United States or Anguilla ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The French in the South, as has been said, had always used every art to detach the Cherokees from the British interest, and even now the men who had abandoned Fort Duquesne, escaping down the Ohio River, were sending emissaries up the Tsullakee, to the Lower Towns, there finding fruitful soil in which to sow the seeds of dissension against the English.
This was his world, and these his standards the Cherokees and the Chickasaws! The boy even ventured on censorship in his turn. "You say 'Cherokees' and 'Chickasaws' when you speak of the Tsullakee and the Chickasaw; why don't you then say the English-es and the French-es?" For the plural designation of these tribes was a colonial invention.
And so in company with a French hunter in a canoe, Hamish went down the long reaches of the Tsullakee River, coming after many days to their destination, to find only disappointment and a gnawing doubt, and a strange, palsying numbness of despair.
Lured by a vague rumor expressed among the party that those he sought had been removed to a remote Indian town on the Tsullakee River, Hamish broke away from Monsieur Galette, despite all remonstrances, to seek those he loved in the further west if slaves, as Monsieur Galette suggested, he would rather share their slavery than without them enjoy the freedom of the king.
Hamish remembered these names long after they were forgotten by others, and the re-christened Clinch and Holston and French Broad flowed as fairly with their uncouth modern nomenclature as when they were identified by as liquid musical syllables as the lapsing of their own currents; for never did he lose the impression of this night; never faded the mental picture of the Cherokee chief, the war-paint, vermilion and black and white, on his face as he sat before the fire, the waving of the eagle-feathers on his tufted scalp-lock blotting out half the dull-blue landscape below, which had the first hour of the night upon it, and the moon, blooming like a lily, with a fair white chalice reflected in the dark deeps of the Tsullakee River.
And so down and down the Tsullakee River he went, and after the junction of the great tributary with the Ohio, he plied his paddle against the strong current and with the French hunter came into the placid waters of the beautiful Sewanee, or Cumberland, flouted by the north wind, his way winding for many miles in densest wintry solitudes.
And who were they? And whence did they come? They were always here, said Willinawaugh. So said all the Cherokees. They were always here. And whither did this unknown people go? The Indian shook his head, the flicker of the fire on his painted face. They were gone, he said, when the Tsullakee came. Long gone long gone! And alas, what was their fate?
Word Of The Day