Occoneechee, the Maid of the Mystic Lake

by Robert Frank Jarrett

For the terrors which followed the battle of Horseshoe Bend, we have only to refer to history to be able to ascertain the facts concerning the bloody atrocities which were perpetrated upon an oppressed people. Then came the end, which occurred in the year 1838, which culminated in the removal of the band to the Indian Territory, which is now called Oklahoma, (a Choctaw word meaning red people, Okla, people; homa, red).

This removal was the most luckless and recreant of all the abuses that had been heaped upon the brave but helpless band of Cherokee.

Junaluska, who witnessed the removal, but was permitted to remain with the residue, remarked that had he known that General Jackson (who became President), would have removed the Cherokee in such a brutal manner, he would have killed him at the battle of Horseshoe Bend.

The history of the removal of the Cherokee, as told by James Mooney of the Department of American Ethnology, gleaned by him from eye witnesses and actors in the tragedy, may well exceed in weight of grief and pathos any other act in American history. Even the much sung song of the exile of the Arcadians falls far behind it in the sum of death and misery.

Under General Winfield Scott, an army of 5,000 volunteers and regular troops were concentrated in the Cherokee country, and by instruction from Washington, D. C., he was directed and gave orders to soldiers to gather all Indians to the various stockades, which had been previously prepared for their reception. From these posts, squads of soldiers were sent to search out, with rifle and bayonet, every small cabin which could be found within the ramifications and deep recesses of the great Appalachian range of mountains, and bring to the forts every man, woman and child to be found within the gates of the granite hills.

Families, while sitting peacefully at the noon-day meal; others while performing the matutinal ablution, were suddenly startled by the gleam of bayonets and with blows, curses and oaths from the men called soldiers, the Indians were driven like cattle from their humble homes down the rugged mountain paths, and their houses in many cases were burned and their small possessions destroyed, as the brave but defenceless Cherokee people looked on with that wonderful stoicism which no other race of men ever possessed.

Men were seized in the fields, women torn from the wheel and the distaff, and children frightened from the pleasures of play. The vandals who followed in the wake of the soldiery, looting and pillaging, burning and destroying, yet calling themselves civilized Christians, were such a band of outlaws as is seldom seen even among the most savage and barbaric races.

Even Indian graves were robbed of the silver pendants and other valuables which had been deposited with the dead. Women who were not able to go, were actually forced at the point of a bayonet to march with the same speed as men.

Upon one occasion the soldiers surrounded the house of an old Christian patriot, who when informed as to what was to take place, called his wife, children and grandchildren around him, kneeling down among them offered a last prayer in the sanctuary of his home, in his native tongue, while the soldiers stood astonished, looking on in silence.

When his devotions were finished, he arose, bade the household follow him, and he led them into exile, with that becoming Christian fortitude which is seldom witnessed among men.