The Cornstalk Curse

[halsherman]

There has been many stories written about the Cornstalk Curse at Point Pleasant W Va. He was sadly murdered there and many unusual things have happen in that area since. I ran across a story on the site below, which give some good history and some fiction of the event. It is well written with a new twist which make it interesting. www.copperfieldreview.com/fiction/Cornstalk's%20Curse.htm

[Matthew S. Schweitzer]

The link Hal posted wouldn't work right so I've taken the liberty of posting the article in full here below.



Cornstalk’s Curse

By Lynn Veach Sadler



The late-eighteenth-century massacre at Fort Randolph, in today’s West Virginia, owns a mystery. Who was the “fourth Indian” slain with Chief Cornstalk, his son Elinipsico, and Chief Red Hawk? Who brought the curse against the murderers and the area?

I, Cornstalk, did not—do not—curse. You White men thought so. My peace was made with you long since. I had done evil unto you when I was younger, walked sorry for it long years.

You made your evil upon us at Point Pleasant. Put my son, the others, in the River Kanawha. Their spirits could not rise free for me to sing home. I was pressed down apart. Outside the fort where Kanawha and Ohio meet, where you murdered us.

Only one escaped. That one laid the curse on you. Not Cornstalk.

You took me hostage. I went to the fort to warn you the British wooed us to rise against you. Chief Red Hawk of the Delaware had the same heart. We came to make sure our peace with you was strong. I made maps for you even then.

My son Elinipsico came to see why I stayed so long from home. Elinipsico! But I do not go that way. I do not take the path of grief to curse my enemies once my friends. It is hard not to. But I did not curse you. In the midst of grieving for my son, the others, I wanted to curse you.

My spirit was held down because I could not free those dying with me. We had no time to make noble death songs. You did not let us sing, cross The Great Divide, go home to The Great Spirit. Even when you built your town near that fort where you killed us, you did not set me free. I worked after what you call magic, asked The Great Spirit to hear our cause. He took pity, knew where justice lay. He moved your spirit to move my bones. I thought my spirit would break forth then and make things right. It was not to be.

My sister Nonhelema, The Grenadier Squaw, taught the one who cursed you. Her magic was always mightier than mine. When squaws find their way to the Sun Striker, they are stronger than braves. They had a longer, harder way to go. My sister’s magic was always mightier than mine. She taught the one who cursed you.

The Great Spirit put it in your mind to dig me up. I thought to escape but could not because of the magic the one who cursed you had learned. You tried to make it up to me. In The-Year-of-Your-Lord-Eighteen-Hundred-and-Forty, you took me to your Court House in Mason County. Re-buried me there.

The curse went on. Storm, flood, famine. Strange looks from the Sky Lord. Noises not to be explained. Bones walked. My bones walked, you said. Woe upon woe upon woe. You blamed me for it. The curse went on. You tried to appease what you thought was my wrath. First, a monument to me. 1899. Was I not Sachem of the Shawnees, Head of the Confederacy of the Seven Nations? But you did it to stop what you said was my curse. Your motives were not pure.

Nor had mine been. Way back when I took my braves to the Greenbrier settlements, up through the valley of The Great Kanawha. We met the settlers, showed them our peace sign, slaughtered them at the feast they made. Why did I give that order? Even the White Man does not kill the guest at his table. A-e-e-e-e . . . .

You betrayed, too. As I treated with Governor Dunmore for peace, your Col. Lewis crossed the Ohio from Point Pleasant with his Virginia militia to destroy our villages. He hated us, did not want us to come to peace, would burn me on our own Burning Ground. We agreed to terms. Else you would have massacred us. We gave up our lands east and south of The Great Ohio. We promised to return our White captives, not to attack the English colonists traveling down The Great Ohio. I kept my word the rest of my life. Except in one small thing, as I thought it then, I kept my word. I could not return my son’s wife. She would not go.

I tell myself my betrayal in the Greenbrier settlements was for all the years you beat us back from The-Land-Where-the-Sun-Rises. But I know one bad service does not deserve another. We Shawnees are famous for patience in repaying wrong done us, but I was the leader to take us another path. What I did among the Greenbrier settlers was a young man’s way. I tried to make it up by becoming the White Man’s friend . . . . Small thanks I had for it!

You have had small thanks yourself. Another monument. You meant to “dedicate” it July 22, 1909. The night before, out of the clearest sky ever to be seen, a lightning bolt. Damaging the crane meant to hoist that monument, all eighty-six feet, into place. A month it took for the crane to grow whole again.

