Cherokee America, page 42
In the years to follow, Check turned the events of the spring of 1875 over in her mind so many times that they were like a deeply furrowed field of fine-grained, sandy soil. Sometimes, even long into the future, she could be seen standing in the potatoes, staring towards the Arkansas River and the Creek Nation. When Sanders spied her, he kept an eye on her. If she didn’t move for a while, he’d walk over. They’d talk about the weather, the crops, or the latest snake one of them had killed. When Check’s mind was back in the present, Sanders would return to his corn.
Author’s Note
The events in this book are entirely fictional. But I have some idea of the fates of the real people upon whom many of the characters are loosely based. Imagination can provide answers for others.
Check was based on the life of Cherokee America Rogers, who lived a long time and presided over a small empire of people and potatoes. She was “Aunt Check” to many, well loved, and generally got her way. She’s buried next to her husband. Hugh’s headstone is close by. Their home still stands.
Connell (Connell Rogers) became a wealthy farmer and an influential man in the Cherokee Nation. He remained on the land he inherited from his mother, served in the Cherokee Senate, and held several other offices in the tribe. He married a second time after his first wife died. Clifford did not become a doctor. His little brother Otto did for a while, but gave up medicine to grow potatoes. Paul became a cowboy.
Puny, Ezell, and Lizzie were not based on the lives of individual people, but on historical accounts of African Americans in Indian Territory, most of whom were former slaves. Scholarship on the relationship between Cherokees and African Americans is complex, fascinating, and still emerging. I like to think that Puny and Ezell got to go home to Ohio, and lived happy and successful lives. I suspect Lizzie stayed behind, happily married, had two other children, and continued to work for Connell after Check died. Also, far in the future, I think she may have been helpful to one of Jenny’s granddaughters, Maud Nail.
Sanders Cordery was based on the life of Wilson Cordery. He gave up his wife on Braggs Mountain and remained with his Nannie in the bottoms (Nancy Hall Cordery). He spent some time in Judge Parker’s jail, but got out alive. One of his granddaughters—my grandmother—told me on more than one occasion that he lived to be 102.
Jenny and Bert (based on the lives of Louisa Cordery and Albert Anderson) married. Their first child died as an infant, but they raised eight children to adulthood. Twice during their marriage they lived in the bawdy house. Five of their grandchildren were raised in it. That house was moved from the bayou to Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, a few decades ago and was later named the William Penn Adair House. It is currently in disrepair.
Sheriff Rogers, not a young man, died in 1876.
George Sixkiller was not based on the life of a single person. But many Indian boys like George died too young.
Coop (Anderson “Coop” Cordery) lived in the bottoms and on the bayou all of his life. In addition to working on the ferry, he drove the mail and farmed. He named his youngest son Connell.
Mannypack (Amanda Pack) died young. Tomahawk (Thomas Cordery) then married a white woman and had a few brushes with the law. He named sons Hugh and Clifford.
Bert’s little brother, Ame (Amos Anderson), grew up to be a farmer. He married twice. His first wife was Tomahawk and Mannypack’s little girl. Upon her death, Ame married a daughter of Fox, the Creek medicine man.
Four years after this novel is set, Dennis Wolf Bushyhead became the chief of the Western Cherokees. He was well loved and reelected three times, but never lost his interest in money. Alabama died many years before Dennis. She was older than portrayed in this book, and went by her first name, Elizabeth. She is buried in the old Cherokee National Cemetery within sight of Check’s grave.
Granny Schrimsher may be best remembered through the life of one of her grandsons, Will Rogers. Her picture hangs in his childhood home mentioned in this book and in the Will Rogers Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma.
Nash Taylor was based on the life of Florian Nash. Mr. Nash remained a successful businessman, farmer, and community leader. He lived into old age. His house still stands, and is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.
Judge Isaac Parker became known as “the Hanging Judge.” His reputation still lingers in history. One hundred and sixty people received the death penalty in his court, and seventy-nine of those were executed. He extended his control over the Cherokee Nation as much as he could, but in later years somewhat softened his racist views towards Indians.
