Thirteen Moons (23 page)

I WENT TO
the White House with a letter of introduction from Calhoun, who warned that it might have more the opposite effect since a rift had developed between him and Jackson after they won the election of ’28 and Calhoun had become Jackson’s vice president and then resigned in a quarrel over the issue of nullification, there being no stronger supporter of states’ rights than Calhoun.

But you couldn’t say Jackson wasn’t warned about the temperament of his second in command, for Calhoun had also fallen out similarly when he was vice president the first time under Quincy Adams. Calhoun’s nature demanded that he buck against anybody who sat above him, and yet he never managed to get himself all the way on top. It was more than clear to everyone in Washington that Calhoun and Jackson, though both old men, were still violent as fighting cocks at their cores and would very much like to kill each other. So it was a wonder to me that they didn’t find themselves out of an early morning by the misty Potomac squaring off in a pistol duel. And it is a shame they didn’t, for they would have put Burr and Hamilton in the shade as a piece of history.

Calhoun’s letter in pocket, I walked up to the White House, past the paddock where Jackson’s horse stood switching flies and dozing, and on through the door. I searched down long corridors for someone to whom I might present the letter. Finally I opened a door and found the old murderer himself in his office, holding forth to a small gang of cronies, most of them young men about my age. Jackson was stretched out on a chaise, alternately talking and sucking on a pastille. The pleated skin around his mouth opened and closed rhythmically as a bellows. Flattering portraits notwithstanding, Jackson looked older than he was, sixty-five or thereabouts. He had indeed the pointed face, tiny blank eyes, and sharp snapping teeth of a possum. He blinked his little vicious dark eyes beneath his upreaching, pyrotechnic white hair and registered scant interest in me beyond an assessment of how difficult I might be to kill in a formal pistol duel or an impromptu tavern knife fight, both of which he had successfully fought in his youth and middle age.

When I presented the letter and brought up my business—launching quickly into the details of citizenship and ownership of land—the look in Jackson’s eyes suggested he might have a killing or two left in him. But all he did was raise one hand and give a dismissive gesture in my direction and then begin talking around his pastille about his new boots. He wiggled his feet down at the bottom of the chaise to highlight them. His opinion was, the new boots were close to the finest he had ever worn. Whereupon all the attending young men, in turn, commented favorably on their every superlative feature, from heels to lacing. I judged the heels too high to be strictly proper for a man but kept that opinion to myself and occupied my mind, during the round of praise from the cronies, in looking at Jackson’s head and thinking that, between them, Jackson and Calhoun had the two most alarming manes of hair I had ever seen on white men. I qualified the judgment in that way because as a boy I knew a few old Indian warriors who still sported coifs from their youth way back in the previous century, styles that involved plucking half one’s head with mussel-shell tweezers and letting the other half grow long, festooning random braided locks with colored beads and silver fobs and making part or all of the remainder elevate in spikes with the assistance of bear grease. But in a contest of extravagant hair just among white men, Jackson and Calhoun would have split the prize. They hated each other and yet continued to share their lofty hairstyles, which struck me as having all the features of placing exploding possums on their heads. Of course, they were both from South Carolina and thus given to strange enthusiasms.

WHEN THE LEADERS
of the Cherokee, Chief Ross and Major Ridge, came up to Washington City to lobby against removal, they were a source of deep racial confusion to those in power. Chief Ross, the head man for the whole Nation, was as white as any congressman. And Major Ridge, though dark-skinned, dressed somewhat better than all but the richest senators and carried himself with an arrogant attitude that created a suspicion that he was of superior intelligence. Both men were wealthy plantation owners and almost equally powerful within the Nation, which was a new and uncertain country set inside America like a reflection in an imperfect mirror. I had been to New Echota many times and was never sure whether it represented a grand experiment or a pathetically inept confidence game.

Chief Ross had more Scots blood than anything else—seven-eighths majority of it, in fact. He was a short man who spoke Cherokee so poorly that he would not attempt it in public, nor could he even read the syllabary. But he was a sharp and close trader in business and politics, and a prideful little man who parted his hair just above his left ear and carried the long remainder up and over to the opposing ear in an attempt to cover the barren ground of his bald pate. He used a fragrant pomade, and the comb tracks were straight as bean rows traversing his scalp.

Major Ridge, who had been given his rank by Jackson back in the Creek War, had his boys with him, both approximately my age. Young Ridge was the only son, and the other was a nephew, Elias Boudinot, who had been born Buck Watie but had decided to take a name that better suited him. Boudinot and young Ridge featured themselves to be darkly Byronic figures, an image countless young men—myself included—held of themselves.

Looking back upon my first meeting with them in the social room of the Queen, it seems like we should have gotten along. For some now unaccountable reason specific to young men, we didn’t. I knew all about them, though, for they were somewhat famous. Major Ridge had sent them to Connecticut for their educations, and when they could read Latin and write fluently in every verse form common to the English language, they came back to the Nation dressed to the teeth in the latest fashion, riding in matched cabriolets drawn by matching teams, and married to matching white wives, all four of them unimaginably young and burning to make progressive reforms in every department of life you could name. Education, child-rearing, government, literature, journalism, cuisine. Upon arrival in the Nation, the two young Yankee brides were reported to look pale and stunned but game for the new lives they’d chosen with their brilliant and exotic new husbands.

