From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  We did it, George thought. We’ll never be the same, but we did it. Not a man failed me. Hot tears began running down his nose.

  Dear God I never saw such a people. Thankee O Lord for giving me such as these.

  THE RED-TAILED HAWK HAD RISEN TO A THOUSAND FEET again, flying over the ice-burnished flatland. It had veered miles eastward away from the big river, but now far below and ahead of it was another long, wide body of water, another flooded river. Down on that river, nosing slowly upstream among false channels and islands and thickets, moved a sixty-five-foot riverboat, her oars munching thin ice as she crawled slowly eastward.

  The boat was the Willing. Yesterday afternoon Lieutenant Johnny Rogers, trying to keep to the channel of the Wabash in the boundless brown waters, had mistaken the current from the mouth of the White River for the current of the Wabash and had veered into the channel of the tributary. This morning the vessel was ten miles up the wrong river, creeping farther and farther from Vincennes, and as yet neither he nor Duff, nor anyone else aboard, knew that they were climbing the wrong river. But the predominantly eastward progress was beginning to make Lieutenant Rogers uneasy. The only thing hereabouts on the map that tended so much eastward was the White River.

  He stood on the afterdeck with his cloak drawn around him and squinted and watched the winter sun shimmer over ice and frost and sparkle in his own frosting breath and heard the oars’ crushing and the rattle of breaking ice along the hull.

  Have we got off the cussed Wabash again? he wondered. He looked up and saw a speck moving in the sky. A hawk.

  I wish I could be up there, he thought. Just long enough to look things over once, that’s all.

  NOW THEY HAD OVERCOME ALL THE OBSTACLES AND THEY were here, and the fort stood squat and solid as a castle, lit from behind by the descending sun and its glare off the flooded Wabash. But George knew that the odds ahead of them were probably greater than the ones they had overcome already. That fort was well laid out and newly rebuilt, and could be expected to stand off a thousand attackers. Among its garrison was a company of British Regular Infantry, among the world’s best soldiers. Indians in the British pay came and went constantly, and reinforcements from Detroit could be expected down the Wabash at any time as the Hair-Buyer prepared his spring offensive. And Hamilton himself, George knew, was no sloth. That he had descended by surprise from Detroit upon Vincennes was proof that he was both shrewd and bold. That he planned to build an Indian force in the spring and drive all frontiersmen back over the Alleghenies proved that he was ambitious—likely as ambitious as George himself.

  And here was George with this weakened force of guerrillas who, except for the cold blue flame of their vengeance, could hardly stand up. Surely most of their gunpowder was deteriorated by the weather. The gunboat, reinforcements, powder, food, and artillery originally calculated into his invasion strategy were not here, and God only knew where they were.

  Orthodox strategy held that a fort could not be besieged without cannon and vastly superior numbers of troops. An orthodox strategist right now might look over this situation and advise George, since he could not retreat, to walk up to the fort and surrender. He smiled grimly at this notion.

  Sure is a good thing we’re not orthodox, he thought.

  * * *

  SO HE STOOD WITH HIS SPYGLASS RESTING IN THE FORK OF A dogwood tree and started remaking his strategy.

  The only advantages we’ve got, he thought, are surprise and spirit. I know there’s not one American here who’d quit short of dying.

  So it seems we’ve got to play mockingbird again, he thought.

  The evening gun of the fort boomed once, and its smoke and echo rolled over the flooded valley.

  In the twilight the tattered regiment, lean and shaggy and hungry and silent and dark as a pack of wolves, ran through the deserted streets of Vincennes. They began moving fences and carts and barrels and everything portable out toward the edge of town nearest the fort, digging trenches and setting up a network of sniping positions, and getting on rooftops and behind chimneypots, almost without a sound.

  There was no interference from the townspeople. George had sent a French-speaking aide into the town with a warning that he was here with a thousand men and would treat anyone found in the streets as an enemy, and that he would kill anyone who betrayed his presence to the fort. From the looks of the locked and shuttered houses, the townsfolk had taken him at his word.

  But if anyone had slipped into the fort with a warning, then the commandant of the fort might believe there were a thousand Americans out here. George wanted him to believe that.

