PAGE 9
A Victor At Chungke
by
Otasite listened throughout with the courteous air of deliberation which his Indian training required him to accord to any discourse, without interruption, however unwelcome or trivial it might be esteemed. Then, smiling slowly, he shook his head.
“You cannot be serious,” he said. “It would break old Colannah’s heart, who has been like a father to me.”
Abram Varney too had the British bulldog tenacity. “What will you do, then,” he asked slowly and significantly, “when Colannah takes up arms against the British government? Will you fight men of your own blood?”
He was reinforced in this argument by the habit of thought of the Indians–the absolute absence of tribal dissensions, of internecine strife, so marked among the Cherokees: here no man’s hand was lifted against his brother.
Jan Queetlee palpably winced. Come what might, he could never fight for the Cherokees against the British–his father’s people, his mother’s people–no more than he could fight for the British against his adopted tribe–the Cherokee–and he the “Man-killer!”
“They will fight each other,” said Varney weightily, “and the day is not far–the day is not far!”
For in 1753 the cumulative discontents of the tribe were near the crisis, earnestly fostered by the French on the western boundaries, that vast domain then known as Louisiana, toward whose siren voice the Cherokees had ever lent a willing ear. The building by the British government, two or three years later, of those great defensive works, Fort Prince George and Fort Loudon, situated respectively at the eastern and western extremities of the Cherokee territory, mounted with cannon and garrisoned by British forces, served to hold them in check and quieted them for a time, but only for a time. Jan Queetlee, by reason of his close association with the chiefs, knew far more than Varney dreamed of the bitterness roused in the hearts of the Indians by friction with the government, the aggressions of the individual colonist, the infringements of their privileges in the treaty, and in opposition the influence of the ever seductive suavity of the French.
As with a sudden hurt, Jan Queetlee cried out with a poignant voice against the government and its patent unfaith, striking his clinched fist so heavily on the head of a keg of powder that the stout fibres of the wood burst beneath the passionate blow, and in a moment he was covered with the flying particles of the black dust. Realizing the possibility of an explosion should a candle or a pipe be lighted here, Varney did not wait for the return of one of the brawny packmen to remove the keg to a cave beneath the trading-house, which he utilized for storage as a cellar, but addressed himself to the job. Jan Queetlee silently assisted, his face darker, more lowering with the thought in his mind than with the smears of the powder.
Varney remembered this afterward, and that he himself, diverted by the accident from the trend of his argument, had launched out in a tirade against the government as they worked together, the young Briton’s energy, industry, and persistence so at variance with the aspect of his tufted topknot of feathers on his auburn curls, and the big blue warrior’s marks on his broad white chest. For Varney too had his grievances against the powers that were; but his woes were personal. He vehemently condemned the reconciliation which the government had effected between the Muscogees and the Cherokees, for although there were more deerskins to be had for export when the Indian hunters were at pacific leisure, Varney had considered the recent war between these tribes an admirable vent for gunpowder and its profitable sale; and since the savages must always be killing, it was manifestly best for all concerned that they should kill each other. He could not sufficiently deride the happy illustration which Governor Glen had given them (in his fatuity, Varney thought) of the values of peace and concord. In the presence of the two delegations the mediating Governor had taken an arrow and shown them with what ease it could be broken; then how impossible he found it to break a quiverful of arrows, thus demonstrating the strength in union. Varney argued that the Indians would readily perceive a further application of the principle and turn it to account, combining against the colonists. In the same spirit he animadverted upon a monopoly from which he was excluded in common with the traders in general, and which had been granted to a mercantile company seeking to establish posts among the Choctaws. The enterprise, although favored by the government, obviously because, undertaken on a scale of phenomenal magnitude, it promised to dislodge the French and their long-established trade among the Choctaws, and bring that powerful tribe to a British allegiance, had finally proved a failure; and with a bitter joy in this fact he alternately contemned and pitied the government, because it could not wrest this valuable opportunity from the iron grasp of the “Mississippi Louisianians.” He had, too, a censorious word for the French commercially–called them “peddlers,” celebrated their deceitful wiles, underrated the quality of their cloths, and inconsistently berated them for their low prices, finding a logical parity in all these matters in the tenets of their religion, which they had so vainly and so zealously sought to instill into the unreceptive hearts of the unimpressionable Choctaw.[3]