Lone Star Rising: T.S. Wasp and the Heart of Texas

by Jason Vail

As the dragoons galloped up, their sabers drawn, Jackson finally gave the order to fire. A volley crashed from the line and smoke filled the space above the river so that Jackson could not see whether it had any effect. Even without being able to see the enemy, the men loaded without orders and fired individually through the smoke. Jackson let this go on for several minutes and then shouted for a cease fire.

  As the smoke drifted way, he could see that the cavalry had retreated out of range, leaving half a dozen bodies in the grass. A dying horse stood on the bridge, before it staggered and fell to its knees, bleeding from more than a score of wounds. Jackson regretted the death of the horse, but relished the sight of every green coat in the grass. One of the human corpses struggled to his feet and staggered off in the direction of his troop, which had reformed on the road about two hundred yards away. He got half a dozen paces before one of the riflemen put a ball in his back. Tarleton never gave quarter to the enemy he encountered, so they gave none to the British.

  “That’ll show the bastards we aren’t done for yet!” Jackson shouted.

  He rode over to Burleson. “See if you can find the pitch.” Jackson had ordered buckets of pitch left by the bridge in case they had to burn it. It had seemed like a plan for a remote contingency, but now the contingency had come. Not that it would delay Tarleton much: a day at most. With luck, though, that should be enough.

  The men Burleson had sent on that quest finally found the buckets at a house that stood a short distance up the road. The wife who had guarded the buckets came out to the rail fence along the road to watch her charges being carried away.

  “I thought you was gonna whup those sons a bitches!” the woman called to Jackson.

  “I am!” he replied. “Just not today.”

  “That don’t do us a hell of a lot of good.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Jackson muttered so that only he could hear. He hated failure more than anything in the world, and he had a wagon-load of it on his hands right now. Worse, it was public failure. He was acutely aware of how prone to error he could be, just like any man. Usually, however, he kept his mistakes from public view. Not so here. He might have tried his best, but people would blame him anyway, especially once Tarleton fired their houses, killed their boys and raped their girls. He said to the woman, “You better get into town. You’ll be safer there.”

  The woman spat into the road and turned away. Shortly afterward, she and three boys were seen hauling handcarts filled with their few possessions down the road in the direction of Oak Ridge and the Mississippi.

  Someone finally shot the dying horse on the bridge, to everyone’s relief, and pushed it into the water.

  Jackson watched the men apply pitch on the bridge. At first, they tried to pour it, but the stuff was so gooey that they had to spread it on with their hands or bits of rag. When they were done, Burleson strode to the far end of the bridge and set the mixture alight with the tip of his cigar. The pitch caught quickly, and Burleson had to scamper back to avoid getting burned. The men stood in a mass and regarded the product of their efforts as flames ate into the dry wood and curled skyward, throwing up a plume of smoke.

  “All right, boys,” Jackson said when the center of the span had burned through and fallen into the river. “We’ve done our bit. Let’s get to town.”

  It was a two-hour walk yet to Oak Ridge, and the rear guard did not reach the town until after dark. Just before the outskirts came into view, Jackson had the mob form up into ranks again, which occasioned much grumbling, since everyone was tired and hungry. Even if this was just a bunch of farmers and storekeepers with guns, Jackson was determined that they at least try to look like soldiers right to the end.

  The drummer beat the cadence of the march, and the sound alerted the townspeople who had remained. They streamed out of their houses and silently watched the men go by. It was a solemn parade.

  Jackson marched them up to the wide spot in the road in front of Johnstone’s general store and saloon, which lay on the flat ground only a hundred yards from where the Wolf ran into the Mississippi. It was far enough away to be safe from the spring floods, yet close enough to get the majority of the business from the flatboats and riverboats that grounded at the town harbor just south of where the two rivers came together.

