the Cherokees asked for peace, and the British were only too glad to give it to them. Again, the Cherokees were rewarded. Between 1768 and 1775, they signed three treaties and immediately lost all of the lands north of Georgia and east of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Old Tassel, the Cherokee Chieftain, shook his head and said sadly, “The truth is, if we had not lands, we should have fewer enemies.”
And so it was.
By the autumn of 1785, the tribe possessed hope that their troubles were at an end. The United States had outlined the Cherokee boundaries and had forbidden any of their own citizens from trespassing past those border lines, written in blood.
The land was sacred and it belonged to the Indian. That was law, and the Cherokees walked away with the Treaty of Hopewell to prove it. There before them were the white men’s own holy words: “The hatchet shall be forever buried.”
As Nancy Ward, a niece of Chief Attacullaculla, had told the American commissioners:
You having determined on peace is most pleasing to me, for I have seen much trouble during the late war. I am old, but I hope yet to bear children, who will grow up and people our nation, as we are now under the protection of Congress and shall have no more disturbance. I speak for the young warriors I have raised in my town, as well as for myself. They rejoice that we have peace, and we hope the chain of friendship will never more be broken.
The chain of friendship was made with cheap metal, and even cheaper words. It had been molded with ambition and linked with lies.
Congress, in 1789, was still holding fast to the treaty, promising that “the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars.” Congress had not yet felt the growing pains of a nation, stuffed with too many people and even more greed. The Chickamaugans loomed as its only stumbling block in the way of peace. These renegade Cherokees had been the last holdouts, the last warriors to defy American rule. But even they buckled under the military muscle of a new nation, leaving fifty of their braves dead and scalped upon the highland slopes of North Georgia and Tennessee. At the 1794 conference in Telico, Little Turkey, who had followed Old Tassel to the helm of the Cherokees, rose, proud that his people would now be able “to live so that we might have gray hairs in our head.” He stood and said, “Our tears are wiped away, and we rejoice in the prospect of our future welfare, under the protection of Congress.”
The tears would come again.
For happiness would not live in the house of the Cherokees forever, or even for a decade or two.
White men never kept their word to a savage.
In 1803, the United States purchased the sprawling territory of Louisiana, and President Thomas Jefferson found himself wondering what to do with all of that land. It was valuable. It was vast. And, for the moment, it apparently was vacant.
Jefferson smiled. The decision was so easy for him.
The colonies were becoming crowded. Farms were jammed against each other. Settlers shared the same fence posts. Trails kept twisting and turning, tying one settlement to another, and land – Lord, there was so much of it – was rapidly becoming scarce, and empty land was vanishing before their very eyes. It was, as one farmer said, downright suffocating.
Someone would have to go.
And Thomas Jefferson certainly did not want to make his own people mad.
A lot of them already were. Many colonists had moved in next door to the Indians, then complained long and loud because they looked up on morning, and, God forbid, there were Indians living next door to them. A Pennsylvania farmer said with animosity:
A wild Indian, with his skin painted red, and a feather through his nose, has set his foot on the broad continent of North and South America; a second wild Indian with his ears cut out in ringlets or his nose slit like a swine or a malefactor also sets his foot on the same extensive tract of soil. . .What do these ringed, streaked, spotty and speckled cattle make of the soil? Do they till it? Revelation said to man, “Thou shalt till the ground.” This alone is human life . . . What would you think of . . . addressing yourself to a great buffalo to grant you land?
The land surely belonged to the farmer, the colonists said. It surely belonged to them, the white men, the rightful owners. They were adamant about driving the Red Man off the ground that had held the Red Man’s gardens and graves for centuries.
Jefferson, long regarded as the champion of human rights, had called the Indians a “useless, expensive, ungovernable ally” as early as 1776. A decade later, however, he pledged that “not a foot of land will ever be taken from the Indians without their own consent.”
Yet, by 1790, Jefferson had reasoned that the United States, if it paid attention to the fine print, did actually have two legal options of taking land, which, lawfully or at least morally, did not belong to it.
The country could go to war.
Or it could make treaties, even if it had to go to war to get them signed.
By owning those valuable, vast, and for the moment, vacant lands of Louisiana, America at last had a place to send the Indians. It had a depository for the Red Man. Going to a new and open range would simply lead the wayward tribes a step closer to the godliness of civilization. He was sure of it.
The journey west would indubitably be for the Indian’s own good – a peaceful and honorable thing to do. At least that’s what Jefferson wrote to Andrew Jackson. It was a good salve for his conscience, whether the president believed it or not.
He and Gen. William Henry Harrison by 1809 had managed to talk the Delaware, Piankashaw, Sauk, Fox, Wea, Potawatomi, and Kaskaskia tribes out of millions of acres of land in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. The difference between talking and stealing depended on which side of the table a man sat. The Indians, as always, sat on the wrong side.
Jefferson was moving them all to his latest creation – an Indian Territory.
The exodus had begun.
Into the land of the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creek, and Cherokees rode the “Flying Panther,” Tecumseh, the son of a Shawnee Chief. He was the warrior. His brother, half-blind, was the prophet. They came together as a messiah to call for the gathering of all Indian tribes into a common band to guard the lands that God had given them, that broken treaties were stealing away.
Tecumseh rose up, his face glazed with the sweat of summertime, as five thousand crowded around to hear his words. He stood firm and erect, a man of dignity and destiny. And as Lewis Cass, who would someday be secretary of war, remembered, his “language flowed tumultuously and swiftly, from the fountains of his soul.”
“The Great Spirit gave this land to his Red children,” Tecumseh said. “He placed the white man on the other side of the great waters, but the white man was not satisfied with their own, but came over to take ours from us.”
The Red Sticks – the wild and reckless Creeks – nodded.
The Ridge, a Cherokee Chieftain, frowned. He could hear the thunder of war in the Shawnee’s oratory, and he wanted none of it. He and his people only wanted to find peace in the land that bore the footprints of their
