Sunbonnet Soliloquy

By Jewell Ellen Smith

The Red Feather

There seems no end to the stories and legends about people crossing rivers.

Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army in 49 B.C. and thereby initiated a disastrous civil war in Italy.

George Washington and his half starved, half frozen troops crossed the Delaware on the night of 25 December, 1776, captured 900 surprised Hessians garrisoned at Trenton, and thus shortened the American Revolutionary War.

A powerful -- but now long forgotten -- Indian chief, leading his weary braves, squaws and old men and all their little ones to a new hunting ground, crossed the Chattahoochee, stopped, looked around, and called out “Alabama!” (“Here we rest!”) And thus he named what became a southeast corner of the United States.

Now the crossing-the-river story that I like best is not in the history books. And it is not part of Alabama folklore. It is true and has to do with the Chattahoochee River a caravan of white settlers coming to Alabama, two Indian chiefs, and a sick little Indian girl.

From records gathered more than 25 years ago by Miss Frances M. Hails, who was then State Archivist in the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the story goes this way:

Late in the afternoon of November 14, 1833 -- the same date the famous “stars fell on Alabama” -- five families of settlers moving westward from South Carolina reached and crossed the Chattahoochee River. They were the Scotts, the Hails, the Bellingers, the Taylors, and the McGinneys.

Indian tribes living on the Alabama side of the river had learned of their coming and even knew that with the party was a white “medicine man,” Dr. Carnot Bellinger.

So two chiefs, one old and one much younger, met the settlers and begged Dr. Bellinger to come and do what he could for the young chief’s daughter.

“Her little face has gone white,” the young chief said. “She is dying.”

Dr. Belllnger went with the Indian chiefs and treated the little girl. She recovered. When Dr. Bellinger refused payment, the child’s father presented him with a red feather, saying “Worn in your hat, it will protect you from Indians.”

The feather became a treasured Bellinger family keepsake, passed down from generation to generation.

We all cross rivers. We’re not likely to initiate civil wars or stop revolutionary wars. There’s small chance that any of us will name a place as big as Alabama. But at every river in life there are people on the other side who need help.

How would it be, if, as we are transferred from post to post and cross river after river, we try to gather up a few red feathers!

Published October 1981, repeated February 1987. Click your browser’s ‘Back’ button to return.