  He mounted the steps and stood on the porch. It was hard to tell in the dim light of a few lanterns held aloft, but it seemed that almost the entire town had turned out, along with the men from the main body of the army, those at least who had made it this far. He regarded the crowd for a long moment, remembering the hope that had animated the founding of the Tennessee Free State. It had been a fool’s hope, idiotic to believe they could stand up to the Empire.

  Crockett, who stood behind him, shifted his weight, the floorboards creaking. Jackson glanced back at him. “David,” he said, “take a few of the boys and get down to the river. Grab hold of every flatboat and riverboat on the quay.”

  “Steal them?” Crockett asked.

  “No, we’re just borrowing. The captains can have ’em back when we’re done with ’em.”

  Crockett dropped off the side of the porch. His wife was there in the press, and she grasped his sleeve. He whispered into her ear, then beckoned to some of his company. He went off toward the river with the boys, and his wife pushed through the crowd to her own home, soon lost in the darkness.

  Jackson turned back to the crowd. “Boys,” he said, even though by this time there were as many women and children in the crowd as men, “we did our damned best, but it wasn’t good enough. For that, I’m sorry. Tarleton will be here in the morning. You know what this means for you and your families. Those he doesn’t hang will be marched back to Carolina, where you’ll scratch for a living on some asshole’s plantation if they let you live.”

  “What’re you gonna do, Andy?” someone called. “You’re the first he’ll hang, not that you don’t deserve it!”

  It was hard to tell whether this was meant seriously or as an attempt at humor. Jackson had his enemies, who, he had no doubt, wouldn’t mind seeing him swinging from the branch of a tree. There was a ripple of laughter, but most were solemn.

  Jackson smiled thinly. He said, “I’m going west.”

  “There ain’t nothing west of here but Frenchies and Indians!” someone else shouted.

  “Yes, there is,” Jackson said. “There’s hope.”

  Throughout the night, the river bank below the mouth of the Wolf was a scene of frantic activity as those who planned to flee hurried to bring down and load their few belongings on the commandeered vessels. It was amazing what some people thought they could carry away: tables, chairs, bureaus and dressers, mirrors, boxes of odds and ends, all the flotsam of ordinary lives that people could not bear to leave behind. But so many wanted to run and there was so little space on the boats that most of it lay abandoned on the bank.

  The first boats pushed off shortly before midnight, ferrying their passengers across the river to the French trading post serving the Quapaw Indians on the opposite shore. Many people wept as they contemplated the dark wilderness ahead and remembered the homes left behind.

  These voyages continued through the night, until almost all of those who had chosen to flee had been carried across.

  As dawn broke, all that remained were Jackson, Crockett and twenty men who had kept order on the bank and attempted to ensure an orderly loading of the boats.

  Those who had chosen to stay behind mostly had dispersed to their homes; a few stragglers puttered among the discarded tables, chairs, dressers and boxes, salvaging abandoned things. Jackson observed this with disgust, but there was nothing he could do about it apart from setting the lot afire.

  The last flatboat pulled into shore and Burleson leaped from the bow. The other boats, freed from duty, were drifting down stream. None of the captains wanted to be around when Tarleton put in an appearance, for the indifferent stood the chance of being mistaken for rebels.

  “Don’t you think it’s time
, Andy?” Burleson asked.

  “I suppose.”

  Yet now that the last moment had come, Jackson was reluctant to leave. He hated to abandon the familiar for the unknown as much as any man.

  Suddenly, the few stragglers above at the edge of the town scattered, followed quickly by the looters.

  A body of green-clad dragoons appeared on the road from Johnstone’s general store, approaching at a trot. A short muscular man also dressed in dragoon green but with lots more gold braid than everyone else rode at their head.

  The last of Jackson’s boys scrambled onto the boat. Jackson stood on the shore. He and the short man regarded each other. Jackson had seen Banastre Tarleton before, but only from a distance, and was surprised at how small he was.

  “Running away, are you?” Tarleton called.

  “I’d call it moving to a better place,” Jackson said.

  “The forest?” Tarleton gestured across the river. “That’s a better place?”

