1812: The Rivers of War Read online

  “Better yet,” he murmured, “a long and glorious life.”

  “I’m sorry, Ensign, I didn’t catch that,” said Major Montgomery, marching along next to him.

  Embarrassed, Sam cleared his throat and tightened his grip on the sword. “Nothing, sir. Just talking to myself.”

  Sam eyed an arrow that was speeding in his direction. More and more were falling now, though few were yet finding their targets. He didn’t break stride, but he did edge slightly to his right, almost crowding Montgomery. The arrow passed safely three feet to his left.

  “Don’t,” said the major. The word was spoken firmly, even sternly, but the tone wasn’t accusatory. “In a fight, you can’t see every danger. Just ignore it all, young man. That’ll help steady the men—and it’s in God’s hand now anyway.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And that, too, young Sam Houston filed away for later study. He suspected the major was right—but he still thought it was a foolish way to fight a battle. Of course, that might just be his Cherokee upbringing at work. Cherokees, like all Indians Sam knew of, generally thought that the white man’s headlong way of fighting was just plain stupid.

  Perhaps it was. But it was also a fact that white men eventually won their wars with Indians, if not always all the battles. Maybe this was part of it.

  He chewed on that concept, too, for a time. Indeed, he became so engrossed in thought that Montgomery’s bellow caught him by surprise.

  “Charge!”

  Breaking into a run, the major led the way, waving his saber. The fieldworks weren’t more than fifty yards distant now.

  By the time John Ross got back to the river and crossed on the first available canoe, the battle on the other side—between The Ridge’s Cherokees and the Red Sticks—was well under way.

  It was a swirling, confused melee; hundreds of Indian warriors fighting singly or in small clusters, clubbing and stabbing one another among twice that many tall trees. John heard some shots ring out, as well. The Cherokees had been provided with guns by Jackson. Not enough to arm every warrior, to be sure; but they had gotten far more guns from the Americans than the Red Sticks had been able to obtain from the British and Spanish enclaves down on the coast.

  But there weren’t that many shots, for this size of a battle. Even someone as inexperienced in fighting as John Ross could tell as much. He wasn’t surprised, though, now that he saw the terrain. The fight between Cherokees and Creeks on the southern end of the peninsula was simply too close up, too entangled in forest and brush. By the time a man could see his opponent, his gun usually wouldn’t be any more use than a large and clumsy club. That being so, why not use a real war club from the outset?

  John, on the other hand, was no more proficient with traditional Cherokee weapons than he was with the Cherokee language. His loyalties to his nation were clear, but the truth was that he was far more comfortable with the white man’s ways of doing most things.

  So, like any young white man would have done in his first battle, Lieutenant John Ross drew his pistol and charged forward. He would have preferred a rifle, but proper officers didn’t carry such.

  Less than fifteen seconds later, John was glad he’d been armed with only a pistol. A Red Stick came around a tree, screaming out a war cry, and tried to brain him with his war club. John barely had time to throw up his arm and block the blow. Fortunately, his forearm intercepted the club well down the shaft, or he would have had a broken arm instead of just a badly bruised one.

  The Red Stick drew the club back for another blow. He was a terrifying sight, in that moment. His mouth was open in a rictus of fury, and his painted face made him look like a demon.

  John never knew, then or later, whether he pulled the trigger of his pistol out of fear or rage, or just pure reflex. Probably all at the same time, he concluded.

  He wasn’t even aware that the gun had gone off—the sound of it was overwhelmed by the chorus of war cries and the confusion of the moment. Then he saw the Red Stick’s left leg flung aside and a spray of blood erupt from his thigh. The warrior’s strike missed him by a good foot, and the warrior himself staggered for two paces before collapsing.

  But to John’s dismay he rose again, almost instantly, screaming another war cry. The .62-caliber bullet would have shattered the bone, had it struck the leg squarely. But it had only inflicted a flesh wound. A bad one, to be sure—the man would eventually bleed to death if he didn’t tie up his leg—but not bad enough to stop him.

