Along the old "trading-path" that was wont to wind from the Cherokee country among the innumerable spurs and gorges of the Great Smoky Mountains, and through the dense primeval forests full five hundred miles to the city of Charlestown, was visible for many years, on the banks of the Little Tennessee, an "old waste town," as the abandoned place was called in the idiom of the Indians. An early date it might seem, in 1744, in this new land, for the spectacle of the ruins of a race still in possession, still unsubdued. Nearly twenty years later, after the repeated aggressive expeditions which the British government sent against the Cherokees, such vestiges became more numerous. This "waste town," however, neither fire nor sword had desolated, and the grim deeds of British powder and lead were still of the future. The enemy came in more subtle sort.
Only one of the white pack-men employed to drive a score of well-laden horses semi-annually from Charlestown to a trading-station farther along on the Great Tennessee—then called the Cherokee River—and back again used to glower fearfully at the "waste town" as he passed. He had ample leisure for speculation, for the experienced animals of the pack-train required scant heed, so regularly they swung along in single file, and the wild whoops of their drivers were for the sake of personal encouragement and the simple joy which very young men find in their own clamor. It grew specially boisterous always when they neared the site of Nilaque Great, the deserted place, as if to give warning to any vague spiritual essences, unmeet for mortal vision, that might be lurking about the "waste town," and bid them avaunt, for the place was reputed haunted.
The rest of the Carolina pack-men, trooping noisily past, averted their eyes from the darkened doors of the empty houses; the weed-grown spaces of the "beloved square," where once the ceremonies of state, the religious rites, the public games and dances were held; the council-house on its high mound, whence had been wont to issue the bland vapors of the pipe of peace or the far more significant smoke emitted from the cheera, the "sacred fire," which only the cheera-taghe, the fire-prophets,[10] were permitted to kindle, and which was done with pomp and ceremony in the new year, when every spark of the last year\'s fire had been suffered to die out.
Cuthbert Barnett, however, always looked to see what he might,—perhaps because he was a trifle bolder than the other stalwart pack-men, all riding armed to the teeth to guard the goods of the train from robbery as well as their own lives from treachery, for although the Cherokees professed friendship it was but half-hearted, as they loved the French always better than the English; perhaps because he had a touch of imagination that coerced his furtive glance; perhaps because he doubted more, or believed less, of the traditions of the day. And he saw—silence! the sunset in vacant spaces, with long, slanting, melancholy rays among the scattered houses of the hamlet; an empty doorway, here and there; a falling rotting roof; futile traces of vanished homes. Once a deer and fawn were grazing in the weed-grown fields that used to stand so thick with corn that they laughed and sung; once—it was close upon winter—he heard a bear humming and humming his content (the hunters called the sound "singing") from the den where the animal had bestowed himself among the fallen logs of a dwelling-house, half covered with great drifts of dead leaves; often an owl would cry out in alarm from some dark nook as the pack-train clattered past; and once a wolf with a stealthy and sinister tread was patrolling the "beloved square." These were but the natural incidents of the time and the ruins of the old Cherokee town.
Little did Cuddy Barnett imagine, as he gazed on the deserted and desolate place, that he was yet to behold the smoke of the "sacred fire" flaring up into the blue sky from the portal of the temple, as the cheera-taghe would issue bearing the flame aloft, newly kindled in the opening year, and calling upon many assembled people to light therefrom their hearths, rekindling good resolutions and religious fervor for the future, and letting the faults of the unavailing past die out with the old year\'s fire; that he was to mark the clash of arms in the "beloved square," once more populous with the alert figures of warriors in martial array, making ready for the war-path; that he was to hear the joyful religious songs of greeting to the dawn, and the sonorous trumpeting of the conch-shells, as the vanished Indians of the "old waste town" would troop down at daybreak into the water of that bright stream where long ago they had been wont to plunge in their mystic religious ablutions. All this, however, the pack-men might see and hear, to believe the tradition of the day, in camping but a single night near the old "waste town."
And so anxious were these gay itinerant companies to see and hear nothing of such ghostly sort that whatever the stress of the weather, the mischances of the journey, the condition of the pack-animals, this vicinity was always distinguished by the longest day\'s travel of the whole route, and the camp was pitched at the extreme limit of the endurance of man and horse to compass distance from Nilaque Great. For believe what one might, the fact remained indisputable, that a decade earlier, when the place was inhabited, strange sounds were rife about the locality, the "sacred fire" was unkindled on the great "Sanctified Day," the two cheera-taghe of the town mysteriously disappeared, and their fate had remained a dark riddle.
