Long Knife (58 page)

Unbearably alone Save for You

The night of our Vict
^ry
I stood in moonlight and thought long on it that it Shone as well on You my Dear Awaiting April I am
^yr
devoted

GEORGE

This was the hardest decision George had ever had to make.

His men, still strung taut as bowstrings with their desire to push on to Detroit, were ready to set out at once, disregarding their exhaustion. His officers were equally enthusiastic, as were the French volunteers, who promised to go along and assured him that their compatriots around Detroit would welcome him. George knew that Detroit was now at its weakest, and that the Indians were stunned and confused by Hamilton’s surrender. All these circumstances told him to set out at once with his small force, despite the severity of the winter weather, and strike while the iron was hot

On the other hand, reason told him he should wait for Captain Montgomery to come with the promised reinforcements. By June they should arrive, he thought, and then the travel will be less rigorous. My men, he reminded himself, are far more spent than they imagine themselves to be, and surely few of them could really effect another winter march. Besides, at least a half of them are needed here to guard all these prisoners.

But what if we never get all the reinforcements Montgomery is pledged to raise? he thought. What if we let pass this opportunity, in simple anticipation of more troops, and they never come? And in the meantime Detroit would be repaired and reinforced?
I had to forsake that goal once before for simple want of men; can I stand to do so again?

He and his officers counciled on it loud and long and, finally, discretion prevailed. They decided to do what any ordinary military officer would have been expected to do: Wait for reinforcements, wait for spring.

Even as he uttered the announcement to the troops on the parade, he felt a dreadful conviction that it had been the
wrong
decision. It seemed that something went out of the troops, some rigidity; and the fervor that had kept them up during and since the long march was kicked out from under them like crutches by the news of this delay, this loss of momentum. In the remaining two weeks before the army’s return to Kaskaskia, many of the men began to fall sick, and to be almost incapacitated by the pains, the internal complaints, the chilblains resulting from the severe exhaustion and exposure of the recent march. A solid week of cold rain increased their miseries.

D
^r
Sir:

I receiv’d your letter with the thanks of the House inclosed. I must confess Sir that I think my country has done me more honor than I merited but rest assured that my study shall be to deserve that Honor that they have already conferr’d on me.

By my public letters you will be fully acquainted with my late successful expedition against L
^t
Gov
^r
Hamilton who has fallen into my hands with all the principal Partisans of Detroit. This stroke will nearly put an end to the Indian War, had I but men enough to take the advantage of y
^e
confusion of the Indian Nations. I could silence the whole in two months. I learn that five hundred men is ordered out to reinforce me. If they arrive, with what I have in the country, I am in hopes will enable me to do something Clever.

I am with respect Sir Y
^r
very humble Servant

G. R. CLARK

A Warrant
To W
^m
MYERS

S
^r
as the letters you have at present contain matters of great consequence and require a quick passage to Williamsburg, This is to impower you to press for the service any thing you may stand in need of. If you cannot get it by fair means, you are to use force of Arms. I request of you to lose no time as you prize the interest of your Country.

I wish you success &c

G. R. CLARK
March 13, 1779

  On the fourteenth of March, the courier Bill Myers set out by land for a return trip to Williamsburg, bearing a packet of letters and reports from Colonel Clark to Patrick Henry, among them a day-by-day account of the battle of Vincennes,

The following day, parties of Miami and Peoria Indians came to Vincennes to assure the Long Knife of their fidelity.

That evening, Tobacco’s Son again sought audience with George, this time bearing as his offering the deed to a huge tract of land amounting to some one hundred fifty thousand acres on the north side of the Ohio River, near the Great Falls. “I wish that the Long Knife should build a great wigwam on that land and make it his home,” said the Piankeshaw. “The land shall hereafter and ever be the sole property of our great father with all things thereto belonging, either above or below the earth, shall be and is his, except a road through this land to his door, which shall remain ours, and for us to walk on and speak to our father. All nations from the rising to the setting sun who are not in alliance with us, are hereby warned to esteem the said gift and not to make that land taste of blood, that all people either at peace or war may repair in safety to get counsel of our father. Whoever first darkens that land shall no longer have a name.”