  Fifteen minutes after the evening gun, a whippoorwill called. And a detachment of rooftop sharpshooters commanded by Lieutenant John Bailey started sniping at the sentries on the palisades of the fort. Their rifles cracked and flashed in the dusk, and soon the sentries were cringing behind the palisades, calling for their duty officer, so busy protecting their heads that they could not shoot back. While they were thus pinned down and distracted, a squad of Captain John Williams’s men, pushing a load of logs and boards and shovels in a heavy cart, trundled out into the open ground between the town and the fort, and quickly dug and built a little sharpshooters’ fortress a mere thirty yards in front of the fort’s gate, so close that the cannons’ muzzles could not be lowered far enough to fire on it. From down in that secure pit they could see silhouetted against the last rosy light of evening any head that moved above the palisades or at any firing port. In the meantime, also under cover of Bailey’s sharpshooters, Joe Bowman led a squad of riflemen with picks and shovels and a powder keg around the fort to start tunneling in the riverbank. Their assignment was a dangerous and dirty one, but promised to be rewarding: they were to undermine the powder magazine in the fort’s west side—Vigo had shown in a sketch just where it was—and blow it up from below.

  And so the battle—this final move in George’s two-year chess game with General Hamilton—was engaged. He had told his men to do as much shooting and shouting as a thousand devils, and they were happy to oblige. They howled like Indians from the edge of the town and fired with deadly accuracy at the fort’s apertures and yelled obscenities and insults at Henry Hamilton with their twangy, hog-calling voices.

  “Hey, Guv’nor! Yer mama’s teat was a carbuncle! That’s how ye got so mean!”

  “Hey, you Hair-Buyer! Yea, you, ye cross-eyed, skunk-bit, pus-suckin’ felon! Your scalp, as pay for my daughter’s!”

  “Hamilton! If he gits your scalp, I got dibs on your eyebrows!”

  “And I git your balls! And I don’t mean eyeballs! Hih, hih, hih!” Their laughter was as cold and hard as blades on whetstones.

  These taunts were answered by a few blasts of cannon fire from the blockhouses, but the cannoneers could see no targets except muzzle flashes, and were reluctant to fire blindly at the town whose inhabitants were supposed to be under their protection.

  And something else was making the artillerymen reluctant about using their big guns.

  Every time a cannoneer moved near an embrasure to put a swab or a load down a muzzle, three or four uncannily aimed rifle balls would hum through the embrasure and whack through his hat or clothes or flesh.

  After a short while the cannon ports were virtually buttoned up, and the cold moon rose on a hot duel of small arms and verbal abuse. To George’s happy surprise, there was as much ammunition for the one as for the other.

  Messieurs Busseron, LeGras, and Gibault, the only three men of Vincennes who had refused to sign a loyalty oath when Hamilton had captured the town, had joyously led George into a parlor, moved chairs and lifted a rug, raised floor planks, descended into a hidden cellar, and hoisted up kegs of powder and bars of lead. Busseron and LeGras, officers of the Vincennes militia, had hidden the ammunition in December, in anticipation of the Americans’ return. “For,” Busseron had explained, “Le Capitaine Helm he say to us how many time since, ‘pas de rien, that copperhead Clark would no let the Hair-Buyer keep
thees fort!”’ Gibault, a younger brother of the Kaskaskian priest, had suddenly spread his arms and tilted his head, eyes brimming with tears of happiness, and wrapped George in a garlicky Gallic hug.

  And George had patted him on the back and laughed, feeling better than he had for a long time. Having given up on the Willing, he had presumed that his boys would have to skimp on powder and wait for sure shots and sound like no more than a firing squad. But with all this, they could pop off at that fort to their hearts’ content and sound like a whole army after all!

  SOMETIME AROUND MIDNIGHT, GEORGE HEARD BOWMAN calling him. “Colonel!” came Joe’s voice from a little way down the line.

  “Here, Joe!” he called back. Neither had shouted very loudly, but it was in a lull in the shooting and voices were carrying well in the clear, windless night, and their deep voices were distinctive; from within the fort suddenly they heard a familiar voice let out a twangy yelp of delight and bellow: “George! Joe! Heyah! Heyah! Heyah! I knowed it! I knowed it!” It was Leonard Helm’s voice, said to be the loudest noise west of the Alleghenies, a voice that Helm boasted could loosen the bark on a beech tree at two hundred yards, and he had heard and recognized their voices out here, and now he was howling with joyous laughter from inside the palisade, a laugh to drown out all other voices. George and Joe listened and chuckled as they met in the moonlight. They heard a lot of the frontiersmen along the line hollering greetings to their old friend, and going, “Glup! Spit! Patoo!” and he was whooping back.

