3stalwarts (51 page)

He was so absorbed in the sight that for the moment he was not aware of the stirring on the sentry walks below him. But as the voices of men reached upwards, he was brought sharply to his senses.

“That’s Ritter’s barn, see.”

“Which one?”

“That one, the little one, just to the right of the other and a little back of it.”

The globes were dispelled and became bonfires. They seemed to have aroused a wind, for suddenly it began drawing from the west, slowly driving the mist past the fort and appearing to build a wall with it over Little Falls. Looking down again, Demooth found that he could see the sentry walk quite plainly, picked out by the firelight, and encircling the darker well of the yard. But even this darker place had come to life. Hearing the men’s voices, the women had stolen out of the sheds. They were standing now with their faces lifted skyward. To Demooth they looked pale and swimming with a queer pained realization of disaster, though as yet they had not been. Then they started moving for the ladders and began to climb up on the sentry walks. They kept shifting, as if they sorted themselves out, to stand with their menfolk, and all together, men and women, they stared out at the burning valley.

The whole valley was alight. Trees stood out against the darkness, distinct and black and two-dimensional. Houses and barns assumed their accustomed shapes with suddenness in a bed of rising fire, then seemed to sink and vanish as the flames went up. The watchers in the fort had ceased talking. Their voices, however, continued; a guttural sort of punctuation of helplessness that swelled inarticulately as they got their first sight of the destructives.

The Indians were plainly silhouetted, darting into the zones of firelight, with their crested heads and their naked shoulders shining. The white men were darker shapes, more governed in their motions. They ran before the fires, or stopped momentarily to watch, before running on. There was as yet no sound of shooting.

Now and then a band of destructives could be traced through the darkness by the burning sticks they carried. They followed the roads as though they were illuminating a map.

On the sentry walk a man shouted, “My God, they’ve set fire to my wheat!”— he strained out over the picket points, his eyes were incredulous. Beside him a woman stood stiff as a spear, with her face turned outward and her eyes closed, as if she could see the roaring burst of flame against the back of her eyelids. The man stopped muttering to himself, and gradually the entire fort became so still that the noise of the nearer fires became distinctly audible. The Indians were too preoccupied to pay attention to the fort, but the first attempt at a sally, the first shooting, would have drawn the entire mob of them. There was nothing that men could do but stand and watch the swift destruction of their homes.

Gil had been keeping watch on the opposite side of the river. Fires already had broken out as far east as Eldridge Settlement, and the small squat tower of the blockhouse was sharply etched against them. But not until an hour had passed did he see the first small fire start at Mrs. McKlennar’s place.

He watched for a moment, identified the barn, then the log house, then the two wheat stacks. They burned so fiercely that after a minute or two they seemed to merge in one tremendous conflagration. In ten minutes half a dozen men had managed to destroy the entire results of his year’s work— the best yield the farm had ever had. He felt that if he watched longer he might burst out crying like a baby.

A volley of musket shots distracted him. The shots came from Fort Dayton, where already there had been considerable burning done in the cluster of the village. It was impossible to tell what had happened, whether the Indians had attacked the fort, or whether the garrison had made a sortie. Joe Boleo lifted his thin face like a fox into the wind and listened to the shots. “Look,” he said after three or four minutes. “That’s a runner. There’s some more coming after him. I reckon they chased some of them away from Dayton.”

The men on the sentry walk saw the band coming through the ford. They made a dark blot on the water. The water was an almost pearly gray. “By Jesus Christ, it’s daylight!” said Helmer.

None of them had noticed the rising sun. It poured a rosy light through the valley, tinting the stray remnants of the mist that hung on the brooks or the edges of the river. The last line of the bank of rainless clouds that all night long had passed from west to east caught fire along its lower edge, burned crimson for a while, and slowly sank away. A flight of plover, riding high against the sunrise, came down West Canada Creek with their soft intermittent calling back and forth.

