a soldier's worse duty / part 2/draft 1

a soldier's worse duty/ part 2

fiction
Edward w Pritchard

I read the story Pritchard wrote of a soldiers worse duty; the story of a northern soldier burying the dead after the battle of Gettysburg. It reminded me of a story my Grandfather told me about our people, the Cherokee Indians and what happened to the dead during the ordeal of the forced march known as the Trail of Tears in the year of 1836.

My Grandfather was a leader of our section of the Cherokees and reluctantly decided and agreed to lead a group of our men, women and children to what became later the State of Oklahoma.

Of course they had to walk there, that is well known, the Cherokees walked on a forced march driven by soldiers, that is well known, many women and children died during the ordeal, that is well known; what isn't well known is the fate of those hundreds of dead bodies. My Grandfather often shared with us his grandchildren of his experience of what to do with the dead during the forced march known as the Trail of Tears.

My Grandfather had been a good warrior in his youth although our group of Cherokees had for years by then in 1836 tried to follow the ways of White Americans in an effort to assimilate and survive, as was the reality of their situation early in 19th century America. Now at the time of the Trail of Tears my Grandfather was an elderly man and walking any distance was difficult for him. Walking from Georgia to Oklahoma was a great distance that had to be endured. Many died on the way. America soldiers had orders not to stop the march to bury the Indian dead. My Grandfather pleaded with the soldiers to allow us to stop to bury our dead but it was to no avail. He ask to bury our dead as a soldier himself, he asked as a spiritual leader, he asked the officers of the Americans as man to man; all to no avail were his pleas to properly bury our dead.

Finishing his story my Grandfather would often tell his grandchildren of how packs of wolves and flocks of buzzards followed the Cherokee Indians as they marched from Georgia to the place that would later become the State of Oklahoma. My Grandfather repeated the story often to me of how the wolves and buzzards would devour our dead children who had fallen on the march of the Trail of Tears. My Grandfather would describe the howl, howling of the wolves as they stalked our tribe and the whirling of the buzzards as they floated above the stranglers in our group.  Keeping his eyes to the front, looking westward toward the future my Grandfather lead our people to a new frontier. The plight of our dead children eaten by wolves and torn asunder by buzzards had to be ignored in order to insure the survival of our group of Cherokee Indians in 1836. This is a fact in the history of America.
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