by Harold Keith
They drew rein at the public well and at the top of a crude flagpole Jeff saw something that startled him, something he had never seen before.
It was a ragged rectangle of gray and blue bunting. Two red bars crossed each other in the middle with a few white stars sewn crudely between them. He realized it was a homemade rebel flag.
He felt vaguely displeased. Compared to his own beloved Stars and Stripes, it seemed cheap and bold and arrogant. And yet it made him feel a little alarmed. If the rebellion against his country had reached the point where the enemy now had a flag as well as a president, a congress and an army, no wonder the war had lasted three years. These people were fighting for something they believed in. They might be hard to subdue.
Suddenly a cannon boomed loudly from behind them. Flea Bite jumped nervously.
A troop of ragged Indian cavalry raced down the street on their small ponies, war-whooping shrilly and brandishing their stone tomahawks. They galloped round and round the flagpole, singing loudly and fiercely something that sounded like, “Yakeh walih, he kanah he!”
Mystified, Jeff turned to Hooley. “Who are they?”
Hooley’s lip curled scornfully. “Choctaws an’ Chickasaws singin’ the Choctaw war song. They always sing it when the sunset gun goes off. If they could fight as good as they can sing . . .”
Jeff remembered these same Indian troops riding blithely into the Battle of Honey Springs armed only with archaic weapons. He didn’t think Hooley was being entirely fair to the Choctaws. They didn’t have much to fight with. Maybe if they had been armed decently, and trained intelligently, they could have fought as well as anybody.
When Jeff and Hooley returned to camp, hundreds of Indian soldiers were hobbling their horses and cooking their suppers over campfires. Hooley led Jeff on a tour and he saw from close range how the Watie men lived during their spare time.
Cheers and shouts came from one of the few cleared spots, where the long grass had been trampled down. Men armed with hickory switches were flailing each other about the legs and hips with howls of mingled pain and laughter. Hooley said the game was called “Hot Jackets.”
They wandered here and there, encountering teamsters repairing sets of heavy harness and greasing them with tallow and neat’s-foot oil. Troopers were sharpening their long, fierce-looking knives on blue whetstones, or cleaning shotguns and horse pistols, or erecting torn dog tents amid the trees. Many were writing letters, using pokeberries for ink and sharpened corn stalks for pens.
Moving on, they heard the distant sound of banjo music and of feet stamping the grassy ground in rhythm. They hurried closer and saw, seated on a bois d’arc stump, a gangling, long-armed rebel banjo player. Dirty hands flying, he was strumming the merriest, rowdiest music Jeff had ever heard.
Listening to it, his feet itched, and he almost felt compelled to join the other Watie men who were grasping each other round the waist and, with shrill cries and yells, stomping about the leaf-strewn ground, hoedown style. Hooley told Jeff the name of the lively tune was “Billy in the Low Grounds.” Like everything else in the rebel country, the banjo was home-made, with a drumhead nailed tightly over half a whisky keg and its five long strings fastened with small staples.
“Whar’s Shoat?” somebody yelled.
A roar went up, and Jeff saw Adair, the long-haired colonel who had questioned him and Bostwick, standing in the crowd, a smile on his handsome face.
Then the crowd pushed “Shoat” out into the open space. A bashful, ragged little man, he held back and shook his head in refusal until somebody held out a green bottle toward him, whereupon he seemed suddenly to lose all his reluctance. Reaching, he swallowed deeply and, so enlivened, jumped beside the banjoist who, throttling down the volume of his instrument, began softly picking a warm, racy tune called “Blind Coon Dog.”
“Shoat” began to pat his foot, snap his fingers and sway rhythmically from side to side. Suddenly he grasped his chin with one hand and began to make with his teeth sharp, clicking noises that sounded like bones rattling, keeping perfect time to the lively music. His performance was received with deafening applause. Several of the listeners were so delighted they rolled on the ground with laughter.
An hour after dark a small troop of heavily armed Cherokee cavalry rode into camp from the Fort Towson Road. Jeff was on night sentry duty. Fields strolled out to meet them.
“Bussey,” he ordered, “take Major Boudinot to headquarters. He wants to see Cunnel Watie.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jeff, saluting. With a tiny shiver of excitement, he thought that he, too, would like to see the infamous rebel cavalry leader.
