Part 34

There was another who heartily rejoiced in this advance of fortune when it came to his ears, for Lady MacIlvesty’s beauty and what were called her “eccentricities” made her of some social note in her day. Laroche had loved the girl very truly for herself, and although he had sought to look upon her rejection of his suit as in a certain sense an escape for himself, in view of her humble station, her plebeian father, her simple education and limited experience, and their incongruity with his objects of ambition and the sphere of his association, he could not entertain the reminiscence without a keen sentimental regret, albeit blended with tender pleasure to know that the world had gone well with her. He too had reached, as he deserved, promotion, and at no small danger, as the sabre slashes received in the hand-to-hand warfare of that day, and which disfigured his bland handsome face, might betoken. He lived several years after his retirement from active service. One who had known him in those halcyon days on the Tennessee River might hardly have recognized him later, so scarred, gray-haired, wrinkled, and very thin he had become,--a mere rack on which to hang his decorations and the ribbons of his orders. He had always been esteemed a man of unique ability, and his conversation was long valued by the judicious in the cafés and salons of Paris which he frequented. When he reached the discursive and reminiscent stage of advancing age, often, as the night would wear on in a choice company, he would discourse of high themes of national possibilities, and regretfully rehearse disastrous phases of the country’s past that had fallen within his personal knowledge,--of the great territories that France had developed and forfeited; plans of empire that she had failed to utilize; strange peoples of martial values who had sought her protectorate in vain. Then he would revert to his own life among them,--reciting details of their curious customs and mysterious antiquity; telling thrilling stories of personal adventure, now of an escape from the menace of the torture and the stake, and now of his release from the trebly guarded stronghold of a British fort by the aid of a beautiful English lady of rank who loved him and whom he adored.

And although as he grew older and his audiences younger they believed this unnamed English lady of rank to be entirely apocryphal, the tear was obviously genuine with which he sweetened his glass as he told that she was dead now,--years ago--ah yes--dead!

“_Il y a une autre vie! C’est une belle espérance!_” he would sigh, for he was always deeply religious. “But alas, that the sweets of this life are transitory!”

And presently he would be talking of the triumphs of engineering possible in that vast America. Sometimes he would trace out on the tablecloth with the aid of the scroll-like pattern of the damask the outline of the great bend of a river which he affirmed had singly saved that country to the English and reft it from the French, as its extraordinary obstructions to navigation prevented all adequate conveyance of munitions of war to the Cherokees, who held the balance of power. He would mark off the canal which he had purposed to build in the fullness of time, and the site he had selected for the barrier towns to guard the region of the portages, necessary to evade the obstructions, as a temporary substitute. The technical terms of the oft-told tale, the abstruse calculations of the elaborately demonstrated problem, would finally wear out the interest of his auditors; they would slip away one by one, and leave him bending over the table, gloating upon the symmetrical possibilities of his plan, bewailing its untimely frustration, seeing, instead of the blank cloth, that rich new land with its gigantic growths of primeval forests and those dizzy whirls of turbulent waters, that stretch out miles and miles impassably, where even now, despite the advance of modern science and the exorcising appropriations of Congress, the devils, _hottuk ookproose_, still dance in the riotous rapids and sing tumultuously as of yore.

NOTES

NOTES

[Footnote 1: Page 4. A detail of the incidents of this visit to the king in London and the consequent impressions made upon the minds of the Indians would be of much interest to the student of civilization. It is to be regretted that Lieutenant Henry Timberlake of Virginia, who accompanied the Cherokees to England, should have devoted so great a space in his “Memoirs” of that event (published in London in 1765) to plaintive accounts of his wrangling with governmental officials concerning his reimbursement for sundry expenses on their account, with which it seems he burdened himself without sufficient warrant, and to the effort to repel the insinuation that he undertook the enterprise of conducting them thither for his own personal profit, as impresario so to speak; for the people of that city pressed in hordes to see them, many of the nobility as well as citizens of lower rank, and some, evidently without the knowledge of Lieutenant Timberlake, paid for the privilege. Beyond the strange dirge-like chant which Ostenaco sang on landing; their indifference to the architecture of the Cathedral of Exeter; their terror of the statue of Hercules with uplifted club which they saw at Wilton (they begged to be taken away immediately); their relish of the entertainments at Ranelegh, Vauxhall, and especially of the pantomimes at Sadler’s Wells; their admiration of the youth, personal beauty, and affability of the king, there is naught to indicate their attitude of mind. A contemporary account, however, in the “Annual Register” for 1762 gives a personal glimpse of them.