  “Listen to ’im, George,” Bowman said. “I swear he’ll call every loon down from Canady! HI, LEN!”

  “HI, JOE! HI, GEORGE! HI, Y’OLD COPPERHEAD!”

  “HI, LEN!”

  “HI, GEORGE! WANT ME T’ CAPTURE THIS PLACE FROM INSIDE?”

  George winked, elbowed Bowman’s ribs, then cupped his hands around his mouth and answered: “NO! GET DOWN IN YOUR DUNGEON AND STAY LOW! WE’RE ABOUT TO START SOME SERIOUS SHOOTING!”

  “HEE HEE! ALL RIGHT, Y’ OL’ LONG KNIFE! NIGHTY-NIGHT, NOW!” And they could hear gruff voices inside the fort, and Helm’s voice fading away, exclaiming, “I be utterly God damned, Gov’nor! If that don’t twiddle your codpiece! Th’ old Long Knife hisself! Hey, I’ll drink t’ that!”

  And then more laughter all along the lines, then some commands from inside the fort; another volley of musket fire crashed from the fort and musketballs whickered through the bushes and sang off rocks and slapped into the log wall of the church near George and Joe, but hitting nobody, and instantly the long rifles were crackling in reply, and again the shooting from the fort was silenced.

  “Well, if the Hair-Buyer didn’t know yet who was a-raidin’ his fort, he does now,” George remarked. “Old Len! B’ God, captivity by his Lordship the Governor-General himself hasn’t refined him much, has it? So, Joe. How goes your mine?”

  “Mucky. We’re like beetles in a fresh cow pie. We’ve got eight feet or so, but she keeps cavin’ in. I know the Redcoats can hear us down there and it makes ’em narvous. But they dasn’t get up on that parapet and fire down on us ’cause Bailey’s boys up on the chimbleys can sweep it perty clean. So we just muck along, but she keeps a-fallin’ in. What’s new up here?”

  “Just a lot o’ prime shooting.”

  “Fine sport for Sons o’ Liberty, it is.”

  “The ladies of the town are baking bread and making enough soup for a thousand. I’ve got to go over to Busscron’s house now. They tell me the Piankeshaw chief’s there wanting to meet Long Knife in person. He’s like this with ol’ Len, and he wants to join us against the fort with a hundred braves.”

  “That’s interesting. Will ye take ’em?”

  “No. We came to punish Hamilton for using red men, so we wouldn’t be right using ’em ourselves, now would we? Morals, y’ see.”

  “True,” said Bowman. “Morals it is.”

  “Besides, mixing a hundred Indians with our boys in th’ dark? Whew! Nope. Too confusing.”

  THE SUN ROSE. Frost glittered on yellow winter grass and frozen mud, and lightened the long blue morning shadows. The sun warmed the Americans’ backs and shone blindingly in the eyes of the British defenders on the front wall of their fort. The frontiersmen, many of them barefoot, all in mudcaked and filthy clothing, eyes red from fatigue and gunsmoke, snot-streaks tracking their powder-begrimed faces, stood or crouched or lay behind barrels and carts and trees and woodpiles and their hastily built breastworks, and kept loading and firing at the fort those few yards away, poking their long rifles through knotholes and between wagon spokes and under logs, sighting on any minute sign of life or movement in the fort, squeezing the triggers, then drawing the long guns back, wiping their runny noses on their sleeves, then tilting their powder horns again. They fired and loaded with a workmanlike concentration. They were not doing so much taunting and insulting now. After thirteen hours of the night cold and the powder fumes and the yelling and the coughing, most were painfully hoarse and some had lost their voices altogether. Squads kept moving back into the village to take breakfast and gulp hot coffee and tea while others went up and took their places. George talked to all of them he had time for, and he studied them and wondered how much longer they could keep it up. They had been on their feet for twenty-four hours now, ninety percent starved, and most of that time they had been either wading in ice water or building fortifications and sustaining a tense, busy gunfight. Most of them were lung-sick but just ignoring it. Most men would have been wanting to sleep or hide or just lie down and die by now. But almost every one who came past him this morning would ask, “When kin we tear down that ’ere fort and git that ’ere Hair-Buyer, suh?” He would wink and slap a shoulder and say, “In good time, man. Let’s just grind ’em down a mite more and watch for our gunboat t’ come up.”

