Long Knife

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  George yearned in vain for a thaw that might enable him to attempt a journey up to St. Louis, and had to content himself with reveries. He would sit late by the fire, maudlin with bad rum, roll the little silver runner’s medallion between his thumb and forefinger, and try to imagine that Teresa with its mate was receiving his thoughts hundreds of miles away.

  Little could be learned about the condition of the British posts and the Indians to the north, and he could only presume that something was being done to rebuild the power center he had shattered by his defeat of Hamilton. General Sullivan’s expedition against the lakes country had petered out far short of its goals; that much George had learned before the winter had cut off the travels of his spies, and it had come as no surprise. It left Detroit as his objective.

  What trade there was had reverted to barter, with skins or tobacco being used as a currency, as the value of an American dollar had dropped to less than a cent. In a way, therefore, severe and oppressive as the winter was, George dreaded the coming of spring, when he would have to begin the activities that would tax all his resourcefulness: holding the vast territory he had won. With the thaw, he was sure, would come a renewed wave of Indians led by British. He had confounded them for one year but knew that the effect could not last.

  The winter broke suddenly and dramatically in February, and a spring as lush and invigorating as the winter had been severe surged into the territory. And virtually on the flood of the melting river came boats bearing American adventurers with their families. News in the East of Colonel Clark’s taming of the Northwest Territory precipitated a flow of land-hungry settlers. Before May, three hundred boatloads of families had arrived at the Falls of Ohio. Half a dozen settlements sprang up on the Bear Grass, near where the courier William Myers had died a lonely death at the hands of Indians just a year earlier.

  George watched this influx of immigrants with mixed feelings. Here was manpower aplenty for his offensive against Detroit, but he had not studied them long before he realized that they were not like the seven score men he had brought down the river two years earlier. These men were intent on gaining land, not defending it. Many seemed to have come to escape military service in the East, or to avoid taxation. Many were Pennsylvanians, prejudiced against Virginia and ready to dispute her Old Dominion claims and resist her government. It was not difficult to see the land-madness and its potential troubles growing. Soon the immigrants were disputing Virginia’s jurisdiction over the Kentucky lands, and in this they were encouraged by the great land-scheme companies, whose agents quietly urged them to petition Congress to claim the territory and proclaim it a new state. As Virginia’s commandant, George knew that he must resist this, and it was not long before powerful resentments began to build between the Virginians who had won the country and the newcomers who were compelled to help man and supply this desperate little force.

  In the meantime, William Shannon returned, bringing George the auditor’s receipt and authorization from Governor Thomas Jefferson to use his own discretion in the coming months; he could try to raise a force and go against Detroit, or build a fort at the mouth of the Ohio as suggested in Patrick Henry’s original orders. The Revolution in the East was static, Shannon reported. Spain having entered the war against England, Governor Galvez was capturing one British fort after another in the lower Mississippi. “It’s good news now,” George mused. “But once we’re done with the British I fear we’ll have Spain to put out.”

  AS PREDICTABLE AS THE NATURAL QUICKENINGS OF SPRING, THE Shawnee raiding parties began sweeping southward and attacking the settlements. Their forays seemed exceptionally furious in this spring of 1780; the Indians were inflamed by the tide of white men pouring down the Ohio, were wanting revenge for the death of their great chief Black Fish, who had died of wounds suffered in John Bowman’s attack the year before, and were once again being incited and equipped by Governor Hamilton’s successors at Detroit. After several murderous raids had scattered settlements, the Kentuckians started beseeching George to lead a retaliatory expedition against them.

  “No,” he argued. “That would be like fanning the stink while letting the carcass lay. You gentlemen give me a thousand men and five months’ provisions, and I’ll take Detroit. And then you’ll have permanent peace.” Most of the county leaders, though, failed to see beyond the immediate threat and insisted that he go against the Shawnee towns. Now with the backing only of his veterans, he set workmen—on promise of eventual pay—to building a large number of boats for the Detroit offensive.

  In the meantime, there was still a fort to be built at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, which would be the nucleus for the defense of the western rivers. It would control English river traffic. It would throw a net to capture the large numbers of Tories and deserters who had been escaping downriver, and would guard the channel of commerce and communication between Spain and the Colonies. But the most urgent reason was that the British were working hard to regain the support of Indians to recapture the Illinois country that he had held for two years; a strong fort there would be an invaluable defense against that threat. George knew he would get no help from impoverished Virginia in this matter. Governor Jefferson’s letter had directed him to build the fort but added:

  … The less you depend for supplies from this Quarter the less you will be disappointed by those impediments which distance and a precarious foreign Commerce throws in the way …. Take such care of the men under you as an economical house holder would of his own family doing everything within himself as far as he can and calling for as few supplies as possible.

  In other words, George thought, I’ll get about as much help from there as I’ve got in the last two years, that being virtually none, but now for a change I’m to be forearmed by the knowledge that hope and patience are useless. Well, in that sense I prefer Jefferson’s way to Patrick Henry’s; I can be realistic.

