And so she had had her child with no knowledge of her husband’s whereabouts. And lying in bed afterward with the infant at her breast, a wistful smile making her look even more than usual like an angel, she said, “Whatever shall we do, I wonder, Mama, for a nursery?”
“Well, I suppose … I suppose ye might have Billy’s room for the while.”
For William had gone off to war again, this time as an ensign in the Regular Army. Ohio’s Governor General Arthur St. Clair, one of George Washington’s old Revolutionary generals, had been appointed to raise a large army and proceed into the northern Ohio lands to wipe out once and for all Little Turtle’s Wabash Confederacy. They had marched out of Cincinnati earlier in the fall, heading north, with orders to build a series of forts as they penetrated the Indian country toward the Wabash headwaters. All Kentucky had been awaiting news of the expedition. General St. Clair was a brave man, and had proven himself very able during the Revolution. Surely, it was thought, he would not make the same mistakes General Harmar had made the year before. Surely Little Turtle and his alliance of tribes could not defeat the Army of the United States two years in a row.
But just as a matter of custom, the Clark family prayed every night for the safety of William.
A LETTER CAME FROM DR. JOHN BROWN.
Hands trembling, George opened it. His parents watched.
Alas, it said. The very patent and monopoly that George had been seeking had just recently been awarded to a Maryland gentleman named James Rumsey, for his model of a pole-driven mechanical boat.
George lowered the paper, and let it fall to the floor. His face was pale. Without a word, he turned from the library and went down the hall to his own room. He locked the door. He went to his desk and scooped up his stack of boat papers, then went to the fireplace and heaved them straight into the flames.
“Pole-driven,” he murmured. “That’ll never even work!”
Then he took the dusty jug down from the mantel. He wrenched the cork out and threw it in after the burning papers.
GEORGE WAS STILL ROARING DRUNK TWO DAYS LATER WHEN the news rolled down the valley that the Army of the United States had been all but obliterated by Little Turtle’s Confederacy. Governor General St. Clair had led his army into a battle as disastrous as Braddock’s awful defeat thirty-six years before.
On the headwaters of the Wabash River, 632 men and officers had been killed, 200 camp followers slaughtered, and nearly every one of the survivors, some 300 of them, had been wounded. The retreat had been nothing less than a disgraceful stampede. Even in the great battles of the Revolution, between armies numbering in tens of thousands, never had so many American soldiers died in a single engagement.
And of the enemy, Little Turtle’s tribes, it appeared that less than a hundred—perhaps as few as fifty or sixty—had been killed!
THE APPALLING NEWS OF THE DISASTER ROLLED THROUGH the new nation. President Washington had asked for a Congressional investigation, in hopes that his old friend General St. Clair might be exonerated. Newspapers were printed with 39 black coffins in rows across the top, each labeled with the name of a slain officer. The Clarks’ only solace was that William’s was not among them. He had not been in the battle. He was now at Fort Washington, serving as an acting lieutenant now that the army had such a sudden shortage of officers.
John and Ann Rogers Clark now sat alone in the library at Mulberry Hill, reading from such a newspaper. George was not here, nor had he been for days. On first news of the disaster, he had ridden away, tipsy and tight-lipped, into a snow flurry. And yesterday John Clark, entering the public house on some business, had heard George’s voice issuing loudly on the lack of discipline in the army and the stupidity of Eastern generals. George’s voice had sounded so full of drunken inflection that John Clark had just turned, flushing, and gone back into the street.
And now here he sat with his wife, in the library of the big, nearly empty house, in this land they had expected to be such a paradise, reading aloud. Fanny was at home, but she was still upstairs, lying in after her childbirth, and John Clark had not wanted her to be exposed to too much news of the catastrophe.
And so it was just Ann, his wife, by the fire near him, working on needlepoint with her eyes cast down, as he read aloud from the newspaper a long funeral elegy written in verse. His voice quavered with emotion as he neared the end:
“If great JEHOVAH takes the shield
And guards us round about
No Indian will his tomax wield,
Nor arrow dare to shoot.…
“Let’s not forget the soldiers brave,
Who fell with Indian ax,
Who scorned to flinch their lives to save,
Nor on them turn’d their backs.…”
“I thought,” Ann Rogers Clark interrupted, not looking up from her needlepoint, “that most of the army threw down their guns and ran.”
“Please, Annie, this is an elegy for them.” And he read on:
“Nine hundred hardiest of our Sons,
Some in their early prime,
Have fell a victim to their rage,
And are cut off from time.…
“Our country calls us far and near,
Columbia’s sons awake,
For helmet, buckler and our spear,
Th’ LORD’s own arm we’ll take.
“With conq’ring might he will us shield,
And INDIANS all destroy,
He’ll help us thus to win the field,
And slay those that annoy!”
The paper rustled as he laid it in his lap; and he sighed and looked into the licking yellow flames at the gleaming brass andirons. Then he sighed again. “How heavy on the heart this is,” he said. “D’ye remember how like this we felt when the news came down o’ Braddock’s Disaster?”
