THE EXPLOIT
OF
CHOOLAH, THE CHICKASAW
The victorious campaign which Lieutenant-Colonel James Grant conducted in the Cherokee country in the summer of 1761, and which redounded so greatly to the credit of the courage and endurance of the expeditionary force, British regulars and South Carolina provincials, is like many other human events in presenting to the casual observation only an harmonious whole, while it is made up of a thousand little jagged bits of varied incident inconsistent and irregular, and with no single element in common but the attraction of cohesion to amalgamate the mosaic.
Perhaps no two men in the command saw alike the peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains hovering elusively on the horizon, now purple and ominous among the storm clouds, for the rain fell persistently; now distant, blue, transiently sun-flooded, and with the prismatic splendors of the rainbow spanning in successive arches the abysses from dome to dome, and growing ever fainter and fainter in duplication far away. Perhaps no two men revived similar impressions as they recognized various localities from the South Carolina coast to the Indian town of Etchoee, near the Little Tennessee River, for many of them had traversed hundreds of miles of these wild fastnesses the previous year, when Colonel Montgomery, now returned to England, had led an aggressive expedition against the Cherokees. Certain it is, the accounts of their experiences are many and varied—only in all the character of their terrible enemy, the powerful and warlike Cherokee, stands out as incontrovertible as eternity, as immutable as Fate. Hence there were no stragglers, no deserters. In a compact body, while the rain fell, and the torrents swelled the streams till the fords became almost impracticable, the little army, as with a single impulse, pressed stanchly on through the mist-filled, sodden avenues of the primeval woods. To be out of sight for an instant of that long, thin column of soldiers risked far more than death—capture, torture, the flame, the knife, all the extremity of anguish that the ingenuity of savage malice could devise and human flesh endure. But although day by day the thunder cracked among the branches of the dripping trees and reverberated from the rocks of the craggy defiles, and keen swift blades of lightning at short intervals thrust through the lowering clouds, almost always near sunset long level lines of burnished golden beams began to glance through the wild woodland ways; a mocking-bird would burst into song from out the dense coverts of the laurel on the slope of a mountain hard by; the sky would show blue overhead, and glimmer red through the low-hanging boughs toward the west; and the troops would pitch their tents under the restored peace of the elements and the placid white stars.
A jolly camp it must have been. Stories of it have come down to this day—of its songs, loud, hilarious, patriotic, doubtless rudely musical; of its wild pranks, of that boyish and jocose kind denominated by sober and unsympathetic elders, “horse-play”; of the intense delight experienced by the savage allies, the Chickasaws, who participated in the campaign, in witnessing the dances of the young Highlanders—how “their sprightly manner in this exercise,” and athletic grace appealed to the Indians; how the sound of the bag-pipes thrilled them; how they admired that ancient martial garb, the kilt and plaid.
No admiration, however extravagant of Scotch customs, character, or appearance, seemed excessive in the eyes of Lieutenant-Colonel James Grant, so readily did his haughty, patriotic pride acquiesce in it, and the Indian’s evident appreciation of the national superiority of the Scotch to all other races of men duly served to enhance his opinion of the mental acumen of the Chickasaws. This homage, however, failed to mollify or modify the estimate of the noble redman already formed by a certain subaltern, Lieutenant Ronald MacDonnell.
“The Lord made him an Indian—and an Indian he will remain,” he would remark sagely.
The policy of the British government to utilize in its armies the martial strength of semi-savage dependencies, elsewhere so conspicuously exploited, was never successful with these Indians save as the tribes might fight in predatory bands in their own wild way, although much effort was made looking toward regular enlistments. And, in fact, the futility of all endeavors to reduce the savage to a reasonable conformity to the militarism of the camp, to inculcate the details of the drill, a sense of the authority of officers, the obligations of out-posts, the heinousness of “running the guard,” the necessity of submitting to the prescribed punishments and penalties for disobedience of orders,—all rendered this ethnographic saw so marvelously apt, that it seemed endowed with more wisdom than Ronald MacDonnell was popularly supposed to possess. But such logic as he could muster operated within contracted limits. If the Lord had not fitted a man to be a soldier, why—there Ronald MacDonnell’s extremest flights of speculation paused.