  He had decided to wait till midmorning for a sign of the Willing. If she didn’t arrive out there with a few rounds of cannon shot to strengthen his hand, he was going to have to start bluffing Hamilton down anyway, because these boys couldn’t keep this going forever, and even if they thought they could, they probably could not storm that fort without at least a half of them dying. George was pretty sure all the cannon in those blockhouses were loaded with grapeshot, and even if they were silent now, they would poke out and belch death all over the place the moment he should attempt a charge.

  By the middle of the morning George was so bone-weary and feverish that he was having to think everything through twice before giving an order or a permission, to avoid using bad judgment. Much longer, he felt, and he would be going blankheaded. Whatever he was going to do, he decided, he had better do it while he could still think. And the Willing still had not been seen.

  So this seemed as good a time as any to send his first demand to Hamilton. Going into the little French chapel that he had made his headquarters, he sat down in a pew. He took his feather quill out of his old hat, and twirled it in an inkpot. Then he wrote, with strong, slashing pen-strokes:

  Lt. Governor Henry Hamilton Esqr

  Commanding Post St. Vincent

  Sir

  In order to save yourself from the Impending Storm that now Threatens you I order you to Imediately surrender yourself up with all your Garrison Stores &c. &c. for if I am obliged to storm, you may depend on such Treatment justly due to a Murderer beware of destroying Stores of any kind or any papers or letters that is in your possession or hurting one house in the Town for by heavens if you do there shall be no Mercy shewn you.

  Feby 24th 1779

  G.R. CLARK

  The gunfire fell silent. A white flag was waved near the log church. When the fort gate was opened a few feet, a Captain Cardinal of the Vincennes militia, who could speak English, went from the church to the fort with the truce flag over his shoulder and Colonel Clark’s letter in his hand. The gate closed after him.

  Half an hour passed. The Americans rested in their shootingplaces, cleaned their rifles, measured powder, replaced flints, bragged about fancy shots, g
nawed French bread, coughed, blew their noses, or tried to doze in the winter sunlight under their tattered blankets.

  Inside the fort then, a bugle called Assembly. Another half hour passed. Voices filtered out of the fort, and once there came a cheer of manly voices. Then the gate opened slightly, and Captain Cardinal returned down the road with his white flag.

  It was not the answer George had wanted, but it was an answer that confirmed his first estimation of his enemy.

  Govr Hamilton begs leave to acquaint Col. Clark that he and his Garrison are not disposed to be awed into any action unworthy of British subjects.

  H. HAMILTON

  Captain Cardinal related what had happened inside. Hamilton had read the surrender demand inside the gate. Then, red-faced, he had gone to his quarters, taking his officers with him. They had come out looking nervous but resolute, and then all the troops had been assembled on the parade ground. There Governor Hamilton had read Colonel Clark’s letter to them and told them the officers had resolved not to surrender them into the hands of such barbarians. The Redcoats had cheered and vowed they would stick to Hamilton like the shirt on his back.

  “Eh, well,” George said. “And his French Canadians?”

  “They,” Cardinal replied, “did no cheer.”

  “So be it,” George said to his captains. “Let’s grind ’em some more. Tell the boys to shoot double-smart.” Bowman passed the word down, adding his own emphasis: “Mister Clark wants them Redcoats in there to crawl up their own ass holes for a hidin’ place!”

  It resumed in the wan sunlight now, in the spirit of a turkey shoot. Within minutes the fort was buttoned up again. George was pleased with the shooting, but knew he would have to do something to exploit the advantage soon. The men were growing impatient to get into the fort and exact their revenge. And at this rate, powder might run so low it would have to be rationed, unless the Willing should show up, and George had learned not to count on that. Just as he was pondering his next move, a white flag appeared above the fort. George ordered a cease-fire and waited. A very nervous French Canadian came down.