From Sea to Shining Sea (77 page)

“Bill,” said Lucy’s voice from outside the door of George’s room, “I’d hoped you and I might take a walk and talk about ourselves.”

“Oh! Yes,” he said, partly rising from his chair. “Just a wee bit, my dear. Then I’ll be along.”

They could hear her breathe an exasperated sigh. Then she said, “Are you giving that poor invalid whiskey and tobacco? Oh, damnation! Ye’ve all got about as much sense as a turtle has hair! Ooooh! Rrrrrr!”

They smiled sheepishly as her footsteps went away down the hall, but George put his glass on the floor out of sight under his bed, just in case his mother should come in. Bill Croghan said then:

“Seems to me you’ve thought a long way into something you say you’d be a fool to do. I’ll ask again: are you going to do it?”

“Probably,” George said after a pause. “If they cry loud enough and assure me I can count on ’em, I’ll do it. If not, I loaf here at home as I deserve, till we all get killed in our own houses. Billy, I’m feelin’ puny. What if you fetched me another medicine? But watch out for Lucy.”

*     *     *

S
O THE LEADERS OF
K
ENTUCKY DID CRY LOUD ENOUGH AND
gave him assurances enough, just as he’d said they would, until at last George Rogers Clark agreed to lead the expedition against the Wabash confederacy, and then almost immediately he found many reasons to regret it, most of them exactly the reasons he had expected.

The militia officers came from their three counties with 1200 men, half the number promised. They rendezvoused at Clarksville, across the Ohio from Louisville, and the base camp was no sooner occupied than the officers began quibbling over George’s plan of attack.

He wanted to march straight toward Little Turtle’s camps on the upper Wabash and strike them at once. He had learned that the Shawnees were getting ready to join the confederacy, and he wanted to attack before they could arrive to reinforce it. George thought these 1200 militiamen could succeed if they moved quickly and attacked without delay. The officers were more cautious. They thought it would be better to wait for another thousand men to be drafted. They did not want to march the 150 miles straight northwestward to the confederacy’s gathering place. Instead, they wanted to go to Vincennes first—a hundred miles almost due west—wait there for the new draftees and for large stores of flour and beef to be brought by boat up the Wabash to meet them at Vincennes, and only then march up the Wabash from there.

George argued that such a slow, indirect approach would almost surely make the expedition fail. But the officers knew the law; they knew that he could not lead them out of Kentucky without their consent, and they were not going to consent unless he agreed to do it their way Their men, they said, would not go without plenty of manpower and plenty of supplies.

At length George hammered out a compromise. He would take them to Vincennes and wait there for the boatloads of supplies. That would take time. But to wait for the new consignment of draftees would allow the Shawnee army plenty of time to join the confederacy.

Instead, he insisted, let Colonel Benjamin Logan of Lincoln County lead the later contingent against the Shawnee towns in Ohio, to divert the Shawnees from joining the confederacy. They would be Fayette and Lincoln County men, and the Shawnee towns were near them, and they always wanted Shawnee blood anyway.

“That’s as far as I’ll bend to you people,” George concluded. “You begged me to lead this shebang, and by heaven I don’t aim
to go out there and fail at it. So what sayee? Do you bend to meet me on this point, or do I go back into retirement?”

They consented, and at last the column moved out of Clarksville in the dusty heat of mid-September, picking up the Buffalo Trace toward Vincennes, and they marched slowly, sullenly, reflecting the sulkiness of their officers. The land was rolling and beautiful and the Buffalo road was as clear and hard as a highway, but terrifically dusty. The column rattled and clanked along, the troops’ canteens and pans and kettles sounding like a mile-long scullery. A herd of beef cattle was being driven along in the rear because of the insistence on plentiful meat, but driving the cattle was unpleasant, dusty duty and no one wanted to do it, and so the column was further slowed by the need to round up strayed animals.

Adding to the discontent were the jealousy and resentment between the militia units of the respective counties. The Jefferson County men were the smallest portion, their county being so thinly populated, and they were firmly attached to George. The Fayette County men were under the command of Colonel Levi Todd, who seemed to have dropped certain old resentments toward George and had vowed to be as useful and cooperative as he could; these Fayette men were in moderately good morale, but tended to mock the enthusiasm of the Jefferson boys. The Lincoln troops, mostly grumbling and ill-disciplined draftees from the most populous county, made up fully a half of the army. And with the reassignment of Colonel Ben Logan, they were left under the command of Colonel Jim Barrett, whose main weakness seemed to be his desire to be liked by his troops, even if it meant echoing their unruly attitudes.

