Rifles for Watie

by Harold Keith

  “Mam, haven’t you got some old worn-out stock somewhere on the place that you could use to pull the wagons?” Forgetting the war, Jeff wanted desperately to help them. “If you went slowly, you might get through. With so much stealing going on, the families with the sorriest teams might have the best chance to make it. Nobody would want to steal any broken-down stock.”

  Mrs. Jackman decided to try it. She and Miss Pat walked out on the range and found several old horses, two sick oxen, and a lame mule the deserting slaves had considered too worthless to steal. Old Joel helped Jeff put on his clothing and assisted him to the rear wagon. He felt faint after all the exercise and lay down on a pallet that had been fixed for him, his head aching dully. At this rate he would never get to Fort Gibson. It was hot in the wagon despite its canvas top, much hotter than in the house.

  With a final look at her beloved home, Mrs. Jackman, in the front wagon, shook out her lines and clucked to her team. The caravan began slowly to move.

  The long trip was pure torture to Jeff. Mile after mile he lay helpless, eating the thick dust and listening to the creak and groan of the wheels. The wheels lurched, jostling him cruelly. When Mrs. Jackman bought some oxen from a settler living along the trail, replacing their worn-out stock, their progress became faster.

  Swinging around the San Bois Mountains, they came out on the Texas Road. The big thoroughfare was crowded that summer with wagons of Cherokee families going south to Red River to live near their menfolk for the war’s duration. Jeff’s malaria returned. His weight shrank. The Jackmans dosed him with everything, from a tonic they made of wild cherry and dogwood bark to a vial of quinine they secured from the apothecary at Boggy Depot. When the long trip finally stopped deep in the Choctaw country, he felt he never wanted to ride in a wagon again.

  The journey ended unexpectedly one night at a deserted log house a quarter mile off the road, where they stopped to rest. They found a large garden, neatly weeded, and an orchard heavily laden with late peaches and early apples. There were a barn and several outbuildings, even a cool spring and a cellar close by.

  “Why don’t you move in?” a neighbor family advised. “You’ll like it here. The Choctaws and Texas people are wonderful. They opened their corn cribs to us and helped us with our crops. The winters here aren’t severe. Spring comes much earlier than at home. And it’s safe. General Cooper’s army usually winters at Fort Washita, close by.”

  Despite her husband’s earlier arrangements for them to live in Texas, Mrs. Jackman sent word to him they had decided to stay here for the present. With all their slaves and cattle gone, they wouldn’t need a large place anyhow. With the help of their neighbors, the wagons were unloaded and the family moved in. Jeff was installed in a small shed room south of the house, overlooking the Texas Road.

  It was a much different life from the one they had led in their luxurious two-story manor back near Briartown. Still too weak to help with the farm work, Jeff could only give directions. The women borrowed a small walking plow and, hitching one of the oxen to it, planted late corn and black-eyed peas. They worked all day in the field. The cinch bugs devoured nearly everybody else’s corn, but not the Jackmans’.

  “Everybody says our rows are so crooked, the bugs can’t find our corn,” Jill laughed one night when she brought Jeff his supper.

  Talk was always about the war. Stand Watie’s name was on everybody’s lips. The whole rebel country seemed to lean on him. Jeff was surprised to learn that he had been elected principal chief of the southern segment of the Cherokees and it was his responsibility to feed the destitute refugee families camped in the Choctaw country. Under his direction, the Confederate government furnished the refugees corn, wheat, molasses, and sugar when they were available from the rebel supply center at Boggy Depot. The Jackman women went there quite often for their supplies.

  Hour after hour, Jeff lay on his stomach watching the traffic go by on the Texas Road. It increased so greatly in August of ’63 that he knew another battle was looming. Company after company of marching rebel infantry and dusty rebel cavalry, accompanied by supply trains, ammunition wagons and large droves of sheep and longhorn cattle and small Mexican mules, came up from Texas, bound for the north. The Southern refugee women living all along the road saw the grim preparations, too, and with mounting dread thought of their fathers, brothers, and sweethearts.

  When news came in late August of the defeat of the rebel General Steele at Perryville, fifty miles north of Boggy Depot, the women waited in fear for the mounted runner Watie always sent south with the casualty reports. When Jeff heard the battle tidings, he found his emotions queerly divided. He was secretly elated at the Union success and yet he didn’t want the Jackmans hurt by it.