July 4, 1921. From another clear, clear sky, the lightning bolt eats parts of your “obelisk.” Your because it remembers the men of Point Pleasant killed when I and my braves were defeated there in 1774. You thought to still the curse by praising your own? When I see your foolishness, I am less sad about mine.

I thought I must do something. For you. For the one who cursed you also. The one whose spirit could not rest any more than mine and the spirits of those whose bodies were thrown in the Kanawha. Again I sought the intervention of The Great Spirit, and He heard. He put it in your hearts to build a new court house for justice better. He put it in your hearts to move me again. I, Keigh-tugh-qua, High Chief of the Chillicothe Clan, was down to little more than a nubbin of corn. Three teeth. The fingers of one hand times that number of bones. To think of it makes me almost wish to curse. But, no, that is not my way. Though you put the leavings of me in an aluminum box, buried me again in a corner of Tu-Endie-Wei Park. My remains are there still. I am next to a worthy man I fought. I fought and then helped. They meant it to say, I think, that enemies could be friends. They meant it to get me to lift the curse. The curse was not mine to lift!

Oh, I did feel a lance of hatred stab me through when they shot Elinipsico. He sat there across from me on a small stool. As if he was a child again. When they came thundering in . . . .

It was the usual sort of thing, I know. Two soldiers from the fort sent out to hunt deer. Indians ambushed them. Indians. Not me or mine. Perhaps I knew them, but they were not mine. My son and The Grenadier Squaw had agreed that no war would come. That no one would come after Elinipsico, who had come after me, until he returned with word of what the White Eyes meant by holding me. My people knew such was my wish, would not have crossed my aim. I was still a power with them, though some did think me too ready for peace.

When the two soldiers did not return, Capt. Arbuckle sent scouts to seek them. One was dead, the other fleeing for his life. They killed the braves who had killed their man, but that was not enough. They were as overwrought as any Indians get. And we do get, as you White men say, “overwrought,” though we mostly have to build to that high state. You White Men fly to it like an arrow straight-shot.

They returned the corpse with them to the fort. Yes, it was scalped and bloody. The whole garrison let out a scream of rage as wild as any of the youngest braves set out to prove their manhood in their first major battle. We heard it in our quarters. No, we were not in prison. We were quartered well. If you do not mind guards at your door. With me, guards to keep me in have never set so very well. Guards to keep me out were more the case I knew.

I moved to the door, swelled to block the sight of those behind me, motioned for them to take such cover as they could.

When the soldiers burst in, they had to take note of me. I was tall, well-built. Built to lead, my people say. It was the way of my family. My sister, The Grenadier Squaw, is taller than I, can do men’s feats as if they are not feats. I was so proud of her. She made women more than squaws. She was tall of body, taller of mind. So was Elinipsico. So was Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins, who became his wife.

When they saw me, tall and unafraid, the soldiers checked. A silence fell. Then the four who carried the dead White soldier pushed through and dropped him at my feet. The whoop went up-up-up-up and out, was bigger even than I was. The whoop was all. The rest of us—White and Indian—were nothing. The whoop! I hear it now!

When its echoes had died away, they began to shoot me. Chief Red Hawk was stabbed with enough knives to equal a porcupine’s quills. Before I fell, I saw them scalp him.

I had been aware of Elinipsico rising from his stool, seeing to the fourth of our party. As I was falling down dead, shot eight times, I saw he had re-taken his seat on the stool, sat there calmly. I was proud of my son. My pride in him was my last thought. I fell down dead. But my other sight went keen. I saw what happened. I heard the curse, knew who gave it, tried to prevent its being vented, but my power was not strong enough. I could not prevent the curse.

And still it goes on. Over two hundred years. That coal mine in Monongah. The Silver Bridge over the Ohio. (The Whites did not seem to remember that my younger brother was Silverheels. I am surprised they did not use this doubling of Silver as proof of my cursing them.) Giant birds falling from the sky—crashed airplanes, they call them . . . . The White Eyes name what we do to them “depredations.” I never heard them use other than “curse” for these happenings.

I could not prevent the curse. It has prevailed over two hundred years. I loved my son, but can even his murder be avenged at such price? It is beyond human nature.

My son was good and manly. He did not disappoint his mother and me. His aunt, The Grenadier Squaw, wished him a girl child, for her own son did not take to her ways. Only in one way did Elinipsico disappoint us. He made the captive White his wife. We made the best of it. I gave her the name Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins. We liked her well enough, and my sister adopted her.

