From Sea to Shining Sea (90 page)

George stood taller, his head whirling, too confused with his emotions, for a moment, to say anything. His reputation was still something!

But now he would have to do what he had promised. He would have to expatriate himself. He would have to renounce his citizenship in his once-beloved Virginia, in the Kentucky he had founded and protected, in the United States that had so greatly profited by his efforts. George very badly wanted a drink. Instead, he took Michaux’s hand. “Good,” he said. “Now we can proceed.”

Things began to move then. A thousand pounds of pork, four hundred barrels of flour, and a pair of brass cannon were sent over the mountains by Charles DePauw, an entrepreneur who had come to the continent with Lafayette. Major Busseron
offered cannon from the artillery of Post Vincennes. George’s men began cutting timber from woodlands near Louisville for construction of an armed fleet. Ten tons of buffalo meat and another five tons of pork, several hundred bushels of corn, and a huge quantity of ammunition came on the next shipment from DePauw. George and Michaux rode much of the winter, confirming recruitments. Michaux was extremely impressed with General Clark’s influence over this formidable variety of men—county officers, planters, scouts, hunters, tradesmen, teamsters, rivermen. Yes, they were assured: about mid-February, if the rivers had thawed and if the million dollars promised by Genet had been delivered, the word would speed through Kentucky and the Tennessee country and along the Ohio and the Wabash and the Mississippi, and as many as five thousand armed men would come to the rivers and be ready to descend on Spanish Louisiana. Michaux watched George Rogers Clark move among these men and watched them gather around him, their faces wreathed in smiles, and his likewise; he watched men of no rank jump into the general’s path with a whoop and a grin, watched him dance them around in a bear hug, and thought,
Oui, vraiment, voici égalité, fraternité
. Michaux was astonished that a man some people called “a helpless sot” could remember so many names and so many details about men’s lives.

Here, he thought, is a leader. I would not want to be in the shoes of the Spanish governor of Louisiana.

“B
Y TH’ SWEAT O’ THE SAINTS
, C
AP’N
C
LARK
,
IT’S NOT A PLACE
I’d chase a scotched bear into,” exclaimed Lieutenant Towles.

“Nope,” William replied, peering through his spyglass, “but how ’bout a Little Turtle?”

Towles gave a wan smile and a shake of the head, and peered toward the place. It was the awfulest tangle of tree trunks and root boles and dead limbs William had ever seen in his life, where some past tornado had blown down a whole forest on the swampy banks of the Maumee River, and it was full of Indians. In the snarl of gray-weathered trunks and rotting bark within the round of his lens he caught glimpses of half-concealed movement and colors: a dab of vermillion war paint, a flash of honed steel, a patch of red cloth. It was a natural fortress, and now the Indians of Little Turtle’s Confederacy—at least a thousand of them, according to the scouts—were forming their defense in it. Beyond the great blowdown stood Fort Miami, the British fort on American soil that had been supplying the Confederacy with
guns and ammunition and knives. And it was obvious that here was the place where Mad Anthony Wayne’s slow, inexorable two-year advance was going to end in a showdown at last. Wayne had President Washington’s authorization to attack the British fort if he deemed it prudent, and to destroy it even though the two countries were not officially at war. His main objective, though, was to crush the tribes that had twice crushed the United States Army.

Wayne had got his 2,500-man army into the heart of their country by avoiding four of the mistakes that had ruined Generals Harmar and St. Clair: he had kept a whole company of scouts out at all times; he had kept his cannons and supply trains up with the troops; he had maintained iron discipline over Regulars and volunteers alike; and he had never stopped anywhere even for one night without building fortifications. Wayne had constructed seven forts during his tortoiselike progress into the heart of the Algonquian country, and countless fortified campsites—one at the end of every day’s march. In all this time, not once had the tribes been able to catch Wayne off guard. They were calling him The Man Who Never Sleeps. They were also calling him The Long Knife, William had learned, and he had felt a deep, sad bitterness on hearing George’s sobriquet applied to a new leader.

