From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Any Expresses you may have sent I expect has fallen into the hands of Governor Hamilton

  I have the Honour to be Sr Your Very Humble Servt

  G. R. CLARK

  The Illinois Regiment came along in an arrow-shaped file with its scouts forming the head of the arrow and the long drab line of riflemen following, feet squishing in the cold mud, the drizzle hissing around them, the French militiamen following behind them and then the pack horses, and more flanking scouts bringing up the rear. Their panting breath condensed in clouds. The men were loaded with their long guns and ammunition pouches and their knapsacks and shoulder-hung pouches and their pistols and tomahawks, and their blanket rolls across their shoulders. Their deerskin outer clothes were rainsoaked and heavy. The land was flat as a tabletop, but walking was as strenuous as climbing because of the weight they carried and because every step brought up a foot clogged with mud like bread batter.

  The ground had thawed on the surface but was still frozen under the sod, so the water from the drizzling rain and the melted snow did not seep down, and it was too flat to drain, and so some miles of the plain were like shallow ponds as far as they could be seen through the mist, water ankle deep and sometimes calf deep, and where the water lay like this the marching was not quite so fatiguing because the mud underfoot was more like soup than batter. On these stretches the feet were always soaked with cold water, but not weighted with anchors of mud, and it was a little less bad, in its way.

  There were no horizons because of the mist. The men in the rear could see the men fading into the mist ahead of them. They could see now and then the vague shape of a brush thicket, and ghostly, pale patches of snow, and for fifty yards around they could see the matted gray and tan prairie grass and dark brown weed stalks, and the footprints ahead filling with muddy water, and the muddy channel they were churning across the unseen prairie in an easterly direction along the Kaskaskia-to-Vincennes trace.

  They had been on the plain for ten days now, and it had been raining or sleeting or snowing all those days. They had at first covered twenty to thirty miles a day by slogging from daybreak to dusk. The officers had given up their horses to buffalo hunters, and now marched in the mud with the troops. Each evening they would seek a campground raised enough that they would not have to lie down in water. There were no tents, and so they slept in the rain, rolled into their blankets with hides over them. If they had not been so extremely fatigued by the marching, sleep would have been impossible in these conditions. As it was, the troops plummeted into sleep with their evening grog still warming their blood, and got up at half-light, sluggish as half-frozen reptiles but eager to march because it warmed them.

  They had been lucky so far, finding buffalo herds every day. Each evening the hunters had ridden in from the surrounding plains with great briskets and haunches and shoulder-humps of buffalo. Each evening, one of the companies would take its turn providing the roast and the entertainment. Each company tried to outdo the others, and so the long, painful misery of every marching day was made more bearable by anticipation of the evening frolic. Under conditions in which two hundred yards was an ordeal, George knew, the men must not be permitted to think in terms of two hundred miles. It was better to let them conquer a day at a time and then celebrate their triumph over that day.

  And now in these last few days they had been coming through that part of the country where several tributaries of the Wabash lay across their path. These were mere creeks, ordinarily, but were so flooded now that every sort of ingenuity was needed to get across them. In water to their waists, the men felled trees upon which to float across the deep main channels. Whole days were spent, strenuous, chilling days under the perpetual rain and sleet, crossing these flooded valleys, swimming the horses across, rafting the barrels and bundles over to reload on the pack animals on the other side, still in waist-deep floodwater. Now, as they neared the Wabash Valley, they found themselves constantly in deep, cold, brown water adrift with stained sponge-ice and woodland debris. And George, who had to keep them believing that they would soon get to Vincennes and have their revenge on the Hair-Buyer, made it a point never to mention what the great Wabash itself would surely be like when they reached it. It’ll be like a Mississippi, he thought, or a Missouri. Dear God let Cousin Johnny be there with the gunboat.

  George had named the boat the Willing. Now he wondered if he should have christened her the God Willing.