It was Elinipisco’s first raid, so I had not let them go all the way to The Dark and Bloody Ground. Only into the Greenbrier again. (Is that why I was so repaid? Greenbrier unto Greenbrier?) The White girl kept the cow she was milking between them. The girl and her cow were a strangeness. And funny to all but Elinipsico and the girl herself. Finally, she refused to leave without her cow. She grew pumpkins from the necklace of seeds she also brought with her. She was not much more than a child when Elinipsico brought her away, but she was already tall like me and all of Elinipisco’s people. I thought her mind dulled by the capturing. That sometimes happened. The mind too weak to bear what is happening goes away to a place of its own. That was what Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins would do—go away into herself. But always she would come back out again and make us laugh at her merry ways. We Indians have always been kind to those with minds touched and those who laugh and spread laughter about. Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins walked both of these ways.

She had another mark upon her, this young captive. This was the mark I could not take pleasure in, especially when I saw how it was with Elinipsico. Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins was also good with him. Only—only she never dropped blood in woman’s fashion. She would never have a child. Men would use, not take her to wife. They did not, for I would not let them when I saw how it was with Elinipsico. Perhaps if I had—well, that was not my way. But she was Elinipisco’s. Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins worked her spell upon him when first he saw her with her cow. I urged my wife to turn his eyes from her. I was Cornstalk, could not bend to discuss such matters.

Then The Grenadier Squaw took her up, in defiance of all I said. When a female makes up her mind, Indian is no better than White at turning it another way. She taught Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins so well she earned the ceremony. We washed out her White blood, brought her into our Shawnee Nation. Aside from The Grenadier Squaw, Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins was the only female initiated into the Warrior Sept.

I do not know. Perhaps converts are fiercer for their new causes. Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins was as fierce as the fiercest Shawnee braves. We marveled at her. Even The Grenadier Squaw thought she might have made a mistake to take this girl so far in Night-Prowler ways.

Elinipsico came to find why I was kept at the fort and also to tell me of their miracle. Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins had come at last into her woman’s ways, would bear his child. I had known she and The Grenadier Squaw had made this their special quest. Whatever they had done had worked. It is best not to look too closely at prophetesses. They have prayed to the Master of Life, brought the world into being.

Unbeknownst to Elinipsico, Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins followed him. She dressed as a man, walnut-barked her face and hands, slipped in the fort at night. We heard her owl cry outside our one small window. She was still slim. We pulled her through.

When the White wolf pack came, Elinipsico thought first of her. Because of the coming child, she did not argue. Besides, there was no time. He pushed her to the chimney, helped her mount, remove her feet from sight, returned to take his seat upon that little stool.

While the soldiers were outside the fort burying me, casting the bodies of Elinipsico and Red Hawk into the keening waters, she gathered traces of our blood. Some from the slain soldier the howlers had brought inside our quarters. Then she slipped away, made her medicine. Worked for us the dead. Worked against them, the living. In the course of her cursing, she lost the babe. That is why the curse is so strong. She mixed in its blood. No medicine could be stronger.

She kept watch three days and nights, made her great owl calls. All the animals miles around joined her outrage and mourning. The White Eyes knew some great pass was upon them when they heard the uplifted voices of the animals, saw lights among the trees at night. The dogs in the fort hid in dark corners, put paws over their ears. The owl screech of Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins was like a storm rushing at, crushing a place. It has grown shriller across the years. The flames of her curse have not gone out, have died down at times when her spirit sleeps underground in tunnels and caves.

I believe the time is near again for my son’s wife to rise. This is why I now speak out. When she must have some ease, her spirit goes a ways from here to a place whose name reminds her, I think, of her original home and whose history is almost as old as our story. At The Greenbrier—the Cold War Bunker underneath it—is where Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins has found some peace, though tourists who have heard her outcries there would not say so.

I will treat with my daughter-in-law to put aside the curse. The Great Spirit has enabled me to know that forces rise to destroy this land. I will remind Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins that The Great America was ours before it was the White Man’s. That I and our Elinipsico sided with the Americans. That wrong was done on both sides. That over two hundred years of “depredations” from her curse have quit the case between us. That these terrorists will come up out of that same once-secret place under the Greenbrier’s West Virginia wing and inside the mountain. That they will disturb her. That they will try to destroy America. In the coming dark days, if I am successful in weaning Tall Girl Good with Cow and Pumpkins from her curse, we will turn it against the cowardly terrorists. Then her curse truly will be Cornstalk’s curse.

—Things That Go Bump in the Night. Ed. Whitney Scott. Crete, Illinois: Outrider Press, 2004: 167-72.

_______________________________________________________________

Former college president Dr. Lynn Veach Sadler has published widely in academics and creative writing. An editor and a poet, fiction and creative nonfiction writer, and playwright, she has a full-length poetry collection forthcoming from RockWay Press. One of her stories was chosen for Del Sol Press’s Best of 2004 Butler Prize Anthology.