“Hey, boys!” he yelled, “look at this!” He crumpled the bloody handbill into a wad and threw it into the bonfire where it vanished in a small, bright yellow flare. “So much,” he shouted, “for your British terror!”
9
DETROIT
June 1778
THESE TWO ARE EVEN BEGINNING TO SMELL LIKE INDIANS, thought Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton as Major Hay and Captain LaMothe talked with Chief Black Bird and the other Chippewa chieftains and prepared to leave Hamilton’s office. Musky and smoky, he thought. Hamilton stood for a moment, hands clasped behind his back, head tilted, a baleful, sideways, heavy-lidded gaze lingering on the two agents and the four Chippewas. The upper lip of his sensual mouth drew up slightly in an unconscious expression of distaste.
He especially disliked Hay. Not just because Hay was a renegade American, but because his courage was questionable, and because he was stocky and uncouth and given to base humor, and was said to consort with squaws.
LaMothe, on the other hand, Hamilton could respect and trust, even though he disliked his arrogant and sinister manner. Captain LaMothe was indeed the only French-Canadian militia officer he could trust. LaMothe looked like an Indian. He was hard, dark-skinned, graceful. He spoke all the tongues of the Lakes tribes, was utterly merciless in warfare, and had an unflinching reptilian eye which never betrayed his feelings. Hamilton suspected that LaMothe was responsible for Major Hay’s success with the Indians to a greater degree than Hay would ever acknowledge. And LaMothe for many months had been proving himself a brilliant, foxy leader of the Indians in the small-scale raids against the American settlements south of the Ohio in Kentucky, those bloody, terrorizing skirmishes which kept the immigration of the Americans at a minimum and produced a steady trickle of scalps and prisoners into Detroit.
Henry Hamilton did not like to deal with the fickle and brutal Indians, but he was getting ever deeper into it. He had held several great war councils with the Indians in Detroit in recent months, dispensing tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of gifts to the tribes. He and LaMothe and Hay had even stripped to their drawers to join in war dances, which memory never failed to make him shudder or smirk at himself. He was confident that within a year he could enlist enough Indian loyalty through these techniques to conduct a thorough, sweeping offensive through the Kentucky lands and drive all the rebel frontiersmen back eastward over the Alleghenies. Even the major American stronghold at Fort Pitt, he believed, could be taken, and then this obscure war he had been waging in the West, with too few British regulars for the expanse of wilderness, would assume a significance that would redound to his reputation.
He shook hands with the departing Chippewas and accepted the salutes of Hay and LaMothe. The door closed behind them and he stood glowering after them. Then he turned and went to his desk, lifted a small chased-silver snuffbox, pinched out a quantity of the brown powder, dusted it onto the back of his left wrist and, gazing out the glass window at the four blanketed Indians who now stood in a knot just outside on the parade ground gabbing gravely with Hay and LaMothe and passing around a new flask of English rum, he drew up the snuff with two quick sniffs. He always resorted to the snuff after parleying with Indians in a closed room. Though a great part of his success with the chiefs was his habit of treating them as individuals and friends—even delighting them sometimes by drawing fine pencil portraits of them—he still had never managed to accustom himself to their odor.
Would God I had never started such dealings, he thought. An endless business, buying the services of these bloody murderers like piecework one trinket at a time.
Hamilton, who had been in charge of Detroit and responsible for the conduct of all affairs in the Northwest Territory since 1775, had advocated the use of mercenary Indians against the American settlers, and had been authorized to do so in 1776, over the strenuous objections of many in Parliament. “But who is the man,” Lord Chatham had pleaded in Parliament, “who has dared to authorize and associate to our arms the tomahawk and scalping knife of the savage? They shock every sentiment of honor. They shock me as a lover of honorable war and a detester of murderous barbarity!”
Ah yes, Henry Hamilton would think whenever he reflected on Chatham’s speech. But how else would you have me uphold the interests of His Royal Highness in this barbaric place? Honorable war indeed!
