XLIV

I send from the Great Father, the King of France, his most gracious compliments to Kis'kambu, Beloved of the Chicaza, and bring these gifts to honor your power over your people and your sacred hunting grounds. May thou and Our Great Father be as brothers against the encroachments of the English slavers, and their allies, the Cherokee.

Kis'kambu, Chickasaw Chief, kept his head facing low towards the gifts sprawled before him in his council house on Old Chickasaw Fields. They included twenty matchlock muskets, two small kegs of powder, a basket full of glass beads, and a case of brandy. His eyes looked up. Who is this French half-blood vagabond and what does he want from me? He smells like a tannery. Kis'kambu admitted he was better mannered and spoke better Muskogee than the Englishman. But he wants me to fight the English? He better bring more guns than this. They are allied with the Cherokee, who also have guns.

The Frenchman before him was named Emil Fouche. He was clad in buckskin and squatted like Kis'kambu in the dusty floor. They were both surrounded by the chief's brothers and cousins, and other leading warriors. They observed these proceedings eagerly. A shaman sat interposed aside murmuring before a gourd that smoked with smoldering berries.  Kis'kambu swept his arm slowly over this offering of goods and made a fist, and pressed it towards the Franca. No deal, Emil interpreted this. He leaned back on his heels and eyed the chief, whose eyes were black and impassive.  He was driving a hard bargain.  It took back breaking work just to haul these twenty muskets across the mountains from Fort Toulouse into the Nickajack. 

Emil was here for more than just profit. He was also here as a spy.  Inglish traders from the Carolinas were pushing deeper into the Nickajack every year. They had been arming the Cherokee who lived on the great river they called Hogohegee above the Gorge, which is the Tennessee River. These armed Cherokee helped the Carolinians suppress and enslave the Yamasee until that tribe had become extinct. Now these Iroquoian speakers, the Cherokee, turned their eyes west into Chickasaw territory, which extended from the Gorge and along the Hogohegee west into Mississippi.  Even the Shawnee were pressing down from the Wasioto River, which is the Cumberland River.  Every tribe was forsaking old methods of warfare with the spear and the bow for the white man's guns. They had no choice. It was arm up with guns, or be enslaved by those tribes with them.  

Emil Fouche was the half-Huron bastard of that legendary captain and explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville. Born in 1690 in Quebec, New France, he flourished under the patronage of the powerful Le Moyne family of that province and accompanied his father to the colony of Louisiana, which he founded in 1700. It was a hard luck sojourn, for he found himself for several years attached as a sort of informant for the Le Moynes in the various settlements along the Mississippi and Mobile Rivers.  At length he found himself at the furthest fringes of the French Empire. Here was a god-forsaken outpost named Fort Toulouse, along the Coosa River near what is now the town of Wetumpka.  It was a log palisade surrounding a few hovels, and around which a sort of Indian camp was erected.  It was guarded by a platoon of Troupes de Marines and they were commanded by a Marine Captain named Francois Marchand de Courcelles, whom the natives called Bald Eagle on account of his pate. 

Emil was no stranger to the frontier. He had been on missions for the Le Moynes to Arkansas, Illinois and even Haiti. He's been shot with arrows, he's killed men with his hatchet, he's sold scalps. But Fort Tolouse was an especially bereft place. He was warned in Mobile by his superiors that Captain de Courcelles had "gone native." He'd served two terms in what was being called Alabama, and had married a Creek princess named Sehoy. He was known to have practiced scalping to the dismay of the Jesuits and he held considerable influence over the Creeks of that region.  Captain de Coucelles would be his controlling officer in his next mission, which was to dislodge the English from the Nickajack by alliance with the Natives. 

And so he rowed the bateaux through the great swamp of the Tensaw and up the Alabama River through wild country and the bluffs of the piedmont, the banks brooding and primeval. Arriving at the sullen fort deep in the interior, the Marines escorted him into the presence of Captain de Courcelles.  He wore his linen blouse and white wool jacket open, where you could see the tattoos some crazed shaman had scratched upon his chest.  A squaw hung on his arm as he sat behind an incongruously imported desk of crafted mahogany.  She was on her knees murmuring and knitting and looked quite pregnant. The Bald Eagle was as bald as a tonsured monk.  The only wrinkles his face beheld were on his chin and his heavy jowls. His pate was as taut as it were stretched at a tannery.  He rubbed water from an enamel basin over his speckled scalp and leaned back.  Lighting an enormously long pipe of tobacco he eyed Emil with suspicious eyes.  

So you are the spy?  You're a Le Moyne.  You are also a Half Blood.  What is your blood, Metis?  

Huron. You know my father, Emil replied confidently.

Yes, I know your father, I know your family. I've fought with them.  And here you are! Welcome to Alabama! A sergeant beside him chuckled. I've got orders for you, he continued. He withdrew an envelope sealed in red wax from a letter box and passed it to Emil.  

The Captain took another long puff from his pipe and passed it to his squaw. He gazed longingly at her as she did so, and he poured a brandy into a glass and drank it hazily. The orders were that Emil should proceed north into the region known as the Nickajack where he was to intercept a pair of white cousins who were English gun and slave traders penetrating into that country.  They were known as Havelock and Lang.  Not much more was known about them.  You have the support of a Jesuit Missionary at the Shoals, the apprentice of which is a La Moyne agent from Illinois Country who goes by the name of Duplantier. Win the support of the local natives and eliminate the English interlopers.  God go away with you.  Your beloved uncle, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, Governor of Louisiana.  

And so after a three month ordeal through the mountains of Alabama and arriving here at the island called Chickasaw Fields, he sat before Kis'Kambu and wondered how he might turn him and his people from the English. The twenty muskets the Le Moyne's had given him were not enough.  He needed something to really impress these people and win their admiration.  It meant guns, of course, but it could mean more than that.  Emil understood that the novelty of the alien impressed the natives, in as much as the alien drew himself unto it. And so he returned to Fort Toulouse where Captain de Courcelles was absent, for his controller was casting about the countryside dressing as a Creek chief himself and dancing about the council fires.  Without authorization from the Captain, Emil subscribed to a Casquette Girl in Mobile and brought her to Fort Toulouse where he was married to her by a Jesuit and began to trek north with her towards the Nickajack. 

Her name was Jeanne Dorvil, and she was an orphan swept off the streets of La Rochelle and committed to transportation to Louisiana as a Casquette Girl.  Her experiences in the Old World were one of unspeakable depradations and poverty.  But the journey upon which she was embarked now with her strange Half-Blood husband would lead to places she could not, in her imagination, have even wondered of. She was going to the Nickajack.