The Legend of Bass Reeves by Gary Paulsen

Author:Gary Paulsen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307513793
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2006-11-10T22:00:00+00:00

6

1840–1863

The Indian Territory

The place that Bass ran to was known as the Indian Territory. It’s called Oklahoma now. Back then it included parts of Kansas and Arkansas and an edge of northern Texas. It is filled with people now, and towns and cities and schools, and churches and hospitals and miles of highways and roads, and airports and strip malls and hot and cold running water, and forced-air heating and air-conditioning systems and electricity and streetlights—all the beauty and some of the ugliness of what we know as civilization.

But a hundred and sixty-five years ago, it was a vastly different kind of place. So pitch dark at night that people lived from sunup to sundown, staying close to a modest campfire once night fell or safely inside the dimly lit cabins they called home. The stars and the moon were the only illumination on those vast plains once the sun went down.

Even in the long, tragic story that is the history of how the United States government has mishandled its Native American population—some parts seem so horrible they are virtually unprintable—it is hard to fathom how settlers could have stooped as low as they did when the government formed the Indian Territory.

A land-hungry fledgling government attempted to wipe out a people by allowing starvation and disease and hardship to go unchecked. It is frightening to contemplate what might have happened if the American government had possessed the technology for mass extermination of a culture.

The Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, Cree and Seminoles— the United States government called them the Five Civilized Tribes of Native Americans—lived in the eastern and southern parts of the country in the early 1800s. The first four tribes were scattered across the southeastern states, with the Seminoles in Florida.

They were by all modern standards truly civilized.

They had towns and settled farms with livestock, and roads between the towns, and farms and written languages and religions (many were Christian), and schools and churches and art. Their culture was in some ways equal to and in many cases better than that of white Americans.

They had spent generations settling their land and cultivating the soil, raising crops that filled complete nutritional needs (corn, beans and squash were unknown to Europeans before they came to the Americas). Since ninetyseven percent of Americans then lived on farms, and since the tribes’ farms were successful and, sometimes, large and wealthy …

America wanted them.

The U.S. military drove the people off their farms, out of their towns, away from their homes, killing those who refused to go, destroying their culture. Many of the tribes fought to keep their homes, but they could not overcome the might of the American army. The Seminoles fought the hardest, actually defeating the army in a fight called the Battle of Fallen Timbers. They are the only tribe that has to this day never surrendered to the United States government. But in the end, even the Seminoles were driven off their farms and out of Florida.

All these people—men, women and children—had no place to live and seemed condemned to simply wander until they died.

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