Okla Hannali, Page 4

  The men had a mission to examine and report on a new country.

  To put it into context, this was just thirty-six years before the Civil War. It was the year 1828, and Hannali Innominee was somewhere between twenty-six and twenty-eight years old.

  We must double back to the current of larger history to examine the reason for their journey.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1.

  Behind God's Back. Near Doak's Stand on the Natchez Road. The Devil becomes President of the United States.

  The Five Tribes were not wild. They had had their own agriculture for centuries, and they came quickly to improvements in methods of farming. At the time of their removal, they were better farmers than the white settlers of the same area. The tribes had maintained their peace over a very large area for a long time, and they were entitled to their peaceful increase there.

  One thing must be understood. There was not a press of population or a shortage of land in the Gulf South states. There is not such today. The Indians had no great resentment against the white settlers coming onto the unoccupied land, even though it would abridge the hunting area.

  But the white settlers did not want to clear the very good unoccupied land. They wanted only that portion of the land that the Indians had already cleared. They wanted the houses and farms of the Indians, their mules and cattle and pigs. A stubborn people who will sulk and die when put under whip slavery is of no use to anyone. The Indians must be killed, and more Negroes must be brought in to work the land.

  Many species of game (and the Indians were a species of game to the white settlers) are hunted out by the use of captive members of their own species. They may be employed to capture their own kindred, as India elephants are. They may be employed as decoys or bellwethers. The analogy is not exact, but captive (white-blood) Indians were used to hunt out and penetrate their less pliable kindred.

  The half-blood chiefs and advisers were used as wedges for splitting and shattering the tribes. Of the white-blood chiefs there would be Alexander McGillivray and William McIntosh of the Creeks, Major Ridge of the Cherokees, Greenwood LeFlore of the Choctaws, and too many others. We have no right to say of a dead man that, by his own lights, he was a bad man. Alexander McGillivray was quite a good man, and others of them meant well; but the white in them worked against the Indian interest. They wanted to see the Indians turned into white men. And the white men wanted no such thing.

  How did it happen that the southern Indians were broken and murdered and driven off their land? Where did the breakdown come?

  In October of 1803, the United States Congress ratified the Louisiana Purchase. The big-water French, the one people who had treated the Indians well, ceased to be their own people.

  In the year 1816, the Choctaws were forced to cede all their land east of the Tombigbee River to the United States. As would always be the case in these treaties, it was pledged that they would be left in possession of the remainder of their land forever.

  They had tossed one of their own limbs to the grizzled wolves to slow them down.

  In 1817, Mississippi, the main homeland of the Choctaws, was admitted to the Union. There were conditions in the laws of the new state that spelled the destruction of the Choctaw Nation; there were clauses that spelled out murder plainly.

  In 1819, Alabama was admitted as a state, and with something of the same tricks in the laws.

  Also in 1819, Spain sold Florida to the United States. Thereafter, that special sanctuary of the Creeks and Seminoles and other Indians was thrown open to the despoilers from the states. Spanish and French Louisiana and Spanish Florida had stood as witnesses. With these gone, the conscience of the Southland could be extinguished. No longer were there free outsiders to observe that rape that was building up. The Indian South became the Country Behind God's Back.

  In 1820, “near Doak's Stand on the Natchez Road,” the Choctaws ceded the large southwest section of their nation to the United States. This was to be in exchange for an equal area of land in the unknown West. It was a very bad trade, but it was forced on the Choctaws.

  They had flung another of their limbs to their pursuers.

  In 1825 in Washington, D.C., certain Choctaws signed a new treaty clarifying — so they were told — the earlier treaty of Doak's Stand. It clarified all their guarantees out of existence.

  In 1828, the Devil of the Indians was elected president of the United States. By this, the Indians of the Five Tribes understood that many thousands of them must die and all of them be uprooted.

