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caused in more enlightened parts of the country carried their appeal to the United States Supreme Court. They were released after serving two years. They returned to their homes to find that they had been confiscated. The men were then run out of the state.
    In Savannah, at the customshouse, the Reverend Mackenzie had sworn his oath of allegiance to the constitution of the state of Georgia, which oath was required of all white people wishing to reside in the Cherokee territory. He was one of many off his boat to swear their oaths, for that territory was a land of opportunity. The official who administered the oath drew the Reverend Mackenzie’s particular attention to that provision of the constitution relating to which color of people might assemble for worship and which might not. His aim was to stay within the law by ministering the rites of the church to his red parishioners singly and in pairs, and meanwhile to convert his white congregation to a spirit of brotherly love for their red neighbors. His dread was that, in their determination to brutalize the Cherokees and to make their lives so wretched they would leave of their own accord, the authorities might tighten the law to forbid him to minister to them in any numbers at all.
    Now here he was in this literally godforsaken place.
    But where were the Indians?
    Where were the wigwams and the tepees, the feathered headdresses, the colorful costumes? Where were the beaded moccasins, the bareback pinto ponies? Where were the queues of braided hair, the tattooed faces? Where were the Indians?
    What he was seeing, the Reverend Mackenzie relates in the first of those letters home of his (to be published by a small Indian-oriented press, long after he had gone to his reward, under the title The Missionary in Spite of Himself ), was a settlement different from the ones he had passed through in getting there only in being newer, recently prosperous, now all but deserted. There was a former church—the one he was to make his own—now a stable. There was a former school—now boarded up. There was a grocer, a dry-goods merchant, a chemist, even a printshop—the latter now shut down. Large white clapboard houses sat back from the streets on spacious lots. No grisly hanks of human hair hung drying on poles in the gardens of the houses. There were no naked dark-skinned children at play, rather there were fair little girls with golden curls in pinafores and buckle shoes, towheaded little boys more decently dressed than the urchins of the streets of Edinburgh. As for the townspeople, they were an outpost of Scotsmen like himself. Not Raindancer, nor Black Bear, not White-man-killer, but McIntosh, Dinsmore, Ferguson, Duncan, Ross, Stuart, Cameron were their names. Where were the Indians? Had he come just too late? Had they tired at last of their long, losing struggle, capitulated and gone west?
    The Reverend Mackenzie’s first pastoral duty in his new post, just days after taking it up, was the baptism of a child. Not a babe in arms but a boy of twelve or thereabouts. In part because this was the first person he had baptized in the New World, in part because of later developments, he would take a lasting interest in the boy—lasting at least for as long as events allowed. It is in his letter relating their meeting that my paternal great-grandfather, Amos, my namesake, the founder of our branch of Texas Smiths, makes his first appearance. However, at the time Smith was not his name—not even one of his several names.
    He was a short, slender boy, a sandy-haired, fair-skinned, freckle-faced, blue-eyed boy (that was the sequence in which his features were revealed to Mrs. Mackenzie as she opened the upper half of the back door of the parsonage to him and he raised his head), and he was a painfully shy boy—“backward” was the word she resorted to. He had looked at her as if she were the first of her sex he had ever laid eyes on, and when she