Boudinot, the man Jeff was escorting, was an important-looking fellow with high cheekbones and long black hair that was visible beneath his black, flat-crowned hat. He carried two bulging saddlebags.
Jeff led him to a brown Sibley tent pitched beneath a grove of locusts. Fields had told him it was headquarters. But the tent was dark, and all Jeff found was an old man asleep on a quilt spread outside on the ground. A small campfire glowed nearby.
Either Watie was absent or Jeff had the wrong tent. Reaching down, he shook the old man by the shoulder.
“Excuse me, sir,” Jeff said, “but can you tell me where we can find Colonel Watie?”
The man sat up instantly, his grayish, long-cropped hair tumbling to his collar.
“I’m Colonel Watie. What do you want?” His low-pitched voice was quiet, courteous, dignified. He wore a knife and pistol in his belt.
Jeff’s jaw flopped open. The man had no bodyguard of any kind.
Recovering fast, he clicked both heels together and saluted. “Sir, a gentleman is here to see you.” With his musket, Jeff indicated Boudinot.
Watie rolled to his feet with a lithe, catlike motion that would have done credit to a far younger man. Now that the firelight glimmered squarely on him, Jeff saw that he was a little, dark-skinned Indian with a square face and a flat nose. He looked more like a full-blood than a mixed-blood. Jeff was never so disappointed in his life. He had always imagined Watie to be a big, sinister fellow. Instead, he looked like some gentle old Indian farmer taking a noonday nap under a tree.
Recognizing his guest, Watie exclaimed cordially, “Cornelius!” and, extending both hands, stepped forward to greet the visitor.
“Uncle!” Boudinot’s voice was equally cordial. His pearly white teeth flashing in the firelight, Boudinot smiled again, and Watie went inside the tent. Jeff heard the scratch of a match and smelled the acrid sulphur burning. Limping slightly beneath the weight of his saddlebags, Boudinot followed.
Jeff stood rooted to the spot, staring after them. Boudinot’s high, melodious voice carried outside the tent. He spoke with obvious pride.
“Uncle, I got the Nation an appropriation of one hundred thousand dollars. I brought forty-five thousand dollars of it back with me. Scott, the Confederate commissioner, is bringing the rest out in July.”
Jeff heard Watie grunt with satisfaction. “Did you bring the gold?”
Boudinot was faintly apologetic. “Only twelve thousand dollars of it, Uncle. Richmond could give me only four thousand. I’ve been weeks scraping up the rest from our people living up and down Red River. Why do you need gold?”
Deciding he’d better get back on duty, Jeff shouldered his musket and started to move off.
“To buy rifles with. New repeating rifles. A Fed officer at Fort Gibson is smuggling them to us from St. Louis. They’re seven-shot Spencers and if we had enough of ’em we could shorten the war fast out here. But they’re expensive. I have to pay fifty dollars in gold for each gun and thirty dollars a thousand for fifty-two-caliber copper cartridges. The Fed officer won’t take nothin’ but gold.” Jeff froze in his tracks.
“Who is he?” Boudinot asked the question inside the tent just as Jeff himself wanted to ask it, standing breathless in the dusk outside.
Watie’s grunt sounded half sarcastic, half amused. “He’s no fool, nephew. He’s not going to
tell us his name. When we pay him off, he always stands in the dark so we can’t see his face. He’s got a gang of Fed soldiers workin’ for him. When the guns arrive at Gibson, he lets us know. He sold us a dozen that way last July. He said he’d have five hundred more this summer. Only I can’t buy five hundred. With only twelve thousand dollars in gold, I can buy only two hundred with cartridges.”
Outside, Jeff drew a long breath into his lungs. Who could the Union officer be? First he thought of Orff, who already had one of the guns. Then his mind went thrusting back to Clardy. However, Clardy had such a violent dislike for everything Confederate that he’d never approach a rebel without shooting first. He’d surely never do business with one. Jeff swallowed. It was probably somebody he didn’t even know. There were hundreds of officers at Fort Gibson.
Boudinot’s voice grew soft with cunning, “Uncle, why buy the guns at all? Why don’t you just take them?”