One of these men, Oo-koo-koo, was well known in Charlestown. Both were of influence in the tribe, but often he had been specially chosen as one of the delegations of warriors and "beloved men" sent to wait in diplomatic conference on the Governor of South Carolina, to complain of injustice in the dealings of the licensed traders or the encroachments of the frontier settlers, or to crave the extension of some privilege of the treaty which the Cherokee tribe had lately made with the British government.
Two white men, who had become conspicuous in a short stay in the town of Nilaque Great, disappeared simultaneously, and the suspicion of foul dealing on their part against the cheera-taghe, which the Cherokee nation seemed disposed to entertain, threatened at one time the peace that was so precious to the "infant settlements," as the small, remote, stockaded stations of the Carolina frontiersmen were tenderly called.
Therefore the Governor of South Carolina, now a royal province,—the event occurred during the incumbency of Robert Johnson, who having acted in that capacity for the Lords Proprietors, well understood the menace of the situation,—busied himself with extreme diligence to discover the subsequent movements of the two white men, whose names were Terence O\'Kimmon and Adrien L\'épine, in order to ascertain the fate of the cheera-taghe, and if evilly entreated, to bring the perpetrators of the deed to justice.
With a long, unguarded, open frontier such as his province presented to the incursions of the warlike and fierce Cherokees, who, despite their depopulating wars with other tribes, could still bring to the field six thousand braves from their sixty-four towns, the inhabitants of which were estimated at twenty thousand souls, he was by no means disposed to delay or to indulge doubts or to foster compatriot commiseration in meting out the penalty of the malefactors. The united militia of South Carolina and Georgia at this time numbered but thirty-five hundred rank and file, these colonies being so destitute of white men for the common defense that a memorial addressed to his majesty King George II. a little earlier than this event, bearing date April 9, 1734, pathetically states that "money itself cannot here raise a sufficient body of them." The search for the suspects, however, although long, exhaustive, and of such diligence as to convince the Indians of its sincerity of purpose, resulted fruitlessly. The government presently took occasion to made some valuable presents to the tribe, not as indemnity, for it could recognize no responsibility in the strange disaster, but for the sake of seeming to comply with the form of offering satisfaction for the loss, which otherwise the Indians would retaliate with massacre.
Nilaque Great with this cloud upon it grew dreary. The strange disappearance of its cheera-taghe was canvassed again and again, reaching no surmise of the truth. Speculations, futile as they were continuous, began to be reinforced with reminiscences of the date of the event, and certain episodes became strangely significant now, although hardly remarked at the time; people remembered unexplained and curious noises that had sounded like muffled thunder in the deep midnight, and again, scarcely noted, in the broad daylight. The "sacred fire" remained unkindled, and sundry misfortunes were attributed to this unprecedented neglect; an expert warrior, young and notably deft-handed, awkwardly shot himself with his own gun; the crops, cut short by a late and long-continued drought, were so meagre as to be hardly worth the harvesting; the days appointed for the annual feasts and thanksgiving were like days of mourning; discontents waxed and grew strong. Superstitious terrors became rife, and at length it was known at Charlestown that the Cherokees of Nilaque Great had settled a new place farther down upon the river, for at the old town the vanished cheera-taghe were abroad in the spirit, pervading the "beloved square" at night with cries of "A-kee-o-hoo-sa! A-kee-o-hoo-sa!" (I am dead! I am dead!) clamoring for their graves and the honors of sepulture due to them and denied. And this was a grief to the head men of the town, for of all tribes the Cherokees loved and revered their dead. Thus when other cheera-taghe kindled for the municipality the "sacred fire" for a new year it was distributed to hearths far away, and Nilaque Great, deserted and depopulated, had become a "waste town."
A fair place it had been in its prime, and so it had seemed one afternoon in June, 1734, when for the first time the two white strangers had entered it. Mountains more splendid than those which rose about it on every hand it would be difficult to imagine. The dense, rich woods reach in undiminished vigor along the slopes covering them at a height of six thousand feet, till the "tree line" interposes; thence the great bare domes lift their stately proportions among the clouds. Along these lofty perspectives the varying distance affords the vision a vast array of gradations of color,—green in a thousand shades, and bronze, and purple, and blue,—blue growing ever fainter and more remote till it is but an illusion of azure, and one may believe that the summits seen through a gap to the northeast are sheer necromancy of the facile horizon.