“I recall it,” she said. “That was hard news too. But at least one didn’t have to suffer as well an elegy writ so bad. Why, that’s worse than what Johnny, rest his soul, used to write when he was in love!” She looked up and saw her husband looking at her with mouth agape.
“Annie,” he said, “sometimes meseems I should pray for your irreverent soul.”
She was quiet, eyes downcast to her needlework for awhile, the fire whispering and fluttering in the hearth. Then she said:
“Pray instead, if you’re going to pray, that President Washington finds someone other than a fool to control the Indians. Or soon we’ll all be dead.” She cleared her throat. “If he had the sense he’s said to have, he’d give our George the task.”
Nay, John Clark wanted to tell her, remembering with shame the scene of yesterday, George is fit only to bellow and reek in a pub house.
But of course he could not bear to tell her that.
ON JUNE 1, 1792, A PLEASANT, BALMY FRIDAY, THE JUBILANT news swept through Louisville that Kentucky had been admitted into the Union as the fifteenth State. Guns were fired into the air, cannon boomed at the fort, and people were running and shouting in the streets.
All this uproar barely penetrated into the fuming, whirling senses of the Father and Protector of Kentucky, where he slumped in a chair in a dark corner of the public house. A burst of gunfire and a chorus of shouting just outside the tavern door stirred him for a moment. He saw men moving across a field in front of him, saw powder smoke, saw Indians coming at a run.
“Master Lovell,” he muttered. “Lay on that drum. Stan’ your groun’, boys.”
And then his arms slid forward across the table, knocking glasses over, and his head fell forward to rest on his arms. And he whispered against the sour-wet wood of the tabletop:
“Trees.”
28
MULBERRY HILL
January, 1793
THE LETTER FROM VIRGINIA WAS IN GEORGE ROGERS’ HANDWRITING, and Ann Rogers Clark noticed sadly as she broke the seal that her brother’s script was shaky, just a bit. He had been hale and solid the last time she had seen him, and she had ever since pictured him that way, but of course
some eight years had passed since then and he was beyond seventy now. We’re old, she thought.
That whispering undercurrent of mortality was still in her soul when she unfolded the letter and read that her youngest sister, Rachel Rogers Robertson, had passed away late the last year, in the same bed in the old parsonage where Donald had died so peacefully at the end of the war.
John Clark saw the tears in his wife’s eyes, saw her figure slump a little, and took her hand.
“Rachel’s gone,” she said. “Oh, my, John! And she was the baby of the family.”
It meant to Ann Rogers Clark that she might expect more such letters now. For once one’s gone, the others will begin to go.
John Clark had his arm around her now. She turned her face to him, and though she was blinking and her chin was crumpling, she looked angry, defiant. He understood that she was not angry at him but at the notion of mortality. And she said:
“I warn you, John. Y’d better not go before I do.” But then she remembered another thought she had had once about this, sometime long ago: when she had wondered what John would ever do without her if she went first. “I mean,” she said. “Oh, I don’t know, John. Whatever are we going to do, you and me?”
WILLIAM STOOD OUTSIDE HIS TENT ON THE RISE AND watched the troops being drilled down by the creek. One thing was certain: lack of discipline would never be the big problem in this new army of Mad Anthony Wayne.
A whole battalion of foot troops, companies on line, were rushing across a meadow down toward the creek, at a fast march, almost a trot, bayonets fixed and pointed at an imaginary enemy, their captains bellowing commands at them. At the moment they reached the bank of the creek, a command went along the line for them to flank to the right, and the whole line shifted simultaneously and started upstream. Another right flank was ordered, and now they were charging back up the slope. It was marvelous parade-ground precision, like magic to behold, all those people functioning as if by a common will. How effective it would be against concealed Indians in the woods was another matter, in William’s mind, but one thing certain was that they surely did obey.
William had a dreadful fear that Mad Anthony Wayne, being an Eastern field officer, was doomed to make the same mistakes that had ruined Braddock and then Harmar and St. Clair. Wayne believed in the bayonet, the direct charge with cold steel, fully erect and in perfect ranks. Wayne expected his men to be as brave and tireless and direct as he was, which was a great deal. Though he was old and portly and arthritic, he was still tough and bristly as briar. He was also a man of gruff good humor, and showy. He loved elegant uniforms, and insisted that his Legions, even while training and fort-building in the wilderness, look as if they were on parade. The battalion of blue-clad men charging across that meadow down there in their straight lines might be pouring sweat and covered with burrs, but from here they looked as smart and colorful as an army of toy soldiers on a tabletop.
York came up with a tray and tea service for William, and stood beside him, watching the lines of blue and white move this way and that on the meadow, and he was smiling, working his fleshy lips wryly, as if enjoying the sight of so many white men being ordered around. “They sure purty, eh, Mast’ Billy?”
“Sure pretty. Now you watch this, York, what happens next, if you want a laugh.”
Down there another right flank was commanded, then another, and once again the battalion was moving swiftly down toward the creek with their bayonets flashing. William’s tentmate, an amiable youth named Lieutenant Towles, now came alongside William and York to watch, shaking his head and grinning. He too knew what was next. “There they go,” he said.
