Free No Resting Place by William Humphrey Page A

drab—Cherokees all. Men in claw-hammer coats of black broadcloth, gold chains with watch fobs spanning their flowered silk vests, looking like aldermen, conversed with men in buckskin leggings gartered and tasseled above the calves, in bright, embroidered and beaded tunics and sporting necklaces of bones alternating with the skulls of songbirds. Nor was it always the lighter-skinned of the two whose measurements were kept on file by the Baltimore gentlemen’s tailor. As outlandish a sight to Noquisi as it would have been to a boy of that seaboard city was the occasional exotic with an ornament in the septum of his nose and pendants in his ears that stretched the lobes almost to his shoulders. Of these specimens the most striking was one bandoliered, breast-plated, shaven-headed and turbaned, longlobed and ox-ringed, and yet the name of this atavism, this throwback, was George Lowrey, and he was nothing less than the nation’s Vice President, and a very able statesman he was, highly respected in Washington. The contrast between him and his chief, sandy-haired, frock-coated, diminutive John Ross, the perfect picture of a small-town banker, presented the two extremes of present-day Cherokee-hood. Of the two, it was Ross who was the more adamantly Indian, throughout his every cell and down to his very marrow.
    All night long, undeterred by the rain that had begun and now had turned the roads into sluices, they kept coming. Places were found for them by firesides and food shared with them, and all who could be were crowded to sleep inside the tents and the covered wagons; even so, many spent the night in the open, including John Ross, who refused all offers of shelter. When day broke the following morning there stood revealed the largest gathering of Cherokees ever assembled. Five thousand strong they were. Or was it five thousand weak?
    Beneath the vast open-sided shed and outside among the dripping trees people clustered for low-toned conversations, the women along with the men, for they were not excluded from tribal deliberations as were the women of other tribes; on the contrary, their opinions and advice were sought.
    The children, too, were there: little pitchers, big ears. They had been sent off to find others to play with but they soon drifted back to their bases. A word, one essential to their striking up acquaintance and getting on with one another, was now missing from their vocabulary, whether they spoke English or Cherokee, or both. It was the word most often on children’s lips. The word was “let’s.” It was with this word that play was begun, projects proposed, it was the “open sesame” to the world of make-believe; now none but the youngest of Cherokee children had any heart for play, and while they might all long to escape into make-believe, the real world was too much with them. They had had to assume worries that fitted them as did their parents’ clothes when they put them on for fun. They had been hearing of these worries since their earliest years. Indeed, they were often the first to hear of them, for in many families the child had to interpret the latest news for parents who spoke no English. Thus when the meeting was gaveled to order, these miniature members of the tribe stood to listen along with their elders, and just as gravely.
    On the speakers’ platform, on one side of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, sat Major Ridge, looking like an elderly lion with his grizzled mane and his fixed, fierce frown, and on the other side sat little Johnny Ross, Tsan Usdi , also known affectionately by his childhood pet name, Guwisguwi: Swan Song, with that equally fixed faint smile of his. A figure of towering authority, every inch of him, the one looked; few inches of anything much at all, the other. Lowrey too was there, as were Ridge’s son John and his nephew Elias Boudinot.
    The business of this gathering was to hear the government’s latest—and last,