Long Knife (47 page)

He looked up at the spitting gray skies. We’ve been lucky to have no freezing, he thought. A freeze would make the crossing impossible, unless the ice were strong enough to support us, and no chance of that.

At daylight the next day George walked to the water’s edge with the scouts who were to man the pirogue. “Now listen well, boys. I want you to pole the water for depth all the way. Find where the river channel lies. Find the opposite shore, and build a scaffold there to put baggage on so’s we can swim the horses
over to pick it up. Got that? Blaze the route on tree trunks so you can find your way back here. And mind this, now: Whatever it’s like out there, you bring me back a
favorable
report. I don’t want this army going into that water with any doubts in their heads. D’ you follow me?”

The scouts looked at each other with raised eyebrows, then back to him, and nodded. They clambered into the fresh yellow trough of the vessel and he shoved them out into the stream. “She floats like a swan, sir!” exclaimed the man in the bow, who stood holding a long sounding-pole. The soldiers on the bank sent up a cheer and hopeful laughter. The expanse of water looked less formidable now that they understood it would not be an absolute unknown. The canoe moved slowly away and soon was out of sight among the trees.

Camp was struck and the men loafed on the ground waiting for the return of the scouts. Finally, about midmorning, there was a shout. “Here she comes!” The boat, now smeared with brown mud, came slowly back, the scouts pausing at a tree every few yards to swing a tomahawk and chip away a spot of bark.

The scouts were in good humor. “Found the channel, sir,” they reported. “About thirty yards wide in all. Rest of the way the water’s two to four feet deep. We found t’other shore an’ put up a scaffold like you said, in about three feet of water.”

“Fine work! All right, lads!” George shouted. “Let’s get this fine ship loaded with the baggage, and we’re off!”

The loaded pirogue, burdened so heavily that her gunwales were almost awash, moved out onto the flood again and George waded into the brown water to follow her. “Come on in, boys! Time t’ get your feet wet again!” He braced his spirit against the shock of the icy water that flowed into his moccasins and crept further up his legs with every step.

“Yowee! Hoo ha!” the men shouted as they waded in after him, one by one, gasping.

The file waded for an hour, the land disappearing behind them, the bottom squishy and invisible under their feet. They carried their rifles across their shoulders and their powder horns around their necks. The water reached their knees, their thighs, their hips, their waists, eventually their chests as they struggled onward toward he river channel. Every breath was a gasp through chattering teeth. Their skin grew too numb to feel; the pain of the cold advanced inward to their bones and joints.

When the water was to his chest, George heard a chorus of
shivery laughter behind him. He turned to look. The men, their faces gray-blue, were watching Dickie Lovell, the little drummer boy, who had hauled himself up onto his drum and was lying on his stomach upon it, floating, hanging with one hand onto the fringe of Sergeant Crump’s coat and thus being towed across. Responding to their laughter, the boy grew antic, splashing with his feet, grinning, finally letting loose of Crump’s coat, and paddling himself along with his hands. George roared with happiness and turned to continue ahead, seeking the bottom carefully one step after another with his benumbed feet. His heart thudded rapidly in his breast and now and then a terrific shudder would shake him the whole length of his body. He turned again to look back and saw them coming on, their arms held high, each one close behind the other, rain dripping from their hats and noses, concentrating on their footing, not a one complaining or straggling. Some of the shorter men were immersed to their very necks, only their heads and forearms and hands above the surface. The current was becoming perceptible as the column crept closer to the channel of the river.

At last the scouts stopped the pirogue. “Here we are, sir, the channel!” George stopped the column. The men braced themselves against tree trunks or held on to the branches of scrub and waited while the pirogue was paddled across to the scaffold and unloaded. Then it came back; five or six men at a time were hauled into the dugout, an equal number threw in their guns and powder and then hung on to the gunwales with both hands to be towed across the depths.

In two hours of this, while those standing in wait gritted their teeth and fought with all their will to keep the last embers of life-warmth from ebbing out of their bodies, the ferrying of the troops was completed. The horses were swum wild-eyed over to the scaffold, found their footing, and standing belly-deep in the water, were loaded again.

And the march resumed up the gradually sloping bottom, the men growing more and more cheerful as the water level dropped below their waists. They began joking and cursing merrily as they went along. There was still no land in sight, but the awful fear of slipping under the murky waters and being drowned was past, and they grew intoxicated with that heady joy of having survived what had been for many the worst experience of their lives.

The column waded on for another three miles, a little warmed by their exertions again, but now feeling that awful gnawing
emptiness in their bellies and knowing that there were no hunting parties out this day to bring them fresh meat for supper. Most had only a little corn and a few scraps of yesterday’s meat in their pouches. “What’re we eatin’ tonight, sergeant?” somebody asked.

“Y’ might search through yer clothes,” came the reply. ’Y’may’ve picked up a catfish ’r two along th’ way.”

“Hey, Colonel Clark!” somebody called from back in the file. “Sir, where was all this water last July when we was a’goin’t’ other way crost Illynoy?”

“Hey, you remember that, do you?”

“Aye!”

“Well, think on it hard, then, and maybe that’ll warm you a bit!”

“Ha ha!”

In that spirit they reached the channel of the second river, wading down again to their chests, then crossing in the pirogue or clinging to it, and it was a quicker crossing than the first, this river being not quite so wide nor deep and the men more familiar with the procedure. Dickie Lovell entertained them by floating on his drum once more, letting the boat tow him across.

