Toward dawn, I pulled the wagon off into the woods and picketed the horse beside a little branch. We slept all day, taking turns on watch, and at dusk we ate a small pot of cold hominy. That night we crossed the county line and traveled all night past Live Oak and Suwannee Springs. Beyond the Suwannee River was new country, but taking no chances with my evil luck, I moved through darkness by the light of the half moon until the Georgia border was behind us.
From Valdosta, the way west through chilling rains crossed the Flint River and the Chattahoochee and finally the great Mississippi, crossing from Vicksburg on the ferry to Louisiana, and from there north and west again to the Arkansas Territory, where I had heard that a man plagued by the law might catch his breath.
Already the season had turned cold, numbing our spirits. The Indian Nations was no place to arrive as November was setting in, with its promise of cold and hungry misery for little children, and so I was lucky to find harvest work for a horse and wagon on a late cotton crop in Arkansas. There we wintered. I rented a small farm to make a pea crop before heading westward after summer harvest. In early autumn of ’88, I reached Fort Smith and crossed the line into the Indian Nations, Oklahoma Territory.
This hill country of plateaus and river buttes had been assigned to the Cherokees and Creeks, with a few Florida Seminoles thrown in. Some of these Indians still had the slaves they took west with ’em back in the thirties, when Andy Jackson ran these tribes out of the East. Stray blacks had drifted out this way after the War, and a lot more showed up after ’76, when Reconstruction was finally put a stop to. Plenty of Southern cracker boys and some hard Yankees, too, because the local government was Northern even if most folks were Southern-Texas, Missouri, Mississippi. In short, all breeds of the human animal were mingled here in various shades of mud, like the watercolors in my sister’s little paintbox back at Edgefield Court House, and every last man with a cock between his legs considered himself your equal if not better, since any stranger was likely on the dodge or worse. The buffalo soldiers with Comanche scalps strung on their belts were maybe the most arrogant of all. I kept an eye out for my shadow brother, asked a few questions, and these boys told me that Corporal Jack Watson, having taken care of the local white ladies to the best of his abilities, had been mustered out and gone back east, headed for Georgia.