  “Better than here, under the heel of your bastard of a king with only the precious few liberties your sort deigns to allow.”

  Tarleton’s mouth tightened. He drew a pistol and trotted onto the quay, swerving around piles of abandoned home furnishings. The other dragoons followed.

  “Come on, Andy!” Crockett called.

  The crew had already poled the boat with the oars some distance from shore. Jackson had to wade in up to his hips to reach it. He pulled himself on deck.

  Tarleton halted at the edge of the river. He pointed his pistol at Jackson. Only thirty feet separated them. It was hard to imagine him missing at this distance.

  Then all along the gunwales and from atop the cabin, rifle locks clicked as the boys on the boat leveled their pieces at Tarleton.

  “You sure you want to do that, Banny?” Jackson asked. “That pretty coat wouldn’t look so fine all full of holes.”

  Tarleton hesitated, then thumbed the hammer of his pistol to safe.

  He and Jackson watched each other as the boat drew away, hate in their eyes.

  Soon the boat was out of pistol shot and the dragoons turned back and reentered the town.

  “We should have shot him when we had the chance,” Jackson said to no one in particular.

  “Wouldn’t have made much difference,” Crockett said. “There’s a whole country like him, ready to tell us how to live.”

  “It would have been payback,” Jackson said.

  By the time they reached the far shore and the uncertainty of freedom, fires had begun to bloom from the roofs of the houses in Oak Ridge. Smoke columns climbed into the sky.

  Lone Star Rising: A Short History of the Republic of Texas and the Free States of America

  by Victor D. Lautenberg

  That moment on the banks of the Mississippi was the only time that the old enemies ever came face to face.

  Their failure to exchange more than words would shape the fate of nations.

  Chapter 1

  Lone Star Rising: A Short History of the Republic of Texas and the Free States of America

  by Victor D. Lautenberg

  The Spanish consul’s visit to the warship did not incite anyone’s curiosity, even that of Armand Rochelle, the head of the French intelligence service in New Orleans. It was a natural thing for the consul to pay a visit to a vessel in the naval service of his country.

  The consul, Emilio Arco, was ferried across the river in a modest rowboat and climbed the ladder to the spar deck. The captain of the frigate, Martin Mendez y Reyes, greeted him and for a moment they gazed across the river at the Wasp, which was tied up at the foot of Ursulines Street. Mendez looked as though he wanted to spit at the sight, but he was too much a gentleman to dirty his deck in that way.

  “What do you want?” Mendez asked. He had his orders, and he suspected that Arco’s visit meant the interference of diplomats.

  “Your assistance,” Arco said, ignoring the tone.

  Mendez almost gaped at him, surprised and disarmed by the reply.

  “We’ll talk in my cabin.” Mendez headed for the gangway.

  When comfortably settled on cushioned chairs in the captain’s great cabin with glasses of wine before them and the stewards withdrawn, Arco said, “We have two problems, señor.”

  “We?” Mendez asked. “I have only one problem, the pirate. I am to destroy her. It is all Havana cares about.”

  “Madrid may care more about our other problem.”

  “Go on,” Mendez said. While consuls tended to be mere mercantile men largely beneath the notice of caballeros like himself, their letters were read in the foreign ministry and sometimes even given weight. If there was another problem, it may be one that the ministry cared about. It did not hurt one’s career to have pleased the foreign minister.

  “France has been giving support to rebels who still resist the Empire. A large shipment of muskets and powder has been collected and is ready for shipment any day.”

  “I have my orders. I am to take the pirate. I cannot be diverted by a few guns.”

  “This is not a few guns. There are six thousand — enough for an army. They are a graver threat to the Empire than a simple pirate.”

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  “I need the services of a few of your men.”

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  September 1820

  I had just climbed into my cot after an evening of tavern crawling, my head still spinning from the whiskey, when alarm bells began to sound in the city. I expected them to cease after a while, but they kept on. A house fire, I thought, nothing more. Although the bells seemed persistent for a mere house fire, such a thing was serious enough in a town like this, where most of the houses were made of wood.

