Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab

by Steve Inskeep

  PART TWO

  Origins

  1767–1814

  Five

  Send a Few Late Newspapers by the Bearer

  Once in a letter, John Ross referred to the boundary of the Cherokee Nation. He called the area beyond the Cherokee border the “whiteside.” He wrote that compound word as if it was in common use, as it might have been for a man like Ross, who lived on the dividing line between two worlds. Part white and part Cherokee, he grew up crossing and recrossing a border between races. Not until well into his adult life did he definitively signal where he would come to rest.

  Ross was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of white traders who had lived in the Cherokee Nation since British colonial times, though the word “trader” did not really describe the compass of their influence. They acted as vital links between the Indian and white worlds. Traders bought furs and other items, exchanging them for cloth, guns, beads, and whiskey. Often they married native women, which explained Ross’s Cherokee blood. His prosperous family built homes in Cherokee places that would later become famous landmarks of the Civil War, like Chickamauga and Lookout Mountain.

  From his earliest days Ross felt the tug of competing identities. Born October 3, 1790, he spent his early years surrounded by Cherokees who visited his father’s store. Cherokee children were his friends. One year his mother made plans to take her children to the annual Green Corn Festival, one of the celebrations around which the Cherokee year was organized. She expected him to dress like a white child, but the boy didn’t want to appear before his friends that way. She let him change into traditional Indian dress—which, for a small boy, might not be very much clothing at all.

  Kooweskoowe, the bird’s name he received at adulthood, appropriately honored his ancestry in the Cherokee Bird Clan. His great-grandmother had been a full-blooded Indian, a woman named Ghigooie, whose clan was one of seven into which the nation was divided. She married a Scottish trader and bore children, including Ross’s maternal grandmother. That grandmother—half white, half Indian—grew up to marry another Scottish trader. He was John McDonald, an outsize character whose personal experience with shifting loyalties foreshadowed Ross’s own.

  McDonald was among generations of northern Britons who flooded the American colonies throughout the eighteenth century. From Ireland, Scotland, and northern England came roughly a quarter-million people, a migration that played an enormous role in shaping the early American identity. While most of these migrants settled among colonists like themselves, the traders found opportunity beyond the frontier, on the Indian map. McDonald learned the Cherokee language and became an adviser to Cherokee leaders. He was also a sort of diplomat representing the interests of the British crown. When other colonists revolted in 1775, McDonald remained loyal to his king, as did the Cherokees, who saw the distant king as their protector against the land-grabbing white men who lived nearby. Enrolled as a British soldier, McDonald organized Cherokees to fight the American rebels. He became the sort of overseas operator the British Empire used for centuries, Lawrence-of-Arabia types who learned local tongues and motivated native armies to fight in the British cause. In McDonald’s case it was a lost cause. When the British gave up in 1783, they abandoned their Indian allies as well as Tories like McDonald. He became American by force of circumstance rather than by choice.

  The Tory trader did not embrace his new identity easily. He became a one-man nation with his own foreign policy. He continued living among the Cherokees, but as they negotiated for peace with the new United States, McDonald maintained ties with Britain and even with Spain, which controlled Florida and New Orleans to the south. He was not alone in hedging his bets with the Spanish. James Wilkinson, the commander in chief of the U.S. Army, received barrels of Spanish coins in payment for intelligence and advice. Farmers and traders had to swear allegiance to Spain to ship goods down the Mississippi. Generations later, a historian discovered the astounding news that Andrew Jackson himself took a secret oath to the Spanish crown. These oaths were mostly a farce; westerners got the access to New Orleans that they needed, and never got around to delivering the interior United States to Spanish control. But nobody was certain where John McDonald’s loyalties lay. In 1792 he went on the Spanish payroll, earning $500 a year, a substantial sum on the cash-poor frontier.

  One day the trader learned of two other white men in danger. They were traveling by boat down the Tennessee River when a band of Cherokees seized them. The leader of the Cherokee band, known as Bloody Fellow, was angry at the white men for giving a ride to a native who was out of favor. But McDonald arrived in time to smooth over the dispute, managing the affair so adroitly that Bloody Fellow changed his mind about the white travelers and welcomed them to trade with the Cherokees. One, Daniel Ross, settled near McDonald. He was yet another Scotsman, and married McDonald’s daughter Mollie, who was one-fourth Cherokee. Of their nine children, John Ross was the third, and the oldest son.

  • • •

  Nothing about his ancestry made it impossible for Ross to be regarded simply as Cherokee. Cherokee society was matrilineal, with ancestry traced through mothers rather than fathers, and Ross could follow his Cherokee blood directly through his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. All those white men were less relevant. It was expected that a woman would marry outside her clan, and common to marry outside her nation. The idea that Ross was only “one-eighth Cherokee” would not have made much sense in Cherokee culture.