  It was in the same year (1828) that a party of men from the tribes went to view the new lands in the West. Hannali Innominee was likely the least known man of this party, for most were town chiefs at least, or the deputies of district chiefs. But the party was to be representative of all sorts of Indians, and Hannali was the successful manager of one of the largest Choctaw farms. He would know about land.

  This would be the first time that the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, or Seminoles had officially seen the new land for which they were forced to trade their nations. There would be a difficulty. The Osages, Quapaws, Caddoes, and other Indians who lived in the “new land” knew nothing of the United States giving their land to others; they knew nothing of the United States at all. And they were warlike Indians. The United States had traded land that it did not hold either physically or in real title.

  We review the bare bones of the affair. We hurry through the details of the uprooting. It's a small matter to murder a nation, and these were but Five Nations out of hundreds. Three years, four, five, and most of it is ended.

  We will go with the removed Indians to the new land and live with them there. We will be Territory Indians and know the Blue Stem Country and the Winding Stair Mountains and the False Washita River and the Big House near the Three Forks of the Canadian.

  2.

  Dancing Rabbit Creek and the laws of unaccepted testimony. Greenwood LeFlore and the Mingo. One of the few refining pleasures in his life.

  The end of it all would be the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830. By the time it was signed, many of the Indians would already have emigrated to the new land.

  In 1828, Georgia had extended her criminal laws over the Cherokees within her borders (and Hannali Innominee was with the Pitchlynn-Colbert Exploration in unnamed Oklahoma), followed by Mississippi enacting most peculiar laws over the Choctaws and Chickasaws, and Alabama over the Creeks — and the Indians were moving.

  The laws of the three states declared all Indian treaties and constitutions to be void, and the tribes to be extinguished. They declared the Indians to be subject to the state courts under a curious condition: no Indian's word would be considered against a white man's word in those courts. The opportunities opened up by this device were without limits.

  The Indians found themselves evicted from their own farms by forged deeds to white men whom they had never seen. They had no recourse anywhere. The white man could swear in court, and the Indian could attend but could not give testimony.

  There is a black page in the plotting that preceded Dancing Rabbit Creek.

  In March of 1830, Greenwood LeFlore, the white-blood chief of the Okla Falaya Choctaws, called a selected assembly of men from all Choctaw districts. The requirement of this assembly, said the enemies of LeFlore, was that all who attended should be traitors to the Indians. LeFlore stated that in those trying times all the Choctaws should unite under a single chief.

  LeFlore dealt with them shrewdly. He set up two puppets and then absorbed them. David Folsom, a weightless rival of old Moshulatubbee, was declared to be chief of his district. John Garland — another white-blood Indian and rival of Nitakechi (Pushmataha's nephew, Pushmataha was dead) — was stated to be chief of the Pushmataha District. Then both Folsom and Garland abdicated in favor of Greenwood LeFlore, and LeFlore was proclaimed chief of all the Choctaws.

  The assembly drew up a treaty agreeing to give all Choctaw lands in Mississippi to th
e United States, and pledged all the Choctaws to remove to the western country. All of this was engineered by Major Haley, a personal envoy of President Jackson.

  The treaty was carried to Washington, but the Senate refused to accept it. Defenders of the Indians insisted that any treaty must be made with the real representatives of the whole tribe. The Senate had the smell of the thing pretty accurately.

  LeFlore was ordered by those who pulled his strings to make himself chief in fact. LeFlore and Folsom came down to Mushulatubbee's district with an army of one thousand men. They caught old Mushulatubby (he spelled his name all these ways himself, why should we not?) with an unarmed party at the “factory” of the Choctaw Nation — a collection of smithies and shops on the west bank of the Tombigbee River.

  LeFlore said that Moshulatubbee must abdicate or die.

  The old Mingo Moshulatubbee grinned weirdly at the white-man Indian intruder, and LeFlore must have felt uneasy even with a thousand men at his back.

  What happened then isn't quite clear, except that Moshulatubbee did not abdicate and did not die. In some manner, the advantage passed over to him.

