Chapter 3: Cane Hill

 

     "Woa Marty," Benjamin commands his favorite quarter horse with a little pull on the reins as they approach the spinning mill wheel of the Cane Hill trading post. "What in tarnation?"

"Soldiers taking them dirty Indians to Oklahoma," a teenager calls up in the steady rain as he offers to hobble the sorrel gelding.

"You'd be a might worse off herded five-hundred miles," Benny mumbles as he slips in the mud while swinging off the young horse named for President Martin Van Buren. 

"Still sir," the boy calls back leading the skittish animal to a long hitching post beside a nibbled down canebrake on the high prairie of the Springfield plateau west of the Ozarks. "Cherokee don't belong out here."

     That was precisely the problem for the eastern tribes being displaced west since the Indian Removal Act of 1830 - not belonging anywhere. Van Buren had been elected in 1836 and continued the removal policies of his Democratic predecessor Andrew Jackson. The prairie hills set aside for the Cherokee in the northeast corner of Oklahoma Territory were still shared bison hunting grounds for Apache, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, and Osage peoples. 

     A more immediate issue for those already on what would become known as the Trail of Tears was the privation that a long foot journey to nowhere engendered. Both the starving old and very young succumbed to the pneumonia, measles, and typhoid diarrhea that quickly spread through huddled campsites. An even more virulent, if less age-discriminant, European disease had arrived by the time the Cherokee were in the Ozarks. 

     "Seeing as I can't read the small print, would you be so kind?" Benjamin asks a shriveled man staring up at a government flyer posted on the log wall at the storefront.

"Well now young fellow," the grey-maned elder begins with a wry laugh that breaks into a dry cough. "It says to not do what you're doing, fraternizing with the prisoners."

"Take these," proffers Benny holding out a burlap sack and a glass jar of clear liquid and nodding toward clumps of people squatting beside the creek. "Corndodgers for the young'uns and the recipe for what ails the rest of you."

"Plenty of firewater traders follow us," the pock-marked old man rasps between coughs, accepting the food and ignoring the jar.