From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  The steady murmur of the troops rose now. The advance scouts were in a skirmish line spurring their horses into a trot straight through the weeds toward the distant gray mass of dead tree trunks. William raised his spyglass to watch. On the limb of a sumac tree in the foreground perched a female cardinal, a dull ruddy brown, with rusty crest and brow, tilting her head left and right, her bright orange beak opening for tiny cheeps that could not be heard over the great murmuring rustle of the moving army. William twisted the eyepiece, and the cardinal dissolved and now the fallen timbers were in focus and he could see the woods crawling with Indians. He slid the brass tube shut and put it in his pouch and drew his sword.

  The advance party rode straight on, closer and closer toward the blowdown, almost like sacrifices to the god of war, their black hats and white crisscrossed belts jogging up and down. William’s pulse seemed to be jarring his eyeballs as he breathed shallowly and watched them go. Their dangerous role was to draw fire, feign panic, and draw Indians out of the woods in pursuit.

  Then the blue-white smoke and the staccato rattle of guns poured out of the woods amid the howling of massed warriors. The vanguard hesitated, some men flinging up their arms and tumbling, others discharging their weapons into the trees; horses wheeled and fell; gunsmoke screened the gray woods from view. And now through the yelling and rattle of gunfire came the chattering beat of the general’s drummers, and the officers’ shouts: “Arms at ready! Double step! For-ward!” And the whole front of them, shoulder to shoulder, nearly half a mile from wing to wing, swept forward like a wave in that surprisingly swift pace they had practiced and practiced and practiced on the fields at every bivouac.

  Now the survivors of the vanguard came thundering back, blood-smeared, wild-eyed, through the thinning smoke, many riderless horses and unhorsed riders among them; and close behind came the howling of the warriors who had sprung from the woods to pursue them. The infantry opened ranks to let the horsemen through and then closed again and swept on, and as they closed on the astonished Indians they began bellowing, a deep, angry chorus in monotone.

  A din of clattering and clinking swept along the line now as bayonets and swords and tomahawks clashed. William was where he had been half a dozen times before in his young life: where little bits of death whizzed thick as bees through the air—musketballs, arrows, and blades.

  But for once, the clash did not slow the onrush. The line of blue, with its gleaming edge of steel, overran the tawny warriors and rushed on against the jumbled timbers like a wave against a reef, leaving in the weeds behind it a few dozen struggling forms, men trying to pull their bayonets out of flesh, while the warriors trying to flee back into the woods got in the way of those who were still in there trying to shoot.

  Now William plunged into the crazy tangle of limbs and roots, hacked across a fleeing red back, laying flesh open to the ribs; and to right and left he could see and hear his soldiers crashing and yelling and thrashing. The Indians had had no time to reload, and their desperate swipes with warclub, knife, and tomahawk were too short; a man with a five-foot musket and a two-foot bayonet had a superior reach. William was suddenly beginning to understand Mad Anthony’s faith in this weapon. Indians doubled over, their hands clawing at gun muzzles, as the steel slid between their ribs or punched into their abdomens.

  And the very tree trunks and limbs and roots the Indians had chosen for their defense now impeded their retreat, and entrapped them. Some tripped backward and lay squirming under the probing bayonets; some were pinned to tree trunks as they tried to scramble over them; some were impaled as they tried to crash through mats of dead wood. William could hear virtually no gunfire and not much shouting; now it was mostly a crunching and crackling and munching, like a herd of animals rushing through undergrowth, here a gasp, there a groan, now and then a scream of dying or a curse or a command in English, and, somewhere behind, the chattering of drums.

  “They’re on the run!” William shouted. “Keep on! Don’t give ’em a breath! Don’t lose each other! Bear hunt! It’s a bear hunt.” A russet arm, smeared with sweaty ochre war paint and grease, flashed across his vision and then tightened like a hawser around his neck and his breath was cut off and his hat was down over his eyes, and a heavy hard body was on his back. William anticipated the stab of a knife, but before he could struggle, the arm jerked tighter and then released and there was a loud grunt. William turned, his hat falling off, and saw one of his troopers pressing and twisting on his musket, driving the speared warrior to the ground. William croaked through his bruised windpipe: “Thankee, man!” The Indian was on the ground gaping like a fish and twitching, still holding the knife he had not had time to use. It was one of those British-issue scalping knives with a red-painted wooden handle.