  John stepped back, wondering what to do. Even against a half-crippled opponent, his pistol with its twelve-inch barrel was a poor match against a real war club, especially when the club was being wielded by a religious fanatic. What was worse, he certainly didn’t have time to reload.

  The Red Stick lurched toward him, still screaming. The smartest thing for John to do was simply to run away, of course. Fanatic or not, the Creek would have no chance of catching him, not with that bad a leg wound. Or by the time he did, at any rate, John would have been able to reload.

  But John couldn’t stomach the thought of being seen as a coward. So, he braced himself, took a firm grip on the pistol butt, and decided he’d try to deflect the coming blow—

  Then another Cherokee came around the same tree, as silent as a ghost, and shattered the Red Stick’s skull with a single blow. From the amount of blood and hair and gore that was already covering his ball-headed war club, this wasn’t the first brain he’d spilled that day. The warrior paused to stare at John.

  “Stupid,” the Cherokee growled in English. “Why didn’t you just run away?”

  The newcomer was no older than John himself. He glanced around quickly to make sure there were no other enemies in the immediate vicinity, and then grinned at him. “Stupid will make you dead,” he continued, but he said it quite cheerfully now. “I’m James Rogers. You?”

  “John Ross.”

  He’d never met Rogers, but he’d heard of him. He was one of the sons of Captain John Rogers, the Scottish sometime-adventurer and sometime-adviser for John Jolly’s chiefdom. The sons were said to be close friends, in fact, of the American ensign Houston whom The Ridge had found so interesting.

  Rogers grin widened still further. “You’re John Ross?” He switched to Cherokee, in which he proved to be quite a bit more fluent than John himself. “From the way you look and the uniform you’re wearing, I thought you were an American. The John Ross, from Ross Landing? The same one who made a fortune swapping stuff with the Americans down on the river by Chatanuga?”

  In keeping with the language, Rogers used the Cherokee name for Lookout Mountain.

  John nodded.

  “In that case,” Rogers jibed, switching back to English, “you’ve got no excuse. I’m only half Scot. You’re supposed to be much smarter than me.”

  Ross grinned back. “That’s only if you believe what the Scots say.”

  Rogers pointed at John’s pistol with his gruesome club. “Better reload that thing now. This fight is turning into a mess.”

  Trying to keep his hands from shaking, John did as Rogers suggested. “I’m looking for The Ridge,” he told Rogers. “I’ve got to warn him that Coffee has all his men lined up on the river, ready to shoot anyone who tries to cross back over. That means Creeks, not us, of course, but . . .”

  Rogers barked a laugh. John grimaced.

  “Exactly. So I need to find—”

  “It doesn’t matter. The Ridge has no intention of retreating, believe me. We’ll stay here until it’s done.” Rogers waved his club in a little half circle. “As for where he is, who knows? Best advice I can give you is just to follow the screaming. Wherever it’s loudest, you’ll probably find The Ridge. He does love that sword the Americans gave him.”

  Rogers eyed the pistol. “You reload pretty well, I’ll give you that. So if you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay with you. I’ll handle any Red Sticks who make it past your deadly gunfire.”

  “That probably means most of them,” John a
dmitted.

  “Probably,” Rogers agreed amiably. “But ‘most’ is still better than ‘all.’ ”

  They encountered two more Red Sticks before they finally found The Ridge. Ross fired twice, missing both times. Rogers did all the killing, although Ross had one of the men grappled by the legs before James brained him.

  “You’ll make a good diplomat, people say,” Rogers commented idly, as they moved through the trees.

  John hoped he was right. He’d certainly never be famous as a warrior.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sam ran pretty well for a man of his size, but he couldn’t match Montgomery.

  The major was a big man himself, as tall as Sam if not as heavily built, but he just seemed to bound through the hail of arrows and bullets now being fired at the oncoming Thirty-ninth by the Red Sticks forted up behind their barricade.