“Three Cherokee chiefs, lately arrived from South Carolina, in order to settle a lasting peace with the English, had their first audience of his majesty. The head chief called Outacite or Man-killer, on account of his many gallant actions, was introduced by Lord Eglinton, and conducted by Sir Clement Cottrell, master of ceremonies. They were upwards of an hour and a half with his majesty, who received them with great goodness, and they behaved in his presence with remarkable decency and mildness. The man who assisted as interpreter on this occasion, instead of one who set out with them, but died on his passage, was so confused that the king could ask but few questions.

“These chiefs are well-made men, near six feet high, their faces and necks coarsely painted of a copper colour, and they seem to have no hair on their heads. They came over in the dress of their country, consisting of a shirt, trowzers, and mantle, their heads covered with skull-caps and adorned with shells, feathers, earrings, and other trifling ornaments. On their arrival in London they were conducted to a house taken for them in Suffolk street, and habited more in the English manner. When introduced to his majesty the head chief wore a blue mantle covered with lace, and had his head richly ornamented. On his breast hung a silver gorget with his majesty’s arms engraved. The other two chiefs were in scarlet, richly adorned with gold lace, and gorgets of plate on their breasts. During their stay in England of about two months they were invited to the tables of several of the nobility, and were shown by a gentleman, appointed for that purpose, the tower, the camps, and everything else that could serve to impress them with proper ideas of the power and grandeur of the nation; but it is hard to say what impression these sights made upon them, as they had no other way of communicating their sentiments but by their gestures. They were likewise conducted every day to one or another of the places of amusement, in and about London, where they constantly drew after them innumerable crowds of spectators, to the no small emolument of the owners of these places, some of which raised their prices to make the most of such unusual guests. Here they behaved in general with great familiarity, shaking hands very freely with all those who thought proper to accept that honour. They carried home with them articles of peace between his majesty and their nation, with a handsome present of warlike instruments and such other things as they seemed to place the greatest value on.”]

[Footnote 2: Page 5. The Indian phrases given in this volume are studied from sources as nearly contemporaneous as may be with the events herein narrated, both for the sake of verisimilitude and because of the multitudinous changes to which the aboriginal languages have since been subjected, for the purpose of classification in view of the diverse orthography of the earlier philologists, which varied, of course, according to nationality, French, German, or English.

It is interesting to note the differing estimate of the value which the learned place on this singular jetsam and flotsam of the seas of Time. The study of the aboriginal languages, apart from historical considerations, possesses great interest in the revelation of “new plans of ideas,” as Monsieur Maupertuis felicitously phrases methods of grammatical construction. “The Greek is admired for its compounds, yet what are they to those of the Indians!” exclaims the eminent philologist, Mr. Duponceau. “What would Tibullus or Sappho have given to have had at their command a word at once so tender and so expressive--_wulamalessohalian_, ‘thou who makest me happy’? How delighted would be Moore, the poet of the loves and graces, if his language, instead of five or six tedious words, had furnished him with an expression like this in which the lover, the object beloved, and the delicious sentiment are blended and fused together in one comprehensive and appellative term. And is it in the language of savages that these beautiful forms are found!”

And yet in the learned work on America by Mr. Edward John Payne of University College, Oxford, still in course of publication, it is stated that “the majority of these languages, if not absolutely the lowest in the glossological scale, are as near the bottom as the student of the origin of speech could well desire.” Of their polysynthetic features, which Mr. Duponceau so much admires, Mr. Payne speaks as of merely bunched words, regarding the holophrase as the primitive and simplest form of ignorant language, which in the development and weight of meaning is broken finally, producing in its disintegration parts of speech.

Lord Monboddo, in his “Origin and Progress of Language,” founding his opinion partly on the testimony of Father Sagard’s work, “Le Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons,” says of the Huron language, “It is the most imperfect of any that has ever been discovered;” whereas Mr. Duponceau finds it “rich in grammatical forms,” and permits himself the expression “pompous ignorance” in alluding to the conclusions of his learned confrère.

The fact that Dr. Adam Smith as well as Lord Monboddo perceived in the tendency to incorporate in one word the meaning of a whole sentence an evidence of barbarism induces Mr. Duponceau to support the contrary opinion with “a lively example from Suetonius, _Ave Imperator, morituri_ (those-who-are-going-to-die) _te salutant_. Since it has been discovered that the barbarous dialects of savage nations are formed on the same principles with classical idioms, it has been found easier to ascribe the beautiful organization of these languages to stupidity and barbarism than to acknowledge our ignorance of the manner in which it has been produced.”