The gold stash was found—but not in the fake well.
In an attempt to destroy nonreservation Indians by assimilation, Congress abolished their tribal governments in 1898, and required those nations to submit to a general allotment of their lands and to the laws of the United States of America. The Cherokees were the last of the “Five Civilized Tribes” to capitulate. Oklahoma became a state in 1907. After that, the Cherokees in Oklahoma languished for decades without tribal rights, a chief, or a government. They slowly regained their autonomy and power, due in no small part to the efforts of Earl Boyd Pierce, one of Wilson Cordery’s great-grandsons, who, as the Cherokee general counsel, fought tirelessly to reestablish the tribe. Today the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is thriving, and one of the largest employers in the northeastern part of the state.
The Arkansas River was tamed by the McClellan-Kerr Navigation System. It still goes around the bend, but without the roar.
Acknowledgments
Aside from my grandmother, to whom I have dedicated this book, I particularly want to thank:
Sequoyah, for the invention of his syllabary, which, in a matter of months, educated the Cherokee people in a written language, changed the course of Cherokee history, and contributed to the plot of this tale. Sequoyah could neither read nor write any other language, and his intellectual achievement is unique in human history.
Emmet Starr, the author of History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore, which was first published in 1921 and is filled with tribal facts and genealogical information without which this book would have never been conceived nor executed. Before the internet was invented, I used Starr’s rather complex genealogical tables for the “Old Families” of the Cherokee Nation to establish blood relationships among characters. Subsequent research might prove them factually incorrect in a few instances, but they are a primary source, and as fictional people have lives of their own, that possibility hasn’t concerned me enough to check sources beyond Starr.
James Mooney, the author of Myths of the Cherokee and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, which was collected in two volumes in the 1880s for the Bureau of American Ethnology. My copy was reproduced in 1972 by Charles Elder, Bookseller and Publisher, Nashville, Tennessee, probably at Elder’s own expense.
C. W. “Dub” West, author of Fort Gibson: Gateway to the West, who, again probably at his own expense, published 1,000 copies in 1972. I consider myself fortunate to own copies 188 and 189.
The Fort Gibson Genealogical Society, which compiled Fort Gibson, Oklahoma Area, and the Old Illinois District of the Cherokee Nation, published in 2000.
My cousin, Nancy Leeds McLemore, for lending me a helping hand, and Denise Chaudoin and Ella Christie, teachers at the Cherokee Charter School, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, for improving my dictionary Cherokee with accurate translations and advice. If there are any mistakes in the Cherokee, they are my own fault for not providing enough context.
Earl Boyd Pierce, the chief attorney for the Cherokee Nation from my early childhood long into my adulthood. Earl was my mother’s first cousin and my grandmother’s favorite nephew. He could talk about John Ross and John Ridge as if he knew them well and had seen them yesterday. While I was growing up, Earl fought and eventually won, before the US Supreme Court, the Arkansas Riverbed case, which awarded over $14 million to the Cherokee Nation and provided for me proof Indians don’t always have to be victims. Novelists are sometimes asked whom they’d like to raise from the dead and invite to dinner. Earl would be on my list. I wish I’d paid more attention to his stories when I was young and dumb.
I’d also like to thank the following friends of mine who read and critiqued any of the numerous drafts of this book I’ve written over the years. That list includes my ex-husband, David Verble, who spent many a Friday night listening to me read aloud what I had written during the week; my college roommate, Laura Derr, with whom I exchanged chapters for her suggestions, first through snail mail and then electronically; my business partner, Judy Worth, who criticized the manuscript in helpful ways; my first cousin John Haworth, Senior Executive Emeritus of the National Museum of the American Indian, who has an encyclopedic understanding of Native American issues; and other readers, who probably doubted this book would ever be published, but nevertheless spent their time, energies, and minds to help me improve it—my aunt Barbara Haworth, and friends Bill Blackburn, Gretchen Brown, John Burruss, Lana Dearinger, Rona Roberts, Martha Helen Smith, and Sue Weant. I’m sure I’ve left somebody out. I apologize. It’s been a long, bumpy road, with many turns and several washed-out bridges.
