Government, how Gen. Winfield Scott’s soldiers came down into our quiet villages and ordered the Indians to go forth leaving everything behind them.  My great-grandfather, the old King Cooweeskowee, with his wife and children, paused at the first hilltop to look back at his home, and already the whites were moving into it.  The house is still standing at Rossville, Ga.  Do you know what the old people tell us children when we wish we could go back there?” Her eyes are half closed, her lips compressed as she says slowly, thrillingly:  “They tell us it is easy to find the way over that ‘Trail of Tears,’ that through the wilderness it is blazed with the gravestones of those who were too weak to march.

“That was seventy years ago, in 1838.  The Government promised to pay amply for all it took from us, our homes and lands, cattle—­even furniture.  A treaty was made solemnly between the Indians and the United States that Oklahoma should be theirs ’as long as the grass should grow and the waters run.’

“That meant perpetuity to us, don’t you see?” She makes her points with a directness and simplicity that should disarm even the diplomatic suavity of Uncle Sam when he meets her in Washington.  “Year after year the Cherokees waited for the Government to pay.  And at last, three years ago, it came to us—­$133.19 to each Indian, seventy-eight years after the removal from Georgia had taken place.

“Oil was discovered after the Indians had taken the wilderness lands in Oklahoma and reclaimed them.  It was as if God, in reparation for the wrongs inflicted by whites, had given us the riches of the earth.  My people grew rich from their wells, but a way was found to bind their wealth so they could not use it.  It was said the Indians were not fit to handle their own money.”

    She lifts eyebrows and shoulders, her hands clasped before her
    tightly, as if in silent resentment of their impotence to help.

“These are the things I want to tell; first our wrongs and then our colonization plan, for which we hope so much if the Government will grant it.  We are outnumbered since the land was opened up and a mass of ‘sooners,’ as we call them—­squatters, claimers, settlers—­swarmed in over our borders.  The Government again offered to pay us for the land they took back—­the land that was to be ours in perpetuity ‘while the grass grew and the waters ran.’  We were told to file our claims with the whites.  Some of us did, but eight hundred of the full-bloods went back forty miles into the foothills under the leadership of Red Bird Smith.  They refuse to sell or to accept the Government money for their valuable oil lands.  To appease justice, the Government allotted them lands anyway, in their absence, and paid the money for their old property into the banks, where it lies untouched.  Red Bird and his ‘Night Hawks’ refuse to barter over a broken treaty.