Long Knife

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  In June, he received a letter from Captain Helm which cheered those hopes. From a trader recently reaching Vincennes from Canada, Helm had learned that Detroit was as ripe for an easy conquest as any fort could be. Its commandant since Henry Hamilton’s ill-starred departure, a Captain Lernoult, was apparently a man of little self-confidence and had only a handful of trustworthy royalists in the fort to help him defend it. The French-Canadian and Creole prisoners whom George had paroled and sent home to Detroit had spread his fame in the vicinity of Detroit, and many even declared openly that though they had sworn not to fight the Big Knives on their arrival, they felt themselves free to fight beside them. Helm’s letter continued:

  he says its not safe for a person to spake dispicably of the Americans that there is a Room for you and an other for me in every principle Gentlemans house in the Village furnished with Bowls and Glasses and Called Col° Clarks & Capt Helms Rooms … that he seen Children in the Streets with Cups of water drinking Success to Clack Success to Clack.

  George smiled at those images and grew ever more impatient to get his force underway to Detroit. His veterans talked of little else, and soon they had infected Captain Montgomery’s companies with Detroit fever as well.

  Helm’s letter also contained information that, in the wake of the American victories in the territory, settlers were again pouring down the Ohio and through the Wilderness Road into Kentucky, and that the settlement he had founded at the Falls of the Ohio was growing in population day by day. Helm had also learned from a Delaware Indian informant that a large expedition of Kentuckians had departed from the Ohio to trounce the Shawnees in their great town of Chillicothe. This, George presumed, was Colonel John Bowman’s army, which was scheduled to rendezvous with him at Vincennes for the March against Detroit. The news that John Bowman was making such a hazardous side excursion worried and irritated George. It was, it seemed to him, a reckless attempt by Colonel Bowman to glorify his own name on the frontier. George had heard often that John Bowman was jealous of the fame of his brother Joseph and, particularly, of George himself.

  Damn you now, John Bowman, George thought. If you want to make a brave name for yourself, just help me capture Detroit. Don’t waste all those lads you’ve got on a useless—nay, a harmful—amusement against the Shawnees! God, man, there’s no need to rile those savages at this moment just to gain yourself a few laurels.

  But, presuming that a brother of Joseph Bowman’s could not be utterly stupid, George told himself not to worry about it, and continued with his efforts to provision his army. And that was proving to be a difficult task. Prices for all sorts of stores had been driven up as high as five hundred percent by traders outbidding each other in his absence. This caused the French and Spaniards to conceive of the Virginia currency as valueless, and they were refusing to take it. The partnership of Vigo and de Leyba, as well as Monsieur Cerré, had begun advancing considerable sums of their own property, which tormented George despite his gratitude. They will be ruined, he thought, unless some method can be used to raise the credit of the Virginia currency, or a fund sent to New Orleans. Oliver Pollock had by now exhausted his own properties, and had not been reimbursed by Governor Henry. With a heavy heart, George wrote to Pollock in June:

  … I act by his Excellency’s authority and I know that he will take every step he possibly can to make you a remittance which I expected would have been the case before this time …. Virginia State will never let you suffer long for what you have done for her and if it has not been in her power to send you supplys she bears it with a greatful Remembrance.

  Still with full faith in Virginia, not aware that she, like other states, was heading toward insolvency, George authorized his supply officer to obtain everything the army needed by drawing bills on the state, which he endorsed himself. It did not seem a prudent thing to do even as he did it, but he saw no other way to carry out his mission.

  In this hectic and desperate manner the weeks were used up, and the date for the June twentieth rendezvous in Vincennes was imminent; there would be no opportunity whatsoever to go up and see Teresa and her family before the campaign. Swallowing that disappointment, he sat alone in his office late one night, sipping brandy and puffing on a clay pipe, and rubbing the smooth silver of his lucky foot-racing medallion between thumb and forefinger. It was unusual to have just one of the lucky pieces. But he entertained himself by imagining that Teresa in St. Louis might at the same time be touching its mate, which he envisioned lying upon the moist smooth skin of her breast, attached to the chain of her crucifix.

