A spectre of power

IT so chanced that Eve, with all her primeval curiosity, dwelt in the Cherokee town of Great Tellico. Hence came disaster. To the inquisitiveness of the woman it was always imputed, although the undisciplined heart of man, the turbulent impulses of ambition, and the serpentine supersubtlety of a covetous political scheme were potent elements. Little, indeed, such as she might seem concerned with matters of high import. From afar, unindividualized among scores of the other subservient Cherokee women standing on the banks of the glittering Tennessee River, she had watched the approach of the herald of the embassy. A Choctaw Indian he was revealed as he ran holding broadly outstretched in each hand the great white wing of a swan, streaked with symbolic lines of white clay. The headmen of Tellico, the warriors of note, and the “beloved men” swiftly assembled in the “beloved square” to greet the arrival of the ambassador himself, and with no presentiment of personal significance in the event, she beheld the entry of the splendidly bedight Choctaw chief, Mingo Push-koosh.

Through the forests he had elected to come, and as he advanced with that wonderful, running gait of the Choctaw Indian, who could outwind, it was said in that day, a swift horse, he sustained impassively the eager, fixed gaze of the hundreds of Cherokees assembled in his honor.

The iconoclast, who was not born yesterday, was here and there in the crowd, and had a word of covert scoffing at his neglect of the great advantages of water carriage afforded by the numerous fine rivers of the Cherokee country; for the Choctaws had but little familiarity with navigation, owing to the few and very limited streams of their own region, and notoriously, of all nations of Indians, they could not swim.

Envy, however, could hardly spare a fling at so imperious a figure as the Mingo presented as he stood in the “beloved square” and delivered in rapid, fervid, poetic diction his oration of greeting to the headmen of Tellico. The afternoon sunlight glittered on the silver wrist-plates on his muscular, bare arms, his gorget and “earbobs” of the same metal, and a half dozen strands of the glossily white, fresh-water pearls of the region, exceedingly large and regularly shaped, which hung about the neck of his white, dressed doeskin hunting-shirt. His head was not polled after the fashion of the Cherokees, and his hair grew thick and long. A great cluster of scarlet flamingo feathers stood high in the midst of the straight, black locks, and he wore a broad, silver band on the backward slant of his forehead, artificially flattened thus in infancy, according to the tribal custom. His leggings and moccasins were also scarlet. He bore no arms except a pair of handsome, silver-mounted pistols in his embroidered belt.

The gentle breeze carried his full, rich, guttural tones to the uttermost outskirts of the crowd, and suddenly it was swayed by a new sensation and a straining of necks to see. For although the Choctaws beyond all tribes were most addicted to the punctilio of ceremonial observances, and scorned and resisted innovation, the voice which followed his words, substituting the familiar Cherokee equivalents, was the voice of no Indian interpreter. It was suave and fluent and easy of comprehension, but now and again an idiom occurred, a method of construction essentially French. For beside the Mingo, and in front of his escort of a dozen Choctaw braves, stood a glittering object, a white man, a French officer in full uniform, and with his hair curled and plaited and powdered.

The headmen of Tellico, all decorously listening to the ambassador, all respectfully gazing upon his bright animated face, as he declaimed his plea for welcome and his pleasure in beholding them, could not altogether cloak their surprised interest and covert glances at this resplendent apparition in the lowly functions of an interpreter. It was a relief when Push-koosh openly alluded to his companion, and he himself repeated in Cherokee the explanation of his appearance in this capacity, and they were free to let their eyes rest unrestrainedly upon him.

In his clear, ringing, military enunciation, he stated that the official Choctaw interpreter with whom they had set forth on the long journey from Fort Condé de la Mobile had sickened by the way, and sinking very low they had been obliged to strangle him, death being inevitable. But they had left his body on a scaffold out of reach of wild animals, whither the official “bone-picker” should be sent on their return to the southern country to perform the last sad rites of the Choctaw religion (which seems to have had few rites other than these frightful funeral observances). For these reasons they were fain to crave the indulgence of the great Cherokee chiefs for appearing without that essential functionary, an interpreter, since the lieutenant, Jean Marie Edouard Bodin de Laroche, was but scantily acquainted with the charming Cherokee language, so musical and of so elegant a construction, and Mingo Push-koosh, to his infinite regret, had of it no knowledge save a few scattered phrases.

The discerning and thoughtful Tanaesto, standing in the group of brilliantly arrayed Cherokee headmen, silently eyeing them both, noted naught significant in the face of the Mingo as the untoward fate of the strangled interpreter was recounted. This assistance in shuffling off the mortal coil would have been to the Choctaw a matter of course and a national custom. But Tanaesto knew that the white man was not used to so summary a disposition of the inconvenient dying. He was subject, like all the Catholic French, to many stringent religious restrictions, chiefly pertaining to the precise method in which he might take life, and although he looked as stanch as steel, and as glittering, his face was young and bland and as unmoved as if he were reciting a fiction,--which indeed he was! The heart of Tanaesto weighed very light with the thought,--there had been no interpreter to die.

“My brother,” he said in a low voice to Colonnah, to test his joyful suspicion, “why does a French officer speaking but indifferent Cherokee come to us with a Choctaw embassy without an interpreter from the governor of Louisiana?”

