To prepare for a siege, George led a heavily armed company of two dozen riders, with pack horses, on a week-long sweep through the abandoned settlements, to forage corn and anything else edible that might have been left behind, as well as flax and hemp. They rode hard and fast through the cold and rainy weather, and found that there was very little the Indians had not looted already. Indian signs were everywhere among the bleak and sodden hills and valleys.
The riders got back to Harrod’s Town on the eighteenth of March. They were scarcely inside the gates before the Shawnee horde rushed the fort from all sides.
They came howling and yipping like wolves out of the woods and across the clearing, sprinting toward the palisades, diving behind stumps for cover, peppering the stockade walls with musketballs, sprinting and diving again. They were using covering fire in an intelligent way to get across the open ground and close to the fort, and were shooting as if they had unlimited ammunition. George barely had time to form a defense.
Inside the compound was pandemonium. Panicky livestock milled in the mud and manure, getting in the way of the riflemen. George, racing from one blockhouse to another, skidded on one steaming-fresh cowpat and almost fell, then was nearly bowled over by a squealing, zigzagging sow. “Harrod!” he bellowed. “Get these infernal animals penned up! I can’t fight Indians and livestock too!” Harrod dispatched a herd of boys to herd the animals, and for a few more minutes, until they had accomplished the roundup, the commotion was twice as bad: the whack-whack of lead hitting the logs, the ceaseless yipping and gunfire from the Indians outside, the squealing and lowing and neighing of animals and shouting of riflemen and the yelping and wailing of women and children, the shrieking of terrified babies from inside the cabins, the whisper of Indian bullets overhead, the fluttering rush of fire arrows arcing toward the fort, the cracking thuds of the defenders’ rifles, the dense, eye-stinging smoke of gunpowder and burning oak.
The defenders were shooting well, though; George had organized them into squads that took turns firing from the portholes and reloading, while women hurried from hearthside to gun ports, fetching hot lead in skillets, and the Shawnees were unable to reach the walls yet through such steady and accurate fire.
The battle had held this way for about an hour, under a fast-moving cover of darkening clouds, when a stinging, drenching downpour of cold rain suddenly came hissing across the clearing. It extinguished a stubborn roof fire. The Indians paused where they lay, and their firing slacked off. In the distance near the edge of the woods, George saw a chief on a black horse riding the periphery, yelling in a voice powerful and clear even at this distance of two hundred rain-filtered yards, calling back his warriors. That, George was sure, was Black Fish—obviously a foe to be reckoned with.
And after another five minutes there was not a live Indian within sight of Harrod’s Town. The Shawnees in withdrawing had gotten all their wounded away.
The only white casualty of the fray was a married man, Hugh Wilson, who left the fort too soon after the battle. He was killed and scalped a half-mile from the stockade when he went out before nightfall to scrounge for Indian souvenirs.
THE BITTER RAIN THAT HAD CURTAILED BLACK FISH’S ATTACK continued for ten days, becoming as much a curse as it had been a blessing. The ground inside the palisades was a chilly, stinking, churned, knee-deep soup of mud and animal waste and human excrement. It was constantly being tracked into the buildings. There was a damp chill in every room, firewood being wet and scarce, and everyone was sniffling and shivering. Many of the children lay all day wrapped in damp bedding, feverish and chilling by turns, and everyone was weak from dysentery brought on by bad drinking water, musty corn, and tainted, half-cooked pork fat. Even such a crack hunter as Butler would come in empty-handed most days; Black Fish’s braves, still roaming the vicinity of Boonesboro and Harrod’s Town, were killing whatever game had not been driven out by flooding rivers.
“What the hells this?” Jim Harrod asked one morning as his cook brought breakfast to him and George.
“Th’ usual, sir,” said the cook, setting down plates of something gray-brown, flat, and steaming, with grease congealing around the edges.
“Which ‘usual’ is it,” Harrod grumbled, scowling at it, “scorched cow chips or fried starch?”
