“They’s no place to pass,” said the man with the pole. “It’s over their heads, sir.”
“Give me that pole, man,” George said. He scrambled into the canoe and they went out northward, probing for the bottom with the pole. It was shallow for a while. But a few hundred feet out it grew deep. Each time he brought the pole up, the waterline was as high as his neck or chin, which meant that it was indeed over the heads of most: This was a dismal discovery. It meant that the men would have to be ferried in the canoes much of the way to the sugar camp, which would use the entire day and probably also the whole night, as the vessels would have to pass so slowly through dense bushes. The loss of so much time to these starved men would be a matter of serious consequence. Damn, I’d give anything now for a day’s provision, he thought. We should have slaughtered a horse or two while we had them, instead of leaving them over there where they do us no good. Damnation! He was very displeased with his judgment now; for the first time he was beginning to wish he had never left Kaskaskia. He had the paddler return very slowly to the island, giving himself time to think. The bushes parted, and as the canoe drew near the shore he saw numbers of the men trotting down close to the water’s edge to hear what he would say. He stepped out of the canoe onto shore, looking as solemn as he felt, and as he started to tell Bowman what he had decided, he felt that every eye was on him. Forgetting to display his usual confidence, he whispered seriously to Bowman, and then realized what a mistake that was. Evidently taking it as the signal of their final despair, the whole troop became alarmed even without knowing what he had said, and began milling about, bewailing their fate.
George watched this desperate confusion growing for a short minute, and realized that he had to do something about it instantly. Whispering to the officers to follow his example, he scooped some water in his hand, poured gunpowder into it, blacked his face, gave a mighty war whoop, and marched into the water without a word of explanation. The officers followed him in. Their commotion got the attention of the troops, who stopped their lamentations, gazed at them for a moment, then fell in line one after another like a flock of sheep, following the officers into the water.
“Sing ‘Katy Cruel,’” George told his officers. They began it, the troop’s favorite marching song; it soon passed along the whole line as they marched cheerfully into the icy water.
When I first came to th’ town.
They brought me bottles plenty.
Now they have changed their tune
and bring me bottles empty!
Oh, diddle lully day
Oh, de little li-o-day!
Thro’ the woods I’ll go,
Thro’ the boggy mire;
Straightway on the road
Till I come t’ my heart’s desire.
Oh, diddle lully day
Oh, de little li-o-day …
We’ll just wade as far as we can and then start ferrying them when it gets too deep to go on, he determined. However long it takes. It’s all we can do. We’ve just run plumb out of alternatives.
George was in water that had risen to his waist when one of the flankers called out that he thought he had discovered a path in the water. George went to him, and there did indeed seem to be a sort of footpath running northward, slightly higher than the surrounding bottom, and on the presumption that it would follow the highest ground, he led the line along it.
They progressed along it for hours, seldom getting in more than waist deep. It was a laborious process, as every step of the invisible path had to be felt out by moccasined feet numb with cold. Several of the men had to be hauled into the canoes, being by now too weak from hunger or twisted with muscle cramps to go on. But by evening they had reached the half-acre of soggy ground that had been the sugar camp, a sort of elevated grove of sugar maples bearing the old scars of the tapping spiles, and here they took up their lodgings, having surmounted one more major obstacle, and joyous to have survived one more day. They now believed themselves to be within three or four miles of the town. Captain Bowman was too exhausted to write in his journal that night, but made the entry next morning.
22—Col. Clark encourages his Men which gave them great Spirits Marched on in the Water, those that were weak and faintish from so much fatigue went in the Cannoes, we came one league farther to some sugar camps, where we staid all Night—heard the Evening and Morning guns from the Fort—No provisions yet, Lord help us.
General Hamilton inspected the rebuilt section of palisade wall, grunting in satisfaction. He turned and looked about the compound of Fort Sackville in the evening light. Now here is what a British fort should look like, he thought. Not a rotten log in her now.
“Now, then, Mister LaMothe,” he said to the French officer beside him, “a worthy labor well done, eh? I take a satisfaction from the sight of all that bright new wood, don’t you?” LaMothe glanced about quickly and puffed a wordless syllable of acknowledgment out of his sharp nose. LaMothe was seldom good company; being laconic and hard-eyed, he made the hearty British officers uneasy. But he was like a quick sword, which Hamilton could use with swiftness and surety, and so the British commandant favored him and endured his reptilian personality. “Come, Captain, I think our gentlemen deserve a spot of refreshment for all this, eh?” They set off across the compound for the officer’s quarters.
Soon an amiable celebration was underway, but it was interrupted shortly by the arrival of François de Maisonville, who arrived from a scouting party on the Ohio with two Americans he and his Indians had captured. During the business of consigning the prisoners to the guardhouse, Maisonville took General Hamilton aside. “On my way up the river last night, oh, I would say, three or four leagues below the fort, I saw on the eastern shore a number of campfires among the trees. I counted fourteen all on one rise of ground. Something of a large party, I thought, but whether of an enemy or of Indians, I couldn’t tell.”