“I accept this generous gift of a great estate from my brother, Tobacco’s Son,” George said. “I accept it in trust for Virginia, which I serve. And the road will always be open for the red man who wishes to come and talk to me.” For a moment, his mind slipped away to a familiar vision: the great house overlooking the peaceful valley where white-stone buildings grew;
the woman, now Teresa, sitting by his side in a chair on the porch. This, he thought, is still another of my dreams coming true.

But I won’t have it, any of it, I’m afraid, until Detroit is mine and the war is over.

O
N THE FIFTEENTH
, W
ILLIAM
M
YERS RETURNED TO
V
INCENNES,
having been unable to go by land to the Falls because the whole country seemed to be flooded. He stayed only long enough to trade his horse for a canoe and, with three other men, set off down the Wabash to take the water route to the falls. Within minutes the frail little vessel had ridden the seething rivercourse southward out of sight among the inundated woodlands.

The following day most of the French-Canadian prisoners took the oath of neutrality and set off on their return to Detroit, carrying with them a copy of the French-American alliance and a great deal of excitement for the new American cause.

It rained and snowed for the better part of the next two days as the
Willing
and five smaller armed boats were caulked and loaded for the return to Kaskaskia. On the night of the nineteenth, an entertainment marked by excesses of joy and melancholy was held in the fort, during which Tobacco’s Son drank a great deal of Leonard Helm’s toddy, and the more inebriated he became, the more dignified. He finally became so dignified that some of the revelers speculated that he had died and left his body leaning against the wall.

And the next day, after command assignments had been completed, George and Bowman stepped aboard the
Willing
, which was jammed to the gunwales with seventy soldiers. Reaching over the side to grasp the hands of Captain Helm and Lieutenant Brashear on the landing, George looked at their teary eyes.

“So we’ll rally here in June, lads, to go for Detroit,” he promised.

“Aye,” said Helm, then he paused, interrupted by Bowman’s sudden violent, phlegmatic cough. Bowman spat into the river and wiped his mouth on his coat sleeve. Helm looked at him, trying to hide the fear in his eyes.

“My regards,” he said, leaning confidentially close to George, “to yer sweetheart and her brother.” Then he stepped back and saluted; the lines were cast off, and the stout vessel, pressed by the current, swung ponderously away from the landing with
Davey Pagan standing proudly at the rudder post, trying to wink conspiratorially, with his one eye, at his commandant.

Bowman, shuddering under a tarpaulin, wrote in the papers of his journal.

Then he lay back and shut his smarting eyes and enfolded himself in memories of the bare, brown warm flesh and the tender ministrations of Mai-hah, his Piankeshaw princess, whom he was going to miss sorely.

When the fort had dropped out of sight astern, the rambunctious troops in the two boats grew quiet, and fell to gazing at the flooded landscape, each man turned inward upon his own private thoughts. At length, a woodsman sitting near the port side, his arm on the gunwale and his chin resting on his knuckles, swung his hand out and pointed at a low gray rise of land. “Yonder,” he said quietly, “ain’t that th’ sugar camp, sir?”

“Right you are,” George said, and several of the men, who had apparently been studying the route of their painful trek a month earlier, nodded in agreement.

“I can still feel where I woke up with m’ arm froze to th’ ground,” somebody said.

George shuddered, remembering it. Wet snow sifted down, the little white flakes vanishing as they fell upon the brown water; the oars groaned in the rowlocks; the flood swashed and purled.

“Now,” said somebody else, “I see down thar th’ Bubbie.”

“Bejeezus!” exclaimed another softly. “Hit’s a looong hike. I can’t quite believe it’s true we done it.”

“I can,” said the first man, “I can feel in my bones that we done it.”