  He was the one who first saw the rebel cavalryman turn into the Jackman driveway four days after the battle. It was an hour before dusk. The lone rider came trotting in from the north. He was gaunt and dirty; the buckskin horse he rode looked sweaty and hot.

  The Jackman women had just come in from working in the garden. Janice saw the rider as she was bathing her face at the spring.

  “Look, Mama,” she gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. They stood in a little cluster at the well, watching him ride up, a strange fascination in their faces, an odd paralysis in their legs. His horse shied nervously at the chickens, and, growling something unintelligible, the rider pulled rein about twenty feet away.

  “Is this the Jackman home?” His brown, whiskery face looked like a weed-grown field.

  Mutely the women nodded.

  “Does a Mrs. Sophie Chavis live here?”

  With a little cry of anguish, Sophie shrank back against the clapboard shed. Mrs. Jackman and Marjorie moved quickly to her side.

  “I’ve bad news, mam. Your husband, Thomas Chavis, was killed in the Battle of Perryville. We didn’t recover his body, mam. We was retreatin’ too fast. The Feds will probably bury it, mam.”

  Thus did the war serve the women on both sides.

  There were happier times, too. One afternoon in early September, Mr. Jackman rode into the yard for his first visit since the family had arrived in the Choctaw country. Deliriously happy, his daughters hurled themselves upon him, hugging him joyfully.

  “Stir around, Hannah, and help get something to eat, but only the Lord knows what it will be,” Mrs. Jackman called to black Hannah. Then turning to her husband, she embraced him, saying, “Why didn’t you ring a bell, or blow a horn and let us know you were coming?”

  After dinner was over and the girls had related all the exciting details of their flight by wagon from Briartown to the Choctaw country, they brought their father to see Jeff. He was a small, ragged, black-haired man with a drooping mustache. Soberly he told of the Confederate defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in the East and at Perryville and Fort Smith in their own theater of the war, about the terrific rate of desertion among Cabell’s Arkansas troops and of the rebels’ appalling lack of arms, clothing, medicine, and shoes. With the Mississippi River patrolled by Union gunboats, the hard-pressed Confederate government at Richmond could not supply their westernmost forces in the Indian country.

  And then he told them something that made Jeff’s heart jump like a quail exploding from a grass clump.

  “I think we’ll do much better in the spring,” Jackman added hopefully. “We’ve been getting a few new repeating rifles smuggled in from the North. Stand thinks he was worked out a way to get hundreds more. This rifle shoots seven times without reloading. It’s lighter and more than a foot shorter than our muzzle-loaders. After you shoot, you crank a lever under the trigger. It opens the breach, kicks out the empty cartridge, pumps in a new cartridge, and you’re ready to shoot again, all in the flash of a second.”

  A panic came over Jeff as he heard Orff’s new Spencer repeater described in such exact detail. Any rebel cavalry force equipped with a rifle like that would have a tremendous advantage, might lengthen the war five years or even bring the Union to its knees in th
is far-off Western sphere.

  He knew he must stay longer in the rebel country. If the rebels were getting repeating rifles from some place in the North, it was his job to find out where they were coming from and stop it, if he could. But how was he going to, lying flat on his back in the Choctaw country, nearly a hundred miles below Fort Gibson?

  In late September he got his appetite back suddenly. One afternoon Miss Pat brought him a piece of hot dried-fruit pie, made from the apples the women had sun-dried. As she held it out, tempting him, Jeff could smell the spicy odor of the nutmeg and the hot, brown juice. To his surprise, the smell did not sicken him. He gulped the pie down so hungrily that the girl ran excitedly to the house to tell the others.

  That night Aunt Hettie Sloan came to sit up with Jeff, much to his disgust. Tall and stern, she was famous as a local humanitarian. She lived on Yarberry Creek, a mile and a half west of the Jackmans. She wore her gray hair roached upward in a strange-looking topknot into which she had thrust a tiny, jeweled comb.

  Tiptoeing in, she seated herself decorously by his bed. Adjusting a faded green shawl about her thin shoulders, she leaned forward, staring long and soulfully at him. Then she wrinkled her long, high-bridged nose at Mrs. Jackman and shook her head.