“Hm. I don’t know of any of our savages down there now. Wait. Captain LaMothe, would you hearken to this, please, and see what you make of it …”
LaMothe’s eyes flashed as he listened and he agreed that it could bear looking into.
“Would you then take Lieutenant Schieffelin and a detachment down that way and find out who’s there?”
“I’d be happy to lead you down, Captain, and show you where I saw them,” said Maisonville.
“That would be very much appreciated,” said Hamilton, “though I’m sure you must be exhausted already ….”
“My curiosity is piqued,” Maisonville replied. “And one can’t be too watchful …” He had made much of his alertness ever since that humiliating day in August when he had had to bear to Detroit the news of Colonel Clark’s invasion of the Illinois.
Twenty militiamen were armed and outfitted and, with LaMothe and Maisonville and the lieutenant riding at their head, set out from the strong new gate of the fort, went down through the village, and making a wide curve eastward to avoid the flooded lowlands, set out to find the mysterious party.
Within three hours, having wandered back and forth in the darkness trying to find a dry passage down the riverbank, they were lost. They settled down to make camp for the night, intending to continue their reconnaissance at daybreak.
“I regret having caused you this inconvenience,” Maisonville said to LaMothe as they sat on a log by their campfire drinking taffia. “I have no idea whom we’ll find, have you?”
“Madmen,” LaMothe replied, managing to smile a mocking smile without in the least raising the corners of his mouth. “Only madmen would be out in this flood. And only madmen would be out here expecting to find someone!”
Maisonville laughed uneasily and gazed into the fire. “I take it you think I was imagining those fires?”
LaMothe merely shrugged, leaned forward with his elbows on the muddy knees of his leggings, and put a glowing brand to the bowl of his clay pipe.
THE SKY WAS CLEARING, AND FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE TWO weeks of the expedition, stars were visible. Bu
t the cloudless sky also brought on a severe drop in temperature. The air which had hovered above the freezing point for so many rainy days now had an edge of stinging cold, which added to the extreme misery of Colonel Clark’s wet and starving woodsmen. The Frenchmen who had become attached to the force two days before huddled together for a few minutes, glancing about uneasily, then came to speak to George and his officers.
“Mon colonel,” said their spokesman, “permit us to doubt that even these extraordinary people of yours can survive a cold night like this and another march tomorrow without some food. M’sieur, please let us take the canoes up to the town tonight and bring back provisions.”
George hesitated, moved at first by the offer, then suddenly becoming suspicious. “Thank you for the offer,” he said. “I should dearly love to see them break this long fast. But I’m going to have to decline, because we must effect a complete surprise. No one must suspect we’re here.”
“Mais non,” protested the Frenchman. “We could bring food only from our own houses, without anyone knowing about it.”
He wanted to trust them. He wanted desperately to see his men filling themselves on the nourishment they surely would need to go the last four miles to Vincennes. It seemed a proposition so easy to execute, and to so much advantage.
“George,” hissed Bowman, “in the name of God, let ’em go do it!” His voice was quavering in the bitter cold darkness. George himself every few seconds would have an uncontrollable spasm of shivering and a feeling that his heart was going to stop. Bowman continued, pleading with him, “We could send a few of our men with ’em as a surety of their good intentions. What say you, George? These boys is like t’ perish if they don’t get het up from th’ inside!”
But something beyond rationality told George not to risk it. Providence had after all helped them each time to go a little beyond the apparent limit and miraculously kept them from being discovered, and it seemed somehow to him that they had exploited the law of averages. Even if their intentions are right, he thought, they might simply by mischance give us away. “Joseph,” he said finally, “don’t press me on it. I feel as you feel, but something’s telling me it should not be done, and so it shall not. No more on it, please, and messieurs, I thank you for your generous offer. Now let’s snug down and rest as best we can. Good night all of you.”
THOSE WHO HAD NOT SHIVERED THEMSELVES AWAKE IN THE BITING cold before sunrise were brought out of their stupor by the boom of the morning gun of Fort Sackville, which now was so close that it was loud and distinct. The men agonizingly brought themselves to their feet, literally white with the frost that had formed on them in the night. Some found their clothing frozen to the ground. Many of them were shivering visibly and constantly. Some tried to get their circulation going by pounding their arms across their chests and stamping their feet, only to find themselves exhausted by that little effort.
Had it not been for their intense suffering they might have been cheered by the sight of the morning. The whole world had a clean, sun-sparkling, crisp look, so greatly contrasted to the bleak, sodden black and gray and brown they had been seeing for so many terminable days. Now the sky was a pale blue whose quality was reflected on the frosty ground and on the skin of ice that had formed at the shores and in the still waters. It looked to George like a brave day, and he was certain it would be the day they would reach their destination.
