The Heathen School Read online

  The last few lines carry forward to the following day—and are especially hard to fathom.

  The Ishmaelite with his wife Harriet & their kinfolks made ready their Charriotts [sic] and journeyed to the borders of the Great River … saying we will go to the house of John the Duke; peradventure his heart may be softened and he will permit us to warm by his fire for it is cold; and they went in and the wrath of John the Duke was kindled and he thrust them all out of his house. (“The Great River” was the Housatonic, Cornwall’s western border. “John the Duke” cannot be identified; perhaps he was a prominent Cornwallite opposed to intermarriage.)

  There remains the question of authorship. But the field of possibilities can be narrowed. It was someone fully versed in the Bible—the King James Version. It was someone intimately familiar with all the wedding details—and with the wide range of people involved. It was someone with a close emotional connection to those details and those people—hence the undercurrent of deep feeling, and the tone of mockery, maybe even self-mockery.

  There is really just one person who qualifies on all counts. And that is Elias Boudinot. Almost certainly, this was a bitter send‑up composed by the embattled “Ishmaelite” himself.114

  * * *

  * Although in some sources the variant spelling “Harriett” appears, the traditional spelling, Harriet, is used here.

  • INTERLUDE •

  The Cherokee Nation

  Sarah (Northrup) Ridge left Cornwall for the Cherokee Nation with her husband, John, in February 1824; Harriet (Gold) Boudinot made the same trip (although by a somewhat different route) with her Elias two years later. Neither could have had any clear picture of the place to which they were headed. The land, the climate, the culture, and, most important, the people among whom they would make their home: All were blank spaces to be filled by experience.

  So, too, in my own case: an equally blank space. Until I have a chance to go there.

  Traveling south on the broad superhighway that crosses from southeast Tennessee into Georgia, I begin to assess the landscape. There are hilly stretches, alternating with pancake-flat plains. There are numerous streams to cross, but most so small that they can barely be seen from the road. There are areas of forest, though nothing like what must have been present two centuries ago. Much of this, in fact, is obscured behind billboards, onrushing trucks, telephone wires, and other accompaniments of modern living.

  Presently, I exit the highway and turn onto a small side road. Now I’m in the north Georgia countryside; the scale of things seems greatly reduced. Approaching the town of Calhoun, I pass through a sparsely populated area, with occasional squat one-story residences, a few small chicken farms, two side-by-side auto-scrap yards, four different Baptist churches (all within the space of barely two miles), and a large fenced enclosure advertising a “Turkey Shoot.” A little farther on, there is a nicely manicured golf course—and then, directly opposite, the protected historic site of the onetime Cherokee capital, New Echota.

  It is still early; I have the place to myself. The land is treeless and, as one visitor wrote of it in the 1820s, “smooth as a house floor”; its color in late spring is a dusty tan. A modest office building, attached to a small museum, marks the entrance. Just inside the perimeter, the signage begins; I read that New Echota was founded in 1819, with the express purpose of creating an official center for the Cherokee Nation. It was from the start a planned community, with a carefully gridded plat of roadways, converging on a cluster of government buildings in the middle. The latter comprised a Council House, a Supreme Courthouse, and a printing office. The same 1820s visitor noted also “two or three Merchants Stores [and] about half a dozen hansom [sic] framed Dwelling Houses … which would be called respectable in Litchfield county & very decently furnished to be in any country.”1 As time passed, other residential housing would gradually fill the remaining lots.

  To be sure, none of this has survived in its original form. Replicas of the three main public buildings were constructed some years ago, and may now be seen by visitors. Each is a virtual cube—two stories high, but with a remarkably small footprint (a bit more than twenty feet on a side)—raised on stone piers well above ground level, apparently to protect the base from flooding. (A good-size river, the Oostanaula, flows just to the north but isn’t in view from the town itself.) The interiors of both Council House and Courthouse have elevated platforms on opposite ends—to be occupied by judges and other government officials—with benches for spectators in between; the upstairs rooms were used as conference chambers. The look of the whole is tidy, unpretentious, rather sparse, and more than a little compressed. There is one other replica to see, a “Cherokee farmstead.” This includes a small dwelling made from stacked logs notched on each end so as to intersect at the corners, a boarded barn, a smokehouse, and a corncrib, set on a lot of no more than half an acre and surrounded by a split-rail fence. Presumably, this was the typical household plan when New Echota was a fully functioning unit. In my mind’s eye, I correct for the passage of two centuries by imagining the presence of trees and other vegetation.