  Late in April, with a convoy of troops and workmen, he arrived at the wide juncture of the mighty rivers and began surveying for a feasible site. Several great drawbacks immediately became apparent. To build the fort just below the confluence would be to put it directly in peril of being washed away by seasonal floodwaters; too, the lowlands here were humid; malarial, and unhealthful. Moving through brush and dense cane down the floodplain on the east bank of the Mississippi, his party at last came to a bluff which stood well above any flood danger. Though it was nearly five miles below the juncture of the two rivers, it commanded an immense view of the lowland and the broad, curving sheets of water. The bluffs were streaked with rusty red, which convinced him that it was the place the French river travelers had called the Mine au Fer, and the Americans the Iron Bluffs.

  Drawing on everything he had learned about fortifications, George laid out plans for a good log fort with blockhouses covering each other and thick earthen redoubts, and his workmen and soldiers began a vigorous and well-organized construction project. Settlers began arriving soon by boat, attracted by the promise of four hundred acres of land to each family at a favorable price to be fixed by the General Assembly. In the mild spring weather, axes and mauls and hammers began chunking at daybreak each day and continued until the westering sun burnished the sluggish surface of the wide river. Oxen and horses dragged logs and stones and great wooden sledges of earth to and fro. At night the weary laborers rejuvenated themselves with fiddle and pipe music and tall tales, whooping and stomping dances, and athletic contests.

  To gather an adequate force of men for this new stronghold, George sent orders to Fort Patrick Henry at Vincennes calling for the Americans there to leave that place garrisoned by a company of French militia and come to the new fort. He also sent orders to Colonel Montgomery to retire most of the American troops from the Illinois villages. Montgomery began making preparations for the pullout, and it was a move viewed with relief both by the Americans and the French; in the ten months since Colonel Clark’s departure from Kaskaskia, the passionate friendship between his soldiers a
nd the French inhabitants had been eroded steadily by disputes over the provisioning of the garrison. The impoverished Americans had virtually no buying power, and had been forced now and then to take food, provisions, and animals from the inhabitants against their will.

  But before that evacuation from the Illinois villages could be effected, an alarming series of messages came to Colonel Clark from several quarters. Traders and spies came down from the north with reports of a stirring of British military activity. They said that Lieutenant Governor Patrick Sinclair at Michillimackinac was gathering loyalist traders and chiefs of northern and western Indian tribes for war councils. Along the upper Mississippi, tribesmen of several Indians, including the Ottawa, Winnegabo, Sauk, and Fox, were gathering in large numbers and being harangued about the presence of Americans in the Mississippi valley. The Indians were being incited to anger also against the Spaniards, who were now at war with Great Britain. Sinclair, the reports said, was promising exclusive control of the rich Mississippi fur trade to those traders who would help him regain control of the valley. A great Sioux chief named Wabasha was being assigned to attack the American rebels at Kaskaskia and then sweep on down the Mississippi as far as Natchez. A trader, Emanuel Hesse, was being authorized to seize and control St. Louis, and was collecting a mixed force of traders, servants, and Indians that was reported to number a thousand at least. A support party of Indians and Canadians, under the dreaded Indian partisan Captain Charles Henry Bird, was setting out from Detroit to go through the Shawnee country, gather warriors along the way, capture Clark’s fort at the Falls of the Ohio, and then descend upon the central Kentucky settlements.

  George was appalled at the task that was building for him. The numbers of enemy involved in those rumors could amount to two or three thousand, and their tactics would force him to be virtually in two places at once; his whole reliable force consisted of the one hundred fifty steadfast but unpaid and threadbare veterans under his direct command.

  Any hope for his cherished offensive against Detroit had to be forgotten now. Nothing remained to him but to direct a desperate defense. He sent word for Montgomery to unpack and remain at Kaskaskia to organize a defense there. George rushed completion of Fort Jefferson at the mouth of the Ohio and pondered over the defensive alternatives he would have.

  Early in May the first direct call of alarm came down from Cahokia, the northernmost and thus most imminently threatened of the French Illinois villages; the huge enemy force was in the vicinity. Almost immediately followed appeals from Montgomery at Kaskaskia and Don Fernando de Leyba at St. Louis. His course was now obvious: the defense of the Mississippi outposts first, then back to Kentucky. His old energy seemed to flood back into him now that the decision was made, and leaving a modest number of defenders at the new fort, he boarded his new boats with a small company of his best frontiersmen for a one hundred sixty mile dash up the Mississippi to Cahokia and St. Louis.

  Never in the last two incredible years had he headed to battle with such a sense of urgency. Not only were his hard-won gains of 1778 and 1779 at stake; also in immediate danger were his Teresa, his generous and vulnerable friend, Don Fernando de Leyba, and his younger brother Dickie, who was serving with McCarty at Cahokia.

  Now I am afraid, George thought as his fighters strained their oars against the yellow-brown current, that Fernando will soon satisfy his eternal curiosity about the sensations of killing. I can only pray that he shan’t have been tested at it before I get there.

  “Put some sinew in it, lads!” he cried. “You must admit it’s a lark after swingin’ axes and shovels!”

  He was answered by a chorus of chuckles and groans.