He had them formed into ranks in the morning sunshine and braced himself to keep from shuddering. Facing them, breath condensing, he looked them over for a moment—the whole ghastly-looking parcel of them, their clothes soiled dirty gray, some having lost their shoes in the flood bottom, their faces chalk-white to blue, eye sockets purple as bruises, faces grimacing with cold, half of them trembling like aspen leaves, most sniffling and hacking, these men who had suffered so to come with him—and his affection for them was so overwhelming that for several minutes he could not speak. Each time he would open his mouth to form his words, the pronouncements would be strangled in a flood of pity and admiration. To gather himself and hide the sentimentality that must be, he felt, softening his authority, he turned his face away and looked northward in the direction of the town. Before him lay a flooded plain of some three miles in width, and visible at its far horizon was a narrow blue line of trees. The water looked blue under the bright morning sky, blue with its rim and sheets of new ice, less than an inch thick. There was not a tree or bush standing in the plain to give a handhold for a sinking man, and the bitter cold and starvation, he knew, would make this the most trying of all the difficulties they had faced. With a deep breath to steady his voice, George turned back to face the men, who were looking at the icy expanse with distrust or resignation.
“Gentlemen, listen now:
“You might be pleased with yourselves. I’ve long studied the history of wars, and I’ll tell you that there never has been a march the equal of what you’ve done this month. In times when armies were routed and fleeing for their lives, they might have endured such hardships as these. But never did anyone go through this on the way to a fight!” Some of the troops began grinning and standing straighter; a few began to weep noiselessly.
“But then,” George continued, his sight of them blurring with tears, “I reckon there never was a people of such a temper as we are.” He turned and pointed across the flooded plain. “That,” he said, “is the last obstacle between us and Fort Sackville. You see that line of woods yonder? There lies the end of your fatigues! Beyond those woods sits the object of your brave effort, boys: the Scalp-Buyer!”
Then without waiting for a response he turned and walked down into the water, followed by a loud huzzah and war whoops. The ice cracked and broke away in triangles and curving slabs, and he drew his sword to shove these pieces out of his way.
The ice water filled his shoes and leggings instantly and the cold shot up his spine like a bolt of pain. His heart fluttered and skipped and only with effort could he keep himself from whimpering aloud. But to display anything other than absolute stoicism now to these men could ruin everything. They were bearing all this because he seemed not to mind it. He knew that. They were trying to prove themselves to him; he knew that; he suspected it had become as important a drive as their patient motives of revenge.
But some of them might not be able to follow through this, George thought. The French volunteers. Some among them might not come along. George stopped and turned. About a third of the men were in the water with him now. A few of the French were hanging back.
“Captain Bowman!”
“Aye, sir!”
“Fall in at the rear with your company and have them shoot any man who refuses to march. We want no such people as that among us, do we, boys?”
“Right you are, Mister Clark!” yelled Sergeant Crump, and the rest gave a fierce cry of approbation. “Up, laddie!” Crump shouted, snatching up little Dickie Lovell and mounting him on his shoulders. “And beat that drum fer all y’re worth!”
And in a few minutes the whole line was in the water, flanked by its canoes, heading northward toward that faraway line of trees that was its final horizon.
The benumbing cold sapped the men’s vigor almost instantly, and they were only a few hundred yards out on the floodplain, thigh deep in water, before the marrow of their bones seemed to be frozen. The simple process of making their limbs work grew frighteningly difficult, not only because of exhaustion but because the nerves were not telling the mind where the feet were, or whether a knee or ankle was bent or straight, or what muscle might respond to what effort. Walking, difficult enough on mucky bottom, half-submerged, and weighted with arms and knapsacks, was reduced to a kind of gingerly, slow-motion stumbling, as if upon unfamiliar artifical limbs instead of responsive flesh and bone.
George was bewildered to find that he would have to force a leg forward, pause to determine whether the foot was planted on the bottom, then make a conscious decision to shift his weight to that dubious leg and start hauling the oth
er one up. All this while his vision telescoped back and forth, went from blinding-bright to cloudy and back to blinding, and often he saw double. This was a new and awful thing, finding his powerful and athletic body unable to obey the commands of his will. George kept some fifteen or twenty of the biggest and strongest near him, those who most likely would have the strength to do his bidding in emergencies; and when the column was about halfway to its destination he began to feel himself sensibly failing, saw those strong men around him lurching along, gasping, moaning, and blowing, he was overcome with an almost panicky worry for the weaker men. There was nothing, not a tree or a bush, for them to cling to if their strength failed them, and he feared the weaker ones, if not the stronger too, might cramp up, collapse, and drown. Each time he looked back and saw them floundering along, their eyes wide with fright and strain, he grew more alarmed. He realized that he had always believed a man could force his body to go on as long as his will was determined, but for the first time began to suspect that it might not be so.
“Quick!” he called to the canoemen. “Go ahead and make land as fast as you can do it, unload the munitions and come back to pick up the men! Fast, now!” The canoes shot forward, soon diminishing in the distance. “Master Lovell, lay on that drum!” The boy, still perched on Sergeant Crump’s shoulders, beat the drum forcefully right by the sergeant’s ear. “Greathouse, and you, Freeman, come here.” Two tall, rugged riflemen waded to his side. “I want you both to range on ahead, and holler back t’ me now and then that the water’s getting shallow.”
“Aye, sir,” said Freeman. “But what if’n it ain’t?”
“Say so anyway. They need the encouragement. And when you get nigh th’ woods, start hollering, ‘Land!’ Do that, now. Off you go.”