  I correct also by adding a human presence; fortunately, there are period documents to help with that process. In 1819, a missionary witnessed the very first of the council meetings held here: “It was past noon, the council had convened, and a multitude of people gathered.… All at once a troop of horsemen were seen coming along the road … with a stately looking person in front. A little way from the council they alighted, [and] marched two in a file … with the stately person before them, whom I observed on drawing near to be the Cherokee [Major] Ridge … reported to be the greatest orator in the nation.”2 Another visitor described the bustle of movement and trade around New Echota: “There is much travel through [the town]…. Large wagons of six horses go to Augusta and bring a great load.… I have seen eleven of [these]…pass by … in company.”3 Nowadays, the feeling of the place is quite desolate; back then, it was anything but.

  There is another part of the site that captures my attention: the lot that held the home of Elias Boudinot. It is clearly identified, but all that remains in the ground is an ancient well and a stone foundation—a rectangle of roughly sixteen feet by twelve—probably the base for a freestanding kitchen. The main residence is known to have been a substantial wood-framed building of two stories, with front and back porches and superimposed balconies, all done “according to the New England style.”4 A visitor remembered its interior as including four rooms downstairs “and three upstairs, with five closets.… The chimneys were of brick with large open fireplaces.” On the whole, it is said to have closely resembled the only still-extant structure on the entire site, the home of the longtime missionary to the Cherokees, Rev. Samuel Worcester. (Worcester’s house lies on the very fringe of town, clearly—perhaps purposefully—set apart from the rest.) The Boudinot property also included a stable, two corncribs, a smokehouse, a “turkey house,” and a pair of orchards (for peaches and apples).

  So here, on this exact spot, Elias and Harriet Boudinot lived for roughly a decade, beginning a year or so following their arrival from New England. Here they would birth and begin to raise their children. From here, it was just a short walk to the printing office, where Elias would hold forth as editor of the Nation’s newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. And here in 1835, he and other leaders would gather in his living room to sign the famous (infamous?) Treaty of New Echota, transferring the Cherokee homeland to the federal government and presaging the migratory process that would later become known as the Trail of Tears. (But this is getting ahead of our story.)

  The current reconstruction of New Echota gives no sense of the natural environment supporting the town in its heyday. For that, one must enter the surrounding woods, following a well-marked trail. It seems safe to assume that much of the vegetative life found here today would also have been present two centuries ago; indeed, period documents, by and about the Cherokees, provide good confirmation. Many of the various trees and
plants can be identified with their Cherokee names and linked to a host of traditional uses.5

  The trail parallels a small creek bed, where outsiders are believed to have set up camp while visiting New Echota; the water, though brackish now, would have been important to their stay. I pass through a grove of pines of the so-called loblolly type, common throughout the Southeast—their trunks standing straight and tall, their wide crests piercing the sky. There are also white oaks, yellow poplars, redbuds, and especially dogwoods, now bedecked with their showy springtime flowers. Before the modern era, Cherokees used the dogwood tree in multiple ways. Its blossoms were boiled in water to create a steep taken against colds or headache. Its tree bark helped make a special bath thought to cure poisons, and its root bark infused a poultice valued for healing wounds. The root might also yield a reddish dye applied to fabrics—and sometimes to human skin.

