Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (4 page)

Jackson was fighting simultaneously against the Creeks, against his own army, and against his political enemies back home in Tennessee. He was certain that the troops who’d marched home against his wishes were telling nasty stories about him. Having come from all over the state, they were spreading back to their homesteads like an infectious disease. “
I have no doubts but you hear a great deal of stuff about Tyranny, etc., etc.,” his friend and subordinate John Coffee wrote home to his wife, urging her to be patient until the public learned the truth. Jackson, whose regular job as major general of militia was an elected one, also served with an elected governor, and he could not ignore the risk of losing public support. He had been documenting his military victories, assuring Coffee that proof of success would “
kill dead
our enemies,” adding in his uncertain spelling, “
The snarling
curs
may grin—lie—and falsely swear but the[y] will die with their own bit[e]—all we
have to do is perform our duty, and they are politically doomd.” That, at least, was his confident prediction in mid-February, although the language and timing of his letter—he scrawled it at “12 oclock at night,” by the light of some flickering flame at Fort Strother—suggested how much the topic gnawed at him.

And so on March 14 Jackson threw down a marker. He would not send home another complaining soldier, nor would he let his army fall apart. At midday the general had his entire force assemble “
on an elevated piece of ground, in front of the fort,” as an eyewitness reported, and the prisoner was led before them. Jackson’s letter was read aloud, followed by “the performance of divine service.” The firing squad took one step forward.
They shot Private Wood on schedule. Understanding at the end that he truly would be killed, Private Wood had dictated a farewell message to his parents, which a fellow soldier took down for him; perhaps young Wood had never learned to write. According to the soldier who wrote and mailed it,
Wood’s farewell was composed in rhyme.

Jackson was beginning to impose his will on a new democratic society. He was channeling the energy of that society toward a great goal that even he probably did not yet fully see: the complete reorganization of the southern United States. Natives in that region had been on the defensive for centuries, but in 1814 five southern Indian nations still held their heartlands. The parade ground at Fort Strother, at noon on March 14, was where Andrew Jackson first demonstrated how far he would go to change that. Neither his enemies nor his own men would be allowed to stand in his way.

T
he burial of John Wood was a last bit of business for Jackson’s troops to complete before the army began to move. If his men were still “clamorous,” most would for now march in the direction he ordered. He intended to leave Fort Strother and follow the southward course of a nearby river, the Coosa, one of several streams that radiated out from Mobile Bay like the gnarled fingers of an old man’s hand. Jackson was far out on this finger, and now pointed his army in the direction of the palm.

Jackson was concentrating his scattered forces for this move. A messenger had gone to summon Jackson’s friend John Coffee, who often kept his horsemen to the north. Other messengers searched out the six hundred or more Cherokees and friendly Creeks who were serving as part of Jackson’s army. At least one messenger departed the Mississippi Territory, traveling northeastward up the Coosa and into the northern part of the state of Georgia. This was Cherokee country, where
the courier found
Second Lieutenant John Ross, an adjutant, or assistant to a senior officer, in the Cherokee Regiment.

When the summons arrived, the first thing Ross did was to pass on the news. He sat down to compose a note. He wrote to Return J. Meigs, the federal Indian agent—the government’s representative to the Cherokee Nation, as well as Ross’s elderly friend and patron.

Sir

I have this moment received by Express a letter from Colo. Morgan dated Ft. Armstrong 1st March—intimating that he had just recd. Marching orders & would march this morning for Fort Strother with all the Cherokees with him.

A detail of this letter suggests that Ross, like so many in Jackson’s army, insisted on doing his duty in his own way. The summons said the march had already begun, meaning Ross must be needed urgently, but Ross informed Meigs without apparent concern that he did not intend to leave Chickamauga for three or four days. It’s not certain what business detained him. He could have been performing the time-consuming rituals that Cherokee tradition required before going to war, although it is just as likely that Ross had more prosaic concerns. He had a wife at home, Quatie, who later that year would bear their first child. He may also have had a duty to gather supplies, which the army was so terrible at providing. Ross, after all, was a trader, and
his trading firm had signed a contract to supply the Cherokee Regiment with everything from blankets to corn. There was no doubt, however, that Ross would go. He was hoping Meigs would send reinforcements from among the Cherokee Nation.