But now by good management Wayne was here; he had moved his hardened, polished army through an infinity of the world’s deepest woods and prickliest, swampiest landscapes. The reckless courage that had earned him the nickname of Mad Anthony in the Revolution had matured into this Alexandrian thoroughness. He was middle-aged, fleshy, and sat on his mare nearby now, his rheumatic thigh wrapped in layers of flannel; and his legions, their blue uniforms wet from a morning rainshower and the sweat of a three-hour march, were maneuvering into positions for the charge, and surely the Indians swarming in that tangle were licking their lips in anticipation of another hearty draught of blood. Here was Wayne’s parading army in blue, lining up for a frontal assault against a concealed hornet swarm in a gigantic brushpile, and to William it seemed that the whole phenomenal progress would prove to have been in vain, that Wayne was going to make the same fatal mistake that the other generals had made.

General Wilkinson came riding along the ranks, looking pink, sleek and nervous, handing down General Wayne’s words. “Be set,” he told each company as he came along. “After the advance guard decoys them out, listen for the drums. Run over them with bayonets. Don’t shoot till they’re in full flight!” He
reined in near William, leaned down and muttered: “I do believe he’s mad after all. Look at that pile of jackstraws! I swear we’ll all die in there!”

Though this was what William had been thinking himself, Wilkinson’s criticisms seemed out of place, here on the brink of battle, and William replied, trying not to show his irritation:

“I reckon this is time not to doubt but to pray.” Wilkinson, surprised, maybe disappointed, raised his eyebrows, grew pinker and poutier, and rode on to the next company.

The muggy air was thick now with apprehension, as if every man’s nerves were giving off atoms of fear that combined with the others to create an invisible miasma of it all over the field. All the low voices, all the whispering of hooves and boots through the brush and of cloth on cloth, all the wheel-trundling, all the gun-handling and sword-drawing and the thousands of nervous adjustments of gear and clothing, combined to make a rushing sound like waterfalls. Every infantryman now stood with his bayonet gleaming and musket loaded with a ball and three pellets of large shot. Down by the river on their big warhorses sat the helmeted dragoons, with sabers drawn and resting aslant on their shoulders; their duty would be to slash their way around the Indians’ left flank, while the mounted Kentuckians of General Scott would prevent the Indians’ right wing from breaking out of the timber. If I was running this thing, William thought, I’d send Scott clear around ’em to cut off their escape. Wilkinson had proposed this to Wayne, but the commandant had his own notion, from which he would not depart: a swift, solid front of cold steel, nothing fancy.

The steady murmur of the troops rose now. The advance scouts were in a skirmish line spurring their horses into a trot straight through the weeds toward the distant gray mass of dead tree trunks. William raised his spyglass to watch. On the limb of a sumac tree in the foreground perched a female cardinal, a dull ruddy brown, with rusty crest and brow, tilting her head left and right, her bright orange beak opening for tiny
cheeps
that could not be heard over the great murmuring rustle of the moving army. William twisted the eyepiece, and the cardinal dissolved and now the fallen timbers were in focus and he could see the woods crawling with Indians. He slid the brass tube shut and put it in his pouch and drew his sword.

The advance party rode straight on, closer and closer toward the blowdown, almost like sacrifices to the god of war, their black hats and white crisscrossed belts jogging up and down. William’s pulse seemed to be jarring his eyeballs as he breathed
shallowly and watched them go. Their dangerous role was to draw fire, feign panic, and draw Indians out of the woods in pursuit.

Then the blue-white smoke and the staccato rattle of guns poured out of the woods amid the howling of massed warriors. The vanguard hesitated, some men flinging up their arms and tumbling, others discharging their weapons into the trees; horses wheeled and fell; gunsmoke screened the gray woods from view. And now through the yelling and rattle of gunfire came the chattering beat of the general’s drummers, and the officers’ shouts: “Arms at ready! Double step! For-ward!” And the whole front of them, shoulder to shoulder, nearly half a mile from wing to wing, swept forward like a wave in that surprisingly swift pace they had practiced and practiced and practiced on the fields at every bivouac.

Now the survivors of the vanguard came thundering back, blood-smeared, wild-eyed, through the thinning smoke, many riderless horses and unhorsed riders among them; and close behind came the howling of the warriors who had sprung from the woods to pursue them. The infantry opened ranks to let the horsemen through and then closed again and swept on, and as they closed on the astonished Indians they began bellowing, a deep, angry chorus in monotone.