  The door to my sleeping cabin opened without the courtesy of a knock and I was about to reprove the sailor for disturbing me, when the man spoke. It was David Crockett. He was thirty-three or thirty-four then, six or so years older than me, but slim and youthful looking, with brown hair parted in the middle, those long whiskers by his ears that were fashionable among the people on the frontier, and an nose that ran straight and narrow but in the dim light of the cabin reminded me of the more bent one haunting Andrew Jackson’s face, as if they had been carved by the same artist, although there was no relation. He said, “Paul, you better come see this.”

  “What is it?” It was warm under my blanket and I thought if I did not move, I would not throw up.

  “A fire. A big one.”

  “You got me up for a fire?”

  “I don’t like the look of it.”

  He remained in the doorway. I could have sent him off with a sharp word, but instead I climbed out of the cot. It was a good thing that I’d not undressed before going to bed, except for my shoes. I slipped them on and said, “All right. I’m coming.”

  We climbed to the quarterdeck. There was a lot of rushing around on the quay and a great deal of shouting now. Crowds were streaming toward the west, and Crockett pointed in that direction. “There,” he said.

  There was the foot of Bienville Street. Tongues of flame licked above the roofs of the houses.

  “That is a big fire,” I said.

  “Did ya think I was trying to fool ya?” Crockett asked.

  “You do have a talent for exaggeration.”

  “This ain’t no story.”

  It certainly wasn’t. Upriver, the ships moored at the foot of Bienville Street were beginning to cast their lines and make for the middle of the river, as it was clear that cinders from the fire were falling upon them. It was an untidy mess, here and there ships colliding and being swept toward us on the current.

  “I wonder,” I said to myself. “That’s very close to the —”

  “Armory,” Crockett finished for me.

  Where six thousand muskets, powder and shot waited for us, bought from the French government with the silver we had liberated from the Spanish during our summer cruise. Without those guns, there would be no Texas Army, and without
the army, there would be no Texas independence from the Spanish Empire. President Jackson reckoned that no militia armed only with civilian hunting weapons could defeat the Spanish imperial army. The plan was to load the munitions in the morning, and we’d be off for the wasteland.

  That the armory might be burning was more alarming to Crockett than to me. At the time, I didn’t think my fate was bound up in those muskets. But another thought occurred of a threat far more personal. I rushed to the larboard rail and searched in the dark for the Spanish frigate that had showed up a week before and anchored by the far shore no more than six-hundred yards away. She was a brute of a warship, easily one-hundred-eighty feet long, lean and muscular, no doubt almost as agile on the sea as Wasp, who was two-thirds her size. And the Spaniard had twice our number of guns as well, and triple the crew. She had made me nervous from the moment she had rounded the great bend in the river to the east. I imagined her boats full of armed men creeping toward Wasp through the dark and confusion, confident that our attention was riveted on the fire.

  “David!” I called back. “Call the men to quarters. Stand by to repel boarders.”

  “You don’t think they’d try that here?”

  “If I had command of that ship, it’s exactly what I’d do.”

  “Well, everyone knows you’re crazy.”

  “I appreciate your confidence. Now call out the men.”

  We stood to arms as the fire grew in fury and intensity. We hoped that the city fire watch would get the blaze under control, but about two a.m. there was an enormous explosion at the source of the fire. Smoke and flame blasted into the heavens, and the sound thundered across New Orleans. The shock wave was so powerful that it knocked down nearby buildings and overturned a pair of schooners at the wharf. Burning debris arched through the sky like a volley of comets. One large section of blazing rooftop landed with a great crunch at the very foot of our gangway, throwing deadly sparks everywhere. Other bits of flaming wreckage had fallen into the river or on some of the ships to our west, and at least one of the ships had been unable to put out the fire and now was burning.