  Indeed, the forest is remarkably diverse. Farther along, I see sweet gums showing their distinctive burrlike seedpods, red cedars with a berry fruit favored by birds, and hickory trees whose characteristically shaggy bark was used by the Cherokees both in basketry and in preparing a tea drink consumed by “ball game” participants in order to make their limbs more supple. There is luxuriant undergrowth everywhere: wild honeysuckle plants, ferns of many sorts, and profuse clusters of river cane. The woody stems of the cane were cut for weaving into mats, baskets, or even fences, and might also serve as arrow shafts.6

  Of course, the forest supports a variety of wildlife (though much less now than formerly): muskrats, kingfishers, raccoons, wild turkeys, turtles, water snakes, and more. Two centuries ago there would also have been larger game: wild pig, bear, deer. In the trees are multitudes of songbirds—warblers, catbirds, yellowthroats, kingbirds—plus owls and hawks. All the different animal species would have been well known to the Cherokees. Some were hunted with arrows and guns, others taken in traps. Aside from what was consumed locally, they supported a flourishing trade—with other Indian groups, and, increasingly, with white settlers both nearby and far away. Medicinal plants were especially coveted by whites, and deerskins were carted out to colonial centers in huge quantities over the span of nearly a century.

  I’m nearing the end of the nature trail now, and completing my New Echota tour. On the way out, I pass the Worcester house; it virtually shouts its “New England style.” From here, in 1831, Worcester defied the Georgia law obliging white residents to leave Cherokee lands, a stance that would lead to the crucial Supreme Court case—Worcester v. Georgia—preceding the Nation’s forced removal.

  Back on the road, I head south for another several miles; my next goal is the former home of Major Ridge in the town of Rome. Now maintained as a public museum (called Chieftains), it powerfully evokes Ridge’s life and times, and the community he led. Its origins and early development were unusual. The first structure on the site, dating perhaps to the 1790s, was a form known as “dog trot”—with two separate parts, aligned north and south, and joined by a covered walkway in the middle. Each part contained two single-room stories, top and bottom. A ladder on one side gave access to the upper story. Windows were two per room (just eight in all). A brick chimney climbed the south end. The walls were of hewn logs throughout, creating a strong backwoods look. As best one can tell, the second-floor rooms were used for sleeping and storage, while those on the lower level served as keeping room and kitchen.

  This was the situation until the late 1820s, when the house underwent a major renovation and expansion. The original dog trot was not taken down; instead, its log walls were encased in finished siding, with the original floor plan left mostly intact. Additions were made on the east side, greatly enlarging the building’s footprint. The walkway was fully enclosed so as to become a center hall, with a formal staircase ascending to the upper floor. The walls and ceilings were paneled in various hardwoods; in particular, an upstairs parlor was “finished in first-rate style.”7 And the entire design was given a new orientation by moving the front door to the south wall. The renovation also added a veranda at each end, many more windows (with shutters), two new fireplaces, a portico athwart the entrance, a balcony supported by “turned columns,” and a complete weatherboard exterior painted (both then and now) a gleaming white. If this process sounds complex, so is the struggle to comprehend it. (Fortunately, the museum provides a number of helpful charts; and glassed openings afford views into the old log walls.) But the main point seems clear, and compelling: The house was transformed from “backwoods” to quite grand and genteel. The timing is also pertinent. The work was carried out within a few years following John Ridge’s return from the North; he apparently played a direct, supervisory role. Thus in January 1831, he wrote, in a letter to Cornwall’s Dr. Samuel Gold, “I built a fine house for my parents, which would look well even in New England, before I left them.”8 The comparison to New England brings me up short. When I stop to think about it, a New England influence could include quite a bit more in the life of the Nation—the mission-sponsored schools and churches, for example, and a certain genteel style found among its leaders. Obviously, too, there was the matter of direct support, from and by New Englanders, during the run‑up to removal. (Was this outside connection held against the Cherokees by powerful southerners? Possibly including Andrew Jackson?)

