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From Massacre to Matriarch - Six Weeks in the Life of Fanny Scott/De la Masacre a Matriarca (Tales of the Vir) (Tales of the Virginia Wilderness)

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Massacre to Matriarch covers a history I have familiarity with, the bitter border warfare along the Appalachian Mountains in what is now southwest Virginia. This conflict involved several tribes, notably the Sawnee and Cherokee. The interior tribes in North America east of the Mississippi had an ambivalent relationship with the whites. Traders and occasional white hunters were not often molested by the Indians. Traders supplied the necessities of life. A central figure in Massacre is a half-blood war chief, Robert Benge, who conveys to white captive Fanny Scott his tribe's anger over the hordes of white settlers moving onto the tribal hunting grounds. The Indians made it clear to her, after killing all members of her famly, that white settlers were not welcome on Shawnee land. The Shawnee tribe would be a moving force in trying to unite all of the eastern tribes into a vast coalition to keep the American settlers and militia at bay. Such a union would have considerable success against American forces until the early 1790s. The eastern resistance of the Native Americans to government control of their territory west of the Appalachians would be in effect until after peace settlements were made with the U.S. government and Britain in 1815. Shawnee chief Tecumsah would be the last great leader among the tribes north of the Ohio. Fanny Scott suffered much on her trek back to the white settlement south of the Ohio River in her desperate bid for freedom. She would ultimately succeed and take a second husband and raise a second family, but her experience will stay with her for the rest of her life. In contrast to the bitter violence north of the Ohio, southern tribes such as the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw would try accommodating the white man after about 1820. Many white traders over the years had married into these tribes, so by 1800 a large contingent of mixed bloods existed. The mixed blood cast among the tribes for more land cessions, which upset the full blood. Ultimately mixed and full blood tribal members were forced to cooperate, to defy the executive orders for the forced removal of tribes to west of the Mississippi. Arguably the most inhumane experiment in early U.S. history was this removal policy, which grew out of earlier conflict between the Native American and European settlers in the 1800s. Blame can be reviewed from both perspectives. Fanny Scott's ordeal, and similar experiences, fashioned the sympathies of the thousands of citizens for the removal, yet even among politicians the Indian removal was not universally endorsed. Henry Clay of Kentucky, several times Speaker of the House David Crockett of Tennessee, and former Tennessee Governor Samuel Houston (who had a common-law Cherokee wife before getting involved in frontier Texas) were against the Indian removal policy, yet with frontiersman Andrew Jackson in the White House, Jackson's policy prevailed. The story of Fanny Scott is a passionate re-creation of a time and place many writers, including myself, have revisited many times. A short historical novel, 40-odd pages, in bilingual edition. Ken Dunn, as published in The United Lumbee Nation Times, Winter 1998-99.