And so the whole noisy, disorderly column, strung out longer than a mile, shuffled westward through the countryside, raising a cloud of dust among the heat-wilted woods and plains, and their pace was half that of a spirited army. It was soon obvious that the three-and-a-half-day march to Vincennes would take a week.

George, still thin and weak from his convalescence, rode ahead with William beside him, and he was glad William had come, because he could say to a brother things he would not have aired with others. “I could have taken Detroit with an army half this size back in ’79,” he mused sadly. “But I wouldn’t have tried it with
twice
this many if they’d been as sulky and negligent as this mob is. Oh, I tell ye, Billy, I’d made those old boys into real Spartans. And could do the same with these, had I a free hand. But look at ’em. God damn!”

It was William’s first ride through the Indiana Territory, and
George, despite his preoccupations, had much to teach him about it. “Down yonder,” he’d say, pointing down a valley, “down near where the Blue River runs into the Ohio, there’s a cave that’s likely the biggest cave in the world. Got some rooms in it so big they have whole hills o’ broken rock in ’em. The Wyandots say it’s dry as a house inside and goes for miles under the ground. Maybe you and I’ll explore it when this present trouble’s past, Billy.”

“God, yes! I can’t wait!”

“Now on the other extreme, there’s a cave farther along west that’s always full o’ water, because it’s a whole danged underground river. Y’see this plain off to the right? Look how potty and dippy it is. Ever see land that shape? Sinkholes, that’s what those are. Where underground water’s eat away the stone underneath, it seems. There’s thousands of ’em, some you can go down in, others plugged up with debris.”

They rode over a rise later, and George paused to point. “See that next range o’ hills there? It’s a honeycomb o’ caves. I’ve slept in many a cave while passin’ through here. Places where ’ere’s stone chips from making weapons, tools. And in the river valleys, strange thing: There’s huge mounds o’ mussel shells. They say a people, God knows how long ago they lived, ate mostly mussels. Those shells would pile up fifteen, twenty feet high, and they’d build their villages atop ’em. One I saw where you could tell there’d been ditches and streets.

“Billy, I want us t’ study all that. Come peace, we’ll wander over this territory, you and me. Take notes. Just like Tom Jefferson. A little way on, there’s a lick where the water smells like bad eggs. The French and the Indians both take it as medicine.”

On the next day out, George got to a point he seemed to have been building to in all this talk. “Listen, Billy,” he said, “you’re most excited about goin’ to war, eh? Aye. I remember how that is. Like wanting a woman, that first time is. Your blood runs so high y’ think you’ll die with being eager. Some people like it so much they want to go at it every year. Well as I see it, brother, there’ll be war over this land for a hundred years. You’ll be in it, so much you’ll be sickened. It’s
duty.
But there’ll come a time when you’ll know as well as I do what a blessing peace is.

“Y’ve met Indians you liked. At Fort Finney. Well, someday, maybe next week, if we ever get there, you’ll be a-facin’ the ones you like, over a gunsight. And there’ll be times when you admire some o’ them more than ye do some of your own.

“When matters are like that, Billy, duty’s a curse. I tell you, there’s more glory in seeing a new horizon, in finding a new
river, or understanding someone else’s God, than there is in makin’ war. Remember how Pa would use to preach at us on that? Well, he was right. Somehow in his wisdom he’s learned the direct way, without havin’ blood on his own hands, what a false glory making war is. Y’ll see, Billy. God damn it, ye will if you live long enough.”

William could remember the exuberant, whooping, happy George who had used to roar into Virginia from the West, and it was plain that much had happened to change him. George now was like those elder chiefs at the treaty council.

“Here,” George said, now pointing up a ravine on their left, “is where Dickie’s saddle was found. Likely his bones are up in a glade someplace, unburied. But …” He reached across and put a hand on William’s arm. “Never say that to family. It’s no picture we’d want in their minds, hear?”

