Long Knife

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Now hear me!” he shouted, sweeping a pointed finger over the crowd. “This land office for this moment is nothing. You may have deeds in your pockets and no scalps on your skulls this very week, unless you put aside your private greed and behave like principled men! Open your eyes, damn you! Or you’ll have nought but a title to your own burial plot. But the Shawnees won’t even respect that! Rather they’ll leave you lie to stink and feed the buzzards!

  “Now, listen. I give you no choice: you will stand and fight for this place. And I do mean no choice! I’ve put pickets on the Wilderness Road to turn back any craven who tries to flee out of Kentucky. Look about you! I have men here who marched with me and won this land you’re dickerin’ over. They’re right among you now—d’you know the man at your shoulder, eh?—and they have my order to stop any able-bodied man from leaving! I tell you, there’s honor in fighting alongside those boys, and a lot to learn. If you refuse to serve, then, by your leave—or without it—we’ll at least put your horses in the service and take your guns and ammunition to put in the hands of braver boys—ten-year-olds, maybe, who haven’t yet learned to put avarice over honor!”

  He paused and studied the crowd. Many looked sullen, some scared; here and there in the mob stood lean men with familiar faces, with hunters’ eyes and vulpine grins, old campaigners leaning on their rifles, delighted with what was happening here.

  “I reckon I’ve made my intentions plain,” George continued. “Anyone too dense to understand what I say would be of little use to this country. As of now, this land office is a recruiting office …”

  Suddenly the crowd’s attention was distracted by hair-raising sounds coming from the fort gate behind them: women wailing, and the throaty, tearing, sobbing cries of some tormented creature.

  The women led him in through the gate: a straw-haired boy of fifteen or sixteen, the front of his homespun clothing spattered with blood and smudged with mud and soot. His scraped, bruised face was distorted beyond recognition by agony, his nose drained into his hps, his lips onto his chin. The crowd parted as the women led him to Colonel Clark, supporting him by his arms as his legs wobbled and threatened to buckle.

  The boy slid to the ground before George, and sat there snuffling and gagging, trying to talk but totally incoherent. But the women, all trying to talk at once, told what the boy had said to them, and it sent a shock through the crowd:

  “He run all the way here! Ruddell’s Station was massacred! Shawnees and Redcoats by the hundreds! O, Gawd, Gawd! He’s the only one got away, the rest is took! His whole family! Almighty help us!”

  The boy, who had fallen apart upon reaching the safety of Harrodsburg, was soon calmed enough to sit on a bench in the land office and relate what had happened.

  “Thursday,” he whimpered. “A guard called down from the wall … We looked out … They was hundreds, hundreds out there … They shot a cannon at us … It busted open a blockhouse. Mr. Ruddell he waved a white flag … Went out to talk to three redcoats on horses … They said surrender to King George and the womenfolk and chillun could come here safe … Mr. Ruddell he says yes …

  “But when the gates was open, the Indians run in yellin’ … They kilt ladies an’ babies … with their tommy hawks … sculped ‘em. Miz Ruddell had her boy baby … Indian grabbed ‘im an’ thrown ‘im in a fire … She jumped for to save ‘im, an’ they kilt ‘er and thrown ‘er on th’ fire too … They sculped Mr. Ruddell when he run to help ….

  “They kilt maybe twenty ‘fore the British officer could stop ‘em … He called ‘em cowards. Made ‘em promise they wouldn’t murder at Martin’s Station … Lines us all up to march … But them too sick or old or little to walk was … was just kilt standin’ there an’ sculped an’ left to rot …”

  The men in the office listened and looked at each other and their faces were white and their mouths bitten narrow. “What else?” George coaxed. “What about Martin’s Station?”