A din of clattering and clinking swept along the line now as bayonets and swords and tomahawks clashed. William was where he had been half a dozen times before in his young life: where little bits of death whizzed thick as bees through the air—musketballs, arrows, and blades.

But for once, the clash did not slow the onrush. The line of blue, with its gleaming edge of steel, overran the tawny warriors and rushed on against the jumbled timbers like a wave against a reef, leaving in the weeds behind it a few dozen struggling forms, men trying to pull their bayonets out of flesh, while the warriors trying to flee back into the woods got in the way of those who were still in there trying to shoot.

Now William plunged into the crazy tangle of limbs and roots, hacked across a fleeing red back, laying flesh open to the ribs; and to right and left he could see and hear his soldiers crashing and yelling and thrashing. The Indians had had no time to reload, and their desperate swipes with warclub, knife, and tomahawk were too short; a man with a five-foot musket and a two-foot bayonet had a superior reach. William was suddenly beginning to understand Mad Anthony’s faith in this weapon. Indians doubled over, their hands clawing at gun muzzles, as the
steel slid between their ribs or punched into their abdomens.

And the very tree trunks and limbs and roots the Indians had chosen for their defense now impeded their retreat, and entrapped them. Some tripped backward and lay squirming under the probing bayonets; some were pinned to tree trunks as they tried to scramble over them; some were impaled as they tried to crash through mats of dead wood. William could hear virtually no gunfire and not much shouting; now it was mostly a crunching and crackling and munching, like a herd of animals rushing through undergrowth, here a gasp, there a groan, now and then a scream of dying or a curse or a command in English, and, somewhere behind, the chattering of drums.

“They’re on the run!” William shouted. “Keep on! Don’t give ’em a breath! Don’t lose each other! Bear hunt! It’s a bear hunt.” A russet arm, smeared with sweaty ochre war paint and grease, flashed across his vision and then tightened like a hawser around his neck and his breath was cut off and his hat was down over his eyes, and a heavy hard body was on his back. William anticipated the stab of a knife, but before he could struggle, the arm jerked tighter and then released and there was a loud grunt. William turned, his hat falling off, and saw one of his troopers pressing and twisting on his musket, driving the speared warrior to the ground. William croaked through his bruised windpipe: “Thankee, man!” The Indian was on the ground gaping like a fish and twitching, still holding the knife he had not had time to use. It was one of those British-issue scalping knives with a red-painted wooden handle.

The soldier who had saved William’s life now pulled his bayonet out of the Indian’s side and without a word crouched and went under a log farther into the tangle.

T
HE BATTLE HAD BEEN WON IN MINUTES, AND FROM THEN
on it had been just a matter of climbing and crawling through the fallen forest after the fleeing Indians, finishing off those who had crawled into coverts to hide and die. Halfway through, the companies were halted and reformed, refreshed with a shot of whiskey and words of praise, and then ordered to push on. Now mosquitoes and snakes were the only living enemies in this close, damp, dizzying world of deadwood. The sweating troops began emerging from the other side of the blowdown at about noon, onto a weedy meadow, and there, less than a mile ahead, stood the palisades and block houses of Fort Miami with the British flag, hanging limp atop its flagstaff. Spread far around the fort were Indian dwellings, hundreds of acres of corn and vegetables,
and the British trading post. The legion was halted here to form a defensive line in case of a counterattack.

But there would be no counterattack; that was plain. William climbed up a slanting limb of a huge fallen oak, slid out his spyglass, and gazed on a pathetic scene.

Hundreds of warriors, many limping, some carrying wounded comrades on their backs, were crowding toward the British fort; some were pounding on its gate with their weapons and demanding refuge. But the British officers and soldiers stood above, gazing toward the American Army, and made no move to open the gates and let the Indians in.

“Look’ee, sir,” William called to General Wilkinson, extending his spyglass. Wilkinson rode over and took it and studied the scene. William said through clenched teeth: “Some allies, the Redcoats, eh? They hire the savages to war on us, then shut ’em out when they’re whipped! By God, but that fort’s an insult to all that’s human!” he growled. “Pray he’ll let us storm it, eh, and cut off the Hydra’s last head! We’ve come too far not to, right, sir?”