Killing time usefully during the rainy days, some of the men went around the outside of the stockage prying Indian musketballs out of the logs. They collected nearly two hundred pounds of lead, which they melted down to make balls for their own rifles.
The rain stopped finally, and the temperatures dropped below freezing. As the river fell and the ground hardened, George detailed his riflemen into watches and had them gazing off the walls constantly for the return of the Shawnees.
It was the twenty-eighth of March when they came, and their arrival was so stealthy that they surprised several hunters outside the fort.
“They’re here,” gasped one of the survivors. “They scalped Pendergreet. I saw ’em carry Pete Flinn off still kickin’.”
And now once again the disciplined warriors of Black Fish were advancing on Harrod’s Town under a hail of musket fire. The defenders, now reduced by disease and wounds to sixty-four men and boys, were barely managing to keep them off the walls. Many of the riflemen, their vision and reflexes dulled by disease and fatigue and shakes, were not the shooters they had been ten days before. And Black Fish, now more familiar with the ground, had improved his tactics. One side of the fort would be sprayed by musketballs fired from good cover, and while the riflemen behind that wall were flinching against whistling lead and flying splinters, half a dozen braves would come at a crouching run to stumps or defilades a few feet closer to that wall. Then another quarter of the fort would absorb a fusillade and the warriors would advance there. This Black Fish was a good general indeed, and George studied him admiringly through a spyglass as he rode to and fro just a little beyond range of accurate fire. George was growing desperate. No new mode of defense came to mind. He shuddered. The temperature seemed to be dropping by the minute, and the riflemen’s firing and loading was being hampered by numb fingers and shivering limbs. It seemed to be near zero.
George had an idea then, while watching Black Fish race from one distant quarter to another: it’s him that’s making ’em so damned effective; it’s him we ought to put out of the fight. He remembered Jonathan’s story about Charles Town, how the greatest part of the artillery had been concentrated on Admiral Parker’s ship. If we can see that Indian, he thought, might be we could hit him. Like to blow his damned pants off. He called together five of his best marksmen.
“Boys, there’s fifty quid out o’ my own pocket for the man that shoots that Black Fish off that black horse yonder. And,” he added, now pouring an extra long powder charge down the barrel of his own rifle, “if I’m the one gets ’im, y’each owe me ten. That fair?” He had kept his voice down, so that the rest of the shooters wouldn’t get greedy and forget to keep shooting at the nearby attackers. His marksmen grinned and nodded—though he knew probably not a one of them had ten pounds to his name—and began setting themselves up to concentrate on the great Shawnee. George could outshoot anyone he knew of except Simon Butler and maybe Boone, so he was fairly confident that he had a chance to claim the prize himself, unless he blew himself up with his overloaded rifle. Or unless Black Fish was protected by his Supreme Being.
He aimed about a degree over Black Fish’s head and about a horse’s length ahead of him, and squeezed the trigger. The recoil almost threw his shoulder out of its socket. He saw immediately that the shot was wasted; Black Fish at that instant had wheeled his horse and was not at the place where George had sent his bullet. While he reloaded with another long charge, three more super-loud bangs crashed over the general din of shooting.
But Black Fish apparently was becoming aware that he was a marked special target now; he bent low over his horse’s neck and began maneuvering the animal through some of the smartest dodging and sidesteppin
g George had ever seen. A lesser man, he thought, would probably just ride back into the trees.
George and his sharpshooters got off about three more supercharged shots apiece at the elusive chief, but missed, and George was about to believe that Black Fish was indeed favored by Moneto.
But it seemed the fort was too. Once again the weather intervened to save Harrod’s Town. The Shawnees were not dressed to fight in subzero temperatures, and after another hour Black Fish called them. The firing stopped. The frontiersmen stood shaking and stamping and flailing their arms for warmth, peering out over the frozen, deserted clearing, still not quite convinced that the siege was really off. The ground was rock hard now, and the cold seared nostrils and made bones ache. Men stood with their hands between their thighs or inside their coats, stood shaking, breath crystallizing, and stared out at the frosty silence.