  The soldier who had saved William’s life now pulled his bayonet out of the Indian’s side and without a word crouched and went under a log farther into the tangle.

  THE BATTLE HAD BEEN WON IN MINUTES, AND FROM THEN on it had been just a matter of climbing and crawling through the fallen forest after the fleeing Indians, finishing off those who had crawled into coverts to hide and die. Halfway through, the companies were halted and reformed, refreshed with a shot of whiskey and words of praise, and then ordered to push on. Now mosquitoes and snakes were the only living enemies in this close, damp, dizzying world of deadwood. The sweating troops began emerging from the other side of the blowdown at about noon, onto a weedy meadow, and there, less than a mile ahead, stood the palisades and block houses of Fort Miami with the British flag, hanging limp atop its flagstaff. Spread far around the fort were Indian dwellings, hundreds of acres of corn and vegetables, and the British trading post. The legion was halted here to form a defensive line in case of a counterattack.

  But there would be no counterattack; that was plain. William climbed up a slanting limb of a huge fallen oak, slid out his spyglass, and gazed on a pathetic scene.

  Hundreds of warriors, many limping, some carrying wounded comrades on their backs, were crowding toward the British fort; some were pounding on its gate with their weapons and demanding refuge. But the British officers and soldiers stood above, gazing toward the American Army, and made no move to open the gates and let the Indians in.

  “Look’ee, sir,” William called to General Wilkinson, extending his spyglass. Wilkinson rode over and took it and studied the scene. William said through clenched teeth: “Some allies, the Redcoats, eh? They hire the savages to war on us, then shut ’em out when they’re whipped! By God, but that fort’s an insult to all that’s human!” he growled. “Pray he’ll let us storm it, eh, and cut off the Hydra’s last head! We’ve come too far not to, right, sir?”

  Wilkinson handed the telescope back up to William, and there was a cynical half-smile on his mouth. “I don’t know, friend Clark,” he said. “As y’re aware, His Excellency is a cumbrous body, and yon fort might decay before he decides to knock it down.”

  GENERAL WAYNE DECIDED NOT TO ATTACK THE BRITISH stronghold, but, instead, simply to scorn it out of existence. He encamped his army within plain view of it, building the usual breastworks and setting up his cannon to bear on the fort. He put his troops to work then destroying the British trading post and all the Indian dwellings that lay under its “protection,” and to burning all the grainfields and trampling vegetable gardens under hoof. By now all the remnants of the whipped Indian force had vanished. General Wayne, accompanied only by his aide, Lieutenant William Henry Harrison, then rode within a stone’s throw of the fort’s walls and casually inspected it all around. This action so infuriated the British commander that he sent a messenger out to Wayne under a white flag, demanding to know why an American army had come to stand so insolently close to one of His Majesty’s posts, as he knew of no war between the two countries. Wayne sent back a note telling the Englishman to quit his fort and get out of American territory. But he would not attack the fort. He did not think it was worth starting another war with Great Britain.

  * * *r />
  TWO DAYS LATER, TO A DIRGE OF DRUMS AND FIFES, A FUNERAL ceremony was performed over the graves of the two American officers and twenty-six men who had died in the attack in the fallen timbers. One of these officers was William’s tentmate, Lieutenant Towles, who had died somewhere deep in the timbers with a tomahawk in his chest.

  The cannon fired three rounds to conclude the ceremony, and then, baggage wagons creaking with the additional burden of a hundred wounded, the army left its camp and began to retrace its route, from fort to fort, back through the Ohio country toward the winter quarters at Fort Greenville. General Anthony Wayne was certain that he had at last completely defeated the Algonquian Confederacy. Most of the officers were not so sure.