  Sam took his lead and example from Montgomery, not knowing what else to do. There was something bizarre about the whole experience. It just didn’t seem reasonable for a man to race through deadly missiles with less thought and concern than he’d give so many raindrops in a shower.

  It wasn’t that Sam was scared, really, although by all rights he should have been frightened out of his wits. This was easily the most dangerous thing he’d ever done in his life, and he wasn’t a cautious man.

  He’d been even less cautious as a teenager. Plenty of his Tennessee townsmen in Maryville had thought the sixteen-year-old boy had been a lunatic to run away from home and travel through sixty miles of wilderness to live with savage Indians for three years. But it had seemed a reasonable proposition to Sam, at the time, compared to working on his mother’s farm or as a clerk in his brother’s general store. Still did, for that matter. Clerking wasn’t what it was cracked up to be, and farming was worse yet.

  So, he’d enlisted and given his oath, even pressed for a commission as an officer. The government having carried out its part of the bargain, Sam was now obliged to make good on his end of the deal. And if that involved charging a log wall armed with nothing more than a sword and a pistol, well, so be it. The Red Sticks pelting him with arrows and bullets were just . . .

  Irrelevant, he decided. Sam, who’d memorized two-thirds of the poem, conjured up something from Alexander Pope’s marvelous translation of the Iliad to steady himself.

  But know, whatever fate I am to try

  By no dishonest wound shall Hector die;

  I shall not fall a fugitive at least,

  My soul shall bravely issue from my breast.

  When Montgomery reached the wall he was ten feet ahead of Sam. The major clambered up the log fortifications using only his left hand, still waving his saber in the right.

  He shouted something. Sam thought it was Follow me! but he wasn’t sure. Between the gunfire and the screams of the Red Sticks on the other side of the barricade, he couldn’t hear himself think.

  Not that there was any thinking to be done, really. It all seemed very simple. Climb the wall, get on the other side, do your best to beat down your enemies before they did the same to you.

  Montgomery reached the top of the wall and dropped into a crouch, ready to leap across.

  Then he shouted again. It was a wordless cry, this time, nothing more than a dying reflex as lungs emptied for the last time. Sam was sure of that. He could see the blood and brains erupting from a bullet that passed right through Montgomery’s head.

  The major fell back to the ground, his body passing Sam as he clambered up the wall.

  “Follow me!” Sam shouted. Pretty damn good and loud, too, he thought. But he didn’t try to wave the sword he carried in his hand. He’d save that for when he reached the top.

  Finally he was at the top of the wall. It had seemed to take forever. Since Montgomery’s crouch hadn’t done much good for him, Sam decided to emulate what he imagined an Achaean would have done. Achilles, anyway, if not Odysseus.

  He started to rise. Started to raise his sword, ready to wave it about now and shout Follow me! again. The painted faces of the Red Stick warriors staring up at him from the ground below were just a colorful blur in his mind.

  He never even saw the arrow coming.

  Fortunately, his foot slipped just as he started to stand, and what would have been a heroic posture turned into an ungainly sprawl. Fortunately, because had he kept his footing, that arrow would have plunged deep into his groin. As it was, the missile simply sliced a gash along the outside of his thigh before caroming off to the side.

  It didn’t even hurt. Sam realized he’d been wounded only when he spotted the blood soaking his trouser leg.

  But he just shrugged it off. He was a big man, there was a lot of meat and muscle there, and the wound wasn’t spouting the way it would if an artery had been severed. It was, quite literally, nothing but a flesh wound.

  Besides, Sam had far more pressing concerns. Sprawled across the wall the way he was, his head was now within reach of the enemy—and, sure enough, a Red Stick was trying to brain him with an atassa.

  Frantically, Sam brought up the sword. By sheer good luck more than any conscious intent, the blade intercepted the haft of the club. There wasn’t enough power in that awkward parry to do more than deflect the club, but deflected it was. Off balance, the Red Stick stumbled past.

