They sped onward through that first afternoon, through that deep green humid gloomy silence, hearts slamming, lungs burning. Their perceptions grew unreal with their increasing exhaustion, and at times it seemed to George that they were progressing across the bottom of some fantastic green sea. They paced on until the last flickering peeps of sunlight turned red-gold and winked out. Then it was less than an hour before the foliage grew black and the terrain too dim to travel.
Reconnoitering for a few minutes in the darkening woods, they found no sight or sound of Indians, discovered a trickling spring in a steep-sided ravine, and decided to risk a small fire, as the place was so sheltered.
Having refreshed their burning skin with the chilly spring water, they heated strips of jerky over the fire to create the illusion of having a hot meal. They chewed strenuously on the smoky fibers, munched parched corn, chased it down with water, then sat, embracing their knees, gazing into the licking yellow flames and orange coals and feeling their stomachs transform the food into new vigor for their spent limbs. George began to smile as he studied the scene: the mossy stone from which issued the spring; the ferns and the great twisted root-knees and fissured trunks of the venerable trees all softly illuminated by the firelight; the encircling blackness with its choruses of night-creature sounds probably unchanged for eons; his companions with their berry-stained skin and sweat-streaked war paint, bear-claw necklaces, fringed breechclouts, and beadwork moccasins, gazing mesmerized into the campfire. Major Harlan yawned, the firelight shining into his great cave of a mouth with its bad teeth like stalactites and stalagmites, then caught George gazing at him with that half smile on his lips.
“You seem amused, sir.”
“Aye, Major. Reckon I am, thinking about things in general.” He shook his head and gazed at the flames another moment, still smiling. “As a boy I had the scriptures drummed into my head at home. Then a hard Scot tutor filled me with history, and geography, mathematics, and the ancient tongues. Mr. Mason then imbued me with moral precepts and philosophy, and I learned to minuet at the hands of pink misses of the Tidewater aristocracy …” Harlan and Lieutenant Consola were listening blank-faced to this unexpected recitation. “… and now,” he concluded, indicating with a sweep of his hands their primitive little enclave, “look how far all that civilizing has brought me!”
THEY WERE OFF THE NEXT MORNING AS SOON AS THE WOODS WERE light enough to see their way in. Their feet and muscles protested with stiffness and pain for the first few miles, until it was all worked out by the relentless moving. They ate their noon meal on the run, following the easterly tributaries toward the Tennessee River.
They reached the Tennessee shortly before sundown. They estimated that they had made sixty or seventy miles in their first two days. They scouted the wooded banks of the deep stream, finding evidence of recent Indian landings but seeing no Indians. As evening fell, they pitted their reluctant muscles against the task of binding two logs together with grapevines to make a raft. They slept beside it on mossy ground, too exhausted to try an evening crossing.
They awoke before dawn, to a sensual chaos of itchy mosquito bumps, bleeding fly bites, dewy gooseflesh, and aching joints, the watery murmuring and gulping of the Tennessee a few feet away immediately reminding them of their hazardous first duty, the crossing. In the semi-darkness they dragged the heavy makeshift raft down to the river’s slippery edge and launched it, wading it up to their waists in flowing water which was, fortunately, warmer than the morning air. The ooze of the river bottom dragged at their moccasins as they strapped their precious rifles, food, bullet pouches, and powder horns atop the raft with leather thrums cut from the fringe of their leggings. They then covered the cargo with brush from the shore. As gray light began dissolving the darkness, they saw that a mist hovered over the river surface, obscuring everything more than ten feet away. Major Harlan and Lieutenant Consola worked grimly, trying to hide the dread in their faces. Neither of them could swim, and the narrow raft was too small for both men and baggage to ride upon.
“Very well now, gents,” George whispered, bracing his legs against the pressing current. “I don’t have to tell you to hang on tight. Keep your heads low. Kick, but kick deep and don’t splash the surface, if you please.”
“We know how, sir,” Harlan whispered back, almost testy in his uneasiness. “God knows we’ve snuck acrost many a river since we met you.”
George grinned. “Then get hold, and shove off!”
The mucky bottom released its grip on their feet; they felt themselves borne away into the liquid flow; the shore dissolved from sight behind them. George commenced making powerful frog kicks under the water, and felt that he must be doing all the work while the other two hung on for their lives. “Give me some power, boys, or we’ll be in th’ Ohio ‘fore we make the other shore!” Soon their surging breathing told him they were at work.
It was a delicate balancing act in the disorienting mist. Consola tended to pull down hard on his side with each kick and George had to strain to keep the narrow conveyance from rolling over several times. Being rudder as well as propeller, George had no reference for navigation but the faint sense of current on his right side. He was aware of the invisible and unknowable depth below him, and he was sure that the others were doubly conscious of it. A fragment of cut bough slipped off the raft and drifted downstream; he hoped no Indian patrol down near the mouth would find it and paddle up to investigate.
A low black shape materialized out of the mist at that moment, heading straight at the raft. “Consola! Look right!” George hissed, just as the object, a splintery-ended drift log, bumped the front of the raft and began to swing around, as if to crunch Consola’s head between itself and the raft. George thrust the aft end of the raft downstream with a powerful kick of his legs, and the log swung off and dissolved in the mist downstream. Consola, eyes wide in his red-stained face, edged forward hand over hand to check the condition of the forward end of the raft.
“Busted a vine,” he whispered back. “Pray it’ll hold t’ shore.”