  DISCOMFORT AND HUNGER SET IN WHEN THE ARMY WAS back in Fort Greenville; a supply train and herd of beef cattle had been badly delayed. William was exceedingly gloomy in his billet, the empty bunk beside his reminding him of Lieutenant Towles’ death. The diet of pan bread and bear’s oil, the lack of liquor or tea or coffee, kept his stomach sour and growling. Firewood and clothes and shoes were constantly damp, and half the garrison was sick; every assembly sounded like a coughing chorus. The troops wounded at Fallen Timbers were mending slowly on the poor diet. William thought of the tons of good Indian food that had been destroyed. He filled his off-duty hours by writing in his journal, and grew every day to hate army life ever more. There had been letters from the family awaiting him at Fort Greenville, letters expressing concern over Brother George’s expatriate scheme, which saddened them and offended their patriotic sense even though it seemed to be restoring his spirit and keeping him sober for the most part. William’s own sympathies were with George; he himself had become disillusioned with everyone else’s brand of leadership—with that smugness of Anthony Wayne, with that witty cynicism of General Wilkinson.

  These dreary days, when Wayne was dead certain he had defeated the Indians once and for all but most of the officers were certain that he had let real victory slip through his fingers, William thought often of resigning his captain’s commission and going to join George’s phantom legion, an army with a cause. There was something more noble, more worthy, William thought, in going to war against the corrupt tyrants of Spain than in helping Congress methodically push Indians out of their own lands. It was, after all, this same Congress that had refused year after year to honor George’s war debts until it had at last wiped out his great loyalty. In the night hours William struggled feebly to retain the precepts of his parents, their faith in God and Country. His diary pages for Fanny grew still more cynical. Fanny’s letters were low and bitter, too. She had a new son, Benjamin, but never saw her husband.

  Such doubts and discontents had been gnawing at William’s morale in the gray weeks at Fort Greenville when, one day, a joyous shout from the parade ground signaled two cheering arrivals.

  The first was expected—long expected. It was that overdue supply train, with its flour, its liquor, its medicines, and, above all, its herd of beef cattle. “Mmm—OOOooo! I’m just dying to be beef roast for th’ soldier boys!” someone yelled, running alongside the beasts.

  The other arrival, unexpected, showed up first as a rap on William’s door an hour later. “Come in,” he called, turning from his writing box to see who was coming in off the muddy compound.

  The stranger, an ensign, stepped into the room so stiffly he appeared to have a ramrod down his back, shut the door with a strange erect pivoting motion, and took his hat off before facing William. He was not tall, but his compact figure gave an immediate impression of hickorylike strength and hardness. He was mud-caked as high as his thick-muscled thighs, and markedly bowlegged; even though his muddy heels were smartly together, his knees gave each other an inch or two of leeway. His face was not really handsome, its mouth being small and severe and his round ears jutting like handles, but the eyes, winter-sea gray and deep-set under a massive forehead, were utterly startling. The lids were long-lashed, heavy-lidded, almost sleepy-looking, but the quick gray eyes themselves had that all-perceiving acuteness in them that William had seen only rarely, in certain scouts. One glance at them and William somehow was aware of the untidiness of his own room and person. They were a bit like old Daniel Boone’s eyes, but the face was not relaxed and happy as Boone’s was; it seemed instead to have been cut from granite and then polished to a girlish smoothness. The man’s hair was thick, auburn, pulled tightly back behind his prominent ears and queued in back. Now this man, this tight bundle of force, gave a formal little bow and said, as William rose from his chair:

  “Captain Clark, Sir? I am Meriwether Lewis.”

  * * *

  THIS STRANGE YOUNG SPECIMEN OF AN ARMY OFFICER, IT happened, was to be William’s new billet-mate. It was news not immediately to William’s liking, as Meriwether Lewis at first glance seemed an odd combination of prig and spartan. He was as orderly as a housemaid; worse, there was as much tension about him as about a drawn bow. William mused on him, wondering if he slept at attention. He watched from the corner of his eye as Ensign Lewis opened a portable bookcase to display a collection of books of sorts that had bewildered William in the years of his own education: Plutarch, Plato, Aeschylus, and the like, giving William to believe that atop all his other miseries, he was to be locked up in a room all winter with a man of inferior rank and superior education. William thought again on the notion of resigning his commission, and wondered how long it would take him to get out.

