From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Very well,” said Rogers, squinting up into the spitting rain at the little wind-flapping scarecrow silhouetted against the bruise-colored clouds. “Can ye see a way to get to it?” Johnny Rogers was getting an awful despairing choke in his voice. They had come early this morning to a point of bluff with large elms on it, which Duff had sworn marked the mouth of the Wabash. A couple of Kaskaskian rivermen had confirmed Duff’s landmark. And so the Willing had nosed toward that bluff through the misty expanses of turbid water and headed into a wide stretch that seemed to be the mouth of the Wabash. They had searched the bluff with spyglasses for signs of Indian sentinels. They had seen none, but that did not mean none were there.

  And so they had gotten into the Wabash Valley and as far as they knew they had not been seen by any Indians since the fracas in the Tennessee River. As far as they knew.

  But now in the course of this long, rainy day they had thus far gone up three blind channels, and this was the third time they had had to send Davy Pagan up the mast to have a look-see. The first time, they had been able to turn the boat around and row out. The second time, the Willing had run aground on some hidden hummock, and only by putting men out in the cold water with ropes and shovels had they been able to back her off. A day gone by and they still were surely no more than two miles up the Wabash, with more than a hundred miles to go to their rendezvous with the Illinois Regiment.

  Now Davy Pagan had studied the maze and he called down:

  “Sir, I’d say back ’er down the way we come, ‘haps one quarter mile, and there’s a bay-oo big enough to bring ’er about. Then we p’ceeds ’bout three hundred yard and there’s a reed patch on th’ larb’d, openin’ through to open water. Might have to push ’er through, but through them reeds lies the way, I’d say, sir. I see no other.”

  “Very well, Mister Pagan. And can y’ see what lies beyond that open water? Can y’ see the bluff, the elms, any hills?”

  “Sir, I see nowt but water, then mist, thick as on th’ Firth o’ Forth on a November morn.”

  “Eh, then, come down, Mist—”

  “HOOP, HOOP! Avast, sir!” Pagan cried down suddenly, tightening his grip on the perch and leaning far out, peering till his eye popped. “Yonder comes a wee boat, sir, with but one soul in ’er, and comes a-flyin’!”

  Now everyone was gaping aloft at him, as if trying to see through his eye what this might be. As they craned like this, they began to hear, faint in the dank air, yipping voices.

  There was no mistaking it: Indians. Excited ones. “To arms, and stand ready,” Johnny Rogers called. The men laid down their poles and scrambled for rifles. “What see now, Mister Pagan, eh? Sing out, damn it!”

  “It’s a canoe with a Christian in it, it is! But I make out a long canoe a half a mile ahind of ’im, up to her scuppers in heathens. They’re after his skelp, sir, way I see it!”

  “Hell’s fire! All these guns but we’re blind down here! How many Indians in that canoe, Pagan?”

  “I make out eight. Our white man’s ’bout tuckered, sir. If I had my gun up here, I’d sink me a heathen canoe!”

  The Indian voices were distinct now. The riflemen on deck were tense with frustration.

  “Can y’ get his eye, Pagan?”

  The little man put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and emitted a shrill whistle, then waved his hand in a summoning motion. “He’s seen me, sir, and’s a-comin’ thisaway!”

  “Good! Now come down.”

  Two long, tense minutes passed. The Indian voices, urgent as the song of foxhounds Johnny Rogers remembered from Virginia, were loud and near now. Then the sounds of splashing, panting; a shape among the trees; then the prow of a canoe weaving among drowned shrubs. They could see the man in it now.

  “Damn me if ’tain’t Myers!” someone hissed.

  “Get ’im aboard! Raise those shields and stand ready!”

  The men reached strong arms down and yanked the gasping, astonished white man out of his canoe and swung him aboard. A dozen flintlocks cocked and were aimed over the oaken breastworks toward the sounds of splashing paddles and excited Indian voices out in the flooded woods. The prow of the big war canoe came into view, then a painted face, two, three …

  And when the Indians suddenly discerned the long, low shape of the gunboat lying in their path, they stopped paddling to grab for their muskets, gasping queries to each other.