  For a good luck piece, it’s luckier now than it ever was, he thought. He smiled at his little joke, and slipped off into his reveries. It was a rare thing for him, this daydreaming. For over a year he had seldom been able to detach his mind from his purposes long enough. Now he found himself succumbing to it in the evenings when the demands of his position receded, and would sit late in the quiet evenings drinking, thinking as much now about Teresa as he did about Detroit.

  Two more glasses of brandy and he still could not pick up his tired body from the chair and put himself to bed. He grew more and more wakeful, his mind shuttling back and forth from Virginia to St. Louis to Vincennes to Corn Island; he mused on the faces of people who had so unexpectedly forced themselves into his affections during this remarkable odyssey: de Leyba’s family, Gibault, Vigo, Cerré, even the obsequious Tobacco’s Son. What an array of unlikely friends and companions, he marveled, puffing breaths of wistful laughter out of his nostrils.

  And Dickie here now, bringing all the poignant memories of home and family ….

  He stirred. Must write to the family, he thought. There’ll be no time for it on the way to Detroit.

  He went to his desk. As he addressed the letter to his father, he was aware of pains in his wrist and elbow, and in his hips. These had been growing in him since the winter hardships in the Wabash. They were, he suspected, the stiffnesses and twinges of old age, and he had earned them early. It frightened him.

  Dr Sr:

  I Received your much Esteemed Letter by Dickie who arrived safe at this place. Happy to learn that all Friends are well. I have for a long time Injoyed a perfect State of Health under the greatest fatigues. My dispositions of War Hitherto have been Crownd with great success but must Confess that Circumstances appear more serious at present than for some time past but I hope to Extricate myself as formerly no person Commanding on this Continent is in a more Critical Situation than I am Surrounded on all Sides by Numerous Nations of Indians with English officers among them Incouraging them to war but my Influance and Success of late hath been so great that I still keep the greatest number of them on our Side of the Question I dont doubt but you have before this time had a full account of my late Attack on post St Vincents after an Ingagement of Eighteen Hours the famous Governor Hamilton and his Murdering Band fell into my hands nothing extraordinary has happened Since my Last to you by Captn Jack Rogers, I have Given Dickie a Lieutenants Commission if I Can get him to Imbrace the Air of an officer I dont doubt but he may make a good appearance in a short time I think he already improves. Expences in this Cuntrey is amasingly high it has not Cost me less than twelve or thirteen Hundred pounds since I have been in it. I Can give no account when Shall See you but as Soon as possible … You have for several years known the height of my ambition but I did not Expect to arrive at that so much determined Moment in so Short a time as I have done. Fortune in Every Respect as yet hath hovered Round me as if determined to direct me You may Judge Sir what Impressions it must have on a greateful Brest whose greatest Glory is to addore the Suppreme director of all things.

  George stopped writing, drank off the dregs of his brandy, and gazed into a far corner, suddenly so pressed by melancholy that he thought his heart would cave in. What would Father think if I told him of Teresa? he thought suddenly. No doubt his Episcopalian heart would miss a beat at hearing of my betrothal to a Catholic lady. He sighed and shook his head.

  But t
his is a different world, he thought.

  Sir it would give me the Greatest happiness to be assured that it was not a doubt in your Brest but that you had in me as dutifull a son as ever Father was possessed of. My dr Mother Brothers and Sisters is possessed of my sincear Regard

  I am Sr with Esteem yours

  G. R. CLARK

  The second trek eastward across the Illinois to Vincennes was as pleasant as the first one had been miserable. In a party of mounted soldiers, George rode under hot blue skies across vast green and gold plains of waving grass dotted with the dark bulks of grazing buffalo; the earth underfoot, the same earth they had slogged through, wet to the knees, only four months ago, now was as firm and smooth as a highway, and the same two hundred forty miles that had taken them seventeen laborious days in February they now made in four. Montgomery, his men, and the supplies had started out early in June by boat to go around and up the Wabash and meet him in Vincennes, and Joseph Bowman was marching the main body of troops from the Mississippi posts overland, no doubt eager to return to the brown arms of his Mai-hah.