In the deep verdant cove below, groups of the giant trees common to the region towered above the stanchly constructed cabins that formed the homes of the Indians, for the Cherokees, detesting labor and experts in procrastination, builded well and wisely that they might not be forced to rebuild, and many of the distinctive features of the stout frontier architecture were borrowed by the pioneers from aboriginal example. Out beyond the shadows were broad stretches of fields with the lush June in the wide and shining blade and the flaunting tassel. The voices of women and young girls came cheerily from the breezy midst as they tilled the ground, where flourished in their proper divisions the three varieties of maize known to Indian culture, "the six weeks\' corn, the hominy corn, and the bread corn." A shoal of canoes skimmed down the river, each with its darting shadow upon that lucent current and seeming as native, as indigenous to the place as the minnows in a crystal brown pool there by the waterside—each too with its swift javelin-like motion and a darting shadow. Sundry open doors here and there showed glimpses of passing figures within, but the arrival of the strangers was unnoticed till some children playing beside the river caught sight of the unaccustomed faces. With a shrill cry of discovery, they sped across the square, agitated half by fright and half by the gusto of novelty. In another moment there were two score armed men in the square.
"Now hould yer tongue still, an\' I\'ll do the talkin\'," said one of the white adventurers to the other, speaking peremptorily, but with a suave and delusive smile. "If yez weren\'t Frinch ye\'d be a beautiful Englishman; but I hev got the advantage of ye in that, an\' faix I\'ll kape it."
He was evidently of a breeding inferior to that of his companion, but he had so sturdy and swinging a gait, so stalwart and goodly a build, so engaging a manner, and so florid a smile, that the very sight of him was disarming, despite the patent crafty deceit in his face. It seemed as if it could not be very deep or guileful, it was so frankly expressed. It was suggestive of the roguish machinations of a child. He had twinkling brown eyes, and reddish hair, plaited in a club and tied with a thong of leather. His features were blunt, but his red, well-shaped lips parted in a ready, reassuring smile, and showed teeth as even and white as the early corn. Both men were arrayed in the buckskin shirt and leggings generally worn by the frontiersmen, but the face of the other had a certain incongruity with his friend\'s, and was more difficult to decipher. It looked good,—not kind, but true. It had severe pragmatic lines about the mouth, and the lips were thin and somewhat fixedly set. His eyes were dark, serious, and very intent, as if he could argue and protest very earnestly on matters of no weight. He would in a question of theory go very far if set on the wrong line, and just as far on the right. The direction was the matter of great moment, and this seemed now in the hands of the haphazard but scheming Irishman.
"If it plaze yer honor," said O\'Kimmon in English, taking off his coonskin cap with a lavish flourish as a tall and stately Indian hastily garbed in fine raiment of the aboriginal type, a conspicuous article of which was a long feather-wrought mantle, both brilliant and delicate of effect, detached himself from the group and came forward, "I can\'t spake yer illigant language,—me eddication bein\' that backward,—but I kin spake me own so eloquent that it would make a gate-post prick up the ears of understanding. We\'ve come to visit yez, sor."
The smile which the Hibernian bent upon the savage was of a honeyed sweetness, but the heart of his companion sank as he suddenly noted the keen, intuitive power of comprehension expressed in the face of the old Indian. Here was craft too, but of a different quality, masked, potent, impossible to divine, to measure, to thwart. The sage Oo-koo-koo stood motionless, his eyes narrowing, his long, flat, cruel mouth compressed as with a keen scrutiny he marked all the characteristics of the strangers,—first of one, then deliberately of the other. A war captain (his flighty name was Watatuga, the Dragon-fly, although he looked with his high nose and eagle glance more like a bird of prey), assuming precedence of the others, pressed up beside the prophet, and the challenge of his eyes and the contempt that dilated his nostrils might have seemed more formidable of intent than the lacerating gaze of the cheera-taghe, except that to an Irishman there is always a subtle joy even in the abstract idea of fight. The rest of the braves, with their alert, high-featured cast of countenance, inimical, threatening, clustered about, intent, doubtful, listening.