  “Shoot ’em,” said Johnny Rogers, and twelve guns cracked almost as one. The war canoe for a moment was full of jerking arms and twitching bodies, and then it turned over with a flurry of splashing. The sulphurous smell of gunpowder drifted through the dank air, and no one came up from the bloodstained water.

  MYERS WAS GEORGE ROGERS CLARK’S CHIEF COURIER. HE had gone from Kaskaskia to Williamsburg in September, loaded with messages, and had had to wait for the fall session of the Assembly before starting back, as he explained now, slumped on a bench, sipping rum, in the cabin of the Willing, and he had a lot of letters from Governor Patrick Henry and congratulations from Benjamin Harrison, speaker of the House of Delegates, and messages from friends and families of the Illinois Regiment—“a good twenty pounds of mail,” said he, lifting the precious bag with one hand and then letting it drop to the deck—and he was just skintight full of news of war and scandals and politics back East, but first, he wanted to know, what in the ding-dong, owlhootin’ blue-flame hell was Colonel Clark up to now and why was this scorched gunboat sitting here in a slough of muddy branchwater two miles off the Wabash River with that crazy one-eyed swab perched up on her at tree-top level, a-whistlin’ and flapping his arms like a jaybird on a limetwig, anyhow?

  “Well, Mister Myers, I’ll try to explain it all to your satisfaction and wonderment by and by,” replied John Rogers, “but first will y’ kindly show me where in all this God damned water the Wabash River runs, because I got to get up it in a terrible hurry. Otherways, y’ll never get to deliver your mail.”

  * * *

  THE ILLINOIS REGIMENT WAS WITHIN SEVEN OR EIGHT miles of Vincennes now, but from the looks of the expanse of swift floodwater now in front of them, they might as well have been hoping to attack London.

  George stood looking at it, and the men and officers were gathering behind him, dazed and numb and weak from hunger. They had not eaten for three days. They had been two weeks without shelter, and there had not been a day in those two weeks when it was not snowing, raining, or sleeting. They had waded countless swollen creeks and crossed three rivers. They had stopped at one place for two days to cut down a huge tree and build a dugout pirogue to ferry them across river chanels.

  And now they were facing the biggest stretch of open water they had seen yet, and they no longer had the pirogue. It had been sent down to find the Willing, with orders for Lieutenant Rogers to bring her on day and night. Without the Willing, without her meat and flour and rum, without her broad hull to float them across the flooded Wabash, it seemed, the regiment must surely perish of exposure and starvation here in these wintry floodlands, within three leagues of its unreachable destination. To go back two hundred miles over the way they had come would be impossible. To the officers and men gathering behind Colonel Clark now, that was the way their situation looked as they stood in floodwater on the edge of the last major river before the Wabash, the Troublesome River, which the French called the Embarras. They looked at it, hearts sinking.

  But now to their amazement George’s voice rang out as cheerful as ever.

  “All righty, then, boys, let’s don’t trouble ourselves with the Troublesome!” He pointed downstream. “We’ll just follow the bank down to the mouth, two-three miles yonder, isn’t she, Mister McCarty? And then we’ll need only cross the Wabash herself. Damned if I’ve got time to play in every little creek, I’m after that Hair-Buyer!” He strode off southward now, waving his right arm in a sure, impatient summoning motion that utterly belied the wild desperation he really felt.

  And the men, as usual, trusted his determinatio
n, and hoisted their guns and fought off their shivers and went limping along after him. “Master Lovell,” he said, leaning down to the drummer boy, “tap out somethin’ to strut by.”

  And so Dickie Lovell did, and soon the whole staggering, blue-lipped, hollow-eyed line was singing “Katy Cruel,” their favorite marching song:

  O, diddle lully day

  O, de little lie-o-day!

  O, diddle lully day

  De little lie-o-dum day!

