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139 CHAPTER 8 Attakullakulla Late in November of 1774, “Two Indian men and a woman,”1 listened to an organ played in the Moravian town of Bethabara near presentday Salem, North Carolina. The sweet singing both entranced and troubled the listening Cherokee, and the lid had to be taken off to prove no child was trapped within, making the sounds; the Cherokee took many scalps both white and Indian and burned a prisoner now and then, but they, like all Indians, loved children, and never in their raising of them found necessary the beatings the white man used. The smaller of the Indian men may have smiled indulgently at the worries of his wife, the listening woman. He, from long association with the white man, knew the music was not that of a singing child. He had been delighted with the music of “ye spinnet”2 in a Virginia mansion more than twenty years before, and in the intervening years had had many opportunities to hear an organ. This was Attakullakulla or the Little Carpenter, “the most celebrated and influential Indian among all the tribes then known,” a half or vice chief of the Cherokee, and though renowned as a warrior his especial field was diplomacy. “Like as a carpenter could make every notch and joint fit in wood, so he could bring all his views to fill and fit their places in the political machinery of the Nation.”3 He weighed only around 145 pounds, a “lean and light habited man,” but “vary straight and square built,” of a fine personal appearance and with a gracious and cheerful smile.4 He spoke English perfectly, and had adopted the white man’s greeting of shaking hands.5 Still, he was very much a Cherokee with two large scores on each cheek, and his ears cut and so heavily hung with silver they reached almost to his shoulders. Attakullakulla was at this time around sixty years old. His greatgrandfathers would have been among the strong-legged braves who traveled hundreds of miles on the hunt and the warpath with Gabriel Arthur a 140| Chapter 8 hundred years before. Even then his people had been losing the old ways and leaning more and more on the goods of the white man. Once when traders and their goods were scarce Attakullakulla, proud chief though he was, had gone begging to Governor Glen of South Carolina: “It was not from fear that I came here. . . . the Overhills People, being very poor and in straights for Goods, compelled me to go.” But, want goods as he did, Attakullakulla could not forbear to add, “Do what we may the white people will cheat us in Weights and Measures. What is it a Trader cannot do? Some of the white people borrowed my yard-stick and cut it shorter, for which I am blamed.”6 He would have been but a papoose on his mother’s back when in 1715 French traders reached Chota after many weeks of the weary labor of pushing and pulling and poling their goods-laden boats up the Tennessee. The chiefs had let them build a scaffold in the town and there they had stood to display their goods and make orations; doubtlessly they used many fine words about brothers and friendship and peace, for through friendship with the Cherokee lay France’s hopes for control of the middle Mississippi Valley. The Cherokee had listened in polite silence, for they were ever a polite people. It is not recorded that they were rude when they sprang up, cut off the heads of the French traders, and threw their bodies into the river.7 Very different from the treatment they had given Gabriel Arthur, and more different still from the homage paid Sir Alexander Cuming, young Scotch Baronet and businessman, who had in “one of the most strangely romantic incidents in American history,” gained Cherokee loyalty for England as well as a trade agreement. History has not dealt kindly with Sir Alexander Cuming. Early, he lost favor with men in high places, but Attakullakulla must have remembered that strange and daring man with pleasure. Cuming had as a newcomer in Charles Town learned of England’s wish but seeming inability to win the Cherokee, then, in 1730, known mostly through their white traders. No one sent him to the Overhill towns on the Tennessee, or told him how to treat with the Cherokee chiefs, a ceremonious and ticklish business. Ludovick Grant and other...

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