From Sea to Shining Sea (40 page)

Yes, here was his regiment now, more than five hundred miles downriver from Fort Pitt, building a camp in the heart of enemy country and preparing for the last long trek to his targets on the Mississippi, three or four hundred more miles to the west by water and trail through the wilderness. He was nearly ready now for the big thrust of his plan, and his Strategy of the Absurd had come to seem more and more absurd every step of the way. Any other strategist would have called it off by now, he knew; he had almost done so himself two or three times along its ill-starred route.

He had designated them the Illinois Regiment because of their destination, but they were little more than a company.

He had come away from Red Stone Fort early in the spring, discouraged and enraged, with only 130 men instead of 300. They had obtained boats and ammunition at Fort Pitt, and embarked down the Ohio’s flood toward the Kentucky River where they were to be joined by Captain William Bailey Smith’s promised 200 Holston Valley volunteers, and all the way down George had assured himself that with Smith’s men he would have some 330—enough, perhaps, to succeed still. They had rowed 500 miles to the Kentucky without, as far as he could discern, even being seen by Indians.

He had found Smith waiting as promised—but not with 200 men. He had only 20. The Holston settlements had been too worried about Cherokees to let 200 fighting men be taken away, Smith had explained.

At that dismal moment George had almost quit his scheme. He had sat down with the forlorn Smith in a rain-soaked tent for a cup of rum to ease the agony of disappointment.

But then, inexplicably, George had been stirred by an outrageous, desperate, elated certainty that he could
still
do it. That there were only a third as many men meant only that it would be three times as hard, not that it would be impossible.

And so he had brought them on, to this remote and unpeopled island by the Falls of the Ohio, while his boat-weary troops grumbled and wondered why, if they had been recruited to defend Kentuck, they were proceeding a hundred miles beyond its last settlements.

At last, on that little island one night in the light of a huge bonfire, he had assembled his regiment, and had described to them all that he had learned about the British Governor General Hamilton the Hair-Buyer, and about his web of Indian agents and his line of forts on the Mississippi and Wabash. They had listened with keen interest, as there was hardly a man among them who had not lost at least one blood relative or loved one to the Hair-Buyer’s hired savages. And then, after he had worked them into a state of boiling rage over Hamilton’s atrocities, he had revealed to them the true nature of their secret mission.

For an awful moment they had sat in shocked silence, with the bonfire roaring before them and the falls rushing behind them, and George had had every reason to expect they would turn in mutiny against him.

But instead, almost to a man, they had risen around him, raised their fists and guns and knives and voices, and cheered him. He had almost keeled over with relief. And Leonard Helm, dazed with admiration for the audacious plan, had turned to Johnny Rogers, crying:

“What did I tell ye, boy? Oh, he always was a one to grab th’ Devil by th’ foreskin!”

That night a few had had second thoughts and deserted. And the next morning George had had to thrash one surly brute who had raised the complaint that they had been tricked. Since then there had been no more dissent. They were all for Colonel Clark now. They devoured his every word when he harangued them about the chance he was giving them to serve their country. They subjected their anarchic souls to the hard demands of military discipline.

During their training, George had joked to Johnny Rogers that he felt as if he were domesticating a wolf pack. They had come to admire him, and tried to please him. He had swelled their
heads with praise whenever they did something right, but raised swellings on their heads if they deliberately did things badly.

Until by now he had convinced them that they were a special breed of men with a special opportunity to do more good than all the huge armies marching up and down the seaboard. He knew they had frolic in their blood, and he had persuaded them that the upcoming adventure was going to be the greatest frolic this territory had ever seen. And so by now he had them in the palm of his hand, and he was shaping them into something greater than a mere guerrilla band.

It was the most ruffscuff lot of chawbacons that had ever gone by the name of a regiment. Almost every man in it had been living like a wolf in that dangerous realm between the white frontier and Indian territory, and their weather-cured hides bore scars to tell their hazardous histories: here a puckered bullet scar on a freckled shoulder, there a row of bear-claw scars down a flank, here a thin knife scar across a neck, there the gnarled vestige of a bitten-off ear. There was a noseless man, and a sergeant with a whitish tonsure shining through his greasy brown hair: one who had been scalped and had survived.