  And down, down they went, on lower and lower ground, with their O diddle lully day O de little lie-o-day, the tune going round and round in their heads with its senseless but heartening monotony, and George led them on down, his eyes stinging with tears sometimes at the sound of their fine, manly voices, at the thought of this seemingly fatal trap he’d led them into, knowing they were as hungry and spent as he was but kept coming along because he didn’t seem to mind it and because he seemed to know what to do next, and soon they were wading again, searching in the twilight for the Wabash. Somewhere along the way the drummer changed his cadence and the men picked it up and started singing a song old Leonard Helm had made up and taught them, about a homemade liquor so bad that only every other mouthful could be swallowed, so that you had to sip twice as much to do you the same amount of good, and each refrain ended with a “glup, spit, patoooo!” in imitation of spitting out the awful stuff. And the soldiers sang it and sang it and tried to outdo each other with the awful sounds of spewing and gagging and retching, with each new depth of revolting noise earning a laugh. It was the lowest and most hilarious form of humor, and a noisy march for one so deep in enemy country, but George did not try to hush them because it was keeping their minds happy. Anyway, he thought, this abominable weather surely was keeping everyone, Englishman and Indian alike, burrowed in at the fort. There had not been one sign of anyone across the entire Illinois in the two weeks since they had marched out of Kaskaskia. So they must have their singing now, he thought; it’s all the nourishment they’ve got.

  And now night was falling and there was not a spot of ground anywhere for a camp, and for the first time George was afraid that his determination had outreached his judgment, that for the first time since he had been leading men he had led them not just to the limits of their abilities but beyond them. The men could not lie down or even sit down to rest in this cold water; soon it would be too dark for them to walk in it, and if they tried to spend the night standing still in it waiting for morning light, they were bound to die of exposure. Glup, spit, patoooo!

  Bowman came splashing up with the word that some of the weaker men were having to be hauled along by their stronger comrades, arms draped over their necks for support, while others were holding themselves up only by hanging onto the horses. “Hard fortune, George,” Bowman whispered.

  “Come on, man, y’re doubting,” George hissed at him. “What did I tell you about that?” It gave George a little straighter spine himself, having to straighten up Bowman’s. But ahead, the trees and bushes were losing their outlines in the deepening gloom, and no matter how promising a blurred patch or smear of darkness might look, when he reached it it would prove to be not solid ground but merely a willow thicket two feet deep in water, with nothing beyond it but more water, more reeds, more tree trunks. The evening was drizzly and the hush of water on his hat and the hiss of it in the trees and the plurp plop plip of it dripping into the water seemed eternal. He felt as if he had been born with this rain on his head and this icy ooze around his feet; he felt that it would always be like this and that it was his punishment for bringing his good and faithful people out on this mad errand of patriotism. Or is it patriotism? he wondered, wondering deep below the levels of words, is it patriotism or is it but a terrible ambition for glory?

  That was an awful, unsettling thought, a thought he’d never had before. When he had started devoting himself to the defense of Kentuck there had been no ambition in it, he knew that. When he had planned the capture of the Mississippi posts, he had not felt ambition then, either—just a great, swelling eagerness to do a bold and useful service for his state.

  Maybe something had happened when the Indians at Cahokia had started seeing him as a great white father. Maybe it was the adulation of the Spaniards and the French. Of Teresa. Of his own men.

  Maybe you started believing your own legend, he thought; maybe that’s why you thought you could make a madman’s enterprise like this work.

  His fingertips stung with wet cold, and twigs slapped his aching-cold face in the dark, and his heart was pumping as if it were ready to quit. His nose was running into the stubble on his upper lip, and he felt like a snot-nose boy and wanted to cry with remorse for what he had started and now doubted he could finish.

  But then he remembered his own words to Bowman and he whispered them eagerly to himself.

  “Stop doubtin’, man! Get eager!” And he remembered and whispered: “I don’t intend to let anything stop us!”

  And then he could feel under his feet a slight rising of the ground. “Come on, boys,” he shouted back toward the sounds of splashing, gasping and moaning, “come on, now, it’s shallowin’ up! Campground just ahead here!” He didn’t know that was so. But it was as if he could make it so by sheer wishing.