  ABOARD THE WILLING, LIEUTENANT JOHNNY ROGERS STOOD on the stern deck wrapped in a buffalo cape with sleet stinging his cheek, watching the rowers strain to move the vessel against the Ohio’s fast current, and wondered whether it would be possible to get up the Wabash in time to meet Cousin George after all. Even with her squaresail up, full of a following wind, and two men on every oar, rowing from dawn to dusk, they had managed only about ten miles a day. There were a hundred or more miles to go up the Ohio and then up the Wabash to the rendezvous point, and the Willing was creeping. As if the current weren’t enough problem, the river was over its banks in so many directions that even John Duff, their pilot, was sometimes dubious about whether they were still in the channel.

  Well, all we can do is row like demons and get there when we can, he thought. And if George makes better time than we do, then hell just have to sit and wait a day or two longer, because I sure as Satan don’t think he can cross that Wabash without us or attack that dang fort without these cannon.

  He watched the rowers: half French and half Americans. He had divided them that way according to George’s advice, so that neither half would think the other was having it easy. George always thought out such things.

  He can surely put a responsibility on your shoulders, he thought.

  But never a half o’ what he puts on his own.

  Later, Johnny had his spyglass on the mouth of the creek where the regiment had hidden its boats last summer to start marching overland to Kaskaskia. It had been little more than a mosquito swamp then. Now it was full of water from bluff to bluff and looked like a river mouth.

  He felt a sudden shiver and whipped the spyglass up to see if he had seen what he thought he had seen, along the north shore.

  Nothing but more floating logs. He had thought he had seen a canoe.

  Of course it was likely that the Willing would be seen by Indians somewhere along the way, and might well have to fight her way past them. Vigo’s report had said Hamilton’s Indians were posted on the Ohio. But where? There hadn’t been a sign yet. Maybe at the mouth of the Tennessee? The Willing would be close upon it by nightfall.

  At dusk, John Duff blew a cloud of condensed breath into the sleet and said in a low voice:

  “I haven’t seen a redskin yet, straight on, but there’s somethin’ just offside a mite in my eye-corners that’s keepin’ my head on a swivel.”

  “How long since this case o’ the swivels came over you, Mister Duff?”

  “Since about Massac Creek. It went away, ’s why I’ve not spoke it. It’s back now.”

  “I felt it there too.”

  Duff’s eyes were shifting, poking into distant dark thickets and trees bristling atop the bluffs a mile away. “I’ve just got a real caution ’bout tyin’ ashore tonight, Mister Rogers.”

  The boat shuddered as something bumped along under her keel. “You on the bow, look alive! We’re running over things!” John Rogers barked, then he turned back to Duff. “Remember that island in the mouth o’ the Tennessee? If it isn’t washed away, maybe it would do for tyin’ up tonight.” If you were tied to an island it was like having a moat around you.

  They entered the Tennessee’s mouth in last light and found the island. It was smaller in circumference because of the high water, and aswarm with raccoons and opossums and other small game getting crowded as the land shrank. Johnny moored the Willing in a screen of willow-brush tops on the downstream end of the island. One squad slept on the open deck hugging their rifles, and a sentry stood at bow and one at stern. The rest of the men slept close un
der the hinged panels along the gunwales, out of the sleet. By ten o’ clock the Willing was still. Her low, dark shape hung among the willows while the Tennessee’s current burbled and purled under her hull. The only sounds aboard were a snore, a cough, bone on plank as some achy sleeper turned over.

  John Rogers was kept awake by the sounds on the island: splashings, squeaks, scurryings as its concentration of animals tried to find space or eat each other. John Rogers was full of anxieties about this floating arsenal. Cousin George had made him keenly aware how important it was to the chances of taking Vincennes, and how important the attack would be to the whole scheme of the war here in the West. George had lately taken to calling it “my war,” and that was just about the whole truth. Virginia seemed to have forgotten her Illinois Regiment, and George really was doing the whole thing out here.

  And it was plain that he didn’t intend to fail at it, either. Anyone else in his situation would have probably just given it up when news came that the Hair-Buyer had Vincennes. An ordinary man would have packed up for the safety of the Spanish side. But Cousin George, no. Instead he lights out after Hamilton himself, saying, “Give me my druthers, and I’ll be the wolf, not the sheep.”