  The only eyewitness account is a short one from a white frontiersman who (unlike most of them) loved old Moshulatubbee and hated Greenwood LeFlore. We follow it roughly.

  The shabby old fat man Moshulatubbee had a presence that Greenwood LeFlore could never have, and he whipped him by his presence alone.

  At length LeFlore trembled under the devious grin and silent chuckling of the old Mingo. His influence leaked away as Moshulatubbee faced him down. LeFlore turned away and gave the order to kill the Mingo, but his voice shook when he gave the command and his men laughed at him. They could not hear him, they hooted; speak louder, they said. They became Moshulatubbee's men as they stood there. In twos and threes, in tens and twenties, then in hundreds they shuffled across to the side of the Mingo. Moshulatubbee laughed out loud then and turned away with all the men, and LeFlore was alone.

  The account may be colored a little by a partisan of the Mingo, but Moshulatubbee did win over all the Choctaws, and no shot was fired.

  So that particular sellout was not successful, but the thing was certain as the Sun. Within the year, Moshulatubbee and Nitakechi would be compelled to put their own hands to an instrument conveying away the last of the old Choctaw land.

  For a while the Indians found friends, but not strong enough friends, in the United States Senate. On February 11, 1831, the Senate requested that President Jackson should inform that body whether the Intercourse Act of 1802 (which guaranteed federal protection to the Indians) was being observed; and if not, why not.

  On February 22, 1831, President Jackson delivered to the U. S. Senate a special message — one of the most dumbfounding messages ever. He announced that he was a champion of the state of Georgia (the outrage in question was one of Georgia against the Cherokee Indians) and of all other states in any controversy they might have with the Indians. He announced that he would not enforce the Intercourse Act or any other act or treaty that the federal government had ever made for the protection of any Indians, and that he would not permit them to be enforced.

  And he won, for the Jacksonian revolution (the most misunderstood movement in American history) was in full swing. It was almost exactly the opposite of what is taught and believed of it. To describe it we must borrow the phrase of a better man about a more comprehensible revolution: It was the “Revolt of the Rich against the Poor.” It was that and no other thing.

  It embraced the illegal seizure of two hundred million acres of Indian land in half a dozen southern states, and the turning of this land over to a few hundred already very rich men. It ensured that the seized land would be of the giant slave-plantation sort, and not of the freehold sort. It created the poor white and the poor black classes, which still endure.

  The Jacksonian men were not the poor but honest frontiersmen. They were wealthy and powerful and corrupt, and they had found their leader.

  Most of the Indian removal was in the years 1832, 1833, and 1834. About fifty thousand Indians moved or were removed from the old South to the new Indian country. And some twenty thousand others died on the journeys. The removal groups were always forced to go in the wintertimes. Harassments went from the petty to the murderous. White men accompanied by sheriffs with writs would seize the oxen and horses and mules of Indians for nonexistent debts, and leave the Indians stranded with their wagons. But never mind, other white men with other writs would come and claim the wagons and other possessions. Indian stragglers were murdered. Stubborn Indians were declared black and enslaved.

  Cholera had broken out on some of the Arkansas trails, but the Indians were compelled to use the cholera trails and not others. The sworn Devil of the Indians had aged suddenly; though he had attained the highest office in the land, he was an embittered man with little to cheer his life. But the news of the Indians' sufferings always brought a glow to him. It was one of the few pleasures remaining in his life.

  Perhaps the Cherokees suffered most of all the tribes in the removal, but this is not an account of them. It may be that the Choctaws suffered least of the Five Tribes, for they left only 10 percent of their people dead on the way.

  And it may be that a Choctaw named Hannali Innominee suffered the least of all of them, for he began to have the luck of his father Barua on him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1.

  French Town and Five Luck. Hannali becomes Louis.

  We had run ahead of ourselves a little, and now we must come back to a straight account of our man. The year is still 1828, and Hannali Innominee is in New Orleans on his way to view the new land.

