Sarah Sparrow and the Trail Of Tears

That is not Sarah Sparrow, but, it is a young Indian Maiden who looks very much like the women in our family..except me, my father was full German and I am the blond in the woodpile, much to the disdain of my entire family. This photo was taken in the 1800's and is what Sarah Sparrow is imagined to look like by the Guntown Sisters. Sarah Sparrow was my Grandmother's Grandmother, what would that make her to me? My great great great grandmother? There might be another great in there and I don't care to figure it out. I have read enough about the famous Trail Of Tears to make me understand what a tragedy it was and I will not romanticize it like they do. It is disrespectful and I share none of their fascination or obsessive pride in our heritage. I am not ashamed of it, I just did not live it.
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In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area which is now called Oklahoma. One great branch of the Mississippi borders the Eastern boundaries of Iowa and it was included. The main branch of the famous river runs up the other side, so the white boys had the Iowa Cherokee coming and going. The Cherokee people called this horrible journey the "Trail of Tears," because of what happened to them on this forced march. The devastation and suffering was unimaginable as they faced hunger, disease, cruelty and exhaustion on the forced march. They were in fact, prisoners of the white man and over 4,000 out of 15,000 Cherokees died horrible deaths on The Trail Of Tears. Their only crime was calling their land, the land the had lived and hunted on since the beginning of their time, their own.

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Sarah Sparrow was one of them. As the soldiers rounded up the five known big bands of Cherokee people they also stopped to take any piddly bands in their way on the march to the new territory. One of the bands they they took was the The Water Of The Three Fires Reservation in Iowa. It was a very small population, but, a pretty spot with good hunting and has since been turned a silly piss pot called Lake Of Three Fires with a man made lake the size of a postage stamp which is stocked with croppies and blue gill. Back then, it was primarily prairie and forest, but, there was water, of course. No one settled where there was no water and I have not researched it to find out if there was a natural lake there once or if they used one of the many branches of The Nodaway River. The river has been re-routed by ignorant well meaning officials since then and it would be hard to find the location of their actual camp, but, we all know approximately where it was. There is only local history on it and not much is known, except that it DID exist.

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There is one existing photo of Sarah Sparrow and it was in the possession of my Great Grandmother and I have never seen it. I am told she was beautiful and that part I believe. None of the women in my family are ugly until they get old. They say she was decked out in her finest Indian Princess finery, for Sarah Sparrow WAS a Princess, her Father was the Chief, so that much is not a lie, and in the picture she had a big feathered head dress on with many feathers. That part has to be a lie, because women were not allowed to wear head dress's, that was for warriors and the feathers signified battles and lives lost. Unless her indulgent Father let her borrow it for that new fangled invention, the camera. Some Cherokee men were very fond of their daughters and gave in to their whims and some were only interested in sons who could become Chiefs and hunters and warriors. I have no way of knowing how Sarah Sparrows father felt about her, none of us knew her.

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I know she was nineteen when she was forced onto the Trail Of Tears with her husband and her five small children. One of them was a suckling infant, Sarah Sparrow had given birth to her first child at age thirteen. All my life I've heard Sarah Sparrow and The Chief tales. Sarah, they claim, had extraordinarily beautiful features and a figure only bestowed to Angels. My Aunt Juanita is so enamored of our Indian heritage she's set up alters in her living room (which are still there) and written ridiculous romances about their lives with no research at all. She wouldn't even know the dates of The Trail Of Tears much less the living habits of the Cherokee Indians on the Prairie. She writes about the beating breasts of painfully handsome Braves falling in love with Sarah Sparrow and the great battles fought for her hand against her father The Chief and how Sarah Sparrow grabbed her shield and spear and joined in. You'd think poor Sarah Sparrow had won all the Indian wars by herself, before the age of twelve, the way my Aunt writes it. It cracks me up that people read crap like that.

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The truth of the matter can only be speculated on and I believe Sarah Sparrow probably had a life NOT to be envied. She probably was pretty, but, she never grew into her beauty as a woman because she died on The Trail Of Tears. She was only a girl. She was probably hungry, terrified and cried because her babies were starving to death right in front of her. She probably had one set of homemade clothes that were dirty and ragged and she wasn't allowed to stop on the trail and find the herbs that would have gotten the lice out of her hair. If she WAS as pretty as her legend, then there's a good chance she was used by some of the white men that went bad on the trail. This meant she was of no use to the Indian men ever again even if her Father was a Chief. She would have been called a slave whore and spit on by any Cherokee who wasn't a drunk. She did not die by being shot with an arrow through her pure heart coming out of her hand beaded Tee Pee in the light of a full moon as the wolves howled to meet her true love, an Indian Prince from the hated Apache tribe, as my Aunt writes. I can't find any evidence that the distant Southwest Apache and Cherokee were ever enemies before the dreadful Trail Of Tears. And wolves are NOT indigenous to Iowa. Like I said, research anyone? Pffft.

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There seemed to be only one luxury on that horrible trail and it was whiskey. Many things were traded for it, women being only one. Her husband was a drunk and in a drunken rage he killed her with a skinning knife. Her young body was buried in an unknown location on the trail by relatives. But, her children survived, even the infant, which is some kind of miracle. They were raised by the drunk and they were wild and unruly and uncivilized and uneducated. When they were finally freed, some of them made their way back here to The Lake Of Three Fires (the original name had been mispronounced so much by then, this stuck) which was still a reservation and one declared himself Chief. I don't know how the leftover Cherokee motley crew took that news, maybe they felt he'd inherited the title or maybe he just scared them and bullied them. Or maybe their land had shrunk so much and there was only a dozen of them left and they just didn't give a shit anymore. But, anyway, he got married and the title was passed to his son, the very last Cherokee to be born on that reservation and he was my Grandmother's father. I didn't know him either, but, he married a mixed Indian girl (what a scandal). She was rumored to have a white man somewhere in her mother's family, but, she was of the Cherokee tribe and that white part was never proven. And so, my Grandmother was leagally full Cherokee and her name was Prairie Flower. Which is a real sad name if you know anything about Cherokees. It means Mother's Tears and was what they called the Prairie Rose flower, the wild rose, for all the children who died on The Trail Of Tears. Sad.

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And so, my Mother is light skinned, but, she had the Cherokee cheekbones and nose and black hair so they forgave her for being so pale. My Grandma was blue eyed Injun, so you know there was a white man in that woodpile they didn't talk about. Must have been from her mixed breed Mother's side. My cousins Joe and RosaLee look very Cherokee and so does my brother. Many of our children go to free reservation schools and Indian naming programs at White Cloud Reservation near here. There they get their totum animal discovered by a Shaman and learn their true tribal name. I have no tribal name though legally I could demand one. It was my misfortune to be born blond and therefore ugly and unaccepted in my Aunt and Mother's eyes and RosaLee is this generations Cherokee Princess. She can have it. I think they all continued Sarah Sparrow's tradition of marrying violent dangerous drunkards and it's a miracle they're all still alive.

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My Aunt didn't stop with the Elvis suit, she also made RosaLee an inaccurate Cherokee Princess outfit complete with inappropriate feathered head dress. RosaLee wore it for photos but, always managed to get sick when her Mother wanted her to go out in it. Elvis is half Cherokee, did you know that? Ask my Aunt. Uhh huu. Do you smell bullshit, like I do? All her male book characters look just like Elvis. Bare chested Elvis in a head dress. This family is so fucking weird.