  And it came true. They were on a forested hillock of about two acres, surrounded by gurgling, whispering water, and there was a huge amount of dead wood drifted up on it. “Make fires,” he shouted. “Big fires!” He didn’t worry about fires being seen. It was nine o’clock at night and they were out in the middle of a flood where not even wolves would be on such a night. And it was a matter of life to get these hungry, exhausted men dried and warmed before they just went cold to the heart and died.

  Soon the little camp was ablaze with a dozen strong bonfires, the hardwood smoke rankling in the rain, and the men crowded so close to the blazes that steam rose off their clothes. George went around the campfires as usual to dispense praise and good cheer. Then he lay down shivering in his damp blanket, his stomach growling and stuttering with emptiness, and thought troubled thoughts for a long time—thoughts about ambition, about overweening pride, about irresponsible rashness, about whether the pirogue had found the Willing, about whether it would be necessary to start killing and eating the horses. All this went around and around in his head and, with the shivering and hunger, and the endless watery sounds of this drowned world, made him more and more wakeful.

  Then he heard somebody snoring nearby in the dark. He smiled. He picked up their O diddle lully day o de little lie-o-day and let it go around and around in his mind, and then older songs blended in, home songs from old Caroline, and then he remembered “The Quaker’s Wooing,” and hum hum hi ho hum, fall liddle li dum diddle alla day started going around and around, and then he heard the music of plucked strings, and a tune of Teresa’s gitarra began repeating itself.

  Thank Lord God for this spot of dry ground you left us, he thought, and then he felt such a swell of gratitude for this latest deliverance of his troops that he stopped shivering and went to sleep.

  THE MEN AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING DULL WITH THE weakness of hunger and the aches of cold, and the sight of the brown, cold, dirty sea of water and flotsam surrounding their island camp demoralized them at once. George looked around at the flooded woods and then at the haggard company of scarecrows gazing sullenly about, and he could not imagine how he was going to animate them this morning and make them willing to move off the one piece of solid ground in the world and go farther into that awful water, toward horizons of still more water. The French volunteers were huddling together in knots, casting ugly looks his way, and even his own boys did not seem to be appreciating their legendary leader very much this morning.

  Suddenly a dull, muffled boom rolled across the waters; heads turned quizzically. What the devil.

  And at once he had it. He sprang to his feet.

  “Hear that, boys?” he shouted. “It’s the morning gun at Hamilton’s fort! We’re that close, lad
s!” And now the men were on their feet, cheering, shaking their fists in its direction, whooping and frolicking, thumping each other on the back and shouting threats and profanities at the Hair-Buyer. And warmed by that spark of cheerful fury, they allowed themselves to be led into the water again and waded southward with their de little lie-o-dum day and their glup, spit, patoooo.

  And in the afternoon, their heads and bodies again benumbed by emptiness and suffering, they slopped ashore on a low bluff that was the western bank of the Wabash. They had at last got below the mouth of the Troublesome River. They were now about three leagues downstream from Vincennes. Now they had only to cross the Wabash to its eastern shore and march those last nine miles up that eastern bank, and they would be upon their prey. In those words, it sounded simple. But George gazed across the great river and he understood that what they had done in the last two weeks had been mere practice for what lay ahead.

  There was no other side of the Wabash to be seen.

  The mighty river swept by, dirty yellow, dimpled and swirling, carrying whole trees and floats of debris and misshapen pans of floating ice. Beyond its wide channel as far eastward as he could see over the table-flat floodplain, there was nothing but yellowbrown water, water, water, its expanse broken only by leafless dark trees, white-limbed sycamores, snarls of drift, and the tops of bushes. Beyond the broad channel of the Wabash, he could not see a foot of ground anywhere. Nor a sign of the Willing, nor even the pirogue he had sent to look for the Willing.

  The dismal panorama hit him in the stomach like a cannonball. His vision blurred, the light dimmed, brightened, dimmed. The woeful voices of the men seemed to be coming from inside his own head. His whole brain and soul seemed to be muddling into a chaos of hopeless confusion, frustration, regret. I should have gone to de Leyba’s house and never left Teresa’s side, he thought: a private man with no vainglory. It was vainglory brought me here, and we’re doomed by it.