Adrien L\'épine had his secret doubts as to the efficacy of the bold, blunt, humorous impudence which Terence O\'Kimmon fancied such masterful policy,—taking now special joy in the fact that its meaning was partially veiled because of the presumable limitations of the Indian\'s comprehension of the English language. The more delicate nurture that L\'épine obviously had known revolted at times from this unkempt brusquerie, although he had a strong pulse of sympathy with the wild, lawless disregard of conventional standards which characterized much of the frontier life. He feared, too, that O\'Kimmon underrated the extent of the Cherokee\'s comprehension of the language of which, however, the Indians generally spoke only a few disconnected phrases. So practiced were the savages in all the arts of pantomime, in the interpretation of facial expression and the intonation of the voice, that L\'épine had known in his varied wanderings of instances of tribes in conference, each ignorant of the other\'s language, who nevertheless reached a definite and intricate mutual understanding without the services of an interpreter. L\'épine felt entrapped, regretful, and wished to recede. He winced palpably as O\'Kimmon\'s rich Irish voice, full of words, struck once more upon the air.
"Me godson, the Governor o\' South Carolina," Terence O\'Kimmon resumed, lying quite recklessly, "sint his humble respects,—an\' he\'s that swate upon yez that he licks his fingers ter even sphake yer name! (Pity I furgits ut, bein\' I never knew ut!)"
Although possessing an assurance that he could get the better of the devil, "could he but identify him," as O\'Kimmon frequently said, he felt for one moment as if he were now in the presence. Despite his nerve the silence terrified him. He was beginning to cringe before the steady glare of those searching eyes. It was even as a refreshment of spirit to note a sudden bovine snort of rage from the lightsome Dragon-fly, as if he could ill bridle his inimical excitement.
The adventurers had not anticipated a reception of this sort, for the hospitality of the Indians was proverbial. Credentials surely were not necessary in the social circles of the Cherokees, and two men to six thousand offered no foundation for fear. O\'Kimmon had such confidence in his own propitiating wiles and crafty policy that he did not realize how his genial deceit was emblazoned upon his face, how blatant it was in his voice. But for its challenging duplicity there would hardly have arisen a suggestion of suspicion. Many men on various errands easily found their way into the Indian tribes when at peace with the British, and suffered no injury. Nevertheless as the wise Oo-koo-koo looked at O\'Kimmon thus steadily, with so discerning a gaze, the Irishman felt each red hair of his scalp rise obtrusively into notice, as if to suggest the instant taking of it. He instinctively put on his coonskin cap again to hold his scalp down, as he said afterward.
"Why come?" Oo-koo-koo demanded sternly.
"Tell the truth, for God\'s sake!" L\'épine adjured O\'Kimmon in a low voice.
"I\'m not used to it! \'T would give me me death o\' cold!" quavered the Irishman, in sad sincerity, at a grievous loss.
"Asgaya uneka (White man), but no Ingliss," said the astute Indian, touching the breast of each with the bowl of his pipe, still in his hand and still alight as it was when the interruption of their advent had occurred.
"No, by the powers,—not English!" exclaimed the Irishman impulsively, seeing he was already discovered. "I\'m me own glorious nation!—the pride o\' the worruld,—I was born in the Emerald Isle, the gem o\' the say! I\'m an Oirishman from the tip o\' me scalp—in the name o\' pity why should I mintion the contrivance" (dropping his voice to an appalled muffled tone)—"may the saints purtect ut! But surely, Mister Injun, I\'ve no part nor lot with the bloody bastes o\' Englishers either over the say or in the provinces. If I were the brother-in-law o\' the Governor o\' South Carolina I\'d hev a divorce from the murtherin\' Englisher before he could cry, \'Quarter!\'"
Oo-koo-koo, the wise Owl, made no direct answer.
"Asgaya uneka (White man), but no Ingliss," he only said, now indicating L\'épine.
"Frinch in the mornin\', plaze yer worship, an\' only a bit o\' English late in the afternoon o\' the day," cried O\'Kimmon, officiously, himself once more.
"French father, English mother," explained L\'épine, feeling that the Indian was hardly a safe subject for the pleasantries of conundrums.
"But his mother was but a wee bit of a woman," urged O\'Kimmon; "the most of him is Frinch,—look at the size of him!"
