1812: The Rivers of War Read online

  The fact that the general’s left arm was in a sling only added emphasis to the rigid, accusing finger of the other hand. For two reasons. First, because Jackson seemed to have an uncanny knack for striking dramatic poses. The lion, wounded, yet still able to challenge the hyena. Second, because the militia officer knew—so did everyone, including Sam himself—that the wound in question was the result of a recent shootout at a hotel in Nashville between Jackson and his friend Coffee and the Benton brothers. The pose might be histrionic, but Jackson’s capacity for violence was by now a legend on the frontier.

  Again, that jaw thrusting forth. “Damn me if I won’t, sir!” he roared. “I’ll shoot them myself, if I have to!”

  The jaw receded, leaving the man a sinking wreck. Jackson’s eyes turned back to Sam. “I will trust you to carry out the order, young ensign. If you’ve got spine enough to stand up to me, you ought to have spine enough to shoot a worthless deserter.”

  The officer, though sinking, hadn’t quite dropped out of sight yet.

  “General,” he pleaded, “the terms under which the men enlisted—”

  “Blast your terms, sir! Blast them, I say!”

  This time, Jackson’s finger pointed out of the tent. “Do the Red Sticks care about your ‘terms’? I’ll crush those savages, so help me I will—and you’ll be there to help me do it. You will, sir! Don’t doubt it! Or I’ll crush you first!

  “Now get out of my sight. Your protest has been heard, adjudged wanting in all right or reason, and summarily dismissed.”

  With that, the general took a half step back himself, as if he’d encountered a bad smell. The officer took advantage of the momentary space and scuttled out of the tent.

  After he was gone, Jackson shook his head. “God save us from militiamen,” he growled. “Lawyers, every one of them. And shysters at that.”

  His eyes came back to Sam, ranging, for a moment, up and down the uniform that identified him as a regular in the Thirty-ninth Infantry, U.S. Army. While European armies had adopted close-bodied coats or jackets in the course of the Napoleonic wars, American uniforms remained the traditional cutaway style, with elaborate lapels, facings, and turnbacks. Coats were still closed with hooks and eyes rather than buttons.

  Sam’s uniform was typical. The coat was blue and long-skirted, with scarlet cuffs and a standing collar. The woolen trousers were white, plain, and tucked into his boots. He had his tall leather infantry cap—often called a “tombstone shako”—tucked neatly into the crook of his arm.

  After an inspection that lasted for several seconds, Jackson seemed satisfied. “Fortunately,” he continued, “I now have real soldiers on the spot. What’s your name, Ensign? And how long have you been serving the colors?”

  “Sam Houston, sir. I enlisted in March of last year.”

  Jackson eyebrows lowered slightly. “Houston. I believe I’ve heard about you. Aren’t you the one who was adopted by the Cherokee?”

  The sentence seemed almost like an accusation, but . . . not exactly. Sam couldn’t really tell what lay beneath it.

  “Yes, sir,” he replied. “When I was sixteen, after I ran away from home. I lived for three years with John Jolly and his people. He’s the one adopted me, and gave me my Cherokee name.”

  “And that is?”

  “Colonneh, sir. It means ‘The Raven.’ ”

  Jackson sniffed. “Nasty birds, ravens. On the other hand, they’re also tough, and smart. Let’s hope they picked the right name. Do you speak the language?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fluently?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you get along with the savages?”

  “Very well, sir.” Sam’s big shoulders shifted. “And I don’t take kindly to people insulting my family.”

  Jackson surprised him again. The general grinned—rather cheerfully, it seemed. “It’s against the law to challenge a superior officer, youngster, so you’d best leave the rest of that thought unspoken. I’d have to shoot you dead, and I’d prefer not to do that. Still and all, I’ll refrain from using the term. In your presence, at least.” There was a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

  The general rubbed his long chin. “I can use you for liaison then, if Coffee needs it. We’ve got five hundred Cherokees allied with us in this campaign, and about a hundred friendly Creeks. Do you speak their language, too?”