There were others who wanted him to stop hiring Indians to go against the colonists. Lieutenant Governor Abbot, for one, and Abbot never stopped harping on it.
Hamilton went behind his desk and sat down on the dark green velvet upholstery of his chair. He sucked the inside of his cheek. The afternoon sunlight slanting in the window outlined his powdered wig like a halo and cast the reflection of his blood-red coat among the inkwells and books and candlesticks beside him. He caught a glimpse of himself when he turned to lift some manifests and records off the credenza behind him. His eyes had a tired, cynical cast about them, under the dark eyebrows which ran across in a perfectly straight line. He tended to keep his head forward these days and glower out from under those brows. His jaw, long and narrow, always had a dark shadow of whisker-stubble on it by afternoon unless he could find time to sit for a shave at midday, and that gave him a rather swarthy, piratical look most incongruous with his powdered silver wig and fine gentlemanly features. He held the gaze in the mirror for a moment, surprised by the sullenness of his aspect. This Indian business is changing me, he thought.
With a sigh he lifted an inventory ledger onto his desk and opened it to a marked page. Among the goods listed for the Indians were blankets, kettles, mirrors, rum, and one hundred and fifty dozen red-handled scalping knives. He subtracted twenty-five knives and three gallons of rum from the totals, wrote a voucher to the quartermaster for them, and sent the orderly out with the vouchers. Through the window he watched the fellow’s trim red-clad figure saunter among groups of Indians and militiamen and vanish into a crowd of savages around the great storehouse on the other side of the parade ground. Then he took up his quill, and continued his letter to Governor Carleton at Quebec, which had been interrupted by the arrival of the Chippewas:
“… since our last correspondence the Indians have been very busy, having brought in seventy-three prisoners, and one hundred and twenty-nine scalps, and have been paid handsomely for them, thanks to the continuing generosity of the Crown.”
Reaching the bottom of the page, he sprinkled it with sand to dry the ink, funneled the sand back into its jar, drew forth another sheet of paper, dipped the quill and continued:
“As I have told you previously, sir, these Indians, certain tribes of them in particular, will stoop so far as to divide a scalp in half and try to pass it off as two, to collect a double bounty, but Major Hay has cultivated a keen eye for such deception and scolds them so soundly that it is doubtful the same brave tries that sort of merchandising more than once.”
He paused, wiped the pen, thought, sighed, and then refreshed the pen and added:
“Be assured that I continually admonish the savages to spare the lives of such victims as are incapable of defending themselves, that I pay more generously for living prisoners than for scalps, and that I insist the Indians shew me every proof that they have not unnecessarily slaughtered the helpless. I have told that to Mr. Abbot repeatedly and implore you to believe it also.”
Why should I keep making this apology, he thought angrily, rising from his chair and stalking about with his fists on his hips. If we did not hire the Indians, the bloody rebels would have overrun the Ohio Valley like ants by now! But those things need to be said, as long as Abbot goes on trying to shame our use of the tribes.
By God, if the Indians weren’t raiding the settlements for our benefit, they’d be doing it for their own, to preserve their country from those land-greedy Yankees.
And who is to say the Americans themselves would not be using the Indians against us, if we couldn’t afford to pay them better, he thought with grim satisfaction. The Indians know well the p
overty of the bloody rebels! He returned to his desk. He had had this argument with himself countless times. And every time, he had been able to rationalize it to his satisfaction.
The simple truth is, he thought as he took up his quill again, I alone have had to bear the responsibility for keeping the rebellion under control here in these parts, and, by Jove, I am doing it.
Let him who could do better condemn my method!
10
CORN ISLAND
June 1778
BEFORE DAWN, GEORGE ROGERS CLARK WAS AWAKENED BY A VARIETY of itchings, predominant among them being clusters of mosquito-bite swellings in the skin of his wrists and around his collarbones. Eyes still closed, he worried the bites with his fingernails, each deliciously, maddeningly tingling until it was scratched into submission. The Falls rushed in his ears; birds were beginning to twitter; men snored. He opened his eyes. It was still dark, but a gray-pearly softening of the night was beginning. In his nostrils was a commixture of wood-smoke from the smoldering fires, river mud, tang of fresh-cut hardwoods, flower perfume, and, when he moved in his blanket, the warm stale stink of his own body, which he had not had time to bathe for days. This condition, he presumed, was giving rise to some of his other itches, which ranged from his feet to his groin and scalp.