In the afternoon scouts went out. When they came back, they verified that Black Fish was really gone from the vicinity.
That night Jim Harrod broke open a demijohn of rum and had hot grog made, allowed a pig to be killed for fresh meat, and, despite the cracking cold, made his people feel a warm gratitude for another miracle.
FIRELIGHT HAD ALWAYS BEEN GEORGE’S SPECIAL CONFIDANT. While other men slept, worn out by events, he would sit up, as he did now, on a bench with a blanket over his shoulders, and look into the shifting orange coals, and ponder, with the fireglow, on what those events must mean in the larger picture. It was too easy to let one’s mind be hemmed in by the walls of a stockade or the edge of a clearing or the end of a day. It was such a temptation to shut one’s eyes and go to sleep thinking only of tomorrow’s food and tomorrow’s security. It was so natural, out here in the wilderness, to think nothing of that distant struggle in the East.
But by firelight George would piece together things that he had learned from others. Through Joe Bowman’s angry words two years ago he had learned to suspect Lord Dunmore’s treaty-making. Through Bill Croghan’s words he had come to understand the tenuous cohesion of interests shared by Britain with the Iroquois and Algonquian chiefs. And through the eyes and ears of such far-ranging hunters as Boone and Butler, he had received hundreds of minute bits of western information that must fit somewhere into a large picture of a general truth, out there beyond the visible horizons: a continental picture. These scouts would see or hear something on the trail, something that would hint at the origins and purposes of the warriors and the white agents who flitted across the long wild distances of the territory north and west of the Ohio, the Northwest Territory: that vastness Virginia believed to be Virginia’s, but which England had, since the end of the French and Indian War, considered an extension of British Canada.
And George, by listening to all talking men, had been gathering puzzle-pieces to fit together in his mind during these silent and solitary vigils over the coals of a hearth while other men slept.
Two large and general truths had become evident to him. The first was that the Colonies’ western front was his own Kentuck, and that it was more important to the British than most of the Revolutionary leaders dreamed it was. Kentuck extended like a wedge between the powerful Indian nations north of the Ohio—the Shawnees and Chippewas, the Delawares and Miamis—and those south of the Cumberland and Tennessee—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Creeks. As long as Kentuck was occupied by Virginians and defended by their little forts, it would be an obstacle to the designs of the British. It could guard those great water-roads, the Ohio and Mississippi. It could provide meat and grain and timber, as well as rear-guard protection, for the East.
If, on the other hand, the British and Indians could drive the Virginians out of this stronghold—as they had almost done already in these first grim months of 1777—then all the tribes, northern and southern, could be turned loose unhindered on the inner frontiers. Fort Pitt would fall. Wheeling. Point Pleasant. Red Stone Fort. The Greenbrier settlements. It was plain that this was Britain’s whole design on the West, and had been for a long time.
Little by little, he had been able to piece together a picture of Britain’s western force. It centered at Detroit, where the British lieutenant-governor, a Scottish gentleman named General Henry Hamilton, maintained his headquarters and purveyed English gifts and weapons for his Indian allies. From Detroit it stretched northwestward to Michillimackinac, and southwestward to remote forts like Post Miami on the Maumee, Fort Sackville at Vincennes in the Wabash Valley, and Cahokia and Kaskaskia on the Mississippi. In all these places, Governor Hamilton had Indian agents at work supplying and arousing the Indians to attack the Colonies’ western frontiers.
Evidence was that Governor Hamilton was treating with an ever-widening circle of tribes: Miamis, Weas, Piankeshaws, Pottawatomies, Sacs, Foxes, and even the Sioux beyond the Mississippi. Hamilton was responsible for an enormous extent of wilderness, but he was apparently a shrewd and far-seeing enemy, and was making the most of his responsibility by letting Indians do his fighting and terrorism for him.
I wonder, George thought suddenly, whether he’s sitting up right now by his hearth fire in Detroit, thinking as I am about these causes, these lands, these tribes, these distances.
