Riggs’s campfire picnic is atop Claremore Mound, a barren hill, 785 high that juts up from the flat landscape that was the scene of a battle between the Cherokees and the Osages. “At the right and forward, a fire burns. Three couples–boys and girls– sit about it, eating their picnic supper. They are all part Cherokee Indian” of varying degrees. The company is ill at ease, contemptuous of one another, all on edge.
The battle took place about a hundred years before the picnic, in the spring of 1818, when the Cherokees attacked the Osages and killed them while they slept. The story is retold to the picnickers by Jim Talbert, an old man in “rough clothes, with long hair and strange startled eyes,” who might be a stand-in for the Ancient Mariner.
It’s a violent story to tell at a picnic, and the group sits around a campfire and suddenly realizes that they are amid the burial site of the chef of the Osages.
* Oklahoma Territory (1915). He is also the author of Green Grow the Lilacs (1930), the basis for the musical Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, II’s Oklahoma! (1943).
See Lynn Riggs. “The Cherokee Night.” In The Cherokee Night and Other Plays. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma, 1936, Reprint, 2003.