  Seeing nothing else to do, Sam threw himself off the wall and landed on his hands and knees on the enemy side of the barricade. Instantly, he came to his feet, feeling a rush of relief greater than anything he’d ever felt in his life. Whatever happened now, at least he’d be standing up to face it.

  What was happening now was that the same Red Stick was trying to brain him again. For the first time since the battle began, Sam got angry.

  That bastard was trying to kill him!

  Stupid bastard, too. Most white men didn’t really know how to handle an Indian war club up close. Guns and knives were a white man’s weapons. But Sam had been trained in wrestling and hand-to-hand fighting by his Cherokee friends John and James Rogers. James, in particular, was a veritable wizard with a war club.

  His reflexes took over. A sword wasn’t quite as handy as a war club, but close enough. Sam parried the strike and returned the favor.

  Then . . .

  He discovered that a sword had both an advantage and a disadvantage over a war club.

  The advantage was that it had a blade.

  The disadvantage was that it had a blade.

  Sam was strong, even for his size. He’d brained the Red Stick, sure enough. And now he had a sword stuck in the man’s skull.

  No time to work it loose, either. Two more Red Sticks were upon him, and still more were aiming their bows his way.

  There was nothing he could do about the arrows that would be coming. He left the sword where it was, drew his pistol, and fired it at point-blank range into the chest of one of the two Red Sticks. Then, threw the pistol into the face of the other and grappled with him.

  A good hip roll and the warrior was slammed into the ground with enough force to wind him and jar the war club out of his hand. Sam dove for it, eager to have a usable weapon. He didn’t even notice that the headlong plunge took him out of the path of three arrows that sank into the wooden barricade behind.

  He came up with the atassa just in time to see dozens of Thirty-ninth Infantry soldiers pouring over the wall. With their blue coats, they looked like a wave crashing over a too-flimsy dike.

  The Red Sticks at the wall reeled back from the assault. Sam charged forward to place himself once again at the lead.

  “Follow me!” he bellowed again, waving the war club.

  Even at the time, he thought it was a silly war cry. He had no idea where he was leading them, after all. It just seemed like the right thing to do, under the circumstances.

  When he was excited, Andrew Jackson’s high-pitched voice was often unpleasant, even shrill. But it was a piercing voice on the battlefield, able to cut through almost any din of shouting and gunfire.

  It was
certainly doing so now. From his vantage point atop the hill, Jackson had acquired a perfect view of the storming of the barricade. There’d been a sharp pang of grief, of course, when he saw his good friend Lemuel Montgomery killed. But, as always with Jackson, grief would have to wait its turn when more pressing matters were at hand. Whatever else, the man was a fighter first and foremost. And, for him, the excitement of battle would always override anything else at the time.

  He was excited now. Excited enough, even, to lapse into profanity.

  “Goddamn me, but that’s a soldier!” He snatched off his fancy hat and waved it like a sword. “Go for ’em, lad! Give the savage bastards Jesse!”

  The men standing around him matched his grin. Most of them were artillerymen, and they were out of the battle now, so they had plenty to grin about anyway.

  Jackson jammed the hat back on his head. Then, still grinning, he turned to one of his aides.

  “Do remind me, however, not to call them savages in the presence of that fine young fellow. He might take umbrage, and I do believe he’d be dangerous in a duel.”

  The aide grunted. “Especially if he had the choice of weapons.”

  Jackson’s grin became wider than ever. Wider, and more savage than any of the men killing each other on the field below, of whatever color.

  Leading, Sam soon discovered, was pretty much indistinguishable from chasing. Once their fortifications were overrun, the Creeks seemed to have no idea what to do. Not surprising, really. It was unusual enough for Indians to have built such an impressive line of defense. Sam would have been astonished to discover that they’d prepared lines of retreat, as well.

  But they hadn’t, as he expected. The Creeks reminded him of the Icelandic clansmen he’d read about in Sturluson’s stories, based on ancient Icelandic sagas. Endless clan feuds which produced a race of hardy, resourceful, and ferocious warriors.