Finally, I’d like to thank my agent, Lynn Nesbit, who is a legend in her own time for good reason. And Nicole Angeloro, my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for her deep understanding of the book, her sense of humor, and her light, helpful touch.
1
Maud was bent over one row suckering tomato plants and Lovely was bent over the next one. They were talking about a girl Lovely had his eyes set on. But a cow’s bawling interrupted that. Maud unfolded and looked toward the river. Lovely did the same. The bawling was loud, unnatural, and awful, and it set them to running. They ran first toward the house, not toward the sound, because neither had taken a gun to the garden. Maud stopped at the steps; Lovely rushed in for their rifles. Armed up and not bothering to talk, they both ran straight toward the pump to get to the pasture below the ridge where the howling was coming from. If they hadn’t been fearful, they would’ve run fifty more yards to the gate and gone through it. But they were scared and hurrying, so they climbed the barbed wire just past the pump, and Lovely snagged his sleeve, leaving behind a piece of blue cotton waving like the flag of a small foreign country. Maud did worse than that. She snagged her leg below the knee at the back, opening a tear deep at its top and three inches long. Maud was vain about her legs and Lovely had only three shirts, but still they ran, focused on the bawling, without minding their mishaps.
When they got to the cow, Betty was folded with both her head and her rump sticking up. Between them, smack across the ridge of her spine, were three wide, angry gashes. She was thrashing all over the ground. She’d flattened out a circle of weeds, and, oddly, out of the center wound, a stalk of poke protruded. It was a thick stem of poke and resembled, stuck out as it was, a spear. That’s what Maud thought as soon as she saw it.
Lovely yelled, “Her back’s axed. We’ll haveta shoot her.” He moved toward Betty’s head and raised his rifle. But then he just stood, cheek on the stock, eye down the sights, finger on the trigger.
Maud yelled, “Pull it.”
But the end of Lovely’s gun shook like a leaf in a breeze. So Maud raised her rifle, moved a step west to keep from shooting her brother, and waited until she had a good look at an ear.
The blowback of skull and brain splattered onto Lovely’s overalls and shirt. He lowered his gun and looked down at his bib. He said, “I’m gonna be sick.” Before he completely bent over, he threw up fatback and biscuits over pieces of cow head.
Betty’s legs kept flailing. Maud shouldered her rifle again; said, “Move farther back”; looked down her sights; and sent another bullet into the white patch between the cow’s eyes. Then she cradled her gun in the crook of her arm, cupped her hand over her mouth, and cried, “Betty, I’m sorry.” Her shoulders heaved. She felt the blood trickle down the back of her leg. She looked at the rivulet, laid her gun on the ground, and tore off a Johnson grass blade. She plastered it over the wound and then sat in the weeds and watched the cow twitching to death.
Tears watered Maud’s eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. Betty was a tough Hereford with a big heart and strong legs and, the year before, had climbed a fallen tree to escape the worst of the flood. But any dead cow would’ve been a disaster. They’d lost all but three of their herd to the water. To take her eyes and mind off of Betty’s trembling, Maud looked over to Lovely. He was wiping his bib with a leaf. She said, “Don’t worry about that. We’ve got to save this meat.”
Maud sent Lovely off to round up their uncles, Blue and Early. The men came back with Blue driving Great-Uncle Ame’s 1920 Dodge sedan. He maneuvered it into the pasture as close to Betty as he could get, and the four of them strung her up to the sturdiest tree around. They set to butchering, talking about the meanness it took to ax a cow in the back. They gave Blue the hide to cure and packed Betty’s meat in old newspapers and feed sacks. They deposited those on the floor of the backseat and agreed they’d pay Hector Hempel, the dwarf who ran the icehouse, two rump roasts for storing the meat. The men drove off with the car loaded so heavy it didn’t rattle.