  Hannali had cattle money and mule money, cotton and pecan money, hide and timber money. He had credits and notes. He converted a great part of it to French gold and Spanish silver — still the main specie in the South and the Louisiana country — which he deposited to his credit in New Orleans banks. Money was one of the things that Hannali understood intuitively — like fiddling and farming.

  But he had to appear to better advantage, for now he would be traveling with important men. He bought clothes shrewdly after coming to New Orleans and was not taken. He got a white man shirt and a cravat to go with it, a white buckskin coat, and cavalier-style boots. He bought a canary-colored top hat, and a silver-headed cane as heavy as an old war club. He made a good appearance as he walked through the river city with his fiddle and carbine slung over his shoulders like twin bandoliers.

  Hannali was a bigger man than he had believed, or else the rest of mankind had shrunken. The Frenchmen were neither so tall nor so bulky as the Choctaws, the town Negroes were smaller than the country Negroes whom Hannali had known, the Spanish were wiry but small, the Kaintucks and the men from Ohio and Tennessee were long and nervous but not really big. The Texans in town for trade were all of them small men, as they have remained to this day. The legend of tall Texans came later, and it was and is a legend.

  Hannali walked through the town and was proud that he found no man so large as himself. Because of his size, and for another reason, he drew attention. He jingled dozens of gold coins in his big hand as he walked, and this interested people.

  There was one thing about the appearance of Hannali of which he himself was unaware, and he would be mercifully unaware of it all his life: He was not handsome of face. He was not the ugliest man ever to come out of the Choctaw country. That honor belonged to John T who was a cousin of Hannali. But Hannali may have been the most strikingly ugly of all Choctaws. There was a majesty in his colossal ugliness. With his great body and huge grotesque face, he walked down into Frenchtown.

  New Orleans has changed much since then, but the Frenchtown part — those ten blocks square — has not changed. Then, as now, there were quick-witted men in Frenchtown; they were found on Dauphin and Conti streets, they were alive and courteous, and they knew how to welcome a stranger.

  Hannali, who stood to the men o
f that town as a bear stands to dogs, fell into easy conversation with a group of these gentlemen. They spoke to him in French, and he replied in Choctaw. They invited him by signs to come into an establishment and drink with them. It was also their disposition to introduce him to the game of dice.

  Introduce a Choctaw to dice? What did they think the Chocs did for amusement? Had they never heard of baskatanje, the Choctaw game with the little cubed corn kernels? Anyone who has learned to roll the baskatanje kernels, crooked or straight, will have no trouble with precision dice.

  Hannali played with the drinking gentlemen. There was the usual slow go when all parties try to lose a little for bait. Hannali let a number of his gold pieces trickle away from him, and he began to enjoy the game.

  “Le choc est mur,” said one of the gentlemen to another, and Hannali chuckled. Did they not know that the Choctaws understand the speech of the French as easily as that of the mules or the Chickasaws? And this Choc was not ripe for the taking.

  They played in earnest. Hannali took them all — steadily, and without speed or display. It is a pleasure to win money from such grand and free-handed men.

  The gentlemen conferred with themselves. Then they gave Hannali a gracious green liquor to drink. They brought out the cards, and the chuckle of Hannali became an earth rumble. Choctaws and playing cards were made for each other, and the world was not really completed till they were brought together.

  The Choctaw country was full of two-man logs to be straddled. The center space of these would be cut flat and smooth with adze and draw knife to make a playing surface. The Chocs had used shingle-thin wood cards, they had used cotton-cloth cards stiffened with pine resin. They'd trade a fat hog for a real pack of cards. And it was poker which the gentlemen mentioned, and it was poker that the Choctaws excelled at. Poker is a Noxubee Indian word, and it means five-luck or five-hazard; and the Noxubee Indians were Choctaw affiliates. The Eleventh Commandment for gamesters is: Never play poker with a Choctaw.