Humboldt says: “It is acknowledged that almost everywhere the Indian idioms display greater richness and more delicate gradations than might be supposed from the uncultivated state of the people by whom they are spoken.” Adair, who had forty years’ personal experience among them, writing in 1775, claims that their languages give evidence of culture and scope of expression impossible to have originated with uncivilized tribes such as they were found. A singular circumstance concerning the “syllabic alphabet,” presumed to have been invented by the Cherokee Sequoyah (John Guest) about 1820, would imply an origin at a far more ancient date. A stone engraved with this character was found by an agent of the Bureau of Ethnology in 1889 lying under the skull of a skeleton buried in an Indian mound, with every evidence of antiquity, on the north side of the Tennessee River, in the immediate vicinity of one of the old Cherokee towns. This is of more special interest as Adair and also Buttrick, in his “Antiquities,” record that the Indians always claim to have once had scriptures, or a book, which for their sins they had lost to the white race. May not these quaint characters bear some relation to this tradition?

The “particular plural” for “we,” which it seems occurs in all these languages, even found in the extinct Taensa dialect,--concerning the genuineness of the grammar of which so much interest was elicited some years ago on its publication, edited by Messieurs Adam and Parisot,--seems hardly worth the discussion bestowed upon it, as parallels exist in so many modern European languages,--_noi altri_, _nous autres_, _nosotros_,--and even the vernacular may offer a counterpart in “we-all” and “we-uns.”

Lord Monboddo’s idea, first presented to his attention by the blind poet, the Reverend Thomas Blacklock, “that the first language among men was music,” has an interesting suggestion of confirmation in the speech of the Cherokees as described by Timberlake. “Their language is vastly aspirated, and the accents so many and various you would often imagine them to be singing in their common discourse.” Bartram says of the sound of the Muscogulge (Muscogee) language, “The women in particular speak so fine and musical as to represent the singing of birds.” Gayarre states that the word “Choctaw” means “charming voice,” and was hence applied to the tribe.]

[Footnote 3: Page 8. A letter from General Sir Jeffrey Amherst dated Albany, August 13, 1761, gives a particularized account of these destructive measures. “The country would have been impenetrable had it been well defended. Fifteen towns and all the plantations have been burned; above 1400 acres of corn, beans, and pease, etc., destroyed; about 5000 people, men, women, and children, driven into the woods and mountains, where having nothing to subsist upon they must either starve or sue for peace.”

The fury of these measures after resistance had ceased is partly to be explained as retaliation for the Cherokees’ breach of faith during the preceding year, in the massacre of the garrison of Fort Loudon after its capitulation, while on the march to Fort Prince George under the safe conduct and escort of the principal chiefs. All the officers, including the commandant, the unfortunate Captain Paul Demeré, fell in this indiscriminate slaughter except one, Captain John Stuart, who escaped and was afterward rewarded by a crown office for his courage and constancy in the siege. He was of the family of Stuart of Kincardine, Strathspey, Scotland, married into a South Carolina family, and previous to the American Revolution lived in Charlestown, where was born his son, who became an officer in the British army, General Sir John Stuart, Count of Maida, winning the signal victory of Maida over the French general Reynier, in Calabria in 1806. The garrison of Fort Loudon has a special interest as the first military force of civilization giving battle on the soil which is now Tennessee, its earliest sacrifice in the cause of human progress.]

[Footnote 4: Page 13. Several of the elder writers describe such clever pastimes among the Indians. Timberlake records that while in the Cherokee country he witnessed this favorite pantomime, as well as another equally diverting, called “Taking the pigeons at roost.”]

[Footnote 5: Page 31. It is said that the Indians when discovered had among them no methods of ascertaining weight, and bought and sold exclusively by measure. Hence the incongruity of this locution in their speech has furnished an additional argument to the supporters of the theory of their Hebraic origin, suggesting an idiomatic survival of forgotten customs.]