  Sam hesitated. That was a hard question to answer. The Creek Confederacy was an amalgam of a number of tribes of different origins, further divided between the so-called Upper and Lower Towns. The term “Creek” itself was a white man’s word. Creeks were more likely to think of themselves as Coweta or Alabama or Tuskegee.

  “Well . . .” he began.

  But apparently Jackson understood the reality of the situation. “Any of the dialects?”

  “I can get along, sir, with some of them. I speak a little Choctaw, also.”

  “No Choctaws with us on this campaign, so that doesn’t matter. It might later, though. Once we’re done with the Red Sticks, we’ll be facing the British, you can be sure of it. Maybe the Spanish, as well. John? Do you want him? If you do, I’ll have Colonel Williams detach him from duty with his regiment.”

  The officer who had accompanied Houston shrugged his shoulders. “I could certainly use Ensign Houston, General, but I don’t really need him. At least a third of the Cherokees speak English. The Ridge doesn’t, true enough, but he’s got that young John Ross fellow to translate for him.” Major Coffee chuckled. “Of course, I don’t think Ross really speaks Cherokee all that well. But we’ll get along, true enough.”

  Jackson nodded. “All right, then. To tell you the truth, John, it’d probably be better to keep the ensign with his unit. I’ll be counting on the Thirty-ninth to keep the ragtag-and-bobtail in line.” He glanced at the flap of the tent through which the militia officer had beat a hasty retreat. “I think I did a pretty good job of bullying the little piglet. But you know as well as I do that they need bullying on a regular basis. How was my tantrum, by the way?”

  Coffee smiled. “Pretty good. Not your very best, though.” The major looked down at Jackson’s hat, which was still lying on the floor. “For a really top performance, you should have stomped on the hat.”

  The general stared down at the object in question. “Tarnation. I didn’t think of that.” He seemed genuinely aggrieved.

  Jackson stooped over and picked up the hat, brushed it off, then jammed it back onto his head. By the time he was finished, Sam was thoroughly amazed at the transformation in the man. The general who now stood before him, smiling and relaxed, seemed like a completely different person.

  Jackson gave him a cool, thin smile. “A lesson here, Ensign Houston, which will stand you in good stead. A reputation, once developed, is as valuable as a fine sword.”

  Then the smile became very thin. “But don’t forget that it has to be a valid reputation. Or the sword’s got no edge. I will shoot the bastards, if I have to.”

  There didn’t seem to be much to say to that, so Sam kept his mouth shut. After a moment, the general turned away and motioned for them to follow him to a table that stood in the corner of the tent. “And now, John, let’s discuss the campaign.”

  There was a large map spread across the table. “The Georgians are worthless, as usual,” Jackson growled. “There’s nobody quicker to steal land from Indians, but whenever it comes to having to actually fight the savages—”

  He broke off, tossing Sam a sly glance. “Excuse me, Ensign. I should have said ‘the gentlemen of the red-skinned race.’ But whatever you call them, the Georgians run for cover every blasted time they appear. I just got word that General Floyd has retreated—again—and relinquished command to Colonel Milton at Fort Hull. Who’ll probably be just as useless as every Georgian seems to be. So it’ll be up to us Tennesseans to put an end to the Red Sticks.”

  Coffee studied the map intently, as did Sam. It was hand-drawn, and showed the terrain of the Territory of Miss
issippi, where the Red Sticks were concentrated. The Red Stick faction of the Creeks, the southern allies of Tecumseh, came mainly from the Confederacy’s Upper Towns. By and large, the Lower Town Creeks had either remained neutral or were allied with the United States.

  American newspapers tended to portray the Red Stick war as an attack on white settlers. It was that, certainly, but it was more in the way of a civil war among the Creeks themselves. The people massacred at Fort Mims by the Red Sticks a few months earlier, on August 30, had mainly been Creeks, not whites. Mixed-bloods, true, most of them—but the same could be said of the Red Sticks, especially their leaders. Tecumseh and his brother The Prophet had sought to unite all Indians against the whites. But, like most Indians, they viewed the distinction between “red men” and “white men” more along cultural lines than strictly racial ones. Many of Tecumseh’s followers, especially the Creek warriors of the Red Stick faction, had some white ancestors themselves.