  With the house converted nowadays to museum format, its interior is filled with displays—standing cases and, on the walls, a large array of labeled images and text. In the period of the Ridge family’s occupancy, it would, of course, have looked very different; surely, there were furnishings and other domestic appointments suited to a comfortable, even affluent, life. Much of this would be impossible to recover now. But archaeological digs near the house have unearthed a trove of ceramic and glass fragments, the residue of European-made tableware, including hand-painted china, lusterware, pearlware, mochaware, and fine crystal.9 The most important remaining detail from the 1820s renovation is the staircase, where a gracefully sculpted railing lies atop hand-hewn pine supports. It has one peculiarity; at eighteen inches above the stair surfaces, the railing seems unusually low. According to current speculation, this was to accommodate John Ridge’s congenital hip ailment; he may have gone up and down seated on his backside. (Related evidence includes a pair of shoe heel taps—made of brass, one excessively worn, the other intact—recovered from an excavation site just north of the house; these have been linked to John’s chronic limp.)10 At the turn of the staircase, a handsomely arched triple window looks out over the garden and down toward the Oostanaula River.

  Today, the grounds are unprepossessing. Greatly shrunken in size, they are bordered by a much traveled highway on one side, vacant, scrub-filled lots on two others, and a patchy lawn on the slope above the river. During the Ridge years, the picture was entirely different. Close to the main house stood a group of fine old shade trees: poplars, sycamores, oaks. (One of these survived until blown down in a storm in 1977, at which point it stood nearly two hundred feet tall, with a crown one hundred feet across.) Multiple outbuildings were scattered about, serving both the domestic and “business” activities of the Ridge family. There were two freestanding kitchens close by the back door. There were corncribs, a stable and paddock for horses, a smokehouse, a lumber house, a henhouse, four “old round-log Negro houses,” a garden for vegetables, herbs, and “11 quince trees,” a stockyard for cattle (up to 150 head), and several feed lots for hogs and sheep. Farther to the south were eight crop fields (covering 280 acres) planted in cotton, tobacco, wheat, oats, indigo, potatoes, and, most especially, corn. There were, as well, large orchards, one of which contained over a thousand peach trees, the others many dozens of apple, cherry, and plum. Nearer to the house stood a paled garden, a vineyard, and a nursery for growing ornamental shrubs. The labor on all this property was performed largely by slaves—at one point said to number fifteen, at another twenty-one, at still another thirty. These, presumably, were the occupants of the aforementioned “Negro houses.” (Excava
tion near the site of one such has uncovered traces of colonoware, a distinctive pottery type reflective of West African styles.)11

  Two additional activities supplemented the income that Major Ridge obtained from the land. Perhaps as early as 1817, he had built a general store fifty yards directly to the north of the house. Its day-to-day operation was in the hands of a resident white trader named George M. Lavender, with Ridge as a silent partner. A stone cellar foundation is extant today; recent archaeological work around and beneath the floor has unearthed numerous “high-quality and up-to-date” ceramics produced by known English manufacturers, together with occasional shards of native cooking pots, large deposits of hog bones, suggesting the butchering and sale of meat, and several silver spoons (two of them inscribed JR, presumably for John Ridge).12 An account of the business, written two decades later, included also “medicinal plants and roots … skins and venison and hams,” all destined for export to white customers, and “salt, whiskey, gunpowder, calico, &c, consumed by [the Cherokees].”13 Lavender was “said to have engaged in his service numbers of wagons transporting these commodities to Augusta, a distance of two hundred and fifty miles, and returning with goods for his store.” From all this he earned, over the span of twenty years, “a large fortune,” and Ridge, too, must have profited handsomely.14

  Meanwhile, a ferry business—crossing the adjacent river—furnished still more income. Its terminus was a small dock roughly one hundred yards west of the house. From there, a simple raftlike conveyance, scarcely more than a floating bridge, would be pulled along a rope stretched between trees on opposite banks; by this means, freight as large as a wagon and team could be carried across. Evidently, this was an important service; the road on the north side ran straight through to New Echota, and the entire site was generally referred to as Ridge’s Ferry. In a government-sponsored property assessment from 1836, the value of the ferry was set at $12,000, while that of everything else on the property totaled just over $10,000.15