This time when the line of soldiers reached the bank of the creek, they were given no command. And so the whole battalion, erupting with a roar that was a combination of battle cry and outburst of chagrin, plunged into the cold, mucky stream, their crisp blue uniforms sinking into brown water.
They splashed and slogged and hollered but stayed on line. And at midstream they were ordered to halt at attention and to present arms. They stood that way in midstream, looking ridiculous. York’s eyes were bugging and his mouth hung slack. Then his great belly began to quake with a voiceless laughter. “Oh, laws,” he exclaimed, “tha’s pitiful!” Probably he was thinking about all those wet clothes and muddy shoes someone would have to clean. “Why they do that faw, Mast’ Billy?” It was York’s first visit to the camp, and he had never seen such things back in the fort, where he kept William’s quarters.
“So they’ll do what they’re told, no matter what,” William said. He turned and took a cup and nodded for Towles to have one. And he said to York, “Maybe I should ha’ trained you like that. You’d maybe not be so slow and dilatory sometimes. Y’old lazy scallywag.”
“Hmhm,” York chuckled. “Anything I c’n do faw you gen’men, right this minute?”
“Y’might spoon me some molasses. This tea tastes like tanbark.” He winked at York and grinned. Maybe he had always been too easy on him, but he couldn’t help it. The rascal was so damned droll and likeable that he was worth it. He seemed to have selected the role of buffoon.
That night William sat in the tent at his field table while Lieutenant Towles slept, and wrote in his diary by the light of a bear’s-oil lamp. There was always plenty of bear oil in this army, as General Wayne encouraged his men to spend their spare time hunting bears. He believed it improved their character and whetted the kinds of skills they would need when they met Little Turtle. There was a standing rumor in camp that a bear-hunter would get a double ration of whiskey if his bear was dead of bayonet wounds. So far no one had tested that, and it was suspected of being a joke.
William wrote of such things in his diary, which he was keeping not because he wanted to keep a diary, but because Sister Fanny had asked him to.
“Why?” he had asked with a groan. “I don’t like to write diaries.”
“Because,” she had said, “one day you’ll be as great and renowned as George is, and I wouldn’t want you to be caught as he is now, with a memoir to write and no diaries to go by.”
“Oh, phshhhew!” he had retorted. “That’s a crock o’ butter if ever there was one!”
“Well, then, Mister Reluctant and Modest Sir,” she had said with a saucy toss of her pretty head, “for my amusement, then. Is that reason enough, I being your favorite and most beloved sister?”
“Frankly, no,” he had replied, but actually it was, and so he had been keeping the diary for her during his tours of duty, and actually enjoying it sometimes. She would write letters to him, gushing about how much she had enjoyed his clear and witty descriptions of so and so, and his anecdotes of this or that, in his latest batch of entries, and how she was keeping them for posterity. And after each such letter, he would try even harder to be witty and wise in his journal. As her husband was always away, and William was always in some training bivouac without much to do, their correspondences grew longer and more frequent. And little by little, one of her true intentions was coming true: her unschooled brother, whose education she had secretly taken upon herself, was learning to handle the written language. His handwriting had improved, from a scrawl at first resembling the blood-track of a mortally wounded centipede, to a very handsome cursive script. And though he still spelled the same word twice the same way only by coincidence, he was learning to express even abstract ideas and complex emotions by the written word.
The most intricate thing William was called upon to express in his journal-writings was his ambivalent feelings toward his commanding officer, General James Wilkinson.
At first William had hated being near him, remembering all the old suspicions about Wilkinson’s rise and George’s fall, all those unproven hints that somehow Wilkinson had been the one who had destroyed George’s reputation in the Virginia capital. People had used to say, back in those days, that James Wilkinson’s ambition could be seen darting through all the shadows. Wilkinson’s tenure as Indian Commissioner, after George had been fo
rced out, had produced absolutely nothing of note, but somehow, after St. Clair’s defeat, Wilkinson had managed to get himself appointed commander of the Western forts.
But then while serving under Wilkinson’s command, William had, little by little, come to like the charming, worldly-wise Marylander, to want not to suspect him, and simply to enjoy the benefits of knowing him. After all, Wilkinson was such an able man, a talented man, a brave officer; surely he was not that mean. And if he had actually done so much covert evil to George, why had he befriended William so earnestly and favored him among his subordinates?
It was plain that Wilkinson was a masterful underminer. He was always making subtle mockeries of his own commander, General Wayne. He referred to him in private as Mars, or sometimes as Big Turtle, alluding to his ponderous and thoroughgoing methods. Wilkinson liked to ply his officers with good liquor, which he always seemed able to procure from somewhere, and when they were in a merry mood he would cultivate snide jokes about “that cumbrous body,” General Wayne. William had hated himself for taking part in such merriment, but it was easy to do because he agreed in principle with Wilkinson’s criticisms. Wayne really did seem to be set upon a course of orthodox maneuvering that would once again play into the Indians’ hands.