  The sun beat down, melting the pain out of George’s shoulders and hips, and he felt like his old self, capable of whipping any wrestling opponent unfortunate enough to draw a straw against him during the entertainments in the evening bivouacs. Esprit was high and heady. Now away from the tedium of administration, having left John Todd to deal with all that as the region’s new civil governor, George was once again the exuberant warrior, confident of his plan and sure of his ability. He and his captains laughed, splashing now with such ease through clear, shallow, sun-dappled fording places in the Little Wabashes and the Embarras and the other streams across which they had waded or floated on trees during those desperate dank gray days of winter.

  Now, in fact, these rivers were exceedingly low. It was a dry summer, the sky day after day being hot blue pearl. This worried George, who knew how much the traverse to Detroit would depend on the navigability of the upper Wabash and Maumee rivers. Although he thought three hundred men would be enough to storm and take Detroit, he knew it would require more than that to labor up and down sunken rivers with cannon and supplies, and also to make an impressive—and thus unmolested—passage through the lands of the Lakes tribes.

  Their arrival at Vincennes was noisy and spirited, with Captain Helm throwing a huge celebration for the gathering army and being generous with the fort’s plentiful stores of good food and drink. Helm did an imitation of Major Hay growing faint with fright, and then of Hamilton at the moment when he discovered that he had surrendered to one hundred thirty men instead of a thousand. Joseph Bowman vanished from the midst of the celebration early, and those who knew of his mission to enrich the blood of the Piankeshaw tribe smiled fondly at the thought of the tender circumstances he must be enjoying now with his comely nurse.

  This merriment was increased by the appearance in their midst of Simon Butler, who for months had been presumed dead. Succinctly, Simon told them an incredible tale of capture, torture, and eventual escape. Caught by the Shawnees near Chillicothe, he had survived nine runnings of the gantlet and eventually had been taken half alive to Detroit, whence, after recovering his strength, he had escaped. He was prevailed upon to strip off his hunting shirt and show the scars of his ordeal—an array of half-healed cuts and burns that made even these seasoned men wince and curse. He parted his blond hair to show an inch-deep indentation in his crown where the blunt side of a tomahawk pipe, wielded by the famous Shawnee warrior-chieftain, Blue Jacket, had broken his skull and pushed a disc of skullbone into his brain. The officers shuddered and mar veled at these tales, their imaginations filling in the details and descriptions that he omitted in his laconic account.

  Much as he was taken with admiration by this awesome tale of survival, George was more interested in Butler’s description of the defenses at Detroit; he pressed him for details and was pleased to hear that it was as feeble as other accounts had indicated. Butler in his turn listened with equal admiration to the account of the winter march on Vincennes, and the two young giants took leave of each other well after midnight, each inspired by what the other had done, and each more hopeful than ever that men of their blood and spirit could end once and for all the British influence in the western theater of the Revolution.

  But this hope was dashed when the troops promised by Colonel John Bowman from Kentucky arrived. They came marching wearily into Vincennes, not three hundred as promised, but thirty, led by a dispirited Captain Hugh McGary.

  George and his officers sat that night with McGary, almost weeping with frustration and rage, and listened to the account of Bowman’s attack on Chillicothe. It had been an even worse blunder than George had dreamed it could be. Striking the town, Bowman had failed to move decisively; most of the Indians had escaped and the raid had quickly degenerated into an orgy of burning and looting. Retreating then with goods and a hundred of the Shawnees’ horses, the Kentuckians had been harassed for miles by a small sniping party of Shawnees. In the attack and withdrawal, Bowman had lost thirty men killed and sixty wounded. His attack had cost the Indians only two casualties: the chieftain Red Pole had been slain, and the great and beloved principal chief of the Shawnees, Black Fish, had been badly wounded. “Colonel Bowman called it a great victory,” McGary said quietly, his chin trembling. “Most of us was so discouraged by it all that much of the army disbanded when it returned to Kaintuck. And this is all they is of us left to bring. Sorry, Mister Clark.”

  Hugh McGary was known to be a reckless and murderous Indian-hater, and if he was ashamed of a raid, it must have been a fiasco indeed. George stalked about the room, lips drawn in a white line, clenching and unclenching his fists, now and then staring toward the ceiling and mouthing silent words, as if demanding God’s explanation for this incalculable disappointment. Finally he turned on the uneasy McGary.