Maud walked to the house. She first tended her leg and then drew her dress and slip off over her head. At eighteen, she was fit, dark, and tall like the rest of her mother’s family and most of her tribe. She was more of a willow than an oak, and her figure and personality had grown pleasing to every male within a twenty-mile radius, to some of the women, too, and to most of the animals. Maud carried that admiration the way eggs are carried in a basket, carefully, with a little tenderness, but without minding too closely the individual. She drew on another slip and dress, tossed her and Lovely’s dirty clothes in a tub, and pumped cool water over them until they were completely covered. She left them to soak while she filled one of the front-yard kettles with water and lit a fire under it.
While she stirred their clothes in the kettle, her heart sank further than it’d sunk since the flood, and tears came to her eyes again. Heat rose up to her cheeks, and the fire under the pot made her shins hot. She poked the clothes with the pole and gave in to crying and to some self-pity she didn’t much admire. She wanted a washer with a tub and ringers. They were advertised all the time in the papers. So were refrigerators, lamps that turned on with buttons, toilets that flushed in the house. She lifted her dress out of the water with the end of the pole and dipped it again. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and forced her mind off of the things she wanted. She turned it to the cold kind of cruelty that would kill an innocent cow. She felt Betty’s twitching in the wound on the back of her leg, felt her bawling all over again in her heart.
But she was recovered and hanging the clothes on the line when the men got back to the farm. And although they were noticeably tired from the butchering and lugging of meat, and Lovely was still shaken from the whole ordeal, they pitched in and scooped out the wash water, carried it to the garden for the tomato plants, and set wood for a fire in the pit. Maud had saved back enough meat to feed some of their extended family: Blue and Early, of course; and her grandpa, Bert; and her great-uncle Ame and his wife, Viola; and her aunt Lucy and her husband, Cole. She didn’t save out any for her father. It was Saturday and late in the afternoon. He wouldn’t crawl back until well into the night.
Blue left to clean up and fetch the others. But Early hung around to eat his share of the beef. He was only twenty-six, and his talk was about going to town, gambling, and people of the female persuasion. Maud found Early a lot of fun, and having him to herself raised her spirits some. She teased him about his plans for the evening and fed him the food that was ready, except for the onions. She told him he needed to hold off on those out of respect for the women.
Shortly after Early left, Blue came back in a wagon with his father, Ame and Viola, Lucy and Cole, and their baby boy. He pulled the wagon close to the fire and hitched the mules to the rail. There weren’t enough chairs for everybody to sit, so they ate from the wagon bed, some in it, some standing around the tailgate. And it was a feast—beans, onions, biscuits, hominy, the beef, lettuce, asparagus, and two pecan pies Lucy had baked.
While they ate, they talked about who’d murdered the cow. Not that it was much of a mystery. The Mount boys, or men, John and Claude, were the culprits. Everybody agreed on that because of the sneakiness of the crime and because the Mounts had a history of meanness that Grandpa and Great-Uncle Ame swore extended for generations. The Mounts’ paternal grandpappy had once set fire to his own dog and blamed it on his neighbor. One of their great-uncles had been the biggest allotment stealer in the Cookson Hills. He’d locked three men in a cabin with a barrel of liquor and wouldn’t feed them or let them out until they’d signed their papers over to him. Then when they did, he wouldn’t even let them have the rest of the whiskey. And the Mounts’ mama, Ame claimed in almost a whisper, had more than a little Comanche in her.
So the talk centered more on what to do. Calling in the law was out. Nobody around the wagon trusted the law nor had any reason to. The law wasn’t set up for Indians. But the older folks were against revenge on the practical principle that it multiplied trouble, and the younger ones deferred to their elders by habit and weren’t particularly hell-bent in their natures. Blue (according to Bert) had come into the world with an even disposition and a mark on his head, now disappeared, that had determined his name. Lucy was still a young wife who had been tamed by her marriage. Cole was a married-in white; he respected his in-laws’ customs and folded to whatever they wanted.