He suddenly felt an intense personal interest in a man who, heretofore, had been only a name. I wonder what he looks like, George thought. I wonder how he thinks. That man in particular is my one personal enemy.
Across these hundreds of miles of night and wilderness now George sensed that other brain, the brain of a British gentleman officer who was his own tactical opponent, and suddenly he had a strange and intriguing thought, unlike any thought he had ever entertained: that the Northwest Territory, that vast region of forest and prairie bounded by the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes, was a chessboard, and he was sitting on one side of it and Governor Hamilton was sitting on the other. The thought was so odd and exciting that he squirmed with restlessness, and got up to put another log on the dying fire. As it crackled to flame, he poured a cup of rum, wondering if Hamilton might just now be having a cup of rum in a firelit room three hundred miles to the north; he filled and lit a pipe, wondering if Hamilton might just now be having a pipe of tobacco … Virginia tobacco.
It was a good and amusing fantasy, and he thought:
I have an advantage: I know he exists and I know a bit of his plan. He’s never heard of me. He doesn’t know I sit here thinking of him and guessing what he’ll do next. He doesn’t know that there’s a brain burning like an all-night lamp down here in a log fort in Kentuck.
And so he’s not ready for me. He expects nothing to come from here but more scalps. He doesn’t know of me at all. That may be my only advantage … but it is an advantage.
The rum warmed him and buzzed in his head, and it fueled these wonderful fancies like oil in a lamp. Lord but this is good at such a time as this, he thought, and poured another cup.
He was happy for a change, and full of hope. For weeks of sleepless nights he had been haunted by remorse over Cousin Joe, and that had been his cup-thinking. But now that old sense, that sense that his destiny was here this side of the mountains, was back, so strong it drove the gloom out, and he remembered one of his mother’s proverbs, the one that said, One can do whatever he doesn’t know he can’t do.
Hamilton, he thought. Hamilton thinks he’s got us boxed in. He’s largely right. It’s about all we can do to hold our place. But if this were a game of chess, I’d be thinking ahead of him. I’d figure … I’d figure on doing what he thinks we can’t.
I’d figure on going after him.
He laughed voicelessly into the fire at the audacity of such a thought. It was absurd, he knew, it was rum-headed absurd, to be sitting here a virtual prisoner in this stinking, isolated fort, surrounded and outnumbered tenfold by enemies, and thinking about an offensive. But the thought had taken root.
In no way could Hamilton expect Kentuck to make an offensive, he thought. Likely he’s a good rational British officer and figures only on rational possibilities,
not absurd ones. He’d never be prepared for what I might dream up. That’s another advantage I have, he thought.
We’ll not last long, just defending, just waiting for them to descend on us. They’ll not stop descending till we’re bled dead. But if I was to descend on them…
Like the wolf on the fold, he thought: it’s the wolf that has the day. Hamilton has been the wolf, and us the fold. But what if I was to be the wolf.
He thought of those campaigns in history that had always most excited his imagination: the bold surprises. He thought of Alexander. He thought of Hannibal, crossing the Alps. Of Spartacus, suddenly out of his chains. He thought of more recent bold strokes: Benedict Arnold showing up at Fort Ticonderoga, then at Quebec. Washington stealing across an icy river to raid Trenton last Christmas Day, that astonishing, table-turning victory, the news of which had reached the frontier only days ago. Surprises.
From Kentuck, he thought, I could reach the enemy’s posts on the Mississippi, the Wabash, with speed and ease, by water, and surprise him there.
By the Lord God! he thought, leaping up and throwing the blanket off his shoulders. He was too excited to remain sitting. His notions were swelling up; they were too grand to sit with now; he had to get up and walk them around the room. His absurd thought of an offensive was beginning to make all manner of sense now. Not only would such an offensive stop this shedding of innocents’ blood in Kentuck, it could block off Detroit’s western water route, it could capture cannon, with which Virginia could truly control the Western rivers; it would give him the power, perhaps, to neutralize the tribes by cutting off their pay and supplies. Aye, it might even solidify Virginia’s charter claim to the great, rich Northwest Territory.