Read Online No Resting Place by William Humphrey - Free Book Online

intimation of its destiny. He would remember throughout all the many years until it came to pass wondering whether his would one day be so wrinkled. That would be in far-off Texas, where he would scratch his grandson and bathe with him in the waters of that red river that he had once seen redder with blood.
    1814. If only! Ai ! If only they had done this! Ai ! If only they hadn’t done that! If only! Agiduda was sick of hearing it. It made his ears want to throw up. “If only” was not just a lament too late, it was an admission of foolishness, of lack of foresight—even of hindsight! If only they had realized that in fomenting the Indians’ petty and pointless intertribal wars the whites were exploiting them for their own gain, leaving it to them to exterminate themselves. If only they had realized they were Indians, all of them. Not Cherokees and Creeks and Chickasaws and Choctaws and Seminoles but Indians —brothers not just beneath but on the skin. In numbers was strength. What we needed, we Cherokees, each and every one of us, was cousins, able-bodied cousins—cousins by the dozens. But without seed grain does not grow. Ai ! If only our grandparents had bred more!
    If only in that year of 1814, on that day at Horseshoe Bend, Junuluska, the Cherokee chief, had seized his chance to kill that viper Andrew Jackson instead of saving the day for him! There was an act to cause the bitterest of regrets. To have killed men whom he mistakenly thought to be his enemies in the service and for the glory of one whom he mistakenly thought to be his friend. More than Jackson’s day, Junuluska saved his life by tomahawking the Creek poised to kill him. If he had known that Jackson would one day drive the Cherokees from their homes, he would have killed him himself there that day on the Horseshoe, said Junuluska.
    There at Horseshoe Bend, allied with the Americans against Britain’s allies, the Creeks, there where none of them had any business being, were some seven hundred Cherokee warriors, including the one who would distinguish himself the most, the one without a drop of the blood in his veins but no less, maybe more, of a Cherokee for all that, whose career as a man of destiny, for all its later ups and downs, was to have its dazzling debut in the bravery and bloodshed of that day: Kalunah: The Raven, sometimes Ootsetee Ardeetahskee: The Big Drunk—best known as Sam Houston. Fighting alongside him that day, his future father-in-law. Not the first one, nor yet the third one, but the intervening one, the red one: John Rogers, one of The Ridge’s deputies in the execution of the traitor Doublehead.
    Then newly commissioned in the United States Army (he would thereafter take his service rank as his given name) Major Ridge was there that day. Who among the fighting Cherokees was not there? John Lowrey, Gideon Morgan, George Fields, John Drew, George Guest (when not known as Sequoyah), Richard Brown, George Hicks—Cherokees to a man, every mother’s son of them, their peculiar names notwithstanding, and all were on the battle roll. Even the least likely of the lot was there, little Johnny Ross. Least likely of armed warriors, that was to say—though more of a fighter than the rest all put together. Passive resistance would be this one man’s brainchild, and by his genius at waging it he would almost succeed (he still had not given up the fight, even this late in the day when all seemed lost) in defeating an enemy of overwhelming might and unscrupulous ruthlessness, meanwhile restraining by his persuasiveness (though obliged to speak to them through an interpreter, so little of the red red blood did he have in him) one of the most warlike people ever known and one now provoked beyond human endurance.
    The battle plan that day was for a slaughter. For the taking of prisoners provision was not made. The thousand defenders were besieged in their compound. Flight could be in one