  Tecumseh himself was dead now, killed in Canada in October, when U.S. forces under the command of General William Henry Harrison had defeated the British and their Indian allies at the battle of the Thames. It was reported that Colonel Richard Johnson, who’d led the final cavalry charge and had been badly wounded in the affray, had shot Tecumseh personally. But the fires Tecumseh and his brother The Prophet had lit among the many Indian tribes were still burning in the southern territories of the United States.

  Coffee rubbed his chin. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait for the Georgians to regroup, General?” His finger traced the lines of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers. “We’re not going to move easily through this terrain. It’s pretty much pure wilderness, by all accounts I’ve received.”

  Jackson shook his head impatiently. “We haven’t time for a slow campaign, John. The real enemy is the British, don’t ever forget it. We’ve got to crush this uprising as soon as possible or we’ll still be tied up when the British arrive.”

  “You may be jumping to conclusions, General. Napoleon might beat them, you know, even after his defeat at Leipzig. If he does, the British won’t be in any position to send more troops all the way across the Atlantic.”

  Sam was a little surprised that Coffee didn’t hesitate to argue the matter. After witnessing the Homeric temper tantrum Jackson had just thrown, Sam himself would have been a little hesitant to disagree with him under any circumstances.

  But the general didn’t seem to mind. “All my hopes are with Napoleon, to be sure. But . . .” He sighed. “The bastards are already into France itself. Marching on Paris, according to the latest news. I just can’t assume that he’ll win. And if he loses, which at this point I’d have to say he probably will, then the British Empire is going to bring all its power down on us. With the Spanish holding their coats. Before that happens, we’ve got to have the savages under control.”

  Again, he gave Sam that sidelong glance. “Begging your pardon, Ensign.”

  Sam suppressed a sigh of his own. He had a sneaking suspicion the general was going to needle him on the subject for . . . quite some time.

  Jackson turned back to the map, his own finger tracing a route along the Coosa. “I intend to start our march as soon as possible. We’ll follow the Coosa down to here, at which point we’ll move eastward toward Emuckfaw. From there, we’ll just be a short distance upriver from the horseshoe bend on the Tallapoosa, where Chief Menawa and Weatherford and about a thousand Red Stick warriors have forted up.

  “John, I’ll want you and your cavalry—you’ll be working with the Cherokees, too—”

  CHAPTER 2

  When The Ridge and his companion saw the militia officer come scuttling out of General Jackson’s tent, they said nothing, but they did exchange a little smile. Some of the Creeks had already started calling the American general “Sharp Knife,” and The Ridge was pretty sure it wouldn’t be long before the Cherokees who were Jackson’s allies would be doing the same.

  The smile faded soon enough, however. When it came to the Americans, there wasn’t much for Cherokees to smile about.

  Many Creeks, and a fair number of Cherokees and Choctaws, would explain it on the simple grounds that the Americans were white people, and, as such, a fickle and treacherous race. But The Ridge didn’t think even the Red Sticks really believed that. Maybe in the North they did, where Tecumseh himself had come from. The Ridge didn’t really know that much about those tribes, even though the stories claimed the Cherokee themselves had come from the North, long ago. Those stories were probably true, he mused, since the Cherokees spoke a language that was similar to the Iroquois.

  But racial explanations didn’t make much sense to The Ridge, and never had. He was himself mostly a full-blood, yet all he had to do was look around him to see the extent to which “the Cherokees” had long ago begun to change, on that level which the whites called “race.” Even the name “Cherokee” was of white origin. The term the Cherokee themselves used was “Ani-Yunwiya,” which meant the “Real People” or the “Principal People.”

  All he had to do was look at the man squatting next to him, in fact. Young John Ross.

  To all outward appearances, John Ross was a white man himself. His skin was as pale as any white man’s; his hair was red; his eyes were blue. Nor was that a freak of nature. Measured by blood, John Ross was a white man. The Ridge didn’t know him well yet, since he’d only just met him on this campaign, but he knew some of the man’s ancestry. Seven of his eight immediate progenitors were white people, mostly of Scot extraction. Only one of them, his great-grandmother Ghigooie of the Bird Clan, had been a Cherokee.