  Many white people, far more focused on racial purity, would not have accepted a man with Ross’s genealogy as white. But Ross could pass as white among those who did not know his family. His upbringing made this possible. He grew up in an English-speaking household, which the Ross family made a little outpost of white civilization. They kept the house stocked with books, maps, and the most recent newspapers available on the frontier; Daniel Ross wanted his children to read. (John Ross returned the favor on at least one occasion in later life, helping to keep the house stocked with reading material; his 1813 letter to the federal Indian agent warning about the Creek rebellion ended with a friendly postscript: “Grand Father & Father presents their respects to you & will be very thankful if you will send a few late newspapers by the bearer.”) Young John began his formal education around age nine, when his father hired a tutor. He went on to study at a private academy established for the benefit of Indians, and emerged well educated by the standards of the frontier. As an adult Ross would come to look striking in the European-style clothing that had made him uncomfortable as a boy. His best-known portrait showed him in a formal dark suit with a vest, his hair carefully trimmed and combed back, his large eyes focused on the artist, looking every bit the youthful statesman with his right hand holding a piece of paper. He moved about the Cherokee Nation in boots and a jacket, sometimes topped by a broad-brimmed, flat-crowned planter’s hat. Because he could have passed as a white man, his leadership skills and eloquence might well have led him to prominence, given the widening opportunities for white men in Andrew Jackson’s America. Yet something drew Ross away from the whiteside and closer to his Indian identity. Given the ability to claim membership in one of two different groups, Ross gradually strengthened his ties to the group that was smaller, more vulnerable, and seemingly destined to lose.

  He certainly prospered as a Cherokee, because he was an entrepreneur. He developed real estate in both the Cherokee and white senses of the term. Although Cherokee land was owned in common by the nation, plots could be improved by individuals, as Ross did with houses and fields and the Tennessee River settlement called Ross’s Landing. On the whiteside, Ross speculated in land as allowed by white custom, purchasing remote tracts in hopes that spreading settlement would increase their value. Ross also purchased people as slaves. Decades after Ross’s death, a ninety-six-year-old man testified to an oral historian: “My grandfather, father and Auntie were bought by John Ross.” Ross later sold the father in a trade for real estate. Ross’s slaves, like his wife and
children, were very rarely discussed in his letters, although we can occasionally glimpse them. When Ross referred to “the bearer of this letter” or sending “newspapers by the bearer,” it is reasonable to imagine that the papers were carried across the Cherokee Nation in a black hand.

  Ross was wealthy enough that when he became a Cherokee leader, his political opponents questioned how he made his money. They never proved their suspicions of corruption, and the modern-day editor of Ross’s papers found no sign that Ross had dipped into the Cherokee treasury. When Ross emerged as a leading defender of Indian rights, his white critics made a darker allegation. Ross wasn’t a true Indian, they charged, but part of a mixed-blood elite who misled simple-minded Cherokees to maintain positions of personal wealth and privilege. It was certainly correct that some elites of native nations proved to be excessively self-interested, although it is challenging to classify Ross among them. Corruptible elites commonly worked with white men rather than against them, trading away communal land if the government paid bribes or granted plots of land in their names. John Ross himself was granted 640 acres as part of a treaty with the United States in 1819. But if the land grant was meant to peel him away from the Cherokee Nation, it didn’t work. He grew more steadfast in defense of the people he regarded as his own. He persisted even after his house was taken away from him and occupied by white settlers.

  If Ross ever explained his choice, the explanation has not survived. He might have been the last to know, given the human tendency to choose a course in life and find the reasons afterward. Once he became a Cherokee leader it would have been politically awkward to admit that he ever had a chance to assume a different allegiance. But in pondering his eventual stand on the Cherokee side of the line, it is worth considering the cumulative effect of Ross’s experiences. This book began with Ross’s journey down the Tennessee River in 1812, when he was challenged from the riverbank by white horsemen. Prudence required Ross to obscure his Cherokee heritage and pass as white. This was probably not the only time he ever had to do so. He certainly encountered many people over the years who would have treated him differently depending on whether they perceived him as a white man in a statesman’s black clothes, or a suspicious character on a boat with red men. Ross would have taken their view of Indians personally: it was an affront to him and to his family, particularly his mother. A man in frontier America was expected to seek redress for insults. Though Ross never challenged other men to duels, as Andrew Jackson did, he was equally jealous of his honor. Ross’s answer could have been the life he chose. Maybe he remembered the behavior of the white horsemen who confronted him along the bank of the Tennessee River. Maybe he didn’t want to be one of them.

  Six

  I Am Fond of Hearing That There Is a Peace

  Ross knew his Cherokee history, or at least a version of it. The Green Corn Festival, the annual event at which he had wanted to dress like an Indian as a boy, was where the history was passed from one generation to the next. Old men offered dramatic renditions of tales that they had first heard as boys.

  Until the 1790s, the Cherokee oral tradition included a migration story. The tale suggested that many generations past, the Cherokee, or Tsalagi, people had lived outside the Appalachians, but had been driven by some calamity into the mountains. Cherokee elders were still repeating their story around the time of Ross’s birth, but soon stopped. It’s not clear why, although Cherokees may have noticed that white men could use such tales of past migration to suggest Indians were nomads and not really attached to their land. Ross, as an adult, simply said that Cherokees had held their land since “time immemorial.”