The wary Colonnah replied instantly. “That the Choctaw embassy may go back no wiser in certain things than the French officer may desire.”

The disclosure of a scheme within a scheme was thus promised. The series of notable successes which the Cherokees had achieved in 1760, in their war against the British, had been nullified in the campaign of the succeeding year by the inability of the French to convey to them adequate ammunition at the crisis of their final defeat. Doubtless some new plan was now imminent, some fresh attempt in contemplation to aid them to throw off the British yoke. Tanaesto’s heart leaped at the thought, although a solemn treaty of peace had just been signed at Charlestown with the Royal Governor of South Carolina, and a deputation of Cherokee chiefs now, in the early spring of 1762, were on the way to England as guests invited to visit his majesty King George in London.[1]

The craft of the Indians rendered craft difficult to disguise, and Tanaesto could but wonder if Mingo Push-koosh knew or suspected aught of the limitations of his powers or the secrets of his mission thus withheld from him.

His fine voice died away at last on the bland air; the oratorical display in which the Indians all delighted and the Choctaws so much excelled had been elaborately exploited; the stir of the wind, the lapsing currents of the river, were barely audible in the silence that seemed still to vibrate with the pulsings of his eloquent periods.

Then another voice arose, deep, full, impressive, as Moy Toy, the great chief of Tellico, pronounced the stereotyped sentences of welcome and protestations of a desire of friendship.

The Choctaw responded sonorously, “_Aharattle-la phena chemanumbole!_”[2] (I shall firmly shake hands with your discourse.) Whereupon Moy Toy, with eagle feathers upon his head and a splendid garb of feather-woven fabrics, advanced and grasped with both hands the Choctaw’s arm around the wrist; then seized him anew about the elbow; and again with the like fervent pressure around the arm close to the shoulder, as being near the heart. He drew back from the visitor for one silent moment. Then he waved a great fan of eagle feathers above the head of the ambassador, the plumes stroking him gently, and his formal reception was complete.

The Choctaw turned smilingly to the crowd, which was presently in motion dispersing along the river bank and among the scattered dwellings of the town. The official group of headmen had broken up into informal knots, and among them Push-koosh moved with a suave but princely arrogation, as tolerating the adulation which was equally his custom and his expectation. He had several claims to special consideration, of none of which was he oblivious, and all of which exerted a marked influence upon his personality. He enjoyed a certain distinction because of his well-known acuteness, his employment in the French interest, his war record, and his undoubted courage, which was the more noted because the Choctaws were not always considered brave; for although fighting furiously in defense of their own territory, they were accounted half-hearted and even timorous in invasion and aggression. Moreover, he had much family influence, having four elder brothers, all noted warriors, who championed his every plan and took that prideful, solicitous, censorious, half-paternal account of him characteristic of the fraternal senior, and often resented and ill-requited by the sophisticated Benjamins even of civilized tribes. To this simple trait of family affection is doubtless due the name by which he was known; for throughout his life and to the day of his death he was called Push-koosh, “Baby.” If he had any other name, it is not of record in the history of his times, in which, although cruel as death, hard as steel, and cunning as craft itself, this Choctaw warrior always incongruously appears as “Prince Baby,” Mingo Push-koosh.

The suavity and politic amiability of the carriage of the French toward the savage, which had so marked an influence on the earlier stages of the development of this country, were never more definitely illustrated than in the face of the young officer, Laroche. Its intelligence, its alertness, the military arrogance in the pose of the head, rendered the sudden, bright softness of his smile as flattering as a personal tribute. From an athletic point of view, his slender, erect, sinewy figure coerced the respect of his hosts, and in securing their friendship and confidence, he had a great advantage in his very tolerable command of the Cherokee language. His linguistic accomplishments were already considerable, but before he left Fort Condé de la Mobile, he was set to work under the instruction of the official interpreter, by the order of his superior officer, and he had acquired a colloquial facility as a military duty with the diligence which he would have manifested in mastering military theories and tactical problems. He talked continually, with much ease and good-fellowship, and a sort of elastic, volatile gayety. But he showed a deeply emotional impressionability. He manifested great and genuine pleasure in the aspect of the country. He gazed long and silently upon the azure summits and infinite lengths of the Great Smoky Mountains, as they received the last suffusion of the red, western sunlight like a benediction, and glowed to purer, higher, finer phases of color, becoming densely purple, then delicately amethystine, then all transparent and roseate. As they grew so crystalline of effect as to realize to the imagination the splendid jeweled luminosities of the Apocalyptic jasper, he caught his breath, exclaiming, “_Nanne-Yah! Nanne-Yah!_” (The mountains of God!) He declared to his entertainers that in Old France he was born near mountains such as these (for he was not of the Canadian French, who since the days of Iberville had so heavily recruited the ranks of the soldiery in Louisiana), and that he had no doubt that this mutual nativity to the heights was the reason why he already felt toward them as to brothers. Yet he was not bent upon flattery; for he was alone with Push-koosh when he said again and again, as they walked beside the Tennessee River, and he noted the swift flow of its currents all bedight in red and gold under the sunset sky, “_Ookka chookoma intaa!_” (How the beautiful water glides along!)