The people of the North are very open-minded and so much more advanced than we are. All they did to one of the girls when it became known that she intended to marry an Indian was burn her in effigy on the main street and chime all the church bells of the town hourly throughout the night. She was sixteen or seventeen, somewhere in there. The next morning, which was a Sunday, she got up and dressed in her best clothes and walked alone straight through town, past the grey and still-smoking ashes of her pyre and into the church, where she sat on the front pew with her face set and let the congregation all glare hatred at the back of her head for an hour. She left that afternoon to meet Boudinot nearby and be surreptitiously married by a sympathetic preacher, and afterward they set out south with young Ridge and his equally stunned bride.

It took them the better part of two months to make the journey back to the Nation, because they paused on the way in New York City to watch a few plays and in Washington City to go to parties attended by members of both houses of Congress.

I don’t know what the girls were expecting when they reached the young gentlemen’s ancestral home. Wigwams and feather headdresses, maybe. What they found on arrival was the plantation house of Ridge’s family, hundreds of acres with slaves working vast fields of cotton and tobacco, moving down the rows like the shadow of storm clouds settling over the land. And inside the big house, white tablecloths and silver and china in the dining room. Presided over by a stout big-haired patriarch who went by the title of major and wore ruffled shirts and waistcoats and anything else white men were wearing in America.

All of which is to say that for the Government, Chief Ross and the Ridges were unsatisfactory Indians and hard to deal with. Silver trinkets and talk of the Great White Father got nowhere with them.

Though Ross and Ridge shared the same goal, the survival of the Nation, they hated each other more than Calhoun and Jackson did. Somewhere deep in their minds, they both imagined a future in which the Nation would become a state, a new star on the striped banner. Governor Ross or Governor Ridge living in a new executive mansion.

When their delegations arrived, I half expected Featherstone to be among them, but he was not. Lobbying must have seemed a little too much like real work, though I could have set him straight on that fear.

Both Ross and Ridge viewed me with a great deal of wariness, since I represented Indians living outside the Nation, and when I tried to suggest we join ranks in our efforts, each man let me know I was on my own and warned me not to muddy their waters with my little problems. Nevertheless, Ridge and I drank together some nights in the Queen and got along just fine when we were not talking business. But I made Ross nervous because I spoke Cherokee with a degree of polish, while Ross could barely comment on the weather, and even that topic was limited to the current moment, since the chief ’s understanding of his people’s language was limited to the present tense.

I MET CROCKETT
through the agency of Calhoun. Crockett was then at the height of his fame, at least pre-posthumously. When I knew him, he was a figure of folklore; it took the Alamo to elevate him all the way to myth.

It was considerably more difficult to arrange a meeting with Crockett than with the president. In preparation, I bought
Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett
and went to a coffeehouse and settled in to read. Well, the story just got the more unbelievable the farther I proceeded. And then I reached this line:
Here roamed the red men of the forest, free as the breezes which fanned their raven locks.
I put the book down and tried not to let it color my view of the man, for Crockett had no say in its production. Writers can tell any lie that leaps into their heads.

I had at least gotten far enough to learn that Crockett and I held in common the experience of being bound boys, though in Crockett’s case he had violated the pact his father made by running away from his new master, a hog drover, on their first journey together. Boy Crockett had dared either man—master or father—to try enforcing the contract. He backed them down. At least that’s the story the book told. And for me, it was as Romantic as all of Byron’s poetry put together.

Our first meeting was in his office in the Capitol and we got along like equals, even though Crockett was old enough to be my natural daddy. He soon began coming around the Indian Queen late afternoons for a drink and a visit. He was going through a spell of malaria about then. His color was like wood ash, and his eyes were dark and swollen below the underlids, and he was sheened with sweat even in the cool of evening. Like anybody else of good sense, when he stayed up all night drinking, he favored Scotch whisky of the highest quality, as long as somebody else was buying. He was a hard man to keep up with for more than a day or two, but I liked him and hated to miss good and useful entertainment. So I did my best, which meant showing up to listen night after night and providing a bottle of Macallan’s no more than once a week, for to do so more often would look needy and also wreak entire havoc on my wallet. One useful thing I learned from Crockett on those nights was to alternate my Scotch with glasses of chilled mineral water, preferably from the mountains of Virginia.

THOSE DAYS,
it was hard to be noted as a character in Washington, what with Crockett strutting and flashing about town being the wild frontiersman. I liked him a great deal but I had no desire to become Davy Crockett’s understudy, his sidekick, his young buddy. However, I was around him enough to think that
being
Crockett in those days would have been pretty fine. Crockett had the attention of everyone. When he entered a room, it felt like the candles would all flicker out from the breeze created when every head suddenly turned his way. Even in a great pressing party crowd, everyone knew exactly where Crockett was at all times. If he went outside to piss, word of it spread from one end of a ballroom to the other before he could button up and get back indoors. What made me truly like Crockett was noting, in moments of a public nature, a sad discontinuity between the upcurve of his smiling mouth and the bleak deadness of his eyes. And also that Crockett knew it to be a flaw in his public image but could do nothing to correct it other than, when outdoors, to cock his hat so that it rode low on his brow, its brim casting deep shade to the bridge of his nose.

One day, drinking in the lounge of the Queen, Crockett noted that there had been a withering attack on him in one of the morning papers. I asked if that sort of thing bothered him, for back then it would have bothered me a great deal. Crockett said, Oh, I’m a big target and easy to hit, so there’s no honor in it. Every newspaper jackass with a pen and half an hour of unclaimed time gets to take a shot.