  This was true enough. Cherokees had lived in the southern Appalachian highlands since long before white men arrived. Their homeland centered on the Great Smoky Mountains, known for a wondrous blue haze that tinted the view of the higher slopes. A traditional Cherokee story said the mountains were created in the distant past, when the earth was new and soft, and a great buzzard flew so low that it created hills and valleys as its wings beat the ground. From these mountains, Cherokee hunting grounds stretched out as far as modern-day South Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky. They were a powerful nation, often at war with the Creeks to their southwest and various nations to the north.

  Because early Cherokees were not literate, much of what is known about their history came from their encounters with Europeans. The earliest known contact came in 1540, when the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto found them well established in a string of towns. Failing to discover the gold he was seeking, de Soto and his Spanish soldiers moved on. Later the Cherokees encountered French explorers and traders, who moved inland from the Gulf Coast or down the river systems from the Great Lakes in search of furs. The most sustained contact with white settlers began after 1670, when the British established Charles Towne, or Charleston, as the capital of their new Carolina colony. The British crown granted the Carolinians a sphere of influence including most Cherokee territory.

  Day-to-day British contact with the Cherokees came through soldiers and through traders such as Ross’s Scottish ancestors. Of all the colonial traders, the most famous may have been James Adair, who lived for forty years among southern tribes before publishing a book drawn from his experience in 1775. Adair’s eyewitness observations were only partly diminished by his motivation for offering them: he wanted to demonstrate that Indian customs were similar to Jewish customs, proving the popular theory that the Indians were descendants of a lost tribe of Israel. In fairness to Adair, he could never have embraced this outlandish notion unless he had been willing to see Indians as human beings like himself. Native “persons, customs, &c. are not singular from the rest of the world,” Adair wrote. “Their notions of things are like ours.” He was a sympathetic observer. Adair recalled the Cherokees in the first part of the 1700s as a nation of considerable reach and power. He knew of sixty-four towns and villages, “populous, and full of women and children.” He believed that if provoked the nation could bring six thousand warriors into the field, a force that would dwarf anything the British colonists could muster. Later the population was devastated by European diseases, and may have been cut in half by a single smallpox epidemic in 1738.

  Cherokees were attracted by the opportunities of trade with the British. The British were attracted by the possibility of gaining powerful allies against less cooperative natives. In 1711 the colonists of Charles Towne supplied guns to the Cherokees on condition that they help to fight the Tuscaroras, who were being displaced from their homes near the coast. Cherokees joined British forces in an early version of Indian removal, driving the Tuscaroras so far away they were forced to find refuge among the Iroquois of upstate New York. Soon enough, however, the British encroached on Cherokee land, leading to outbreaks of violence. In 1760 the British unwisely massacred twenty-two Cherokee members of a peace delegation, and triggered a powerful response. Standing Turkey, a Cherokee leader, laid siege to Fort Loudon, which had been built in the Appalachians to keep an eye on the Cherokees. The starving garrison was forced to surrender, and though offered a safe passage out, they were attacked once outside the walls. Many British were killed or captured. Retaliating for this retaliation, the British sent an army that burned fifteen Cherokee towns.

  When peace was reestablished, the British agreed to send a young officer, Lieutenant Henry Timberlake, to live for several months among the Cherokees. Timberlake produced a memoir filled with details of Cherokee life and diplomacy. Today it is not unusual to see Cherokees of the Appalachians sporting elaborate tattoos in Cherokee script or traditional patterns; Timberlake saw something similar in 1761 and 1762: “The Cherokees are of a middle stature, of an olive color, tho’ generally painted, and their skins stained with gunpowder, pricked in very pretty figures.” Cherokee women grew their hair “so long that it generally reaches the middle part of their legs,” and wore it “club’d,” or folded back upon itself. Generations of interaction with outsiders had already influenced their clothing styl
es, which were growing closer to those of Europeans.

  Each Cherokee town had a town house for public meetings, next to the public square where games were played. The town house was a building in the shape of a dome, framed with logs and roofed over with bark. People sat around the fire according to their membership in the seven Cherokee clans, divided like slices of pie, as they discussed questions facing the town or the nation. Timberlake described Cherokee government as a “mixed aristocracy and democracy,” with chiefs or headmen being chosen “according to their merit in war and policy at home.” The system was aristocratic because a chief or village headman might serve for life and could be succeeded by members of his family if they had earned the people’s respect. It was democratic because the chiefs had limited power. Timberlake said the chiefs led only “the warriors that chuse to go, for there is no laws or compulsion on those that refuse to follow, or punishment to those that forsake their chief: he strives, therefore, to inspire them with a sort of enthusiasm, with the war-song, as the ancient bards did in Britain.” Not only was there freedom to dissent, and even to sit out war; there was no punishment for any crime short of murder. Murder required the victim’s family to seek revenge, although even an accused killer could find safe haven in specially designated “towns of refuge,” much as hunted men in other cultures sought refuge in churches or mosques.