In the scheme of his narrow-minded Cosmos the human creature was represented by two simple species: unimportant, unindividualized man in general, and that race of exalted beings known as soldiers. He was a good drill, and with the instinct of a born disciplinarian in his survey, he would often watch the Chickasaws with this question in his mind,—sometimes when they were on the march, and their endurance, their activity, the admirable proportions of their bodies, their free and vigorous gait were in evidence; sometimes in the swift efficiency of their scouting parties when their strategy and courage and wily caution were most marked; sometimes in the relaxations of the camp when their keen responsive interest in the quirks and quips of the soldier at play attested their mental receptivity and plastic impressibility. Their gayety seemed a docile, mundane, civilized sort of mirth when they would stand around in the ring with the other soldiers to watch the agile Highlanders in the inspiring martial posturing of the sword dance, with their fluttering kilts and glittering blades, their free gestures,their long, sinewy, bounding steps, as of creatures of no weight, while the bag-pipes skirled, and the great campfire flared, and the light and shadows fluctuated in the dense primeval woods, half revealing, half concealing the lines of tents, of picketed horses, of stacks of arms, of other flaring camp-fires—even the pastoral suggestion in the distance of the horned heads of the beef-herd. But whatever the place or scene, Ronald MacDonnell’s conclusion was essentially the same. “The Lord made him an Indian,” he would say, with an air of absolute finality.
He was a man of few words,—of few ideas; these were strictly military and of an appreciated value. He was considered a promising young officer, and was often detailed to important and hazardous duty. And if he had naught to say at mess, and seldom could perceive a joke unless of a phenomenal pertinence and brilliancy, broadly aflare so to speak under his nose, he was yet a boon companion, and could hold his own like a Scotchman when many a brighter man was under the table. He had a certain stanch, unquestioning sense of duty and loyalty, and manifested an unchangeable partisanship in his friendship, of a silent and undemonstrative order, that caused his somewhat exaggerated view of his own dignity to be respected, for it was intuitively felt that his personal antagonism would be of the same tenacious, unreasoning, requiting quality, and should not be needlessly roused. He was still very young, although he had seen much service. He was tall and stalwart; he had the large, raw-boned look which is usually considered characteristic of the Scotch build, and was of great muscular strength, but carrying not one ounce of superfluous flesh. Light-colored hair, almost flaxen, indeed, with a strong tendency to curl in the shorter locks that lay in tendrils on his forehead, clear, contemplative blue eyes, a fixed look of strength, of reserves of unfailing firmness about the well-cut lips, a good brick-red flush acquired from many and many a day of marching in the wind, and the rain, and the sun—this is the impression one may take from his portrait. He could be as noisy and boisterously gay as the other young officers, but somehow his hilarity was of a physical sort, as of the sheer joy of living, and moving, and being so strong. One might wonder what impressions he received in the long term of his service in Canada and the Colonies—these strange new lands so alien to all his earlier experience. One might doubt if he saw how fair of face was this most lovely of regions, the Cherokee country; if the primeval forests, the splendid tangles of blooming rhododendron, the crystal-clear, rock-bound rivers were asserted in his consciousness otherwise than as the technical “obstacle” for troops on the march. As to the imposing muster of limitless ranks of mountains surrounding the little army on every side, they did not remind him of the hills of Scotland, as the sheer sense of great heights and wild ravines and flashing cataracts suggested reminiscences to the others. “There is no gorse,” he remarked of these august ranges, with their rich growths of gigantic forest trees, as if from the beginning of the earliest eras of dry land,—and the mess called him “Gorse” until the incident was forgotten.