Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (77 page)

BELOW THE MAUMEE RAPIDS, OHIO, MAY 5, 1813

Lieutenant Joseph Underwood lies shivering in the stern of the leading American flatboat in General Clay’s flotilla as it sweeps down the Maumee in the wan light of daybreak. Underwood is recovering from a severe attack of measles; his single blanket, wrapped tightly around him, is not enough to protect him from the raw drizzle that beats across the valley. Behind him, swirling in the curves of the river, are seventeen similar craft, each carrying one hundred Kentuckians protected from the arrows of marauding Indians by heavy shields of timber nailed to the bulwarks.

Underwood can hear the rumble of the big guns downriver. As
the little fleet courses on, the rumble grows louder, becomes a deafening roar. The sound seems to well up from the bottom of the flatboat until the atmosphere dances with it and the world vibrates with every volley.

It is Underwood’s first experience of cannon fire. He will never forget it. He is only twenty, an ardent Kentucky volunteer, recruited as a private but elected lieutenant in the democratic fashion of the American militia, which will have no truck with the military authoritarianism of Europe. The words of his general still ring in his ears:

“Kentuckians stand high in the estimation of our common country. Our brothers in arms who have gone before us to the scene of action have acquired a fame which should never be forgotten by you—a fame worthy of your emulation—Should we encounter the enemy,
remember the fate of your butchered brothers at the River Raisin—that British treachery produced their slaughter!”

The devil Procter is up ahead: the moment for revenge has arrived at last.

The Battle of Fort Meigs

On the right bank of the river, Underwood spots two men waving at the flotilla. Lieutenant-Colonel William Dudley, in command of the lead boat, dispatches a canoe to pick them up. These are Harrison’s emissaries: they have a message for General Clay. Dudley sends them back to Boat Number Thirteen. Underwood watches them go, wondering what their message is. Alas, he and his comrades will never be told the details.

Like most American militia commanders, Green Clay is more politician than soldier. His roots go back to America’s beginnings: his great-grandfather first came to Virginia with Sir Walter Raleigh. The Speaker of the House is a cousin; Clay himself has served as a member of both houses of the Kentucky legislature. At fifty-five he is wealthy from land speculation. He is also something of a classical scholar, has named his son (a future ambassador) Cassius Marcellus Clay, a name that will be adopted by succeeding generations of blacks on his tobacco plantation, one of whose descendants will become heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

Harrison’s emissary, Hamilton, has memorized a succinct message for Clay:

“You must detach about eight hundred men from your brigade, who will land at a point I will show, about one or one and a half miles above the fort, and I will conduct them to the British batteries on the left side of the river. They must take possession of the enemy’s cannon, spike them, cut down the carriages, and return to the boats. The balance of the men under your command will land on the right bank, opposite to the first landing, and will fight their way through the Indians to the fort.”

Clay makes his plans: Lieutenant-Colonel William Dudley, the senior officer, now in the lead boat, will land the first twelve craft on the left bank to carry the assault on the cannon. Clay will lead the remaining six boats to the right bank to harass Tecumseh’s force.

Hamilton goes off downstream to convey Clay’s orders to Dudley. Underwood, lying in the stern of the lead boat, watches him climb aboard and converse with his commander. Dudley is a heavy, fleshy man, “weak and obstinate but brave” in Harrison’s assessment,
“ignorant and rash” in the later, rueful opinion of Eleazer Wood, the engineer. Like Underwood, Dudley has never heard a hostile gun until this morning. In common with so many other citizen commanders he also suffers from a fatal flaw: he does not bother to explain to his subordinates the full purpose of Harrison’s plan—to spike the cannon and get out fast. Lieutenant Underwood, who is second-in-command of Captain John Morrison’s company, is told only that the troops will land on the left bank and storm the enemy batteries. And then? Nobody tells him.

Suddenly—gunfire! On the right bank muskets flash as a group of Indians appear. One of the captains is wounded in the head. The troops fire back and the Indians flee, no doubt to warn the British.

It comes home to Underwood that he is about to fight and perhaps to die, and with that realization everything takes on a different hue. The morning may be grey, the wind raw, the rain chill, the brooding woods oppressive, yet the world has never looked brighter or more attractive. He gazes about him at ordinary objects and realizes that for him they may soon disappear forever. His thoughts go back to home, to old friends, and in his mind he bids them farewell. He finds that he is neither frightened nor alarmed but strangely calm with the calmness of melancholy.

His daydream is interrupted as the boats nose into the bank and the troops leap off and form up in three columns, one hundred yards apart. The left column is to swing around on the flank and get behind the British guns while Dudley on the extreme right attacks the batteries from the river side. The centre column, led by Underwood’s captain, Morrison, will come up in reserve. Captain Leslie Combs will lead his company of thirty riflemen as an advance party to protect the flank.

Silently, the Kentuckians creep forward. Suddenly Combs’s rangers flush a small party of Indians, who after a brief skirmish flee toward the British encampment. At this the troops break their silence and with a tremendous yell fall upon the enemy batteries. The British gunners flee in disorder, and Dudley’s men, without bothering to wait for the spikes that are being sent by Harrison to
hammer into the powder holes, use ramrods from their muskets to render the cannon powerless.

At this point, everything that Harrison had hoped for has been achieved. The guns have been silenced before Procter’s reinforcements can be brought forward or the Indians on the opposite bank can cross the river. It is time to retire, but Dudley’s men do not know this. They loiter around the useless guns, confused and disorganized, cheering themselves hoarse. In vain, Harrison, watching from the fort, signals them to return. The troops believe the General is cheering them on and so cheer back.