  “The … the British officer told the Indians to promise no murderin’ at Martin’s or he wouldn’t use his cannon for ‘em. He made ‘em promise to give him the prisoners to take to ‘Troit, he said. So they said yes … We was all loaded with all we could carry, an’ went over to Martin’s. They gave up with no fight. Indians killed all the cattle an ‘swup th’ horses … We walk an’ walk. Anyone stumbles gets their head split. They was goin’ back t’ward th’ big river. I see a holler sycamore and see no one’s lookin’ an’ slip in till they all gone past. Then I lit out fer here …” His face went aghast again and now that the duty of reporting was done, he began blubbering. George stroked the boy’s hair and reviewed the images the boy’s words had created. His eyes smoldered. He thought of Captain Bird, his newest enemy, who was perhaps a principled man who had bent his principles a long way and realized too late the inhumanity of employing savages. It reminded him of Henry Hamilton. He shall have to live with it—if he lives, George thought.

  A CLOUD OF GLIDING BUZZARDS SHOWED THEM WHERE RUDDLE’S Station was before they rounded a hill and saw the splintered blockhouse standing above the trees.

  They rode into the compound and were assailed by the stench of rotting flesh. Bodies, scalped and crusted with brown dried blood, lay about in all attitudes, swollen in the sunlight, some having burst, many already partly flayed and picked by the hunchbacked scavenger birds, which raised their messy beaks, shook their wattles, and lumbered into flight as the horsemen rode among them swinging at them with swords and rifles. Black flies by the thousands droned and swarmed through the enclosure. Every foot of ground was covered with trash: bits of paper, broken crockery, feathers, smashed furniture, scraps of cloth, tools, corn husks, skeins of wool and flax, smashed drinking gourds, pewter implements, split trunks, a homemade doll covered with dried blood lying beside a scalped child; it was as if the lives of the four hundred inhabitants had been shaken up in a huge box and dumped within the palisade.

  More buzzards and more mutilated bodies—an old woman with her dugs sliced off, a man with a bandage on his leg and his teeth smashed in, a small boy with his genitals sliced off and the wound alive with black flies—marked the road to Martin’s Station five miles away. There were fewer bodies at Martin’s, where the burned shell of the fort still smoldered.

  After the viewing of those ruins, there was no more difficulty raising an army.

  34

  OHIO VALLEY

  July 25, 1780

  THEY ASSEMBLED LATE IN JULY AT THE MOUTH OF THE LICKING River: a thousand mounted and armed men, in response to Colonel Clark’s call to arms. It was three times as large an army as he had ever been able to gather when he had needed numbers to march against Detroit. This time they could see the immediate result of their fighting: revenge. They left their settlements defended only by their sons and wives and old men, left their crops standing in the fields, hoping to massacre the Shawnees at Chillicothe and Piqua and get back in time to harvest.

  Some of the best leaders and Indian fighters in the territory arrived at the great camp. Daniel Boone came, quiet-talking, catlike, with eyes that seemed to see for miles. Levi Todd and William McAfee came. Simon Butler was there; he was appointed a captain and put in charge of all scouts and spies. Five companies were formed, a colonel in charge of each company: Benjamin Logan, John Floyd, James Harrod, George Slaughter, and Benjamin Linn. This time the settlers of the Kentucky frontier had a brass cannon to use against the Indians. A brass cannon captured two years earlier at Kaskaskia had been brought up the Ohio by the convoy from Fort Jefferson.

  The training period was brief but rigorous. Among the transients drafted at the land office were many accomplished scoundrels and malingerers who had to be thrashed to learn that Colonel Clark had no tolerance for insubordination or wheeling and dealing. Some saw the light while sitting chained to a post in the middle of the camp. The veterans who had served with him in previous campaigns found Clark just as energetic, efficient, and severe as ever, but there was something missing now: he seldom joke
d and seldom laughed. This expedition, they sensed, was somehow different to him from the others.

  On the evening of August first, with the army ready and the crossing of the Ohio scheduled for the next morning, George left his tent and strolled in the late sunlight to the perimeter of the camp, hands behind his back, barely nodding in response to the greetings his troops uttered as he passed among their cookfires. He walked out of the camp and went up a sloping meadow to a place where a dozen freshly cut wood crosses stuck up above the brown earth of fresh graves. Henry Bird and his Indians and their four hundred captives from the raids on Martin’s and Ruddle’s Station had crossed the river here a few weeks earlier on their return to Detroit, and for various unknown reasons a number of the captives had been killed instead of ferried across. The first Americans arriving here for the rendezvous had found their corpses lying about in the grass and reeds, scalped, putrefying, half devoured by animals and insects, and had buried them on this pleasant meadow overlooking the site of their final horror. George walked among the nameless graves, then stopped to gaze down over the big encampment at the river mouth. Hearing a cough, he turned suddenly and saw a familiar figure sitting with his back to a tree at the top of the meadow, looking at him. He walked over to the giant woodsman, and knelt beside him, and they looked at the long shadows.

  “You ready for tomorrow, Simon?”

  “I am.”

  “You’ll remember to keep your advance scouts moving ten or twenty miles ahead of the army.”

  “Aye.”

  They sat quietly for a few more minutes. This was one of the characteristics George always had admired about Simon Butler. He never seemed to feel obliged to talk just to be talking. But now Simon drawled:

  “It may be none o’ my concern, but I’d say as how they’s something gnawin’ you away down in your vitals.”

  “Yes, you’d be right to say that, Si.”

  “I care what it is.”

  Though accustomed to keeping his own counsel, George yearned to say what was on his mind; maybe it would lift off some of his melancholy.

  “Well, y’see, Simon, I think there are better things we could be doing with this size an army than raiding Shawnee towns for revenge.”

  “You mean Detroit.”

  “Detroit. Two years now I’ve been drawn up at the end of my tether, just a few companies shy of going there. Meantime, all this going back and forth for vengeance, Shawnees against Kentucky, Kentuckians against Shawnees, is never going to end as long as the British sit up there selling their guns and gewgaws for scalps. In a week there’ll be more blood spilt, ours and theirs, but it’ll have to be done all over again in another season, then another. But after Ruddle’s and Martin’s, why, these people have to get even, and so I guess I’m their man as usual.” He cleared his throat and sighed. There! he’d said it, and Simon, who knew Detroit’s condition, was nodding in agreement. But now George was wishing he’d kept as circumspect as usual about his feelings. He knew the reason for his discontent was that fate had taken the initiative out of his hands, but it could do no good for a commandant to express his doubts this way to a subordinate. “Anyhow,” he said briskly, shifting his weight and rubbing his hands briskly, “we’ll give ‘em a good enough drubbing to last a season, eh?” Then he glanced aside at Simon’s massive, leonine head, his imperturbable eyes, and changed the subject. “Tell me, if you care to, this yarn I’ve heard about you changing your name to Kenton.”

  The big youth sat wrapped in thought, smiling. Then he said, softly: “Simple. Simple. Kenton’s my true name. Back in ’71, just sixteen, I was, I whup a man. Over a girl. Lost my head an’ pounded ‘im long after he was out. When I calmed down I listened for his heart; thought ‘e was dead. Lit out, never went home. Changed my name to Butler, after a man who took me in. Kept to m’self, as you know. Thought a lot. Coulda gone back and turned myself in, but instead come to th’ frontier an’ stayed Simon Butler. Hope you won’t think less of me for runnin’ away, but I didn’t want t’ hang; I’d whup ‘im in fair fight, an’ didn’t think myself no murderer, but I knowed they would.”

  “All those years an alias! And famous by it, too. But why are you Kenton again?”

  “Well, here’s th’ funny part on’t,” Kenton went on wistfully. “I run onto some tenderfeet up t’ Three Islands a few months back, an’ they was from Prince William County. We got t’ talkin’, and I find out that man didn’t die. In fact, he stood trial for murderin’ me, as I couldn’t be found. But he was acquitted on ‘count of no evidence.” He chuckled. “So that is my story, sir. Don’t it make you think?”

  George mused on it, and marveled. There were so many untalkative men here on the frontier, loners who never spoke of their origins; his beloved old Illinois regiment had had a score of such. How many odd stories there must be, he thought. “Well, then, my congratulations to you on recovering your identity. Now you’ll have to build a reputation as Simon Kenton to equal that of Simon Butler, eh?”

  “Well, but it ain’t reputation I care about. It’s just keepin’ m’self alive. And any as I can help. Now, sir, why I come up here was not to tell you my story, but to give you this letter. It was left off just now by a trader on the way to Fort Pitt from th’ Missipp.”

  It had the Church seal, George noted as he broke the wax, and he knew it could only be from Father Gibault.

  St. Louis, June 28, 1780

  Dear Friend:

  The poste being so dubious in these hazardous times I have made it my sad duty to send you news which you may have or may have not received from other sources, being that our beloved ally Fernando de Leyba succumbed to the complications from his wound, and has been buried this day beside his wife Maria at the church of St. Louis.

  I was with him in his final days and know that two concerns most occupied his soul: first, that he had through negligence let Maria slip from his life without benefit of the last rites; second, that support of his daughters Maria and Rita should be given to the care of their maternal uncle Fernando de Zezar, New Orleans, and Teresa also if any harm should befall you in your present campaigns. Our friend spoke of his love and admiration for you several times in his last hour, and I believe was despite his misery almost happy because he had conducted himself in a fashion you would have deemed manly.

  Mile. Teresa, so fragile of spirit when I first knew her, bears herself in the face of all this with a granite fortitude, but is I fear quite brittle and holding herself together with the divine mastic of Faith, in Our Savior and in yourself, whom I think sometimes she confuses, the one for the other. But she is for the moment well. At her request I enclose herewith a billet to you in her own hand.

  All matters at this place are in the care of Lieutenant de Cartabona until such time as Fernando’s successor shall arrive from N. Orleans.

  The people of his vicinity are in perpetual contention with the representatives of Virginia whose aid and protection they were promised. Most disputes involve quartering of troops and provisioning due to the worthlessness of currency. Your guiding hand is sorely needed here. The sole cheerful news I have to give is that our droll friend Leonard Helm and I did meet in our travels once and I confess that I veered from the path of temperance to toast with him all our dear remembered comrades one by one, yourself several times. It was a night to remember, most of which I can’t recall.

  Any correspondence you may have time to send me should be addressed to Ste. Genevieve where I return within a few days and shall be indefinitely.

  May God be with you in all your righteous endeavors, and bring you back to us sound and victorious. In the name of Our Lord I remain

  Your most affectionate and devoted servant

  P. GIBAULT

  Kenton saw the emotions working in George’s face and turned away, not to intrude. George opened the little letter inside with shaking hands.

  St Louis, June 29, 1780

  Querido Mío,

  Fernando is dead, God ease his torment. After a long bad f
ever he passed away with your praise on his lips.

  Coming to this place has cost us everything. One would not believe such complete disaster could come so fast, this in a land that looks so like the Paradise—until one looks closer and sees the distress and death among the flowers. But Fernando and I did not in the end curse this place. Here we learned how much we could bear, and that, I believe now, though I never supposed it before, is perhaps the essential truth one should know.

  Your precious trophy is as always privately upon my breast above my heart.

  I am sustained now by your dream, that of sitting beside you on a plaza watching the sun go down on a peaceful country. To live without that hope is unthinkable. Defend yourself, and may God protect you.

  I await you and pray for you every hour and if anything should happen to me I would watch over you from Heaven.

  I remain with Fidelity and Adoration,

  Yours

  TERESA

  “Go away, Simon,” George said in a strangling voice. But Kenton had already gone.

  35

  MIAMI RIVER VALLEY

  August 2, 1780

  THE MARCH TO CHILLICOTHE UP THE EAST BANK OF THE LITTLE MIAMI River was swift but strenuous. Because of the cannon, roads had to be cut through seventy miles of the way, through thickets and windfalls and snarls of bottomland driftwood. A great part of the march was under heavy rainfall. Then a sultry sun came out and steamed the valley. Gasping, some collapsing from the close August heat, stung by sweatbees and tormented almost to madness by the clouds of mosquitoes and giant flies that feasted on their blood, the woodsmen with the sharp axes engineered roadways and log fording-bridges along the wild valley.