Chapter 10
S THE IRISH VESSEL SAILED INTO THE MORNING DAWN for the Carolina's, Jakiel MacGwyre waved goodbye to his family. Of course they couldn’t see him that distance away, but from his advantage point atop Breed’s Hill, he had a clear view of Boston’s harbor and all the British ships surrounding the peninsula. When they were out of sight he hastened back to the MacDougal home in Dorchester, and was greeted with sighs of relief by his kinfolk.
"Doesn’t surprise me in the least, young man, but your parents are worried sick,” his uncle spoke. “What makes you do a fool thing like that anyway?’
Jakiel spoke up and to the point, “I’m joining the Patriots to fight the lobster backs.”
“You are, are you laddie? Well I guess our army could use a good man like you, and maybe, in three or four years, you’ll be just the man we summon.”
“I’m sixteen years old,” he lied, “as old as my father when he married mother. Besides, I can shoot as straight as any man twice my age.”
“Can you son? Well you may find that your aim begins to wander when a regiment of Redcoats is shooting back at you.”
“That’s the price of freedom,” he retorted, “that’s what you told Father.”
“Freedom, sure, that’s an honourable goal for all men, but what makes you feel that you will be any more free than you are now?
Jakiel thought for a moment and then blurted out, “Because it is my life, and I should be able to do as I please - and without having to ask anyone’s permission - not the King, nor his Court, not the Pope or his Bishops.”
“And what makes you think that the King and the Pope are quite willing to let you have your precious freedom here in America sonny boy.”
“Let ‘em come over here and take it from me,” he said.
“And when they do just that, then what are you going to do?”
“I’ll fight them to my dying breath.”
“Well, well, indeed. Brave words spoken by a brave heart. Let’s just suppose for now, however, we just see how well you write - your parents should be sent a letter posthaste - and no more of this business about fighting the King, we don’t want to scare them any more than they are already. Take up that quill and ink, my young Patriot, there should be some paper in the bureau there.”The small band of Cherokee warriors encamped near the headwaters of the Big Pigeon River, were armed by the British with hatchets, guns, and ammunition and regularly raided the backwood settlements of pioneers in the western Carolina's and Georgia. Led by their war chief Oconastota, they were joined by Tory militia loyal to the King when pillaging piedmont towns in central North and South Carolina.
In order to preserve the peace, the Cherokee had ceded all of Virginia and the Carolina's east of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the colonists. The royal proclamation of 1763 prohibiting the further expansion of settlements west of the Appalachian Divide were ignored by rich and politically powerful land speculators, and ancestral lands between the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers were sold under protest . By the summer of 1775, cut off from over half of their hunting grounds by the European expansionists, and more and more settlers encroaching upon Cherokee Towns along the Little Tennessee, Hiwassee, Tukasegee, and Savannah Rivers, the Native Americans now saw an alignment with the British against a colonial rebellion as their only hope against further land losses.
Oconastota’s war cry was unmistakable, the white man must be conquered lest their Nation be destroyed, so an alliance with the back stabbing British was made to preserve his people’s homeland.
While her uncle maintained an unwavering hatred for all Europeans, Mountain River had, for some time now, wondered about such a strange and perilous position. She saw the settlers for what they were, farmers in a new land, toiling through hot summers to raise the food needed to survive cold winters. And even though her own mother and grandfather had been murdered by a colonial army, she had seen her own people’s armies kill and mutilate their own kind when hunting rights weren’t settled peacefully.
For all of her short life, the young princess had witnessed incessant war - first between the Cherokee and the Creeks, then the British, and now the Americans. And the battle call was still the same, “Lest we forget the ultimate sacrifice of our brave and valiant warriors that proceeded us, we must battle to our death the enemies before us.”
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