  Well, he do put a load on a man’s back, John Rogers thought. And by the Gods, I mean to carry mine. If this caper fails, I don’t mean the blame to fall on me.

  Now he was lying here in the dark in a gunboat’s cabin with three dozen fighting men and a load of artillery and gunpowder around him, and he was nervous and sleepless and wanted very much to sit up and have a nice soothing pipeful of Virginia tobacco, but because of all the powder there was no smoking or fire allowed on the ship. Even any cooking had to be done ashore.

  All this was keeping John Rogers edgy, and it was a long time before he let weariness swallow him.

  HE EXPLODED OUT OF HIS DREAMS. GUNS WERE CRASHING, footsteps on deck were resounding, men were yelling “Fire!” and cursing, and he could smell smoke and see an orange glow around the hatch.

  He fought his way out of his blanket, bumping into hard, swift-moving forms, his heart pounding in his ears, his pistol in his hand. Fire! And what else?

  Emerging on deck, he saw a swirl of yellow smoke, men scrambling and tumbling, some firing their rifles over the sides, two or three with blankets trying to beat out flames and sparks all over the deck. A ball hummed past his ear, and another whacked into the oaken jamb of the hatchway.

  Out on the river now he could see firelight and the shapes of two canoes. And from one of the canoes, something aflame, trailing sparks, arced through the air coming straight toward him. It went like a comet over the stern, hit some willow limbs, and shattered into fiery fragments which fell hissing into the river. Fire arrows. Another came bending through the dark, came from out there on the water where muzzleblasts were flashing. The Indians were not on the island but in canoes. “Fire pails!” he yelled. “And raise those breastworks!” Some of the men were already doing both. It was good that they knew what to do, because he couldn’t be heard over the shooting and all the babble of English and French words and the howling of the Indians on the river.

  Men were stamping the fire, smothering it, all over the deck, even scooping up flaming wads of oil-soaked bark fiber and whole fire arrows with their bare hands and tossing them over the side.

  Now and then some rifleman would utter a triumphant whoop. They were hitting Indians and putting holes in canoes.

  Soon no more fire arrows were coming. In the distance and downstream a canoe seemed to be burning. Light from its blaze came wavering over the moving water.

  And the last spark on the Willing’s deck had been quenched.

  There was no sign of Indians when dawn grayed. A fog blotted up far shores. The gunboat stank of charred wood and wet, scorched wool. Two or three of the men wore grease and gauze on their hands like medals, and were excused from rowing. No one had been shot, though one man had got oak splinters in his nose when a musketball plowed into the gunwale right under his face.

  John Rogers praised the men for their bravery and quick action, particularly those who had doused the fire. “We’d have gone so high we’d been landing all over Illinois and Kentuck, but for you,” he said.

  And then the Willing moved out into the fog, with muffled oars and no one talking, down the Tennessee’s current and then up the Ohio. Lieutenant Rogers was thankful for the fog. As slow and lumbersome as this vessel was, it would be easy for Indians to follow her, both in canoes and along the bluffs, and it seemed quite possible that the gunboat might have to fight all the way to Post Vincennes, now that she’d been seen.

  On the other hand, he thought, maybe they’ll be a-lookin’ for us up the Tennessee. It might’ve appeared we were headed up thataway. Or maybe they’ll just think we’re making for Fort Pitt and only watch for us on the Ohio. Hope this fog lasts.

  Though if it does, how’ll we even find the Wabash?

  GEORGE LOOKED BACK AND SAW HIS MEN STILL COMING along. The land had disappeared behind them, and there was no land to be seen ahead. All the ground between the creeks was overflowed. The bottom was oozy and invisible under their benumbed feet, and there were roots to trip them and twist their ankles. Many had lost their moccasins and shoes. The water reached their thighs, their hips, their waists. They carried their rifles across their shoulders and their powder horns around their necks. A man would grasp a sapling branch with one hand and keep a hold on it until he could clutch the next with the other hand, because the current was strong. But there were stretches where nothing protruded above the water to support them. That precarious fear of falling, of slipping under, made a strain as exhausting as the effort itself. Or the hunger. In this drowned land amid the tributaries, there was no game, and they were now down to the crumbs and scraps in the bottoms of their pouches.