[Footnote 6: Page 56. So extreme and well founded was the prevalent terror of the torture by the Indians that once captured no immediate sacrifice was too great to evade the grimmer possibility. General David Stewart of Garth gives an instance in this region among the British troops at this time. “Montgomerie’s Highlanders were often employed in small detached expeditions. In these marches they had numberless skirmishes with the Indians and with the irregular troops of the enemy. Several soldiers of this and other regiments fell into the hands of the Indians, being taken in an ambush. Allan Macpherson, one of these soldiers, witnessing the miserable fate of several of his fellow prisoners, who had been tortured to death by the Indians, and seeing them preparing to commence the same operations upon himself, made signs that he had something to communicate. An interpreter was brought. Macpherson told them that provided his life was spared for a few minutes he would communicate the secret of an extraordinary medicine which, if applied to the skin, would cause it to resist the strongest blow of a tomahawk or sword, and if they would allow him to go to the woods with a guard to collect the plants proper for this medicine, he would prepare it and allow the experiment to be tried on his own neck by the strongest and most expert warrior among them. This story easily gained upon the superstitious credulity of the Indians, and the request of the Highlander was instantly complied with. Being sent into the woods he soon returned with such plants as he chose to pick up. Having boiled these herbs, he rubbed his neck with their juice, and laying his head upon a log of wood desired the strongest man among them to strike at his neck with his tomahawk, when he would find that he could not make the slightest impression. An Indian, leveling a blow with all his might, cut with such force that the head flew off to the distance of several yards. The Indians were fixed in amazement at their own credulity and the address with which the prisoner had escaped the lingering death prepared for him; but instead of being enraged at the escape of their victim, they were so pleased with his ingenuity that they refrained from inflicting further cruelties on their remaining prisoners.”]

[Footnote 7: Page 84. The disposition to compete for the Cherokee trade had earlier been the occasion of much remonstrance from Governor Glen of South Carolina to Lieutenant-Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia during their respective incumbency. The vexed question then seeming set at rest was revived later by Lieutenant-Governor Fauquier of Virginia. In his allusion to the subject, Jock Lesly possibly included Lieutenant Henry Timberlake of Byrd’s Virginia Regiment, who had recently been on a visit to the Cherokee country, quitting it in the early spring, on March 10, 1762. But it is only fair to Lieutenant Timberlake to say that the Indians were pressing him to induce Virginia to open a trade with the Cherokees.]

[Footnote 8: Page 182. Timberlake uses the spelling “Kanagatucko;” the name appears otherwise signed to the Articles of Capitulation of Fort Loudon, but of course in each instance the spelling is phonetic.]

[Footnote 9: Page 244. This incantation is an extract from one of the most singular of the ancient Sacred Formulæ of the Cherokees collected by Mr. James Mooney for the Smithsonian Institution.]

[Footnote 10: Page 282. The title of Emperor of the Cherokee Nation was conferred by British authority on Moy Toy through Sir Alexander Cuming in 1730, but this proved no hindrance to the chief’s acceptance of the same high title under the authority of the French government in 1736 through its emissary among the tribe, Christian Priber, a German Jesuit. Adair recounts some details of the latter’s efforts to materialize Iberville’s old scheme of unifying the Indian tribes, which were similar to the experiences in the same emprise of the earlier emissaries, and the futile ventures of Baron Dejean, Louis Latinac, and Laroche a score of years later.]

[Footnote 11: Page 336. The history of the Indians is not a little complicated by the repetition of their names from one generation to another and of their war-titles, sometimes to be differentiated only by the names of their respective towns as a suffix, as Outacite (the Man-killer), of Citico, or Quorinnah (the Raven), of Huwhassee. Even their sobriquets are not to be relied upon for further identification. Another Mingo Push-koosh flourished among the Choctaws a generation earlier, and was the half brother of the celebrated Shulashummashtabe (Red Shoes), who is himself often confounded with the chief of the Coosawdas, also known as “Red Shoes,” long afterward, being active in Indian politics as late as 1789. The Choctaw “Red Shoes” enjoyed great esteem among the British, as did also the Cherokee “Little Carpenter” (more accurately translated as “Superlative Wood-carver”), in whose honor, indeed, an English ship was named and a British stronghold, before the Cherokee War, Fort Atta-Kulla-Kulla.]

[Footnote 12: Page 368. The climate of this southern region at this period seems to have won some renown for its extremes. An officer’s letter from Fort Prince George, dated January 9, 1761, says: “I have been several winters in the north of Scotland and do not think I have ever felt it colder there than here at this time; the snow is in general three quarters of a yard deep, attended with very sharp frosts.” As to the summer temperature, Governor Ellis has left it of record in a letter to John Ellis, Esq., F.R.S., dated Georgia, July 17, 1758, that he thought the inhabitants of this section “breathed hotter air than any other people upon earth.” He takes pains to state that he made his observations with the same thermometer that he had had with him in the equatorial parts of Africa and in the Leeward Islands. Hewatt, the historian, ventures to protest, albeit deferring to the accuracy and learning of the erudite and traveled governor, and says that the mercury never so far exceeded the bounds of reason in South Carolina, and implies that he believed that these eccentricities were very rare in Georgia.]

The Riverside Press _Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._

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