For O\'Kimmon was now bidding as high against the English aegis as earlier he had been disposed to claim its protection, when he had protested his familiarity with the Royal Governor of South Carolina. In an instant he was once more gay, impudent, confident of carrying everything before him. He divined that some recent friction had supervened in the ever-clashing interests subsisting between the Cherokee nation and the British government, and was relying on the recurrent inclination of this tribe to fraternize with the French. Their influence from their increasing western settlements was exerted antagonistically to the British colonists, by whom it was dreaded in anticipation of the war against a French and Cherokee alliance which came later. Oo-koo-koo, complacent in his own sagacity in having detected a difference in the speech of the new-comers from the English which he had been accustomed to hear in Charlestown, and animated by a wish to believe, hearkened with the more credulity to an expansive fiction detailed by the specious Irishman as to their mission here.
They were awaiting the coming of certain pettiaugres from New Orleans,—a long journey by way of the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Cherokee, and the Tennessee rivers,—with a cargo of French goods cheaper than the English. They designed to establish a trading-post at some convenient point, out of reach of the grasping British, and thus to compete with the monopoly of the Cherokee commerce which the English government sought to foster. And then, to furnish a leaven of truth to this mass of lies, he detailed, with such a relish as only an Irishman can feel in a happy incongruity, that the French, having no market in old France for deerskins, the chief commodity of barter that the Indians possessed, disposed of them to ships of the British colonies, from New York and elsewhere, lured thus to New Orleans, in exchange for English cloths and other British manufactures, which the French then surreptitiously furnished to the Indians of the British alliance, underselling them on every hand.
"The intellects of the Frinch are so handsome!" cried O\'Kimmon, the tears of delighted laughter in his eyes. "Faix, that is what makes \'em so close kin to the Oirish!"
Albeit the Cherokee treaty with the British forbade the Indians to trade with white men of any other nationality than the English, these professed aliens were promised protection and concealment from the British government, and the pretext of their mission served to countenance their lingering stay.
Soon their presence seemed a matter of course. The Indians had recurred to their methods of suave hospitality. The two strangers encountered only friendly looks and words, while affecting to gratify curiosity by peering into all the unaccustomed habitudes,—the preparation of food, the manufacture of deerskin garments, the care of the sick, the modeling of bowls and jars of clay, in which the Cherokees were notably expert as well as in the weaving of feather-wrought fabrics and baskets, the athletic games, the horse-races, the continual dances and pantomimic plays,—and were presently domiciled as it were in the tribe. Of so little note did they soon become that when they gradually ceased these manifestations of interest, as if familiarity had sated their curiosity, it seemed to occasion no comment. They were obviously free to rove, to stay, to live their lives as they would without interference or surveillance.
Nevertheless, they still maintained the utmost caution. Sometimes, idleness being no phenomenon, they would lie half the day in the shade on the river-bank. The Tennessee was shrunken now in the heated season, and great gravelly slopes were exposed. The two loiterers were apparently motionless at first, but as their confidence increased and the chances of being observed lessened, L\'épine, always dreading discovery, began to casually pass the gravel and sand through his fingers as he lay; sometimes he idly trifled with the blade of a hoe in a shallow pool left by the receding waters, while the jolly Irishman, now grave and solicitous, watched him breathlessly. Then L\'épine would shake his head, and the mercurial O\'Kimmon groaned his deep despondency.
Once the Frenchman\'s head was not shaken. A flush sprang up among the pragmatic lines of L\'épine\'s face; his dark eyes glittered; his hand shook; for as he held out the hoe, on its blade were vaguely glimmering particles among the sand.
Later the two adventurers cherished a small nugget of red, red gold!
This find chanced below a bluff in a sort of grotto of rock, which the water filled when the river was high, and left quite dry and exposed as it receded in the droughts of summer.
Whether the two strangers were too much and too long out of sight; whether attention was attracted by certain perforated dippers or pans which they now brought into assiduous use, but which they sought to conceal; whether they had been all the time furtively watched, with a suspicion never abated, one can hardly say. They had observed every precaution of secrecy that the most zealous heed could suggest. Only one worked with the pan while the other lay motionless and idle, and vigilantly watched and listened for any stealthy sign of approach. They fully realized the jealousy of the Indians concerning the mineral wealth of their territory, lest its discovery bring hordes of the craving white people to dispossess them. This prophetic terror was later fulfilled in the Ayrate division of the tribe, but to the northward, along the Tennessee River, they sedulously guarded this knowledge. Traditions there are to the present day in the Great Smoky Mountains concerning mi............