All those who wish to signalize themselves by fighting & taking revenge for the blood of the innocent will now step forward & you will be good enough to urge on all those Cherokees that have been delayed . . . I am Sir yrs respectfully

Jno Ross.

When he was ready, Ross started back toward his unit.

John Ross was twenty-three years old. He was a good deal shorter than many Cherokee men, and was almost certainly wearing white men’s clothes. Traveling with his brother Lewis and perhaps other Cherokees, Ross began the ride of a little over a hundred miles, likely
heading south until they struck the Coosa. They would have followed its winding course toward the army. Somewhere along the Coosa they crossed the border from Georgia to the Mississippi Territory—it was impossible to know just where, for the state line imagined by white men had never been marked.

The Cherokee Regiment they rejoined included Pathkiller, the tribe’s aged principal chief, but in practice a white officer gave the orders.
Colonel Gideon Morgan—well known to Cherokees through his Cherokee wife—was the commander who had sent the message to summon Ross. Morgan in turn was under Jackson’s command, and the regiment was on the federal payroll. General
Jackson had promised that the Cherokees would receive the same pay and benefits as white soldiers, including benefits to their families if they were killed.

Here among the gathering regiment was a man named
George Guess, known to fellow Cherokees as Sequoyah. Here were other Cherokee men who, in accordance with custom, were known by names that reflected their exploits, attributes, or a wry sense of humor: the Mouse, the Broom, Club Foot, Old Turkey, Old Brains, Whiteman Killer. Before long John Ross would be recording some of these names on a list of the wounded and dead. Here also was a great fighter known in Cherokee as
Tahseekeyarkey, and in English as Shoe Boots,
after the high European-style boots he wore. He was a company commander, and also a free spirit. Sometimes on the march he would stop, crow like a cock, and continue on his way. It was alleged that he met Jackson once, and told the general that while he crowed like a cock, he was not a “
chicken heart.” Jackson was not segregated from the Indians: at least one, known as
Tobacco Juice, was among a unit of “spies,” or scouts, who had been detailed to serve as General Jackson’s bodyguard. In such a small army it is reasonable to think that Ross, as an officer, had his first conversation with General Jackson; even if not, he would certainly have spotted the general on his horse, his face grim and wrinkled either from determination or from pain, and would have come to know the
hint of a brogue in Jackson’s voice.

Why was Ross fighting on Jackson’s side, the side of the United States? Things had not always been so. Within living memory, the Cherokees’ fathers and grandfathers had been at war against the very sort of white settlers who made up the bulk of Andrew Jackson’s army. When the American colonists declared their independence in 1776, the Cherokees of the Appalachian interior remained loyal to Britain.
John Ross’s grandfather, a Scottish trader, helped to arm and organize the Cherokees to fight on the British side against the new United States. The Cherokee conflict against their white neighbors continued even after the American War of Independence ended in 1783. They were still at war when John Ross was born in 1790.

All that had changed by the time the Cherokee Regiment was formed in 1813. Cherokees had a new outlook, which was visible as the regiment prepared to move south with the army. There were, for example, the white man’s clothes favored by John Ross, and the famous footwear of Shoe Boots. Much of the nation had adopted European-style clothes, or mixed white and native styles. It was still possible to find a man dressed in the old style, his ears slit and weighed down by heavy earrings, as well as a breastplate and wampum around his neck if he was a man of authority, but many another man would wear a
buckskin hunting jacket, once disdained as a symbol of white settlers. John Ross, among others, was sometimes spied wearing a Middle Eastern–style turban.
Cherokee women, for whom it was once socially acceptable to walk about half-naked, now commonly wore modest full-length dresses, the cloth for which they had often spun themselves. This outward change in clothing reflected deeper changes in Cherokee society. Despite the resistance of traditionalists, many Cherokees had been adapting to the culture of the great white tribes that increasingly surrounded them. They had been encouraged to do so ever since a peace treaty was signed in 1791 between the Cherokees and President George Washington’s administration. Washington vowed that he would respect the rights and borders of Indian nations, and his approach was enshrined in a series of laws known as the Indian Intercourse Acts. The federal
government, not states or individuals, would manage relations with the tribes. Government trading posts would sell Indians the goods required for civilization—whether plows for modern agriculture, or books, or boots for Shoe Boots. This was all part of Washington’s sophisticated effort to keep the peace, which he considered “
honorable to the national character” as well as “sound policy.”
Cherokees were particularly adept at seizing the advantages offered.