Tugging out the pouch he had used as a pillow, he groped in it for his lump of soap and a folded change of linen and stockings. He rose silently from his dew-damp blanket, made his way among the forms of the sleeping officers, went down to the riverbank, shushed a sentry who sat draped in a blanket with his long rifle across his knees, pissed on the ground, stripped, and went into the water. It was warmer than the morning air and its current tugged at him. He held his footing on the mossy slick bottom, stooped to submerge himself, shivering and exhilarated. He washed out his dirty linen and threw it ashore. He went into the deep water again to rinse off the soap, and lolled in the current as the morning light strengthened, and watched river-mist tumble in a breeze. For a few minutes he was enthralled by the simple wholeness of this moment, the animal contentment, the disregard of effort and consequence. He remembered a hot summer day before Dunmore’s War when, passing time with a small party of Mingoes, he had sat smoking with the braves while squaws and children bathed naked nearby in a pebble-bottomed pool. Through that entire day his mind had been drugged by a primitive sense of suspended time, seduced from any thought of the surveying, clearing, or planting to be done, immersed in one boundless moment, driven by nothing. That idyll came into his mind as a picture now, then faded, leaving only poignancy and vague voluptuous yearnings. He heard a horse neighing softly down at the picket post on the Kentucky shore. Then he waded out and sluiced the water off his skin with the edges of his hands. He pulled back his hair and knotted it, let his hard body dry in the air, feeling like an inseparable element of the wild riverscape itself, then dressed and went back to the camp. When you’re naked, he thought, it is only now. Clothes are the uniforms of time.
The officers were still sleeping. There was Helm, his hat over his face as a shield against the night damp; there was Joseph Bowman, curled on his side; there was his brother, John Bowman, hair lank with dew, breathing in long rumbles. There …
George paused, noticing that the bed of flattened leaves where Lieutenant Hutchings had been sleeping was empty; there was not even any bedding there. Would he have gone down to sleep near his men? George wondered about that, and then noticed that Captain Dillard’s blanket had been thrown back and was empty. Hutchings and Dillard were members of the same contingent, and George felt a sudden, unexplainable rush of suspicion; he recalled dimly now a moment of uneasiness during the rum-enhanced excitement of the night before: Hutchings and some of the men in that contingent drawing aside into the shadows, looking darkly at him as he glanced at them. The moment had been too slight to dampen his exuberance but now the memory of it seemed full of portent.
Walking with soft tread but swiftly toward the west end of the encampment where that detachment was bedded, wading through a miasma of sleepers’ breath, he was startled by the sudden appearance of Captain Dillard, who was rushing wild-eyed toward him. Dillard stopped before him, expressions of surprise, fear, then guilt fleeting in succession across his face. Before he could gather his wits to speak, a scrawny woodsman with no front teeth ran up behind him, then stopped and drew himself to an agitated stance of attention when he saw the commander. George felt a rush of anger and impatience.
“Well, damn you, speak, man!” he roared.
“Oh, God, Colonel, I’m mortified!” Dillard burst out, looking as if he might cry. “They’s up and went! Hutchings took ’em, that weasel! He …”
“Hutchings, you say!” Even with the rage and frustration pouring through him, George was appalled at himself for having made such a misjudgment of the young officer. “By God, I’ll have his guts for garters, if I find him! How many went?”
“I don’t …”
“About twenty, sahr,” interjected the skinny militiaman. “I jest took a muster. Some stayed.”
“But damn them! We can’t spare twenty! We can’t spare a bloody one!” It was all he could do to speak through his rage. Twenty men deserted, out of this pitifully small excuse for an army! “How in blazes did they get away?” He had thought this island in fast waters deep in the wilderness would make desertion impossible; he had chosen it with that as well as its other attributes in mind.
