Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (8 page)

R
oss 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 gun-powder, 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 styles, 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.

The freedom to ignore leaders could trigger instability. One Cherokee story, recorded in 1828, describes a chief leading an expedition of thirty men to explore western land.
The chief encountered four strange men of an unknown tribe, made friends with them, and exchanged gifts. But when he informed his thirty confederates, they cast aside his diplomacy and chased down the strangers as presumed enemies, killing two. The exploring party itself then came under attack. In other cases, this loose style of governance produced positive results. In the 1760s Lieutenant Timberlake was impressed by the Cherokees’ diplomacy. Though they depended on trade with the British to their east, they maintained
ties with the French from New Orleans and Canada. Timberlake realized the Cherokees were playing one colonial power against another, preserving independence from each. “
Their alliance with the French seems equal . . . to our most masterly strokes of policy; and yet we cannot be surprized at it, when we consider that merit alone creates their ministers, and not the prejudices of party, which often create ours.”

Very soon after Timberlake’s visit it grew harder to play outside powers against one another. The British drove away the French in 1763, and the Americans drove away the British in 1783. The Spanish still controlled Florida to the south, but the Americans were the dynamic power. All the American Indian nations put together might number 600,000 or 700,000 people against the United States’ irrepressible millions. Cherokees needed other ways to guard their sovereignty, and Cherokee leaders embraced the civilization program when it was extended by President Washington in the 1790s.

Washington had developed respect for natives through personal experience. During the colonial period, when he was a military officer charged with defending the frontier of Virginia, he found Indians to be such formidable opponents that
only other Indians could defeat them. He urged Virginia to seek help from natives, including Cherokees. Once he became president, he tried to avoid fighting Indians at all. This required him to protect Indian land from white encroachment. It wasn’t that he opposed western settlement (which he saw as his nation’s future) nor even that he opposed real estate speculation in Indian lands (which he had done on a grand scale himself). He simply opposed white land grabbers’ triggering wars his government could not afford. Washington’s policy explicitly recognized the two dissonant maps of America—the Indian map of nations with great blotches of land, and the U.S. map of straight lines dividing states and territories. He even took the side of the Indian map: the authority of states would only extend to the point where they reached Indian borders.

It was true that this benevolent approach contained its measure of self-interest. Washington expected that the colors of the Indian map
would fade. Natives would need less land for modern agriculture than for hunting, raising the hope that civilizing tribes might sell surplus territory. Indians might even need to sell land to pay their bills at federal trading posts. In an 1803 letter marked “unofficial and private,” President Thomas Jefferson described the policy in terms that make him sound to modern ears like a drug dealer promoting the controlled substance of consumer capitalism. “
We shall push our trading houses,” Jefferson wrote, “and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among [the Indians] run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.” In a message for public consumption, Jefferson expressed the same idea more elegantly: Indians trading land for goods would discover “
the wisdom of exchanging what they can spare and we want for what we can spare and they want.” Jefferson did not think he was doing any harm. Though he knew Indians might be compelled to move west, he felt they might someday grasp a better alternative: they could “
incorporate with us as citizens of the United States.”

Whatever its long-term intentions, the civilization program formally recognized Indian rights and offered real opportunities. The program also created certain political strengths for Cherokees. The most striking example of this came with the spread of Christianity. From 1800 onward, Cherokee leaders allowed Moravian and other missionaries to set up schools, spreading literacy and training for skills such as carpentry. When exposed to the new faith, many Cherokees embraced it and blended it with ancient beliefs, as Christians around the world have always done. (Once I sat with a Cherokee man who knew the generations of his family back to the early 1800s; he observed that his lineage included biblical names such as Solomon, David, and Adam—“meaning they were Christianized”—even though some were also “
conjure men,” using ancient methods to read minds, give strength to warriors, and influence events.) But if the missionaries did not succeed
as purely as they might have liked, the spread of Christianity increased popular sympathy for Cherokees. Many Americans equated the Christian religion with civilization itself. In 1819 a mission in the Cherokee Nation received a visit from President James Monroe. John Ross understood the political value of his nation’s Christianized image, and though never overtly religious,
he joined a church in 1829, just as his nation was under severe pressure.

A significant part of the civilization program was the promotion of Ross himself. By traditional standards he was an unlikely leader, who had fought in the Creek War but came away with no particular exploits to extol. But as an educated English speaker, he had the skills for an age in which sovereignty must be defended by words instead of bullets. He was rewarded with positions of increasing prominence. By the 1820s, the aging leader
Charles Hicks was providing Ross with tutorials on tribal history in order to prepare him for a future position of leadership.

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One more change in Cherokee culture reflected all the others. It was the change in the role of women. The women affected may have included John Ross’s wife. She was believed to be half Cherokee (though some stories said otherwise), and was known by both a Christian name, Elizabeth, and a Cherokee name, Quatie. She bore six children. But the most important thing to know about her is that almost nothing is known. She is, alongside Ross, nearly invisible.

Cherokee women were not always so. Because it was a matrilineal society, a husband joined his wife’s family rather than the reverse. When they divorced, the wife kept her property. During his stay among the Cherokees in the 1760s, Lieutenant Timberlake realized that participation in war and governance was not exclusive to men. There were “
warwomen” whose exploits made him think of Amazons, and some were “as famous in war, as powerful in the council.” It was more common
that women were delegated tasks such as growing food, but at least one “warwoman” did turn up when Cherokees met U.S. negotiators to conclude the Treaty of Hopewell in 1785. According to a contemporary news account, “The War-Woman of Chota” delivered one of the speeches. She said she spoke for herself and all the young men of Chota, her town.

I am fond of hearing that there is a Peace; and I hope you have now taken us by the hand in real friendship. I have a Pipe and a little Tobacco to give the Commissioners to smoke in friendship. I look on you and the Red People as my CHILDREN.