  He would look back with pity and worry in his heart and a feigned smile of confidence and cheerfulness on his face and watch them come wading along under the eternally leaden sky, their leather clothes soaked black, rain dribbling off their hats, their stubbled faces drawn and fishy-white with exhaustion, the pouches under their eyes purple, their red eyes and leaky red noses the only warm color in this whole, dripping, hushing, slopping, gurgling, gray-brown infinity of floodwater, and he would be alarmed for them, and would wonder if they really could keep this up all the way to Vincennes, as he had convinced them they could.

  Some of the short men toward the rear walked near the horses, hanging onto their packsaddles and manes and tails. Every breath was a gasp between chattering teeth. They could smell the raw, cold smell of the icy water and feel the slow, steady tug of the current pressing them. Every time a man would stumble and thrash, the hands of a comrade would snatch the weight of his rifle off of him and grab his collar or pigtail to support him until he got his footing.

  They were running on jokes and desperate laughter now. George made up all the happy banter he could as he led them along. “By gum!” he’d say, laughing, “wouldn’t the Hair-Buyer be just all a-twitter if he knew we’re this close, comin’ to pay him a call? Hey, Joe, wouldn’t ye just loooove t’ catch him in bed in ’is nightgown, the way we did Roachblob? Ha, haaaa!” And the laughter would ripple back along the line.

  “I git ’is scalp, you can have ’is nightcap,” someone would cry, taking it up.

  “You can have ’is merkin,” someone else would yip, “I git ’is codpiece!”

  A dead muskrat floated by, and George snagged it with the point of his sword and held it up. “Lordy,” he exclaimed. “When the muskrats drown …”

  Laughter. Then somebody said, “Save that, Colonel! For t’night’s soup!” More laughter.

  And later when the water was up to George’s ribs, he heard a burst of shivery laughter a few feet behind him, and shouts.

  “Hey! Lookee at that leetle tadpole go!”

  “Hey, Dickie! Got room fer me on that thang?”

  George turned and saw what the gray-faced men were laughing a
t. The little drummer boy had hauled himself up onto his floating drum and he was lying on his stomach on it, hanging with one hand onto the fringe of a big sergeant’s coat and being towed along. Responding to their laughter, he began showing off, splashing with his feet, even letting loose of the sergeant to paddle with his hands. George roared with a happy release of laughter and turned to continue ahead, seeking the bottom with his benumbed feet.

  And when after a while that hilarity had died down and he was hearing nothing, behind him but the dismal swash and phlegmatic breathing and now and then a piteous groan, he would have to start up again.

  “Hey, I feel some warm water, Abe. Is it springtime already, or’d you just sneak a leak?” More laughter came from the trembling wretches all around, and someone took up the joke.

  “Don’t add to it, Abe, I’m neck-deep already!”

  * * *

  “WHERE IN THE NAME O’ GOD’S GREAT GEOGRAPHY IS THE Wabash?” John Rogers muttered. John Duff was grimacing in the rain. The Willing had just labored around the edge of another wooded, inundated point to find herself in still another backwater cul-de-sac. Below on deck the men were pushing the boat along slowly with setting poles. Along each gunwale they walked toward the stern, each straining against a long pole he had stuck into the river bottom. When each reached the afterdeck he would pull up his pole, carry it to the bow, then get in line behind the last man, set his pole in the bottom, and walk, straining, toward the stern again. And the galley would slide a few more feet through the willows.

  “Damn me if I know,” Duff murmured, peering in all directions through the maze of copses and reed-swamps and false channels.

  “All hands, lay off and rest,” Rogers called out. “Pagan, would ye please scamper up that mast and look us up a path back to the river?” Pagan, an old, one-eyed ex-sailor, went like a monkey up the shrouds to the masthead twenty feet above the deck, hooked one leg over the spar, and perched there, taking in all the points of the compass with a slow sweep of his one eye. Then he spoke down. “Onliest water I can see big enough for us, and I can’t swear it’s the main road o’ the river, sir, is ’bout two hundred yard off starb’d.”