The very same Cherokee leaders who advocated change were the ones who went on to establish the Cherokee Regiment. These leaders included
the most imposing man in the regiment, who was known as the
Ridge. Barrel-chested, thick-faced, with curly hair that was starting to go gray, the Ridge was in his mid-forties. He had grown up in the old Cherokee ways, without the slightest formal education and with an early introduction to the rituals of hunting and war. More than a few men had died by his hand. Yet as he matured, the Ridge had chosen another way. He began to rise in Cherokee leadership in the 1790s when he spoke against the tribal law of revenge, which called for a family to respond in kind when one of its members was killed. The law was eventually abolished. The Ridge also took up agriculture. Now he was a planter, ferry operator, store owner, and slave owner. He never learned to speak English well, but was a powerful advocate for modernizing his nation.

It was the Ridge who, with two other leaders, promoted the idea that Cherokees should raise a force to defend the United States in the War of 1812. Ridge argued before the Cherokee leadership council that they
must
fight to ensure their own survival. If Cherokees remained neutral, they inevitably would be seen as enemies, because trigger-happy
white men would categorize all Indians as either with them or against them. The leadership council agreed. By then Meigs, the old Indian agent, had already recommended that the army enroll Cherokees: “
They are real horsemen, they are remarkable for the ease with which they ride . . . they are like blank stationery on which may be written anything.” General Jackson soon filled in the blank. The Ridge was given
the rank of lieutenant and later promoted to the rank by which he would always afterward be known—Major Ridge.

When John Ross joined this unit, he could give different meanings to his service depending on how he defined his identity. As a white trader’s son who was close to the Indian agent, Ross could think of himself like his loyalist grandfather during the Revolution—a white man organizing friendly Indians to put down a rebellion. But as the descendant of Cherokee women, he could also think of himself as a Cherokee who risked his life for the United States in order to ensure his rights within it. This latter meaning is the one Ross voiced after the war was over.

Now, in March 1814, Ross and other men of the Cherokee Regiment were departing Fort Strother along with Jackson’s main force—Coffee’s horsemen, the Thirty-Ninth Regiment, and the clamorous Tennessee militiamen. Somewhere in the crowd was Jackson himself, wild-haired, high on his horse, and soon to be overcome with frustration. So long as the troops had been spread out, they were easier to feed, since smaller units could live off the land, but when several thousand were concentrated, the specter of starvation returned. Army contractors had sent Jackson a letter announcing their success in depositing food at an outpost of friendly Creeks called Talladega, but the army found no supplies when it arrived. Jackson wrote the contractors, and the courtesy of his wording barely contained his rage: “
What could have occasioned you to the erroneous belief on which you felicitate yourselves . . . I am quite at a loss to conjecture.” He would have
eight days’ rations for the troops’ next move, barely enough to reach their ultimate destination and return if nothing went wrong.

Straight downriver, roughly midway between the army and Mobile Bay, was the heart of the Creek Nation, although Jackson was in no rush to get there. It was far more important to destroy Creek forces, so the general planned a detour. The men left the Coosa behind, marching eastward through the woods. They approached a river called the Tallapoosa, the next finger on that gnarled hand of rivers running down to
Mobile Bay. The rude path his army was following was familiar to Jackson. Back in January, learning of a large Creek encampment, he had raced along this same route toward the enemy with nine hundred newly arrived militiamen, only to realize that the Creeks were so numerous, and so well fortified, that if he attacked, he would fail. He chose instead to back away—and then the Creeks attacked him. Dozens of his men were killed before he drove off the assault. Now Jackson was returning with his enlarged force, including a couple of small artillery pieces, determined to finish the job.

Sometimes along the march, the general stopped and climbed down from his horse. A subordinate would hack down a sapling and Jackson would drape himself over it in the only pose that relieved his abdominal pain. Then he’d mount again, hardly more than a cadaver on a horse, with his bodyguard eyeing him. They continued toward the enemy’s camp, tucked in a curve of the Tallapoosa River. It was a place the Creeks called Tohopeka, and white men called Horseshoe Bend.