The runner was passing due south in the direction of the Herter place. As the men followed him with their eyes, they saw that a large group of the destructives stood in the yard. One man kept slightly aloof, in his In-dian blanket, with the sunrise catching a faint shine in the gold lace covering his cocked hat. A whisper went the rounds again. “That’s Brant.”

The runner spoke to him, and the following group of men came up to merge with those that waited. Brant called out several men, who raised their rifles and fired a volley skyward. They loaded, fired again. Once more they repeated it. Then, round the smouldering coals of the Herter barn, they sat down, cooked, and ate their breakfast.

The people in Fort Herkimer did not move. All of them watched the destructives eating breakfast. None of them thought of cooking breakfast for themselves. They were unable, even for a minute, to tear their eyes away. Indians were herding the cattle from the woods. The Indians ran like active dogs, uttering yapping cries; and the cows, confused by the smoke and fire, went in a blind panic-stricken flight before them. Such bands came from all over the valley, apparently erratic, but always converging on the spot where the men were eating. As they approached, the men got to their feet and made ready to mill them.

Other men, white men, were rounding up horses, riding them in singly, or leading a string of them, or driving them hitched in their carts. The process seemed endless.

In reality it took only three hours. The rounding up of the cattle had been thoroughly organized. By ten o’clock the entire herd, inextricably mixed together but moving steadily in their ordained direction to the south, began to stretch out over the flats. They followed the road towards Andrustown. Long after they had disappeared, the bellowing of the cows came back to Fort Herkimer from the hills.

In the fort the people leaned against the pickets in exhaustion, staring with bloodshot eyes at the place they had been accustomed to live in. The wind had died and the fires burned low, but the smoke rose steadily as far as the eye could see in bars against the limitless blue sky.

Gradually the people stirred. Their movements were halting, their voices fumbled at words and gave over the attempt to speak. They looked into each other’s blank faces and looked away. Someone had started a fire in the yard and women gathered round it to cook. They did it mechanically, apathetically, silently, as if they sought comfort in the routine of regular existence.

When he came down, Gil found Lana among the other women. She was bending in front of the fire with the same burdened apathy, but when he touched her she lifted her face. Neither of them spoke for several seconds.

Then he said, “The stone house didn’t burn.”

Lana nodded.

“We were lucky,” he said.

She was looking at him.

“The corn’s standing,” he said.

“And there’s the potatoes,” she said gravely.

The express rider who had taken the news to Cherry Valley returned late in the afternoon with a message that Colonel Alden could spare one hundred and eighty men and was sending them under Major Whiting across country north of the Little Lakes, in the hope of cutting off the enemy. Half an hour later, Bellinger, with two hundred men, recruited during the day from the two forts, Eldridge’s and the Palatine companies, set out on Brant’s trail.

They knew that they could not expect to give battle to Brant’s army; they went with a sense of futility. It was more for something to take their minds off the destruction of the valley. They did not hope to consummate a rendezvous with Alden’s troops— if that had been Alden’s intention, it was a delusion that any man, they supposed, was entitled to. They had not even bothered to ask for soldiers from Fort Stanwix, where Major Cochran commanded two hundred and fifty line troops in garrison. They knew that his orders from headquarters were definite to hold that fort and let the valley go hang.

They spent two days on Brant’s trail without getting anywhere near him. They would have liked to find and kill some stragglers from the army; but the only men they found were the three dead scouts on the hill over Edmeston. They buried the scouts. The people of Edmeston had fled be-hind Brant, taking their livestock with them.

The militia half-heartedly set fire to their dwellings and turned back towards home with twenty or thirty cows and horses which had eluded the Indian herders. They brought the animals to the forts and tethered them.

It took the people more than a week to figure out the extent of the damage. A few men returning to the ashes of their barns and houses found a cow or a horse waiting uncertainly near by. A few flocks of sheep still remained, but these were being harried by the dogs, which, homeless now, had taken to the woods like wolves, and at night could be heard howling over the hills.