  “He looks bad, Maggie,” Aunt Hettie whined. “I don’t like his color a’tall. It’s chalky. He looks jest like my Uncle Jeremiah did before he jined the great majority two years ago.”

  Startled by her ghastly diagnosis, Jeff blinked. “Mam, honestly, I feel better today than I’ve felt in weeks.”

  Aunt Hettie paid no attention. Shaking her gray head sorrowfully, she sighed, “Uncle Jeremiah rallied like that, too. It’s what we used to call the False Recovery. Ever’body thought he was bucking up. Three hours later he commenced pickin’ at the covers. We buried him up on Cowskin Prairie.”

  When they had gone Jeff broke out in a cold sweat of fear. Having no desire to emulate Aunt Hettie’s Uncle Jeremiah and “jine the great majority,” he sat up on the side of the bed.

  His head felt almost normal. The hot fruit pie he had eaten seemed to have given him strength. With growing excitement, he stood and, leaning against the wall in the darkness, took half a dozen slow, halting steps to the door. He felt no dizziness, no headaches. Elated, he wanted to shout with joy.

  Three weeks later he was able to help Mrs. Jackman and Jill sow wheat in the field. He knew he would be expected to rejoin the rebel outfit. Then Adair, who was now a colonel, sent word he need not report back until spring, since Watie had furloughed most of his men and sent them home to assist their families with the crops. So Jeff stayed that winter with the Jackmans, helping with the farm work and slowly recovering his strength.

  He was eager to find out more about the new rifles and hoped that Mr. Jackman, on one of his visits home, might reveal more information. In this he was doomed to disappointment; Watie’s adjutant never mentioned the subject again. Even so, Jeff was glad to be at the Jackmans’ instead of at Watie’s winter quarters at “Camp Starvation.” There the heavy fall rains had left the roads so impassible that the men were subsisting upon small rations of parched corn and poorly dried beef and feeding their horses mulberry brush and tree bark.

  Early in March Jeff walked to the door of his shed room and looked out into the darkness on the Texas Road. The cool air was invigorating. A small, bobbing light glimmered far to the south and Jeff could hear the faint clatter of a string of empty freight wagons, hitched together and drawn by mules.

  He took a long pull of the night air and his nostrils caught the wild, sweet whiff of plum-tree blossoms. He knew that spring was coming fast to the Choctaw country, much faster than back home in his native Kansas. Already the burr oaks were wearing light green tassels and the redbuds’ purplish blooms brightened the hillsides and valleys. The robins had stayed around all winter.

  Jeff felt a surge of renewed hope. It would soon be time to plow.

  21

  Boggy Depot

  Jeff sat in the afternoon sunshine, his back against the wheel of the commissary wagon, watching Heifer make sourdough biscuits.

  It was the second day after he had rejoined the Watie brigade. He had tried to help Heifer unload and rustle the firewood, but the cook wouldn’t let him lift a finger until he got stronger.

  Now Heifer was pinching off pieces of the white dough. Rolling them into balls between his palms, he placed them in the Dutch oven, turning them in the hot grease so that all sides received a coating and they wouldn’t stick together. As he worked he hummed snatches of songs to himself. When Heifer hummed, his sobbing, quavering voice sounded like one of Cooper’s squeaky baggage wagons making a sharp turn in the road on an early frosty morning.

  And yet Jeff had no difficulty recognizing the tune. Today it was Heifer’s favorite, the religious hymn “Amazing Grace.” Watching him, Jeff was ashamed.

  Everybody in the rebel country had been nice to him. Heifer watched over him like a fussy old hen over a single chick. The Jackmans had taken wonderful care of him. The rebel riders had been good to him since he got back. Disturbed by all their kindness, Jeff felt mean about being against them in the war.

  With a sweet gush of sorrow he remembered leaving the Jackmans yesterday. Heifer had come for him in the commissary wagon, a small gray mare trotting behind. All the Jackmans had gathered in the front yard to kiss Jeff good-by. He thanked them as humbly and gratefully as he knew how for all they had done for him. They seemed genuinely sorry to see him go. Miss Sophie even cried.