  But soon, to his pleasant surprise, William began to find Meriwether Lewis somewhat interesting. Quite interesting, even, and a bit more personable than his initial rigidity had suggested. The first good sign was that when William asked him what name he went by, the answer was “Lewis.” Good. It would have been awkward sharing a room with a fellow one had to call “Meriwether,” or “Merry,” or such a thing. And then it transpired that Ensign Lewis knew a good deal about the Clarks. He had, in fact, been born in Albemarle County, not ten miles from the old Clark farmstead where Jonathan and George had been born. And only five miles or so from Thomas Jefferson’s estate. The Lewises were close friends of Jefferson. Lewis had, furthermore, schooled under the Maurys, who had educated Jefferson.

  It soon became apparent, too, that Meriwether Lewis was not a prig or a sissy. Though he was of the land-rich and distinguished Warner Hall Lewises and the influential Meriwethers, he was at twenty years of age the protector of his family; his mother Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks was the widow of first one officer and then a second, and this solid lad had thus been the head of his family since the age of seventeen.

  Anecdotes and recollections began to bound back and forth between the two young officers so fast that each had two exciting questions and a story backed up behind his throat while the other was talking. “Your father rode against Dunmore over the gunpowder affair? Blast my eyes! So did mine, and my brothers, too!” And so on it went, the excitement building.

  “My parents, come to think of it, went to your sister’s wedding, just before I was born—or just after, I’m not sure. What year …”

  They talked about their families, faces alight with fondness and humor, told anecdotes about them, purging themselves of their homesickness. They talked about the army, and Lewis’s wholesome concept of duty was so refreshing that William vowed down inside himself to stop being so cynical about it, and felt much better at once. Lewis, just before getting his orders to come here, had been serving under Jonathan’s old commander, Light Horse Harry Lee, at Red Stone Fort, part of the force President Washington had sent out to quell the Whiskey Rebellion. William at last got a full and understandable account of that remote and rumored disturbance.

  “The duty I’ve really prayed for,” Lewis said, “is one of exploring. From the Mississippi to the Pacific. Mister Jefferson wants to send a French scientist, Michaux. I’ve asked permission to go, but … So far, nothing.”

  “The Pacific! Aye! He’s intended that a long time, I know. Once he asked Brother George to do it. George
and I have talked on it a lot.”

  “I’ve dreamed of it,” said Lewis, “since I was old enough to walk.”

  “Michaux is with my brother now,” William exclaimed. “If y’d come home with me on a furlough, we could see ’im!”

  They agreed on it. They would go at Christmastime.

  Gone was the prospect of a gloomy winter in Fort Greenville. William was happy as a boy again. It became apparent that Lewis was a woodsman and naturalist of considerable experience, with a hungry fascination with natural science reminiscent of Brother George. Fate had brought to William, when he needed it, a friend to stretch his mind and warm his war-chilled heart.

  And a few weeks later, when the chiefs of the Seven Nations came down to talk peace with General Mad Anthony Wayne, and the Indian wars were, truly, concluded for a while, William Clark and Meriwether Lewis knew they would indeed be free to go down to Mulberry Hill for Christmas. They drank to it.

  “To a long friendship,” said Lewis.

  “To a great friendship,” said William.

  GENERAL GEORGE ROGERS CLARK, COMMANDANT OF THE French Legion of the Mississippi, was in the public house at Louisville with Andre Michaux, outlining details of the Spanish defenses at New Orleans with old comrades who were secretly officers of the Legion, when a messenger leaped off a boat at the wharf and ran up the street. He appeared in the doorway of the pub, looking left and right in the dim light, then slipped in among the rough soldiery and handed a piece of paper to Michaux. The Frenchman perused the sheet, then shut his eyes and, with a sigh, let his chin fall to his chest.

  “Yes, what?” George said, and Michaux handed him the paper without looking up.

  President Washington, it said, had learned of the plan to invade Louisiana. Enraged at Citizen Genet’s plotting right under his own nose, appalled by this violation of American neutrality, the President had outlawed the plot, demanded Genet’s recall to France, and ordered General Anthony Wayne to build a fort on the Mississippi to keep the French Legion from going down the river. Michaux, too, would have to go back to France.