But they had qualities. He had watched them row like galley slaves day after day on the way down from Fort Pitt; he had watched them dance and cavort and brawl around their campfires. They were durable, quick, and rowdy. Most men avoid danger; these liked it and looked for it. They were cunning, but had their own kinds of honor, and they were Spartan, and they had spirit. What they lacked in numbers and cannon, they would have to make up for in spirit. They were, as Leonard Helm liked to phrase it, a people fit to goose bears.

But a major element of their spirit now, that which George knew would most suit them for the particular task, was that they were vengeful—seethingly, bitterly, murderously vengeful. Almost every man in the Illinois Regiment now considered himself to have a blood feud with the notorious Hair-Buyer. Almost every one of them had dreamed sometime of taking that British officer’s own scalp. And now here was this Lieutenant Colonel Clark, who seemed to have worked out the only way in the world for them to do it.

George strolled down from the mulberry grove now and moved into a meadow that gave him a wide view of the dark, high hills of the north bank. There, just above the falls on that side of the river, was a rock bluff from which one could see the whole great southwesterly curve of the Ohio for miles and miles. It was a grand, high, lonely place, with a steep stream falling
into the river nearby, a perfect place for a mill. Up on yon bluff, he thought now, daydreaming beyond the war, up there I’d build me a mill, and a fine house with a white-pillared porch, and there I’d sit with an elegant wife at my side, and watch the city grow here where I stand, and see the sun go down over the falls every evening.

What wife? he thought then. He could envision a woman in a billowy dress, but in his mind’s eye he could not put a face on her. But there would be someone. Someday when this task was done, and he had time for his own life, there would be someone who would be as good for him as Ann Rogers had been for John Clark.

He thought of them. He had never seen a place that his parents would like better.

Aye, he thought. This place is it. I’ll survey and engross it soon as I have the leisure. This mulberry grove on a hill. This is where my family will come to. After this war they’ll come here.

I can just feel it.

But first there’s this game o’ chess to finish with the Hair-Buyer.

O
N THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF
J
UNE
,
A BRIGHT
,
CLEAR DAY
with the river running high from a recent rainfall, George loaded his regiment into the rowboats with their guns and ammunition and enough jerky and parched corn for a week, and shoved off the upper end of the island. Left behind to garrison the outpost were seven sick militiamen deemed unfit for the rigors of the trek. They all went around to the north side of the island to watch their comrades shoot the rapids.

The boats were rowed upstream a mile, then swung about into the main channel and aimed down toward the rapids. As the current sped them toward the roaring, milky-white water, the men grew wide-eyed. “George,” Bowman gasped, “y’sure this is safe?”

George beamed at him. “Long as th’ boys don’t stand up and dance, we should stay right side up and bob right through like corks!”

Now the water was falling away before them, and the boats slithered and jounced down a gurgling, glassy-green waterchute between two boulders and then bucked through a churning pool of foam and headed into the next chute. “OooooHOW!” Bowman howled. “There goes m’ gizzard, right into my hat!”

The boats were soaring and dipping down the rushing staircase of water when the bright midmorning sunlight took on an eerie
yellowish pall. There were odd, blurry edges on every shadow, double gleams on every highlight. Those who dared look up saw the sun darkening in a cloudless sky, saw its light slowly winking out as if a giant eyelid were closing over it.

“An eclipse!” George yelled as soon as he understood. “A blessed omen to send us on our way!” But he wondered for a moment if Chief Logan’s Great Spirit were trying to scare him out of his purpose.

And then after a while they were in the frothy but gentle current below the falls, the men chattering like children in their relief, squinting to watch the black disk of the moon release the sun, and then their world was normal again. They gazed around with mouths agape, looking back at the white water in the ordinary glare of June sunshine, looking at the high, forested bluffs, at each other, at their own hands on their oars or rifles.