As the minutes tick by, more Indians appear at the fringe of the woods bordering the open plain on which the British guns are placed.
Indians!
Caution cannot compete with ancestral memories, folk tales, gaudy stories handed down by uncles and grandfathers who have, since the days of Daniel Boone, battled the redskins on the old frontier. Flushed with victory, oblivious to the entreaties of Dudley, who flails about him with a half-pike, the Kentuckians tear after the painted enemy. The slowly retreating tribesmen draw their quarry farther and farther away from the protection of the plain, where the fort’s cannon can give them cover, and deeper into a wooded labyrinth, creased by ravines and encumbered by stumps and logs.

Harrison is in anguish.

“They are lost! They are lost!” he cries from his vantage point across the river. “Can I never get men to obey my orders?”

He offers one thousand dollars to any volunteer who will cross over and warn Dudley. A young lieutenant instantly accepts, rushes to the bank, struggles to launch a pirogue, finally gets it into midstream only to realize he is too late. British reinforcements have arrived. The smell of defeat is in the air.

OLD FORT MIAMI, OHIO, MAY 5, 1813

John Richardson, the teenaged gentleman volunteer with the British 41st, is just sitting down to breakfast in a wet shelter made
of evergreen boughs when a rabble of gunners dashes into camp crying out that the Americans have seized the batteries.

Richardson looks ruefully at the scanty meal he will never eat—a tough steak of half-cooked beef, a piece of dry bread, a mug of tea made from sassafras root, sweetened with sap from the sugar maple. It is not much of a meal, but here in this sodden camp it is a banquet. Richardson, who has not yet attained his full growth, is perennially ravenous, a condition aggravated by the fact that, being a junior, he is the last to reach the cooking pot. On the forced march that follows, the future novelist thinks more of the uneaten meal and what will happen to it than he does of the approaching conflict.

The sound of musket fire on the left snaps him out of his reverie. The Americans are in possession of the guns: Richardson can see them milling about the batteries. The Scotch mist of dawn has turned to driving rain, rendering the mud knee deep. In this soft pudding the men flounder forward in an attempt to retrieve their losses. One of the 41st falls dead. Captain Peter Chambers—the same officer who dealt with Harrison the day before—seizes the dead man’s musket, throws away his own sword, and shouts:

“Who will follow me and retake that battery?”

“I will!” cries little John Richardson. Two other officers and a dozen men push forward with him against the American right flank.

Richardson, who believes this tiny attacking force will be wiped out, is astonished when the Americans give way. He does not yet know that Tecumseh and his Indians have swum the river and sucked the American left flank into the maze of the forest. As the Kentuckians stumble forward, mauled by the elusive native sharpshooters withdrawing behind logs and stumps, Tecumseh circles around behind them. Caught in an ambush, the green troops are driven back toward the advancing British, trapped between two fires.

Captain Morrison’s reserve column has hastened to the rescue of his fellow Americans—too late. Joseph Underwood gets a brief glimpse of Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley, who rails at him for not keeping his men in better line; but the ground is so uneven, the bush so thick that any sort of parade-ground manoeuvre is impossible,
especially for raw troops. It is the last time Underwood will see Dudley alive.

Morrison falls, shot through the temple, his optic nerve severed by a musket ball. Underwood does what he can for his sightless captain, then takes command of the company, already falling back under Tecumseh’s ambush.

The retreat becomes a rout. The Kentuckians rush back through the woods toward the batteries, where Underwood confidently expects they can re-form and repel the Indians. Men are dropping all around him as he runs. Suddenly he feels something slam into his back—a stunning, deadening blow that pitches him forward onto his hands and knees. He pulls himself to his feet, throws open his waistcoat to see if the ball has passed through his body. There is no sign of it. He stumbles on, emerging at last from the woods onto the open ground where the batteries stand. Somebody seizes his sword: a British soldier.

“Sir,” cries his captor, “you are my prisoner!”

Underwood is astonished, looks about, sees the ground littered with discarded muskets.

Says his captor: “Your army has surrendered.”

He has difficulty understanding this, stumbles forward to a line of captives, recognizes one of his men, Daniel Smith.

“Good Lord, Lieutenant,” says Smith, his eyes brimming with tears, “what does all this mean?”

Underwood tells him what he has himself only just discovered: they have been defeated. Of Dudley’s force of 800, fewer than 150 have escaped. The rest are either captured or dead, including the Colonel himself, whose corpse, already scalped, lies somewhere in the forest.

The prisoners are marched downriver toward the old British fort, now not much more than a crumbling ruin. As they are driven forward, the Indians loot them of clothes and possessions. Underwood loses all his outer clothing but manages to hide his watch. Because he has read somewhere that the Indians treat best those who show no fear, he stares sternly at his native captors until
one strikes him full in the face with a stick. Underwood decides that humility is a better policy.

On reaching the fort, the prisoners face a hideous ordeal. On their left, some twenty paces back from the river bank, stands a line of armed Indians reaching to the gate of the enclosure. Each man must run this gauntlet, already slippery with blood and flanked by a hedgerow of naked, scalped corpses. Some of the British escorts attempt to prevent the Indians from belabouring the column with tomahawks, war clubs, and rifles, but when one British regular from the 41st is shot through the heart, these attempts cease.

Underwood notices that the men nearest the river bank, and thus farthest from the line of warriors, suffer the most as they try to reach the fort. He determines to run as close as possible to the Indians, who will not be able to shoot him in the curve of the laneway without killing their own people. He dashes forward, feeling the blows of ramrods on his back. The man ahead drops dead. Underwood stumbles across his corpse, but others fall on it, blocking the passageway. In the end he reaches the safety of the fort, badly bruised and bleeding from the wound in his back but still alive.