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOHN MONTGOMERY AND HIS JUNIOR OFFICERS met George on the wharf when he stopped his little convoy there. Montgomery gave George a bear hug, to the cheers of a crowd of French Kaskaskians who had gathered on the shore to see the return of their old benefactor, and in a moment Father Gibault broke forth from the crowd and trotted out on the plank landing to embrace George and kiss him on both cheeks. The priest’s gentle great eyes were brimming. “How long can you stay, my son?”

  “Not at all. Only a look at the fort, and then on up to Cahokia and St. Louis.”

  “Listen to them people whoop an’ holler,” Montgomery sneered as they went up the bank toward the fort. Flowers rained on them as they went up the street, and hands reached out offering flagons of wine. “Couldn’t hardly extrack a crust o’ bread or pair o’ shoes out of ’em all last winter. But now’s th’ British an’ Injuns got their blood runnin’ yaller again, they like us a lot.”

  “Never mind that, John. Bear in mind we promised ’em a lot of benefits that Virginia hasn’t been able to deliver yet. A main one being protection, and it looks as if we have our chance to fulfill that one now anyway. How’s their militia forming up?”

  “They’re good. With nowhere t’ run to, I reckon they can be counted on.”

  George gave Montgomery a hard look. “I hope you’ll improve that attitude, John. I can’t ever forget that sixty o’ these people marched with us to Vincennes last year. I can’t ever forget that.”

  He met old campaigners he hadn’t seen in a year, and was embraced by many weeping and laughing Kaskaskians. He inspected the defenses of the fort, went into the old Rocheblave house and trailed his fingers thoughtfully over the waxed desk where he had written so many orders and vouchers and proclamations as the new conqueror of the Illinois in the summer of ’78. He went upstairs alone and gazed for a few minutes out of the bedroom window at the streets where the Kaskaskians had danced and sung and celebrated their deliverance on that long-ago July day. He looked down the street at Cerré’s house where he had first seen Teresa de Leyba and her brother.

  In less than an hour he was back at the wharf and ready to continue upstream, convinced that Kaskaskia was as ready as it could be if the invaders got this far.

  “My affections to McCarty and to yer little brother, fine one that ’e is,” said Montgomery.

  “Aye, John. Now you keep alert; keep scouts far afield, an’ make the most of this new morale. Seems it takes th’ worst to bring out the best, eh, John? And now I give you one special charge: Protect this priest with your life if you must.”

  “On my word, George.”

  “May I have a word with you, Father?” The priest strolled to the end of the wharf with him. “If we get through this, Father, I need to know if there’s a way under the sun for a Catholic lass to be married to the likes of me without losing her soul in the process.”

  The priest tilted his head and clapped his hands together under his nose, all his deep smile lines tilting upward around his wide, loose V of a smile. “My son, I shall say this: In my years in this wilderness, I’ve married children of Manitou to backwoods barbarians whose Catholic souls were so far buried in iniquity and sloth that I could scarcely find them. If I could not conceive some liberal way to bring two such pure and noble souls as yours and Señorita de Leyba’s together, I should think I had lost my craft as a minion of our Savior. Yes, George, we’ll find a way, or if there is none, make one!”

  CAHOKIA WAS BUTTONED UP FOR SIEGE WHEN GEORGE AND HIS LITTLE band of reinforcements arrived there on May twenty-fifth, and the main enemy force was reported to be within a day’s river travel. His reunion with his old comrade McCarty and his brother Dickie was joyous but hurried. Advance parties of the enemy had already captured an armed boat from St. Louis with thirteen men, and had taken seventeen prisoners at the lead mines near Ste. Genevieve. The air was heavy with foreboding. McCarty had learned that the Ottawa chief Matchikuis, who was legendary for his daring capture of Mackinac in 1763 and now wore the red coat, epaulets, and title of a British general, was in charge of all the Indians under Emanuel Hesse. A French bushranger had recognized him and brought back that fearsome information. “So be it,” grinned George. “But he has never been up against the Big Knives, has ’e?” The officers smiled and nodded.

  The fort at
Cahokia was a minimal defense, but not badly situated to offer clear fields of fire, as it was not obstructed by town buildings as was Kaskaskia. George saw that McCarty had already had the great elms cut down, the two under which he had first negotiated peace with the Indians. Their obstruction of the view of the approaching enemy would have been dangerous, and now they lay on the ground, their sharpened limbs and branches pointed outward from the fort as part of a well-made abatis. George gazed over the palisade at them and recalled vividly that portentous occasion: the sunlight dancing through the canopy of leaves, the cool shade, the musk of the Indian crowd, the tobacco smoke of the peace pipes. He remembered the long table with the wampum belts lying across it, and Joseph Bowman sitting at the end of the table. Bowman, he thought, a sudden knot in his throat. Cahokia had been Bowman’s command and George wished with all his soul that that brave and capable man had lived to be here for its defense now.

  Soon having heard all the intelligence that they had on Cahokia’s defense and the approaching enemy, George licked his lips and announced:

  “Gentlemen, in the remaining hours, I’m going over the river to St. Louis, to have a look at their defenses. Dickie, you’ll come with me, and I’ll take a squad of riflemen for our protection.” Several of the officers started and stood up, their mouths dropping open, and McCarty protested: