"John
Sevier is a good man"--so declared the Cherokee, Old Tassel,
making himself the spokesman of history. Sevier had survived his
old friend, co-founder with him of Watauga, by one year. James
Robertson had died in 1814 at the age of seventy-two, among the
Chickasaws, and his body, like that of his fellow pioneer, was
buried in an Indian town and lay there until 1825, when it was
removed to Nashville.
What of the red tribes who had fought these great pioneers for
the wide land of the Old Southwest and who in the end had
received their dust and treasured it with honor in the little
soil remaining to them? Always the new boundary lines drew closer
in, and the red men's foothold narrowed before the pushing tread
of the whites. The day came soon when there was no longer room
for them in the land of their fathers. But far off across the
great river there was a land the white men did not covet yet.
Thither at last the tribes--Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and
Creek--took their way. With wives and children, maids and youths,
the old and the young, with all their goods, their cattle and
horses, in the company of a regiment of American troops,
they--like the white men who had superseded them--turned
westward. In their faces also was the red color of the west, but
not newly there.
Pages:
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262