  Heifer’s cowhorn mustache looked a little shaggier and grayer, but otherwise he seemed the same. Mrs. Jackman had heard of him through her husband. She urged him to stay for supper.

  “Can’t, Madam,” Heifer replied in his broken speech. “Gotta be gittin’ back and fixin’ my own supper fer the boys. But here’s somethin’ anyhow fer yore supper.” And groping in the back of the wagon, he pulled out a middling of bacon and half a sack of wheat flour.

  “The hoss is fer you, kid. Got her from our fo’age camp, down in Texas. Name’s Flea Bite.”

  Jeff looked for the first time at the small mare daintily cropping the Bermuda greening along the Jackman driveway. She was more cream-colored than gray, with small brown freckles all over her trim, young body. Enchanted, Jeff felt the thrill of ownership. He liked her looks. She was sleek and lean. There was a saddle on her back, a small, than Frazier with narrow stirrups bound in shiny brass.

  Jeff gulped, “Corn, Mr. Hobbs, thank you for finding her for me.” Heifer beamed happily. His distorted face seemed more frightening than ever when it was registering joy or pleasure.

  Jeff saw Miss Pat big-eyeing the mare longingly. He felt sorry for her. He knew she hadn’t straddled a horse since her beloved Barney had been stolen by the Pins. Since then, the girl’s only contact with stock had been driving an ox to the walking plow they sometimes borrowed from a Choctaw neighbor.

  Jeff walked to the back of the commissary wagon, untied the bridle reins, and held them out to her.

  “Here,” he said, “why don’t you take a gallop on her while I go pack my things?”

  He liked the way her eyes suddenly grew big and round and starry.

  “Oh, thank you!” she breathed. Quickly she tied the reins to the wagon wheel. Squealing with delight, she raced to the house to find her riding habit.

  Later, when it was time to go, Jeff couldn’t wait himself to ride the mare. Putting his foot in the stirrup, he went up on one side of her and came down on the other in a heap, Heifer catching him with one arm just in time. He still wasn’t entirely over his dizziness. He felt silly, folding up like that in front of everybody. He rode off seated in the back of the commissary wagon, where he could lead the mare and look at her. . . .

  Now Heifer was lifting the lids of other Dutch ovens and turning the beefsteaks in them. The ovens were deep, iron skillets with three small legs and a heavy lid with an upturned lip so the hot lid could be picked up with a gouch hook. There were
red coals of fire on top of each lid as well as underneath the oven.

  The rebel cook certainly knew how to revive a balky appetite. Yesterday he had taken his shotgun and, riding out into the brush, killed two fat quail, frying them for Jeff in the Dutch oven. From the sack of dried apples the Jackmans had given them, he had made a pie, rolling out the dough with a whisky bottle and cutting the initials CMR, for Cherokee Mounted Rifles in the top crust with his bowie knife.

  The brigade had seemed glad to see Jeff back, too. One shaggy fellow brought him four hen’s eggs. Even Fields welcomed him with a stiff handshake. The sergeant wore his campaign coat buttoned neatly in front. His shoulder seemed entirely healed.

  “Heared yuh been layin’ sick. Too bad. Glad yore back.”

  Again Jeff felt the prickings of his stubborn conscience. He almost wished they weren’t so good to him.

  A week later the whole outfit moved north fifteen miles toward Boggy Depot. Gorging himself on Heifer’s cooking, Jeff was feeling fine.

  He rode Flea Bite alongside the commissary wagon. They splashed across a creek with clay-colored water and white haw blossoms blooming along its banks. He heard the redbirds whistling and they reminded him of home. The sun penetrated warmly through his old coat. Spring was on the way.

  When they first saw Boggy Depot, it was late afternoon. In the sun’s flat rays the rebel war capital looked like a handful of clods on a muddy creek bank. But as they rode closer, Jeff saw with surprise that the town sprawled all over the woodsy flat. It had been built in the edge of the woods. Stumps of trees protruded in the streets and patches of native live oak and hickory remained undisturbed in the very heart of the town.

  It was an hour before sundown when they jogged into its outskirts. After helping Heifer set up in the military zone at the town’s south edge, Jeff and Hooley Pogue rode down the middle of Main Street.