Blood Moon

An American Epic of War and Splendor in the Cherokee Nation

John Sedgwick

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501128721
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

An astonishing untold story from the nineteenth century—a "riveting…engrossing…'American Epic'" ( The Wall Street Journal ) and necessary work of history that reads like Gone with the Wind for the Cherokee. "A vigorous, well-written book that distills a complex history to a clash between two men without oversimplifying" ( Kirkus Reviews ), Blood Moon is the story of the feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States through the infamous Trail of Tears and into the Civil War. Their enmity would lead to war, forced removal from their homeland, and the devastation of a once-proud nation.One of the men, known as The Ridge—short for He Who Walks on Mountaintops—is a fearsome warrior who speaks no English, but whose exploits on the battlefield are legendary. The other, John Ross, is descended from Scottish traders and looks like one: a pale, unimposing half-pint who wears modern clothes and speaks not a word of Cherokee. At first, the two men are friends and allies who negotiate with almost every American president from George Washington through Abraham Lincoln. But as the threat to their land and their people grows more dire, they break with each other on the subject of removal.In Blood Moon, John Sedgwick restores the Cherokee to their rightful place in American history in a dramatic saga that informs much of the country's mythic past today. Fueled by meticulous research in contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts—and Sedgwick's own extensive travels within Cherokee lands from the Southeast to Oklahoma—it is "a wild ride of a book—fascinating, chilling, and enlightening—that explains the removal of the Cherokee as one of the central dramas of our country" (Ian Frazier).Populated with heroes and scoundrels of all varieties, this is a richly evocative portrait of the Cherokee that is destined to become the defining book on this extraordinary people.

PART ONE

PARADISE LOST

1771-1814

1

A BIRTH ON THE HIWASSEE

Its walls made of branches slathered with red clay to keep out the wind, the little hut was alive with the pine scent of the wilderness as she writhed, her copper skin gleaming, on a bed of crosshatched reeds. She was O-go-nuh-to-tua, a Cherokee of the Deer Clan. Although her father was a Scottish trader who didn’t stay long, she bore the high cheekbones and delicate features of most Cherokee women, and perhaps some of the exquisite “coquettishness” that exceeded even that of the French—or so said the Duke of Orleans, later the French king, when he came through to view these astonishing tribespeople. He couldn’t fail to be struck by the women’s supple beauty, the bewitching way they dipped their heads and angled their forearms, their skin lightly tattooed, with flickers of jewelry off their ears.

A few attendants fluttered over her, doing what they could to ease the mounting pain. A fire was going in a pit in the middle of the earthen floor, the dark smoke rising up toward a hole in the ceiling. Beside it, a long-robed shaman sat hunched, scrutinizing the ashes for portents.

Her husband, Tar-chee, knew better than to come anywhere near his wife in labor. He was a man of stout and boastful armbands, massive hoop earrings, and impressive nose ornaments, his hair in a topknot, the back of his head jauntily adorned with a sprig of feathers. He’d stay with the men, or simply go off by himself, to wait over a long-stemmed pipe.

Her face bore the look of birthing mothers everywhere: skin tight, eyes wild, as she strained, her belly impossibly huge, her head swinging this way and that, her black hair whipping about. She’d gone through this hell three times before, producing three sons, all three of them dead now. It was enough to put fear in anyone, but here the tale turns mystical. For the Cherokee, the spirits were as real as the wind. To believe the shaman, her sons had fallen to a primal malevolence that struck like lightning or a flash flood and needed now to be watched for in the fire that burned in the little hut.

There is much to see in a fire. The exact color of the flames, the heap of the ashes, the way the smoke rises. All could convey the intentions of the Great Spirit. The shaman sprinkled some tobacco leaves onto the embers and watched the smoke rise. It went straight to the hole above. That was a relief. No witches were about tonight.

It was safe for the attendants to ease O-go-nuh-to-tua outside on a stretcher of deer hide and into the cooling breeze that blew off the river. Remaining inside at his post by the fire, the shaman let out a shriek. The tobacco smoke was curving north! In the Cherokee compass, north was the place of ice and darkness. It bred witches. To dispel them, the shaman loudly recited chants and poked the embers. All to no effect. The smoke still leaned north.

Outside, the pains came faster, until a baby was brought forth, slick with blood. A boy. The midwives lifted him into the air in praise of the Great Spirit, wrapped him in cloth, and handed him to his mother. She was about to bring him to her breast when the shaman rushed out and snatched the boy from her. If he was to survive, he must drink nothing but tea for seven days. The shaman’s tea, following his recipe. It would do more than just protect him from witches. It would give him special powers. He would be able to see the invisible, to leave his body, to take any form he chose. Crawl about as an ant or fly as a hawk. All the forces of the world would be his. He would be a magnificent hunter and a deadly warrior. He would be a force of nature. So said the shaman.

The mother gladly fed her son the shaman’s tea from a leather nipple. But she let him suck her breast, too. Power was one thing, love another. She wanted both for her son, and both would be needed for what lay ahead.

• • •

It was 1771, the season now unknown, in a small Cherokee settlement along the wide-swinging Hiwassee River that wound through the steep blue-green mountains of what would soon be called Tennessee, veering off east from the wide, U-shaped river that would give the state its name. The headwaters of the Hiwassee were said to have poured down from a cleft in the towering ridgeline, as if spilling from a vast, invisible sea pooled on the far side. Down and down the waters tumbled, until they finally hit bottom to glide quietly through the meadows.

The whites called the place Savannah Ford, since its waters were passable, and it lay about twenty miles north of the future Chattanooga, near where the states of Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee would converge. The Cherokee name for the settlement does not survive; there may not have been one. To the villagers, this stretch of shore may have been all the world there was. To them, it was simply here. It was the same impulse that inspired the Cherokee to call themselves the Real People. It fell to the neighboring Choctaw to call them, derisively, Cherokee—cave dwellers.

It was one of about sixty Cherokee villages spread out across the southern Appalachians, those great long slabs that angled across the Northeast, from the mystical Great Smokies that traced the future Tennessee’s jagged eastern border across to the river-riddled Cumberland Plateau that lay to their west. All of the settlements were approximately like this one, with rough-hewn dwellings arrayed about a central “town house,” round, with a conical roof, where official business was conducted amid clouds of tobacco smoke. Beside it was a ceremonial square for the stomping war dances of nearly naked, enraged men about a roaring fire, and the zesty fertility dramas of the harvest Green Corn dance, among other exuberant festivities of a ceremonial people.

In summer the fields were sprinkled with the rapturous red of strawberries; beyond them rose trees laden with peaches and plums. And there were crop fields for corn, beans, pumpkins, and sweet potatoes. Life was so rich in sunshine and rainfall that everything grew—twelve varieties of berries alone. It was almost as if a seed would merely have to touch the ground for a plant to hit the sky.

A heavy forest climbed up the mountainside, straight up in places, all of it thick with unchanging spruce and pine, and also with chestnut, oak, maple, sourwood, and hickory trees whose leaves turned from the deep, lush green of spring to the fiery orange of fall. The lofty mountaintops were often enswirled in a heavy mist that veiled the source of the terrifying lightning, booming thunder, and fierce winds that periodically shook their world and confirmed the Cherokee belief that there were far greater powers beyond the ones they could see.

When the doughty naturalist William Bartram, the aspiring son of the botanist to the king of England, scrambled over Cherokee territory in 1773 determined to catalog every species, flora or fauna, that he encountered, he saw the sublime in the “divine and inimitable workmanship” of the “glorious Magnolia,” in the “expansive umbrageous” live oak, and even in the “pride and vanity” of the daylily. Bartram’s literary raptures inspired Coleridge to write his phantasmagoric “Kubla Kahn,” and Emerson and Thoreau to develop their heady Transcendentalism. At a mountain peak, Bartram imagined he’d reached the top of the world as he looked out on “ridges of hills rising grand and sublimely one above and beyond another, some boldly and majestically advancing into the verdant plain, their feet bathed with the silver flood of the Tanase”—the Tennessee River, into which the Hiwassee drains—“whilst others far distant, veiled in blue mists, sublimely mount aloft, with yet greater majesty lift up their pompous crests and overlook vast regions.”

The Cherokee left no descriptions of themselves, so much of what we know comes from outsiders. The most prominent was James Adair, a swarthy Irish trapper who arrived in the New World in 1735. Among the first Europeans to come upon the Cherokee, he married one, a widowed full-blood of the Deer Clan called Mrs. Go-ho-ga Foster, and lived with her for forty years. Of a surprisingly scholarly bent for an uneducated man, in 1775 Adair wrote a massive History of the American Indians, the first account of the Cherokee, and still the best.^I

Adair found Cherokee men surprisingly tall, much taller than Europeans, virtually all of them at least six feet, with an erect carriage, fine taut muscles, and exquisite proportions, as if they’d been designed by Leonardo. Bartram considered Cherokee faces “open, dignified and placid,” their forehead and brow suggestive of “heroism and bravery,” their black eyes “full of fire,” their noses a “royal aquiline,” and their hair “long, lank, coarse and black as a raven.” Worn long, their hair was likely to be pulled up into a topknot clasped with a silver brooch. Both sexes plucked out their body hair—by the roots with a tiny corkscrew twirled by a stick—hair by hair from chin to “privities,” leaving the skin baby-smooth.

Sharp-eyed, strong, and resilient, most Cherokee men seemed to Adair to be made for war. “Martial virtue” was the only quality they admired. Warriors slew their enemies with arrows that flew silently through the air, or bludgeoned them with tomahawks up close, and then, with a hunting knife, hacked off a trophy from the top of their heads. Steady-handed killers, the Cherokee had taken easily to the firearms the Europeans brought.

But not Tar-chee. He was far more hunter than warrior, alert to life in the forest, so precise with a bow and arrow he could hit a deer in the heart atop a high ridgeline, and with a puff of a poison-tipped blowdart, bring down a squirrel leaping from the highest branch of a chestnut. He had to his credit only a single scalp, hacked off in a skirmish with some renegade Indians of the Wabash. But war was coming, and he would have to join it.

A young Cherokee bears not just one name, but a series of names, each one reflecting his identity at a particular stage of life. At first, the little boy was Nung-noh-hut-tar-hee, for He Who Slays the Enemy in His Path, or Pathkiller, which surely reflected his parents’ ambitions for him, whatever the fears of the shaman. Despite his Scottish grandfather, the little Pathkiller looked all Cherokee, with his copper skin and jet-black hair, and he was tall for his age, and hardy. Tar-chee taught him the lore of the forest and the ways of the Great Spirit. But it was a boy’s life there in the village, a life of swimming and ball games, of going naked everywhere, and no particular work to do. He might have been a forest creature, the way he slipped so smoothly through the trees, or a fish when he swam in the river. But the freedom wasn’t just a luscious tumble in the world. It meant exposure to the elements, right on his bare skin. Burning sun, scratching brambles, icy water, hard rock—all left their lessons. There were no books. He learned by living, by seeing what happened. All of it was guided by his father, Tar-chee, the hunter. The only account of The Ridge’s childhood comes from Thomas McKenney, who served years later as the superintendent of Indian Affairs when Indian removal was becoming a national policy under Jackson. McKenney took it upon himself to collect biographies and lithographic images of the more notable Indian chiefs whose lives were being sharply altered by his own office, and one can hear a wistfulness in McKenney’s romantic account of the young Ridge stealing through the forest of his childhood.

His father taught him to steal with noiseless tread upon the grazing animal—to deceive the timid doe by mimicking the cry of the fawn—or to entice the wary buck within the reach of his missile, by decorating his own head with antlers. He was inured to patience, fatigue, self-denial, and exposure, and acquired the sagacity which enabled him to chase with success the wild cat, the bear, and the panther. He watched the haunts, and studied the habits of wild animals, and became expert in the arts which enable the Indian hunter at all seasons to procure food from the stream or the forest.

Tar-chee’s instructions went past the practical details of hunting into mystical elements that McKenney found hard to track, as he detailed how a hunter, if he hoped to be rewarded with prey, needed to “go to water” in the evening to whisper an incantation to the river: “Give me the wind. Give me the breeze.” Likewise, before a hunter lit his evening fire, he needed to ask the fire to warm him while he slept, and never to assume it would on its own. And before he let loose an arrow, he must ask for the consent of his prey—whether it be a deer or a hawk—to be killed. Whatever his quarry, once it was killed he must cut out its tongue and pitch it into the fire as an offering to the spirits, to square the account after having taken something.

As he grew, Pathkiller learned the ways of the mountains, and his talents and daring earned him the name he would bear for the rest of his life, The Ridge, for He Who Walks on Mountaintops. Even as a boy, he ranged everywhere, for days and then weeks at a time, going without food or water, barely clothed if clothed at all, alert to any movement in the quiet, ready with his bow, poised to kill. And he would invariably return with a pack full of fresh meat for his family, which soon grew to four with the birth of a brother, David Oo-watie.

• • •

As he grew, The Ridge could see that it was the men’s lot to roam the mountains hunting. Women were to stay home and tend the crops. The genders were separate, one staying close, the other going far, but they were equal. Society had no ranks. No one was fundamentally different from anyone else; no one should receive more than a fair share; anyone who could not provide for himself should be provided for by others. This was the Cherokee way—everyone was in it together. While there was a village chief, he ruled by consensus, and everyone had a voice, wearying as it must have been to hear them all. While men ran the councils, women selected those men and exerted such an influence over them that Adair memorably scoffed at the Cherokee as a “petticoat society.”

The women held everything of value, from property to children. Tar-chee may have built the marital hut, but O-go-nuh-to-tua owned it. And as the wife she would be the one to determine when a marriage was over. She’d let her man know by gathering up all his belongings and setting them outside the hut. Done. He knew better than to come back. This is probably why O-go-nuh-to-tua’s father vanished from the record, leaving no trace beyond a slight lightening of his descendants’ skin, and a softening of their features. He would have had no claim on his wife, or on their children. He’d been charmed by a comely Cherokee, who was slow to divine his intentions. Sharing no language, they communicated only by gesture and act, one in particular. When he left, his wife’s oldest brother would have taken over as the man in the family, the father of the children, since he was related by blood, not marriage. And it was through the women that the all-important clans were arranged—seven of them, including the Deer Clan of The Ridge, the Bird, the Wolf, the Paint, and the Blind Savannah, all of which served as tribes within a tribe, extended families, and points of absolute loyalty. A man joined his wife’s clan; she did not join his. The clans formed the basis of political society, too: every council house had seven sections. Among the Cherokee, anyone without a clan might as well not exist.

To the Cherokee, balance was everything. It started with men and women, but extended to sun and moon, winter and summer, war and peace. In the grand Cherokee cosmology, everything was poised against its opposite. There was a White Chief for times of peace, and a Red Chief for times of war. Both were essential to life, and each deserved its turn. Nothing was so distressing as when one went missing. Adair was there one night when the moon disappeared from the sky during a lunar eclipse, and he had never seen the Cherokee in such squawking pandemonium. “They all ran wild, this way and that way, like lunatics, firing off their guns, whooping and hallooing, beating of kettles, ringing horse-bells, and making the most horrid noises that human beings possibly could.” They were afraid the moon was gone forever, devoured, they decided, by a monstrous bullfrog in the night sky.

The whites, coming in such numbers, were no less threatening, but they weren’t about to consume their prey in a single gulp. Coming first in ones and twos to live like Adair among the Cherokee, the settlers were now pushing ever deeper into Cherokee territory, building solitary huts, then villages, then fortifications with stout blockhouses and a stockade perimeter, and a garrison of soldiers, ostensibly to protect the Cherokee, but also to protect themselves from the Cherokee. Either way, such forts advanced white society ever deeper into the virgin forest and invited still more settlers. None of these encroachments was yet visible from Savannah Ford, but Tar-chee knew, as everyone knew, they were out there, and coming closer. With so many settlers about, war was in the air in 1771, and the villagers were alert for any strange sounds brought in on the wind.

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I. It is a remarkably clear-eyed piece of ethnography to modern eyes, with one howling peculiarity: Adair devotes the entire book to his argument that the American Indians were a lost tribe of Israel. A “kink,” Thomas Jefferson called this, no doubt chuckling, when he told John Adams about it later. Not tha...