroughly as they supposed. Some of the f
ugitives dropped out of their bands to settle in those vast bottomlands. Mostly members of the lesser tribes those were, never numerous or now decimated in numbers, with few of their own kind to welcome them in The Territory. In time, after the old hostilities had faded from memory, and after intermarriage between them and the loggers, the trappers, the market hunters, the farmers on the edges of the woods had lightened skins and mongrelized features, they ventured out from their lairs as foxes do after the dogs have been called off. Even two generations later, Amos Smith would see faces on the streets of the county town of Clarksville that gave him a start of recognition, and sometimes his look was fleetingly returned, as two people of a banned belief or an outlawed taste might identify each other in passing and, although disposed to mutual self-disclosure, to alliance against the world that had branded and ostracized them, hesitate, out of conditioning and cowardice and fear of being mistaken about each other, and hasten on their separate ways. Inaccessible, counted in no census, in Amos Smith IV’s time, in a county dry by local option, these people would be moonshiners long after the repeal of national prohibition, and as dangerous to approach in their dens as a nest of water moccasins.

  By the time the Fergusons’ band reached Red River, ten days after the battle of the Neches, it was down to a dozen men. Of that dozen, seven were already halfway across the river, out of rifle range, when the party of hunters appeared out of the woods. Still stripping themselves for the swim were the last five, including the Fergusons. Seeing the hunters, they broke and ran. What stopped Noquisi at the water’s edge was the explosion of the shots. There he stood waiting to be shot. Offshore, where his father’s body was sinking from sight, the red water swirled a darker red, like paint when it is stirred.

  “All right, young’un. You’re safe now,” he heard a man’s voice call.

  It was his stopping at the water’s edge at the last moment and not diving in along with the rest that saved him—saved Captain Donovan’s maps in his pocket too. Had he done so, not even his size would have saved him. Indian children were fair game. It was his pale skin, his blue eyes, his freckled face and a frontier folklore of captive white children that told his story at a glance.