No Resting Place by William Humphrey

Author:William Humphrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504006323
Publisher: Open Road Media

Part Four

By holding out, litigating, stalling, the Cherokees were the last but one of the Five Civilized Tribes to go west. That other one, the Seminoles, were on their way now too.

Thus they went knowing all too well what to expect. Knowing it had been one of the factors swaying them to hold out and resist going. In warning them to avoid a like fate, relatives and friends already out west, those voluntary emigrants, wrote telling them what had happened to the other tribes evicted from their lands and convoyed under government escort. It had been going on for some seven years already, though the experience had taught the overseers nothing, and the money to be made off the operation by profiteers, swindlers and corrupt officials had multiplied their numbers like buzzards flocking to a feast.

First to go were the Choctaws. Pacified for centuries, their boast was that never in their history had they warred upon their white brothers but had welcomed them from the first ones they ever saw. They went without protest, agreeing to the treaty proposed to them offering an exchange of land in The Territory for their homeland, and readying to leave before the ink of their X’s was dry.

The Choctaws were dispatched in yearly parties of a couple of thousand head, not in one fell swoop as was the entire Cherokee nation. The Choctaws were a large tribe—over twenty thousand; they had been on the move in these piecemeal installments since 1831, and their remnants still were. For them, emigrating had become an annual rite, almost an inherited characteristic, like the passage of the birds, with the difference that they went north in winter, and none of them returned south. And, not being birds, they lacked wings. The overland trip, on foot, took them all winter long. For it they were issued blankets—one to a family. Natives of southern Mississippi, they hardly knew what winter was. They went shoeless, or at best shod in thin moccasins, many shirtless, and in cotton smocks. It had been the luck of the Choctaws that the seven winters of their expulsion were like the biblical years of leanness in severity.

Of those who got to The Territory to tell their tales, one group spoke of being rescued by a team sent out when they failed to keep a rendezvous and finding them stranded and huddling in a swamp, and their hundred horses—it must have looked like an equestrian statue foundry—standing too deeply in the stiff mud to topple over, though frozen dead for days. Of making camp, and, after dark, the hindmost stragglers limping in to report leaving behind on the trail the bodies of relatives unburied at the roadside, dead of exhaustion, exposure, hunger and of the diseases that struck and raced through them as through a single body. Yet so destitute was the condition of those left behind, their homes and farms taken from them, that, knowing all this, they still flocked to leave for the north each winter like misdirected birds.

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