  But the way the Cherokee measured such things, that made John Ross a member of the clan. The fact that he looked like a Scotsman simply didn’t matter, as far as they were concerned. The Ani-Yunwiya traced lineage through the mother’s line, not the father’s. The white man’s concept of “race” was an alien one. The people whom the Americans called “Indians” actually belonged to a wide variety of peoples, who spoke different languages and had different customs.

  No, The Ridge wasn’t really an Indian, except insofar as the white people placed him in that category. But because they did, he had to deal with it, because he had to deal with them.

  From his own viewpoint, though, he was Ani-Yunwiya, because he belonged to one of the seven Cherokee clans. The Deer Clan. Beyond that, he recognized kinship with many other tribes, since Cherokees often married outside the seven clans.

  John Ross probably had a better understanding of the white way of thinking, even if he didn’t agree with it. Despite his youthful age, Ross had already acquired a reputation among his people, and he was emerging as a Cherokee leader. Certainly no one doubted his loyalties to the Bird Clan.

  Things were no different with their Red Stick enemies. Somewhere in the distance to the south, the Red Stick faction of the Creeks had forted up on a bend of the Tallapoosa River in an attempt to withstand Jackson’s coming assault. Their loyalties to their own leaders were fierce, but had little to do with race. Their central war chief was a man who, like most Indians of the time, had two names. Red Eagle, and . . . William Weatherford.

  Like Ross, Weatherford had more white than Indian ancestors. That hadn’t stopped him from leading the successful attack on Fort Mims, although rumor had it that Weatherford had tried to prevent the massacre of the fort’s population. But The Ridge was quite sure that race had nothing to do with the massacre, either. Most of the people massacred at Fort Mims had been Creek half-bloods, just like Weatherford himself and many of his Red Stick followers. The different ways in which white people and red people measured difference to begin with was just one of the many problems they had faced, separately and together, for over two centuries now.

  The Ridge had seen the sea, several times since his youth, and had never forgotten the inexorable power of the tides. They couldn’t be stopped, certainly. But perhaps they could be channeled.

  Perhaps.

  John Ross was somewhat in awe of The Ri
dge, and so he took his cue from his older companion’s unreadable countenance, and his still manner of watching things.

  “Stoic.” That’s what white Americans would have labeled The Ridge. The word wouldn’t have meant anything to the man himself, since he spoke no En-glish and was basically illiterate. But John himself was fluent in English—more so than he was in Cherokee, in fact—and he was a voracious reader.

  Still, John was a Cherokee, and he thought like one. So he knew that “stoic” was a misnomer. The Ridge’s manner did not derive from the ancient philosophies of the Romans, whom most Americans saw as their political forefathers. John Ross had read some of those Roman texts in school, as did most educated children, but he was sure The Ridge had never even heard of them.

  No, The Ridge’s manner came from the traditions of his own people. The stillness of hunters waiting for prey; the patience of the river bottoms where a people grew its beans, squash, and corn.

  The Ridge was in his early forties. He was well known among the Cherokee as an advocate of finding workable compromises with the whites, and even adopting many of their practices, when it made sense. But, in other ways, he was something of a throwback. One of the great ancient ones, John Ross liked to imagine, come back to life in the Cherokee time of need. The Ridge wasn’t entirely a pureblood, since his mother’s father had been a Scot frontiersman. But there was no trace of that ancestry in his form and figure. The Ridge was as dark-skinned as any Cherokee, with the dramatic nose and cheeks to go with his powerful build. He’d been named for his hunting prowess. “The Ridge” was an English translation of the Cherokee Kahnungdatlageh, which meant “the man who walks on the mountaintop.”

  He had been a blooded warrior at the age of seventeen, killing one of the white Tennesseans who had been allied with the Unakas. By the time he was thirty, he was one of the Cherokees’ most influential chiefs. He was often referred to as asgá siti. The term was usually translated into English as “dreadful,” although for Cherokees themselves the connotations were more that of “terrifying” or “formidable.”