  “It’s the most appalling thing I ever heard of!” he hissed. His eyes were blazing. “Not only does he squander the force that would have wiped out the British influence for good—but he shoots Black Fish! Black Fish! God almighty damn, McGary! D’you understand? We’d almost awed even the Shawnees into peace by taking Hamilton and his partisans. And now John Bowman gives the Shawnees an excuse to ally themselves more solid than ever with the British!” He turned and stalked the floor some more. Joseph Bowman, sick with shame for his brother’s stupidity, rose from his bench and crept out of the room, swallowing bile, tears running down over his burn-scarred cheeks. George turned back to McGary. His voice was calm now, scarcely more than a whisper. “Thankee for comin’, Captain. We welcome you.” He sighed. “We’d better pray that Black Fish will live,” he said. “If he dies, I predict Kentucky will run more blood than it did in ’77.”

  THE DISASTROUS RESULTS OF JOHN BOWMAN’S RAID CRUSHED ANY hope of going against Detroit that season. George held a war council with his officers, and, though all but two still recommended the attack, the proposal finally was abandoned. Reasons were that the rivers were nearly dried up, that half the army was barefooted, that the summer was growing old, that three hundred fifty exhausted men might not be able to take Detroit, and, if they could take it, they might be too remote from supply to hold it long against a major British counterattack. To this rationale was added a newly arrived report that George Washington had sent an army of four thousand continental regulars, commanded by General John Sullivan, to attack British and Indian strongholds in the Finger Lakes region with the ultimate objective of Niagara. If successful, the campaign would choke the British supply line to Detroit and in effect put Detroit out of the Indian-inciting business. If Sullivan succeeded, it was felt, the Virginians’ planned expedition would prove to be unnecessary and wasteful. But will he be? George wondered. McIntosh failed last fall, and Hand before him …

  Late in the summer, word came that George’s boyhood Virginia neighbor, Thomas Jefferson, had succeeded Patrick Henry as governor. That was good. Having been involved in the original authorization of the west
ern campaign, he no doubt would continue to give George a long rein and receptive ear.

  For now, with a Detroit campaign out of the question, George divided up his troops to garrison Vincennes and the Mississippi posts, and left them with orders to conduct feints and patrols throughout the territory, to confuse the British and Indians and “keep them in hot water and suspense,” as he wrote in their orders. Then he bade his people farewell, left Joseph Bowman to take a recuperation leave in the care of his beloved Mai-hah and the Piankeshaw medicine men, and set out eastward with a small escort along the old Buffalo Trace to make his way to the Falls of the Ohio, to establish a permanent base there as the best place for overseeing the whole territory. Would I had someone to authorize me a long respite in the arms of my sweetheart, he thought as he rode ever farther from where she was. That, I think, might ease these disappointments a mite.

  Teresa and Detroit, he mused. Both of ’em always hundreds of miles distant, it seems.

  His reputation, his far-ranging sorties, and a variety of conflicting rumors circulated by his French friends through the enemy’s country, did indeed keep the British officers on the verge of panic throughout the summer and fall of 1779. As far away as Mackinac, British leaders began setting themselves up for defense against parties of Big Knives who were reported to be building a fleet of boats at the place the Indians called Milwaukee; another report had still more Americans at the Chicago River on Lake Michigan. Months later the same British officers reported that Clark had gone down the Mississippi to Natchez, while other British reports circulated to the effect that fifteen to eighteen hundred Americans with cavalry and artillery were moving eastward across the Illinois country. To intercept one imaginary force of mounted Americans, three hundred British, Canadian, and Indian troops were sent out under a British lieutenant, but the fear of the Big Knives was now so great that the Indians deserted. Elsewhere, the British Indian leader Captain Henry Bird, trying to raise a force of Indians near Lake Erie to stop the anticipated American march on Detroit, could not find an Indian who would go to war against the American colonel called Long Knife. At Pittsburgh, Colonel William Crawford wrote to George Washington that even that far east, “Colonel Clark’s affairs have changed the disposition of the Indians much. They have done very little mischief this summer.”