“They found a wadin’ place down yonder,” the woodsman answered, pointing downstream. “Yestiddy when they was a-bathin’ …”
George was aware now of stirring and movement all about. Troops were awakening, propping themselves on elbows to hear this intriguing exchange. Some of them, doubtless, had entertained similar thoughts of leaving upon hearing last night of the formidable and dubious mission ahead of them in the remote western distances, this incredible mission into which, they might rightfully argue, they had been tricked. For a moment George simply did not know what he could do.
“Some of ’em … eh, some of ’em,” Dillard whined, as if trying to salvage what honor he could out of this betrayal, “… some of ’em wouldn’t go …”
“Is their trail cold?” George demanded. “When did they go?”
“Hanged if I know. I run down there when I woke an’ saw Hutchings’ bed gone. Before daylight sometime. No sentry saw or heard anything …”
“Go wake Colonel Bowman and the others. Tell John we’ve got to borrow their horses. Never mind, I’ll tell them.” As he issued orders, he turned and strode toward the place where the officers were. Troops rising from their blankets were murmuring the rumor excitedly among themselves.
“By God,” George snapped at Dillard, “any we catch that won’t come back peaceably will be shot where they stand!”
As a party of twenty picked men thundered up the bluff into Kentucky on the borrowed horses, the rest of the force was summoned to an assembly around the same platform where they had so exuberantly received their orders the night before. Now they looked bewildered, scared, some sullen, as they stood puffy-eyed and rumpled under the blistering stare of their leader. They knew what the blaze of murder looked like in a man’s eyes, and they recognized it now.
“I’ll say this short and absolute for any here as might be doubtful,” he began in a hard voice that cracked open the dawn. “A small and despicable company of cowards has sneaked off in the night, to avoid their duty. They are a crew of filthy squaws, not fit to be among men of purpose. Tell me what you think of that, now!”
“Aye,” came their muttered reply. They seemed a half-hearted lot now.
“If there are any more such squaws here who think they’re privileged to desert their country now or after and leave the fighting to the men, let them come one at a time and try to walk past me! Any who can and will is then free to go. If I stop him, he can swear his allegiance to this task and his folly will be forgot.” He stared around. “Do I have any comers?” He felt at this moment so charged with the
power of fury that he could dispatch five men at a time.
Several big men shifted their positions tentatively, but fell to examining their fingernails or the branches overhead when his eye struck them. Then a familiar voice came from behind him, a snarling brawl.
“Beg to ask, Cunnel, but don’t y’admit we was summat tricked?”
George whirled on him. It was Sergeant Crump.
“You again! All right, Crump, do I take this to mean you’ll try to leave?”
Crump hesitated; it was obvious that he had meant only to voice a thought that had been in many minds. Now he found himself directly challenged, though, and rather than back all the way down, he straightened up and said, “Wal, suh …”
George saw through his own anger suddenly and realized that he had put Crump on a spot he did not really deserve to be on; Crump surely was not the sort who would have deserted. But he was not the sort to back down from a challenge, either. George realized this now, and regretted that he would have to bait Crump, but he needed an object right now to make an important point to the whole troop, and Crump was the ideal object: he was brawny and formidable; he had spoken up before and he had spoken up now. If this expedition was to be held together and succeed in what lay before it, Crump would have to be made an example for the lesson of discipline.
George leaped down from the platform and advanced like a hungry cat on Crump.
The sergeant looked astonished for a moment, then his heavy black brows knotted in anger. George pressed on:
“Are you going to try to get through me, Crump? If y’are, then make your move!”
Crump turned his head slightly to one side to look at George warily through the sides of his eyes. He had no real idea what the full consequence of doing personal battle with a militia commander might be, and the situation was being unfolded on him faster than he could think about it. But he had been on the brink of his very life more than once, and was not one to shrink away from a provocation. He held up one palm toward the lithe red-haired officer before him. “I better warn you, Cunnel, when I git cornered, I’ll chaw th’ ears right off a bear!”
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