Several laughed, understanding the jest well because they felt it too.

“Ay
-men”
George said. Then he lowered his head so that his hat brim hid his eyes.

And he tried to think of Teresa, to keep himself warm.

T
HE WEATHER WAS MELLOWING FAST
. A
LIGHT GREEN PASTEL
sheen of buds was beginning to lighten the gray woods when George Rogers Clark and his small convoy of returning victors reached Kaskaskia early in April, and were welcomed with shouting, dancing, gunfire, and parades by the exuberant citizens. The French Kaskaskian volunteers who had gone with him against Vincennes found themselves particularly lionized, even those who had been aboard the
Willing
and arrived too late to engage in the battle. George encouraged the attitude, feeling that it further solidified the new bond between America and the Illinois French. He wrote a proclamation giving great credit even to the French militia who had remained behind and guarded Kaskaskia.

Also on hand at Kaskaskia was the
Rattletrap
, the gunboat in which Captain James Willing had been terrorizing the British posts on the Mississippi since 1778. Willing had taken the sea route back to report to Congress on conditions in Louisiana, leaving the
Rattletrap
and her forty raiders in command of Captain Robert George, one of his subalterns and a distant relative of Colonel Clark’s. Captain George had run the gamut of British Mississippi posts to get to Kaskaskia, and now placed himself and his vessel in Colonel Clark’s service.

These circumstances, pleasant though they were, meant that
George had to pause several extra days at Kaskaskia even while he was champing at the bit to go on to Cahokia and St. Louis, to carry Governor Henry’s letter to Fernando de Leyba and, above all, to return to Teresa.

She, her beauty, her gentleness, her vulnerability, had become his Siren, drawing him with a magnetic pull from his responsibilities, and like a
succubus
awakening him from night to night. Passionate French ladies of Kaskaskia danced him to exhaustion almost every evening as if determined, like the Piankeshaws of Tobacco’s Son, to infuse his heroic blood into theirs.

No, by Heaven, he thought one April night as an auburn-haired lady of Kaskaskia (he was sure he had danced with her on some night long past) lay back against his arm and invited him with her eyes. No! You, no more than that naked squaw, cannot hope to divert me from my lady.

From Kaskaskia then he rode out with the returning Cahokia volunteers for their triumphal return to their town. It was a beautiful journey of sunny days and mild nights, the rich soil of the countryside bringing up brilliant green young grass, wildflowers in profusion, the stark silver-gray of the forests now softened by a lace-work of redbud and dogwood blossoms. The calls of cardinals and thrushes drifted through the young foliage like flakes of hope; the gentle spring sunlight warmed the riders’ backs; gear jingled and leather groaned. Banners and guidons fluttered in the sun-charged motes of road dust. The Frenchmen, inspirited by pride, springtime, and their thoughts of home, broke into song every few minutes, and it was a happy trip indeed.

“I reckon you’ll want to cross right away to St. Louis to see your sweetheart,” Bowman said, riding close beside George.

“Aye. And to deliver Governor Henry’s letter. You’ll be crossing over with me, of course. They’ll all want to see you.”

“If it’s all the same to you, George, I’d sooner stay in Cahokia. There’ll be a lot for me t’do there …”

George didn’t press him. He knew that Joseph simply did not want the ladies at St. Louis to see him in his wretched condition, with his face covered by this flaking pink and yellow burn scar and the freckles of embedded black powder, the constant draining of mucus from his nose, the sudden bursts of coughing. Mai-hah’s nursing had been very good for Joseph’s soul but had done little to heal his wounds. George had hoped that the arrival
of warm weather would cure that awful coughing, but it seemed instead to grow worse, each day. George had begun to feel an awful sense of doom about Major Bowman; his lungs apparently had been burned and might not heal. Yet Bowman continued to conduct his duties with undiminished energy and obviously would not consider retiring for a convalescent leave while a Detroit campaign was but two months away.