Colonel Bellinger’s tabulation, which he sent to General Stark in Albany, offered the following figures: —

To buildings burned:

Houses 63

Barns 57

Gristmills 3

Barracks of wheat 62

Hay stacks 87

To stock taken and carried away:

Horses 235

Horned-cattle 229

Sheep 269

Oxen 93

Those figures made an impression on even the dogged wits of the hero of Bennington. He began casting round for something he could do, something to balance the German Flats accounts when he sent in his report to headquarters. In this foggy process of thought he remembered that in August Governor Clinton had persuaded him to send in a regiment of Pennsylvania riflemen to the Schoharie Valley. Stark, in a pique, had ordered the commanding officer, Colonel William Butler, to act only defensively, in the only district of Tryon County that was not seriously threatened. Now that he remembered where they were, he dispatched an express ordering Colonel Butler to destroy the Tory base at Unadilla.

For three weeks the regiment had been expecting a shipment of shoes. They continued to wait for three weeks more. Finally they marched without them; but by that time all the hostile Indians and Tories had fled south to Cookoze on the Delaware, where they did some unmolested depredating. The riflemen, however, performed a brilliant march, half barefoot as they were. When at last they reached the Unadilla towns, they found only four or five Oneida and Tuscarora families, who had remained because they were friendly to the American cause.

But Colonel William Butler had come to make war. His orders were to wipe out the Indian towns, so he wiped out the friendly Indians in them, men and women. His riflemen were hard-bitten Morgan men and they had been bored in the Schoharie Valley: they made a spree of the process. Consequently Colonel Butler did not mention the Indians killed in his re-port. He wrote instead:—

I am well convinced that it has sufficiently secured these Frontiers from any further disturbances from the savages, at least this winter.

General Stark, feeling that at last he had done something, piously echoed the conviction. He considered James Dean’s reports that Walter Butler had left Niagara with a hundred and fifty Rangers and fifty regulars, ostensibly to defend Tioga and possibly to make an attack on the Mohawk Valley, were sheer delusions. Anyway they were not headed for the Hampshire Grants. And shortly thereafter he resigned his portfolio to Brigadier General Hand.

Edward Hand found that there were several reports from spies in the west, all predicting the same raid, and there seemed to be a general trend of agreement that the raid would strike Cherry Valley. Being an earnest man, General Hand decided he would visit Cherry Valley himself in November. He found the fort short of bread and powder and returned to rectify the mistake. He also sent copies of his reports to Colonel Klock and ordered him to collect militia and hold them ready to march to Cherry Valley should occasion arise. He directed Colonel Butler at Schoharie to keep a watch in the same direction. He stopped in to see Colonel Van Schaick, commanding line troops at Johnstown, and said the same thing to him. Then, apparently, General Hand settled himself in for the winter at Albany.

By the end of October two clusters of log cabins had been erected round the two forts in German Flats. Even to the men who had rolled up the walls, they looked small and pathetic. They had had to work too fast to hew the logs. They were the same as the cabin a man would erect for himself when he first went into the wilderness. To some of the old ones in the community, they restored memories of German Flats when it was known as Burnetsfield— just after the French raid of ‘57. Though the fields were, perhaps, ten times as wide as the cleared land of those days, they lay as desolate under the thin sifting of the snow. The black jagged lumps that once were barns and houses looked just the same to the old men, except that there were more of them now. The river ran dark and swift and cold in its white banks; and at night the northwest wind howled down West Canada Creek. The expectation of winter confronted everyone.

In the noon sunlight, under the slow downward drift of flakes, children laboriously puddled clay that was stiff with frost, and women were sealing the cracks between the logs. Men worked with adzes on planks for the doors. The few horses and oxen remaining to the community were all at work drawing in firewood and the cornstalks from the outlying farms. Boys were guarding the stooks set up among the cabins. Browse was already scarce in the woods and the cows anxiously tailed the carts in from the fields and had to be driven away.