“Because we need a thousand rifles, not two hundred. With a thousand repeating rifles, I could crucify their supply trains by land or water, starve ’em out of Fort Gibson and win back all our old country north of the Arkansas so our people could return to their homes in peace. If I take these two hundred rifles without payin’, that’s all we’d get. He wouldn’t bring us any more.”
Jeff was astounded at what he had heard. If he knew the name of the Federal officer who was peddling the contraband rifles, he could leave for Fort Gibson tonight. Once Fort Gibson knew the betrayer’s name, he could be watched, trapped, and taken. Otherwise it would be hard to trace him. Cautiously he began backing through the brush.
The talking ceased abruptly. One of the shadows inside the tent moved with monstrous unnaturalness. Watie appeared at the door, staring suspiciously into the darkness. Jeff made himself so small and flat along the ground that a cabbage leaf would almost have covered him. Watie looked and listened and sniffed the night air carefully. Then he went back inside.
Soon Jeff heard the sharp, clear notes of a flute, blown by Boudinot, coming from the tent, and his nose caught the odor of tobacco smoke from Watie’s pipe.
He was still scared an hour later when he ran into Hooley back at the sentry post. He learned from Hooley that Boudinot, a nephew of Watie’s, had gone to college in the East and was now the Cherokee delegate to the Confederate Congress in Richmond, Virginia. He wondered what Watie would do with the forty-five thousand dollars in rebel bank notes Boudinot had brought from Richmond?
He found out next afternoon. At four o’clock they were mustered for pay. It was the first pay muster in two years, Hooley said. After a review and inspection, Boudinot himself acted as paymaster. Most of the money he had brought, Watie ordered spent to relieve the needs of the destitute rebel refugee families. But each trooper received a month’s salary, too. Jeff looked curiously at the crisp, new green bank notes, two fives and five ones.
“Know what I’m going to buy first?” Jeff said to Hooley, later. “There’s a man selling ginger cakes up on the street. I’m going to buy me a whole dollar’s worth. Come on, Hooley, I’ll buy you a chunk, too.”
Promptly they found the vendor. He was a big, bare-headed fellow, who had built himself an oven in the hillside next to the town blacksmith. He was standing behind a three-foot square of freshly baked brown gingerbread, fanning the flies off it with one hand. The hot, sweet smell was overpowering. Jeff slid off Flea Bite.
“Give us a dollar’s worth of that,” Jeff said, waving his one-dollar bill proudly.
The vendor extended his dirty hand, plucked the bank note away, laid it on the square of gingerbread and, cutting around it neatly with his bowie knife, hewed off a piece exactly the size of the bank note and handed it to the surprised Jeff. Then he pocketed the bill. Thus Jeff learned for the first time of the weak buying power of Confederate paper money.
Hooley laughed uproariously as Jeff broke off half his small piece and handed it to him. Jeff grinned ruefully. “I guess that’s what Pa meant when he told me once that money is the measure of value.”
It was April of 1864 and the war, which had one more year to run, was raging with the convulsive fury of a final struggle. On the day before the Watie brigade left on its spring campaign, Jeff was still trying to learn the name of the Federal betrayer.
For a whole month he sought vainly to get a personal description of the Federal officer who had smuggled in the dozen rifles. But he couldn’t find anybody who had seen him. Pretending that firearms were his hobby, he talked about them with almost everybody he met, starting the conversation on pistols and revolvers and then diverting it to the new repeating rifles. After weeks of the most persistent effort, he was able to locate five of the dozen repeating rifles Watie had bought. They were Spencers, like Orff’s. But when he questioned the men who possessed them, each a crack sharpshooter, they could tell him nothing more.
There were other reasons, too, for delaying his return to Fort Gibson, reasons that were growing on him despite his Union background. When Jeff thought of them, he felt uneasy. And yet he couldn’t help thinking about them. Just as he liked the Washbournes and the Jackmans, he found himself liking the Watie outfit more and more each day.
The Watie men weren’t fighting a war over slavery. Both the Union and rebel Cherokees owned slaves. Nor were they fighting to break up the Union. Neither Cherokee faction belonged to the United States, consequently they had little interest in dividing it or keeping it intact. Among the Cherokees, the Civil War was mostly a political fight. The Watie bunch was fighting to keep the rival Ross party from planting its foot on their necks.
