Free No Resting Place by William Humphrey Page B

sternly warned the Commissioner—offer to them. It was four and a half million dollars—up from three and a half, owing to the good offices of the Ridges. This for twenty million acres of prime farm and forest land, spread over five states, and for their houses and improvements standing thereon.
    Not only was this a good offer, they themselves knew—who better than they?—what their alternative to accepting it was. Thereupon the Commissioner went into a recitation of their woes. Squatters had overrun them, had settled on their lands, stolen their crops, their herds, their livestock. Their fences had been torn down, their barns and houses broken into, burglarized. Traders had corrupted them with whiskey, gamblers had cheated them. They had been falsely arrested. They had been bullied, beaten, hunted like wild animals, murdered in cold blood. The list was long indeed of the Cherokees’ tribulations which the government, represented by the Commissioner, was sworn to protect them against.
    Major Ridge’s speech was, in substance, an echo of the Commissioner’s, though it seemed the other way around, for Ridge was original in style, he was eloquent. He spoke in Cherokee, his only tongue. He was a master of it, the nation’s greatest orator, perhaps its greatest ever, and to them, as to all Indians, oratory was an intoxicant. They nodded now, they swayed, they rocked, they grunted. But when he concluded by saying that their only hope was to leave their homeland and go beyond the Father of Waters, they stood still and silent.
    Ross’s Cherokee was rudimentary. As only a portion of his people understood English, for many of them their leader spoke to them always through an interpreter. However, nothing much was lost in translation, for it had no style to begin with. And anyway, in what Guwisguwi had to say on the subject of their removal there was never more variation than in the song of the swan.
    â€œVery well, then,” said the Commissioner when Ross sat down, “without further ado, all those in favor of accepting this treaty, signify by saying aye.”
    Not a voice was heard—not even a Ridge’s. While thousands of pairs of eyes, like so many double-barreled shotguns, watched, they exchanged warning glances one with another. The two hundred-odd whom they had induced to go west were already out there. Left to uphold their point of view in the old country were they themselves and hardly anybody else. The framer and the one enforcer of the law against the sale of tribal land knew what would have happened to anybody who piped a note to puncture that thunderous silence, or even so much as cleared his throat to do so.
    Jackson’s man on the spot was one Schermerhorn—John F., formerly a Presbyterian preacher, now pursuing the more lucrative trade of Commissioner of Indian Affairs, known to the Cherokees as Skaynooyanah , a nickname always good for a snicker: the Devil’s Horn. He it was who had deceived the Seminoles into signing a document which, when it was explained to them that with it they had thereby conveyed to the United States their native Florida, agreeing to vacate it and emigrate to the west, had sparked the lively little war now waging down there, with the palefaces getting the bloody hell beat out of them in those malarial mangrove swamps where the Indians rose up, struck, then sank from sight like their brothers the alligators. As regarded Cherokees, there was scarcely a one of any standing in the tribe whom Skaynooyanah had not attempted to bribe. Upon the failure of his mission in Tennessee he ordered the nation, every living head of them, to convene again, this time in New Echota, Georgia, theretofore the place of all places forbidden to them to assemble in because it was nothing short of their shrine, the former capital of their short-lived, now outlawed, government, for ratification of the treaty. One man, one vote; and to make sure they exercised