Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab Read Online Free PDF Page A

Jackson’s command, and the regiment was on the federal payroll. GeneralJackson had promised that the Cherokees would receive the same pay and benefits as white soldiers, including benefits to their families if they were killed.
    Here among the gathering regiment was a man namedGeorge Guess, known to fellow Cherokees as Sequoyah. Here were other Cherokee men who, in accordance with custom, were known by names that reflected their exploits, attributes, or a wry sense of humor: the Mouse, the Broom, Club Foot, Old Turkey, Old Brains, Whiteman Killer. Before long John Ross would be recording some of these names on a list of the wounded and dead. Here also was a great fighter known in Cherokee asTahseekeyarkey, and in English as Shoe Boots,after the high European-style boots he wore. He was a company commander, and also a free spirit. Sometimes on the march he would stop, crow like a cock, and continue on his way. It was alleged that he met Jackson once, and told the general that while he crowed like a cock, he was not a “chicken heart.” Jackson was not segregated from the Indians: at least one, known asTobacco Juice, was among a unit of “spies,” or scouts, who had been detailed to serve as General Jackson’s bodyguard. In such a small army it is reasonable to think that Ross, as an officer, had his first conversation with General Jackson; even if not, he would certainly have spotted the general on his horse, his face grim and wrinkled either from determination or from pain, and would have come to know thehint of a brogue in Jackson’s voice.
    Why was Ross fighting on Jackson’s side, the side of the United States? Things had not always been so. Within living memory, the Cherokees’ fathers and grandfathers had been at war against the very sort of white settlers who made up the bulk of Andrew Jackson’s army. When the American colonists declared their independence in 1776, the Cherokees of the Appalachian interior remained loyal to Britain.John Ross’s grandfather, a Scottish trader, helped to arm and organize the Cherokees to fight on the British side against the new United States. The Cherokee conflict against their white neighbors continued even after the American War of Independence ended in 1783. They were still at war when John Ross was born in 1790.
    All that had changed by the time the Cherokee Regiment was formed in 1813. Cherokees had a new outlook, which was visible as the regiment prepared to move south with the army. There were, for example, the white man’s clothes favored by John Ross, and the famous footwear of Shoe Boots. Much of the nation had adopted European-style clothes, or mixed white and native styles. It was still possible to find a man dressed in the old style, his ears slit and weighed down by heavy earrings, as well as a breastplate and wampum around his neck if he was a man of authority, but many another man would wear abuckskin hunting jacket, once disdained as a symbol of white settlers. John Ross, among others, was sometimes spied wearing a Middle Eastern–style turban.Cherokee women, for whom it was once socially acceptable to walk about half-naked, now commonly wore modest full-length dresses, the cloth for which they had often spun themselves. This outward change in clothing reflected deeper changes in Cherokee society. Despite the resistance of traditionalists, many Cherokees had been adapting to the culture of the great white tribes that increasingly surrounded them. They had been encouraged to do so ever since a peace treaty was signed in 1791 between the Cherokees and President George Washington’s administration. Washington vowed that he would respect the rights and borders of Indian nations, and his approach was enshrined in a series of laws known as the Indian Intercourse Acts. The federalgovernment, not states or individuals, would manage relations with the tribes. Government trading posts would sell Indians the goods required for civilization—whether plows for modern