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

so the general planned a detour. The men left the Coosa behind, marching eastward through the woods. They approached a river called the Tallapoosa, the next finger on that gnarled hand of rivers running down toMobile Bay. The rude path his army was following was familiar to Jackson. Back in January, learning of a large Creek encampment, he had raced along this same route toward the enemy with nine hundred newly arrived militiamen, only to realize that the Creeks were so numerous, and so well fortified, that if he attacked, he would fail. He chose instead to back away—and then the Creeks attacked him. Dozens of his men were killed before he drove off the assault. Now Jackson was returning with his enlarged force, including a couple of small artillery pieces, determined to finish the job.
    Sometimes along the march, the general stopped and climbed down from his horse. A subordinate would hack down a sapling and Jackson would drape himself over it in the only pose that relieved his abdominal pain. Then he’d mount again, hardly more than a cadaver on a horse, with his bodyguard eyeing him. They continued toward the enemy’s camp, tucked in a curve of the Tallapoosa River. It was a place the Creeks called Tohopeka, and white men called Horseshoe Bend.

Three
Stamping His Foot for War
    R oss and Jackson were alike that late winter of 1814 in that they were not yet figures of legend. Jackson was a Tennessee politico with a checkered reputation. Had his precarious health collapsed on March 15, his forty-seventh birthday, he would have been buried somewhere near John Wood without a single achievement that later generations would recall. Ross was hardly more than a youth, slim of both stature and achievement, probably known even within the Cherokee Nation mainly as a descendant of notable traders. Now the two men were about to begin their long engagement with history. To understand how the country changed during their time, it is useful to glimpse the United States as they found it.
    In 1814 the American frontier, the farthest western point of consistent white settlement, was roughly where Jackson lived. It was Middle Tennessee. Farther west than that the Indian map was the governing map, and the map of the United States became more imaginary with every mile. In factMiddle Tennessee formed a salient, a peninsula of settlement. Other parts of the frontier were not so far west. In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase extended the nation beyond the Mississippi, but except for a few cities such as New Orleans and St. Louis, the Purchase too was almost entirely the domain of Indians. Thus when Americans spoke of “the West” in Jackson’s day, they usually referred not toOregon or the Rockies, but to Nashville, or Lexington, Kentucky, or “the Ohio country.” That was the frontier.
    This early version of the West was attracting migrants. The national population was exploding—from about four million in 1790 to more than seven million in 1810—and many were shifting westward. New roads and technology encouraged their movement. A traditional westward route led by horse or stagecoach over the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh, at the headwaters of the Ohio River, from which the Mississippi Valley became accessible by boat. It could take many weeks to float with the current to New Orleans, and it was challenging to return, butin September 1811, associates of Robert Fulton completed a steamboat at Pittsburgh and sent it downriver and back again. Trade was increasing on many rivers, such as the Cumberland, on the banks of which Andrew Jackson for years operated a store offering supplies such asbutcher knives, cotton hoes, coffee, “Segars,” chocolate, brimstone, and pink ladies’ hats. The store was near the Hermitage, the farm he bought in 1804, which would remain his home and headquarters for the rest of his life. On the cash-poor frontier,farmers often paid Jackson with cotton, which he shipped downriver toward New Orleans and the wider