Jeff had never seen men who got so much fun out of doing their hard, rough jobs. He liked the informal way they waged a war. There weren’t any Clardys among their officers. If I wasn’t fighting to hold the Union together and clean up the border trouble in Kansas, I could change sides mighty quick in this war, he thought. The Watie men fought well.
They ate well, too. The Union salt horse and hardtack was a poor substitute for Heifer’s Dutch oven T-bones and roasted sweet potatoes. Besides, the lonely rebel cook lavished delicacies upon Jeff that the other rebels never saw—hot sourdoughs six inches high when the wheat flour came up from Texas, or wild grape cobbler, or a mess of fried eggs when he could get them from some Choctaw farm wife. He’d miss Heifer’s cooking when he made the break for Fort Gibson.
And he’d miss Heifer, too. Hardly a day passed but that Heifer tried to make Jeff a better soldier. “Let me learn yo some o’ my experience,” the rebel cook said. He taught Jeff how to squeeze the trigger of a shotgun with both eyes open and the gun swinging on the moving target. He taught him how to ride a horse, steering with his legs, knees, and the balance of his body without putting pressure on the horse’s mouth. He even took time to give Jeff advice on how to get along with everybody.
“Treat evahbody like a gennelman, but let the ivory handle of your revolver allus be in sight,” Heifer counseled.
Jeff dreaded accompanying the Watie men on their savage raiding expeditions, but when he questioned Hooley cautiously about it, Hooley threw back his black head and laughed soundlessly.
“What would we raid now? Watie’s already stripped the whole country clean as a gut. There’s nothing left to raid.”
Jeff was amazed at the endless variety of the Watie cavalry dashes. On their first scout in 1864, they penetrated seventy miles behind the Union lines almost to the state of Missouri to bring out in baggage wagons several Cherokee rebel families—old men, women, and children—who had been robbed and plundered by the Pins. And they never saw a single Union soldier.
Watie’s men harassed the Federals with their bold cavalry forays along the western border of Arkansas, vanishing into the timber or melting into the river mists before a large force could be sent to intercept them. Fields still used Jeff as a horse-holder, so he was never put to the ordeal of having to fire on his own troops.
But he saw it all, anyhow. He was with the Watie outfit in April when as a part of General S.
B. Maxey’s force they took a Federal wagon train at Poison Springs near Camden. He was with them again when they chased a small Federal force off the Massard Prairie into the protection of Fort Smith, falling back across the Poteau River with the Union horses, mules and camp equipage they had captured. He rode and ate and slept with the Watie outfit, sharing the hardships and dangers that bind fighting men inexorably together.
Each day he became more and more impressed with the fierce loyalty of the Cherokee rebels to their cause. At Limestone Prairie in June, their enlistment period terminating, the entire Watie force re-enlisted for the duration of the war “be it long or short.” Jeff had to walk right up with Heifer and Hooley and sign the re-enlistment papers too.
A month earlier he had seen the First and Second Cherokee Regiments, forming with fife and drum, march around and around Watie’s tent, whooping and cheering until their throats became raw, when Watie’s commission as a brigadier-general, signed personally by President Jefferson Davis, arrived by courier.
Later he was with them at Camp Brassie when Watie, addressing the rebel Cherokees in national council, declared that the war should be prosecuted with the greatest vigor and recommended conscription of all physically fit Cherokees between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Not only did the rebel council give him what he wanted, they went even further. When they passed the act, they set the age limits at seventeen and fifty. Jeff thought, These people are in this war for keeps. And if they get those thousand repeating rifles, they might win back the whole of the Indian country in three short months.
Early in June the spring rains set in and the Arkansas River began to rise. Three days later the cavalry was issued five days’ rations and told to be ready to ride on an hour’s notice. Swollen by heavy rains, the river had become navigable for steamers of light draft. The rebels learned that a Union steamer carrying a $120,000 cargo from Fort Smith to Fort Gibson for the Union soldiers and refugees there, was on its way.
Watie and his command rode secretly from Johnson’s Station on the Fort Smith road to Pheasant Bluff, a high timbered spot overlooking the river channel where the steamer would have to approach. Next morning, Watie concealed his cavalry beneath the trees and posted three pieces of artillery halfway up the bluff.