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Location: Pittsburgh PA area, United States

John McCracken is a cab driver in Pittsburgh, PA, a Vietnam veteran and self-educated in American History and psychology. He interacts and exchanges views and opinions with a wide cross section of Americans. John has successfully completed several writing courses. He feels newspaper opinion pieces, though many times witty and insightful, too often do not reflect the opinions of average Americans who offer an important ingredient to debates shaping America today. John gives average, working Americans their seat at the table of public opinion which they often times feel they lack.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

The Price of Absolute Freedom

Three hundred Cherokee, Shawnee and Creek warriors trekked two hundred miles on forest trails from what is now Alabama into Tennessee. They arrived at Buchanan Station’s stockade along Mill Creek after mid-night on 30 September 1792. The Indians came north with one goal, to kill white settlers and drive them off their hunting grounds.

The Indian nations allied themselves with the British in the Revolutionary War. On 3 September 1783 the Peace of Paris officially ended the Revolutionary War. It also gave all the land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River to the new American Nation. This shocked the Indians for the land wasn’t the British Crown’s possession to give away.

Though the great Indian tribes of North America, the Cherokee, Creek and Iroquois, referred to their people as a nation, they lived in a loose confederation of towns. They elected their chiefs and voted on every decision the town made and refused to recognize any central government.

The Indians enjoyed absolute democracy and freedom. For generations they exercised their freedom to live in a feudal society where they raided and plundered other Indian towns. The inhabitants they didn’t kill they took prisoner and adopted into their tribe.

An Indian war party lacked the military command structures of an organized army. They didn’t have squads, platoons, companies or leaders such as sergeants and officers.

The war party stopped and camped several times on the journey to argue about the best way to destroy Buchanan’s Station. With no general to devise a plan and order its execution all the braves offered suggestions on tactics.

When the frontiersmen heard the Indians might go on the war path, they called out the militia. Militiamen weren’t real soldiers. They were farmers, attorneys and tradesmen who agreed to join together in common defense. Militia units formed themselves into platoons and companies and the men took orders from sergeants and officers they elected. The militia army built a new stockade for Buchanan’s Station. When the three Indian chiefs who led the war party sent word that there would be no war, the militia went home.

Indian scouts crept up to the stockade and peeked through peep holes. They brought back news that the settlers had not posted sentries and slept peacefully inside the stockade, unaware of the danger lurking outside.

John McRory looked over the stockade wall when he heard cattle stir, saw the Indians and shot at them. His shot woke the other settlers and they scrambled out of their warm beds to man the walls.

A brave snuck around to the back of the stockade and tried to set fire to the green timbers. A settler shot him. The Indians and settlers fired on each other through the night. In the exchange one chief, Talotiskee, died, another, John Watts, was seriously wounded. The settlers suffered no casualties.

The next morning the settlers found evidence of much blood and the skid marks of litters used to drag away the wounded. The Indian’s ignorance of modern siege tactics, lack of patience and a command structure in their war party forced them to abandon the attack.

The Indian’s absolute freedom to join or not join a war party, to be a peace town or a war town, to bloody each other as viciously as they bloodied the white settlers left them exposed to a new threat. Settlers poured over the mountains after the promise of cheap land and a new life they earned as spoils from the Revolutionary War. Indian nations had a perfect democracy but no central government to organize a unified challenge to this wave of pioneers.

Inhabitants of the Indian nations paid a terrible price for their desire to enjoy absolute freedom. The white men drove them from their land.

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