By evening they were encamped on a half-acre knoll, the trackless water behind them. They were in high spirits, all laughing at each other in recollection of things that had happened in the course of what they were now casually referring to as “this ferrying business.” George moved among their camps and encouraged their joking, here and there laying on a bit of praise. By nightfall they had begun to think themselves superior to other men, boasting that neither the rivers nor seasons could stop their progress. Their whole conversation now was about what they would do when they got to the enemy. They now began to view the Big Wabash ahead as a creek, and had no doubt that such men as themselves could find a way to cross it. They wound themselves up to such a pitch that they soon took Vincennes in their fancies and divided up the spoils, and before bedtime were far advanced on their way to Detroit.

George listened to all this with a catch in his throat, watched them feed themselves on imagination instead of hot food, watched them warm their gaunt, chilled bodies before the bonfires, and marvelled that they could laugh so, being now as it were stranded in enemy country with no way to retreat if the British or Indians should discover them, unless by some long chance they should fall in with the
Willing
. He was now convinced
that they would find the whole low country of the Wabash drowned, and that today’s accomplishment was but a prelude to what they would face in the next few days.

If the
Willing
has been unable to reach her station in this flood, he thought, we’ll have to find and steal boats on this side of the Wabash to get across, even at the risk of an alarm.

Well, he thought. If that’s what we’ll have to do, that’s what we shall do.

Captain Bowman sat by the fire that night and wrote:

They set out early the next morning. It was still raining. They crossed another river and marched until nightfall, finding at last a rise of ground well-drained enough to sleep on, lay down wet and unfed, and lapsed into a state that was as much the swoon of exhaustion as sleep.

On the morning of the next day they set out again, plodding and squishing through the sopping gray-brown countryside, fording more flooded creeks, as if in an endless dream, bellies and heads empty. George sent four men down one of these creeks in the pirogue with orders to cross the Embarras River if possible and steal boats from a plantation that was known to stand on its eastern shore. The day was nearly gone when the troops reached the banks of the Embarras and were dismayed to see that all the land beyond it, as far as the eye could see, was under water. This river, sometimes known as the Troublesome River, flowed southward into the great Wabash a few miles below Vincennes, the two streams making a Y. George had hoped to cross the Embarras, then march five miles overland in the fork to meet the Wabash immediately opposite Vincennes, then make the final crossing of the Wabash and attack. But now it appeared that all the land between the two rivers was deeply inundated. There was nothing to do but detour down the west bank of the Embarras, find the Wabash below the juncture, and cross it there.

Turning the column southward now, he led the bedraggled woodsmen to lower and lower ground. Soon they were wading again, searching in the twilight for the Wabash.

After two more hours of struggling forward in that direction,
they were rejoined by the scouting party in the pirogue, who had been unable to get across the Embarras because of driftwood, debris, and thickets. Now the immediate objective was not to find the Wabash but simply to find a spot of ground sufficiently above water to spend the night on. Rain started again, pelting down in the darkness, as the column floundered and splashed along in pitch blackness, keeping in touch with each other by voice. This was the worst circumstance yet, and George’s mind was sinking toward abject despair, almost losing its orientation and slipping into panic, when his feet detected a barely perceptible rising of the slope. At eight o’clock they were at last on a rise of ground. Faint, aching, trembling so hard they were nearly incapacitated, they dragged up driftwood and built a dozen fires to dry themselves by.

The desolation Colonel Clark’s army felt the next morning when they rose from their wet blankets and saw themselves surrounded by a sea of tan flowing water was dispelled by a single dull boom that rolled to them over the rushing of the flood:

It was the morning gun of Fort Sackville.

“Hear that, boys?” George yelled as soon as he realized what it was. “Hamilton’s cannon! We’re that close, lads!” The men cheered, shook their fists in its direction, pounded each other on the back, and went whooping and frolicking about the island. Having restored their circulation by that outburst, they loaded up and resumed the march southward through waist-deep water, nourishing themselves on a breakfast of marching songs and grim jokes.

At about two o’clock in the afternoon, their heads and bodies
again benumbed by the painful progress, they came at last to a bluff which they knew would be the western bank of the Wabash. They had at last gotten below the mouth of the Embarras. They staggered up onto the high ground, spent, and made such camp as they could.

George reckoned that they were now about three leagues downstream from Vincennes. Now they had only to cross the Wabash to its eastern shore and march northward those nine miles and they would be at the destination they had suffered for so long to reach. Put in those terms, it sounded very simple. But looking across the great river, George saw that their greatest obstacle was indeed just ahead: There was no other side of the Wabash to be seen. The river swept by majestically below. But beyond its channel, as far eastward as he could see, there was nothing but floodwater, bristling with leafless trees, snarls of driftwood, and the tops of bushes. Beyond the place where he stood, he could not distinguish a foot of ground anywhere.

“You swim, Isaac?” he heard one man ask another behind him.

“Swim? Shoot, no,” said the other scornfully. “Swimmin’s fer a fish. A man walks on ’is two legs. But,” he added after a thoughtful pause, “right now I’d give a lot to be a fish.”

I need to … I need to … George blinked his eyes several times and shook his head to clear the rush of fatigue and confusion that was sweeping through it like a windstorm. The river and the drowned lands beyond were looking unreal, changing from brown to silver, coming close and then going away. Got to get to thinking straight, he thought, or I’m liable to make some foolish error! He took a deep breath and everything collected back into a semblance of normal vision.

Have to send scouts across there to seek a landing place, he thought. Find some dry ground.