Free No Resting Place by William Humphrey

its seventh President, the Cherokee Nation elected its first one, John Ross. His determination was to keep his people where they had always been. He was Jackson’s equal in tenacity of purpose, his superior in wiliness, his inferior only in the size of his following.
    Though surrounded by their white enemies, The People were not without white friends. The trouble was that their friends were distant and dispersed while their enemies were united and near at hand. Those bent upon their dispossession had power, but those northern clergymen, philosophers, editors and statesmen, the conscience of the country, whose admiration for their advancement and whose sympathy for their plight the Cherokees had won, had powers of persuasion. John Ross’s hopes were based upon an appeal to the better nature of the American people as a whole—when that failed, upon an appeal to their courts and their self-proclaimed guarantee of equal justice for all free men.
    But you can hire the best lawyers in the land, fight your case all the way up to the Supreme Court, win, and have it decreed that you are, as claimed, indeed a sovereign nation, within the bounds of the state of Georgia yet beyond its laws, then still lose your case when the President, sworn and empowered to uphold the rulings of the Court, declares, “Chief Justice John Marshall has rendered his decision. Now let him enforce it.”
    His week in the asi marked Noquisi’s coming to manhood, but his childhood had really ended a year earlier and not here at home but in Tennessee. His ended along with that of every Cherokee child out of its infancy. Herod himself had not more sweepingly bereft a people of its children than had Andrew Jackson, “Old Hickory.”
    It was at the last full assembly of the nation, or rather, the last unenforced one. The Ferguson family went provisioned for six days on the road and two days on the campsite, with a tarpaulin for a tent and with bedding for all, traveling in a wagon drawn by a span of white mules, theirs but one in the caravan on the road, for the call had gone up every mountainside and down every glen in Cherokee Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas and Tennessee—throughout the twenty million acres left to them, and which they were now being pressured to leave.
    Newcomers joined the caravan at every crossroads. Some leading livestock meant to be slaughtered and cooked on the campsite, they came in farm wagons, in buggies and shays, in oxcarts, in closed carriages driven by slaves, on horseback and on foot, their faces powdered by the dust of the road. Converging from all points toward their destination, they were awed by their numbers, uplifted by their singleness of purpose. Like the smoke signals of old, like the relays of the tom-toms, the call had gone out, carried by riders and runners, and the Cherokees had issued from their lairs in all the variety they presented at this time of transition and evolution: varieties in color, in features, in dress, in deportment. Their oneness of mind contrasted with their diversity of appearance. Among them were people who might have been mistaken for the very oppressors whom they were convening to resist: whole clans of blue-eyed blonds, fair-skinned, freckled, who called themselves Cherokees and who would have fought anybody who called them otherwise, unpropitious as these times were to be one. Among others, within one family, was a gamut of shadings as broad as in one of those specimen apple trees onto the trunk of which have been grafted several varieties of the fruit. Then, down from the tall mountaintops and up from the far-off coves, came those colored and featured like the stones of their native streams: the root stock, the undiluted essence of the tribe. With pigtails and without; bearded and beardless; turbaned, plumed and hatted; shoed, booted and moccasined; in the homespuns and the calicoes of their white counterparts and also in buckskins and blankets; gaudy and