Blood Moon by John Sedgwick

Author:John Sedgwick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

10

A FINAL RECKONING

At Red Clay, “the woods echoed with the trampling of many feet: a long and orderly procession emerged from among the trees, the gorgeous autumnal tints of whose departing foliage seemed in sad harmony with the noble spirit now beaming in this departing race,” went one elegiac account. “Most of the train was on foot. There were a few aged men, and some few women, on horseback.”

This came from a startling new visitor, John Howard Payne, who would be the latest eastern interloper to meddle with the fate of the Cherokee. Of them all, Payne was the least likely. Just five two, he was a peppery little man with tousled hair, a Van Dyke beard, and a knowing, cosmopolitan air. He was best known for writing the lyrics of “Home, Sweet Home,” first sung in his opera Clari, or the Maid of Milan, which had played in London and created a sensation. A combustible mixture of ambition and sentimentality, Payne had gone through many careers, a few poetic, most theatrical, and, when all had foundered, he’d taken flight to Europe to escape his creditors. Now he was back in the United States with a magazine he’d founded called Jam Jehan Nima, the “World from Inside a Bowl”—an unpromising title he’d taken from Old Persian—to be published in London for subscribers keen to hear about the wild life in the American outback. Payne would be the storyteller. By 1835, he’d roamed over several midwestern American states before he came to the southeastern Indians, who held him spellbound. Solemn, exotic, and remote, they made for a nearly spiritual discovery, as he told his sister in a long letter about his picaresque travels that made its way into the Knoxville Register:

I cannot describe to you my feelings as I first found myself in the Indian county. We rode miles after miles in the native forest, neither habitation nor inhabitant to disturb the solitude and majesty of the wilderness. At length we met a native in his native land. He was galloping on horseback. His air was Oriental; he had a turban, a robe of fringed and gaudily-figured calico, scarlet leggings, and beaded belts and garters and pouch.

He continued on for pages with colorful journalistic details, such as Indian women who referred to whites as “sneezer-muches” for their constant snuffling, an American flag floating incongruously over the huts of a local settlement, and a pile of ashes from a century of ceremonial fires.

This tribe proved to be the Creeks, but they led him to the more illustrious Cherokee, whose tragic saga would overleap the pages of Jam Jeham Nima. This was a book, one that would make Payne’s name as not just the playwright of this drama, but an actor, too.

A good journalist, he immediately paid calls on the leadership of both parties to develop inside sources. He started with the Ridges and Boudinots. Elias charmed him particularly, what with his lovely Connecticut wife, Harriet. “A very intelligent and amiable couple,” Payne called them.

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