B
Y THE SIXTH DAY, THE ARMY HAD COME DOWN OFF THE
slopes and rolling woodlands onto plains as flat as a tabletop. They were in the Wabash flood plain. “All this,” George told William, with a wide sweep of his arm, “it was all ice water up to a man’s middle in February of ’79. By the Eternal, I still shake to think of it. Past this wood here y’ll see Vincennes.”

They rode out into a vast clearing then, and there, trembling in heat waves from the sunbaked meadows and grain fields, lay the distant cluster of houses, and beyond, the long palisades and squat blockhouses of the fort on the bank of the Wabash.

William saw the distances and the grim prominence of the fort, and now, even though the season was green and hot, the whole panorama of that bleak, drowned landscape and the desperate drama of the battle, which he had heard told and retold so many times by so many veterans, coalesced at last in his understanding, and became even more marvelous. William looked at the lean, hard, brown profile of his brother, saw him squinting across space and time, this familiar, this blood, of his very own, and his heart squeezed so hard in his breast that it seemed to block his breath.

Now the people of Vincennes were pouring out of their houses and across the commons, racing toward him, waving, yelling their greetings in French and English, joyous at the return of their old friend and protector.

And William wondered, without thinking it in words, whether he could ever, somehow, be a man of such a stature.

T
HE PEOPLE OF
V
INCENNES WERE CHEERFUL, VIVACIOUS
, and shabby. They were desperately poor. While the army waited
at Vincennes for the boats to come up the Wabash with flour and meat, William met the townspeople, learned of their love for George, and came to understand the straits they had been put in by allying themselves with the Americans in the Revolution.

Virginia had promised the French
habitants
a strong and protective government, advantages in trade, and compensation for the help they had given the Long Knives. None of these promises had been fulfilled. And then Virginia had ceded their country to Congress, and Congress had shown them even less concern. Under the rule of the United States, they complained, they had been like abandoned children. Being “Americans” now, they could no longer trade through New Orleans because of Spain’s blockade of the lower Mississippi. Their farming tools were worn out, they had little food or powder and shot. Only Spanish traders came to Vincennes anymore, and they charged cruelly high prices. Furthermore, they were believed to be selling guns and ammunition to Little Turtle’s Indians.

And now the Wabash Confederacy with its 1500 warriors hovered a hundred miles above them on the Wabash, and was expected to fall upon them any day.

It was no wonder that the people of Vincennes were so delighted to see this army from Kentucky.

And yet, the army’s presence here could cause difficulties, of course, Major LeGras noted apologetically. The
habitants
could scarcely feed themselves. To try to quarter 1200 soldiers upon the town would be impossible.

And so, the Army of Kentucky would make its camp across the river from Vincennes and await its supply boats. And it obviously was going to be a very long wait. The Wabash was so low that boats would have to be dragged. George took one look at the river, grumbled a curse, and called a meeting of his officers.

“Now look at that river,” he told them. “It will be a week at the very least before those boats get here, if they can get here at all. They’re bringing five days’ provisions. Damn it all, we’ll eat more than that sitting here waiting for ’em! I told you before we started that it would be a fool’s errand to come to Vincennes! If we’d marched straight for the enemy, we’d have been at his throat by
now.
Listen to me, and listen well: we’ve still got ten days’ rations. We can march on Little Turtle in three days, strike him, and be back here by the time those bedamned scows arrive. I say we march now. We’d be idiots to sit here and wait ten days for five days’ grub, all the while the Shawnees are joining Little Turtle. Idiots we’d be! D’you choose to behave like idiots?”

They chose to do so. George was overruled. And so his army sat on the west bank of the Wabash, consuming its flour and cattle, and waiting.

The Indians, of course, knew of Long Knife’s arrival at Vincennes, and soon an important Miami chief named Pacane appeared, bringing a message. George arranged to meet him in the fort. Pacane was a richly dressed, lordly chief with finely sculptured features, kindly eyes, and a small, prim mouth. He could have passed for a schoolmaster except for his ornaments: a silver ring in the tip of his nose, long earrings made of ten beaded pendants, silver armbands, and one long, tightly braided queue hanging from the crown of his otherwise shaven head. George knew Pacane, an old friend of the British who still carried as his most cherished possession a silver-mounted knife given him in 1778 by General Hamilton.