Joseph Bowman was looking strangely at George now, and finally asked with feeble levity, as if unsure whether to joke or not:

“Now, c’mon, George. How’d y’ arrange a thing like that?”

T
HE OARS WERE DOUBLE-MANNED
. M
EN NOT ROWING OR
scanning the shore slept in the bilges. There were some three hundred miles more to go by river, deeper into enemy country, before they would hide the boats and set out overland. George sat in the prow of the leading boat, like the tip of an arrowhead, with nothing in front of him but the little green-and-yellowstriped Virginia flag flapping on its standard, and the great river. He leaned back against the gunwale and contemplated the pearly sky, the undulating green bluffs etched with gray cottonwoods and greenish-white sycamores, the wildfowl always soaring in the sky or skimming the water. And he contemplated the river. He listened to the regular
pash pash pash pash
against the boat hull underneath him. The French called this one
La Belle Rivière
, and most Indian tribes’ names for it meant the same: the Beautiful River. And rightly. It was majestically beautiful, curving through a thousand miles of primeval forest and virgin meadowland from Fort Pitt to the Mississippi, so wide most of its way that a boat in midstream was out of accurate musket-range from either shore; deep enough in most seasons even for large boats; with a current gentle enough to permit fairly easy travel upstream by oar, paddle, and sometimes even sail. To the practical traveler, trader or soldier, its beauty was enhanced by its usefulness as a road through an almost impenetrable wilderness.

George saw rivers in both those ways, as beautiful and useful.
But he had also, long since, begun to understand rivers as earthshapers. He had seen how rivers force their ways through and around mountains to descend to the sea; he had seen how they ate down valleys and carried dirt and trees down. When he was in or on a river, he seemed to feel, through its tug on his flesh or on the hull of his boat, the very tilt of the continent. With a hand in the Potomac or the James or the York or the Rappahannock, he seemed to touch the Atlantic through watery extensions of his fingertips. Here in the Ohio, or on such of its tributaries as the Monongahela, the Muskingum, the Kanawha, he was sensible of the vast westering drainage.

He hung an arm over the side of this heavily laden war boat now and felt the cool, green water of the Ohio on his hand. But he could imagine that he felt as well the Mississippi’s yellow waters beyond that—though he had never seen it yet, only heard of it—and beyond that great muddy current, he imagined his finger-nerves like antennae touched the warm brine of the Gulf of Mexico.

George and Tom Jefferson had talked much about rivers. Into the Mississippi above the village of St. Louis on the Spanish side, the Missouri poured from westward, and rumor had it that it was even wider and longer than the Ohio, and that it drained a watershed far bigger than all the lands on this side of the Mississippi. His own spies, Moore and Linn, had seen that wondrous Missouri. The theory was that the Missouri started in a great range of western mountains which Indians called the Shining Mountains, and that on the farther slope of those mountains there was a river that ran westward down to the Pacific Ocean.

That would mean, George thought, that the main lowland of this whole continent lies betwixt two mountain ranges, maybe three thousand miles apart but parallel to each other. What runs east off the Alleghenies goes to the Atlantic, as we know, and what runs west off them goes to the Mississippi and down to the Gulf, as we know, and what drains east off the Shining Mountains does the same. And what runs west off the Shining Mountains goes to the Pacific.

With his hand trailing over the side of the boat in the limpid green Ohio, he thought of these immense distances and the long rivers and the great tilting slabs of land they ran off of, and he wondered, as Thomas Jefferson had mused aloud to him, whether there could be a water route all the way from here to the Pacific. Legend had it that there was. Explorers for ages had been seeking a Northwest Passage from sea to sea, but to no avail. In Jefferson’s opinion, if there really was a passage to the
Western Sea, it was by these very rivers. The Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri.

By the Maker! George thought. It’s almost too much to stretch your mind over!

I wonder if I’ll ever see that, he thought, now wiggling his fingers in the current of the Ohio.

When I get to the Mississippi, when I get to St. Louis, he thought, then I’ll see that Missouri, and I’ll put my hand in it and feel its water, and feel where it’s been.