They prayed, and it did. After half an hour in the current, they saw through the thinning fog the dark foliage of the east bank looming a few yards ahead, then their feet found the squishy bottom.
They unloaded the raft, slung on their gear, and put dry powder in their rifles’ flash pans. While Major Harlan was checking his flintlock, George waded back into the river, drawing his long skinning knife to cut the grapevines and dissassemble their telltale raft.
As he slashed at the tough vines, something slithered suddenly under his hands. He recoiled and grasped, the spade-shaped head of a huge water moccasin suddenly jabbing the air where his hand had been. The glistening serpent cocked its head for a second strike, and George stared in horror at the wide, white maw of its mouth, his hunting knife at the ready, wondering if he could be quick enough to decapitate it without being pierced by the venomous fangs.
But suddenly the reptile’s head disintegrated with a cracking roar, bits of it spattering on the river. The mottled body convulsed and fell off the raft. George, with a metallic taste in his mouth and his heart slamming at his ribs, looked up at the cloud of gunsmoke billowing away from Harlan’s rifle. The report’s echo was repeating itself between the riverbanks.
George’s eyes explained everything to Harlan. Gratitude and reproach.
“Sorry,” said the major, reloading. “Wa’n’t no time t’ think.”
George finished cutting the vines and floundered ashore. He picked up his rifle, gripped Harlan on the shoulder, meanwhile listening like a wild animal, his long nose pointing as he turned this way and that. “Listen,” he breathed. From downstream very nearby came guttural voices, then faint splashing sounds, either of wading or paddles. George pointed violently up the riverbank into the forest and, brushing over their trail in the slippery bank as well as he could, disappeared after Harlan and Consola into the woods.
He overtook them and led them at a swift, silent run throu
gh the forest, their water-filled moccasins squishing and slapping. Coming to the bank of a small tributary creek, he leaped into it. The others followed him, knee-deep, as he went downstream a hundred feet, tracked the other bank there, then waded backward into the stream again and returned eastward against the current.
They flitted up the stream a mile, emerged in a grove of hickories and plunged on at full tilt for another mile before drawing up to a halt, chests heaving, to listen for sounds of pursuit. There was nothing. Birdcalls, which had fallen still at their frantic approach, resumed all about.
Their wind recovered, they took up their less strenuous woodman’s lope. Throughout the morning they made their way eastward in a gradual climb out of the valley of the Tennessee, then trotted through forests and lush, flowery meadows through a gentle decline into the Cumberland Valley. They reached the Cumberland with two hours of daylight to spare, scouted quickly along the banks for Indian camps, found none, made another bound-log raft, and on the fourth morning of their trek crossed that river under cover of a steady rainstorm. Now the two major river crossings were behind them, and the greater part of their distance lay before them: two hundred more miles through the rolling, untracked Kentucky countryside on a northeasterly course. The next major river to cross would be the Green, about a hundred miles ahead. Drawing as much nourishment as they could from every scrap of jerky and crumb of corn, supplementing these now and then with berries and edible weeds and roots, they steeled themselves against the burning agony of fatigue and pushed on.
33
OHIO VALLEY
June 14, 1780
CAPTAIN BIRD ARGUED WITH HIS INDIAN CHIEFTAINS, THEN pleaded with them, then gave up in disgust. He sat back in his tent on the bank of the Ohio, a hundred miles above the Falls which were to have been his army’s first target, and resolved to let the Indians make their plans without him.
The Indians had received a report two days earlier that George Rogers Clark was already at the Falls of the Ohio, and flatly refused to go there. Henry Bird was certain that the report was erroneous, that Clark could not possibly have gotten there by the twelfth, the day of the report. Now it was the fourteenth. The Indians had vented the hot air of their blustery oratory for two days in council on this riverbank, wasting time, weakening their resolve, and in general depressing their purported commander a great deal. It was becoming apparent that they would prefer to make a foray instead against two populous but ill-defended settlements on the Licking River, Ruddle’s and Martin’s Stations, which were inhabited primarily by placid and industrious Pennsylvania Germans. Toward the close of the second day of their squabbling, the chiefs announced to Bird that they had agreed to go against the Licking River settlements instead of the Falls, and were ready for Captain Bird’s soldiers and artillery to lead them there.
“So you choose not to strike at the Falls, even though it would be a more important strategic move?” Bird said, just as sarcastically as he dared.
“What is the strategy of the Englishmen?” retorted the Indians’ spokesman. “On Licking River many Americans grow crops and drive game out of the sacred hunting grounds of Cantuc-kee. To stop this is our strategy.”
Bird turned his eyes to the three white men who had joined his force with the Shawnees: Simon, James, and George Girty. Simon, short, black-haired, and black-eyed, seemed to be the most influential of them, and was, for that matter, perhaps the best interpreter and the most influential white man among the Shawnees. The Girty brothers had been adopted captives of the Indians since boyhood but, unlike many such adoptees, they would not remain submerged in the tribes and were constantly appearing on the margins of conflict, goading and scheming. All along the course of this expedition, Bird knew, they had kept exhorting the Indians to avenge the death of Chief Black Fish.
“Mr. Girty,” said Bird, “tell these people of yours that we are attacking the settlements as soldiers, not as a vengeful mob. We will force surrender, take prisoners back to Detroit, and not harm women and children. I must have them understand that this is a British military operation, and I will not lend my men and artillery to it except under those terms.”
Simon Girty’s eyes looked straight into Bird’s, but it was as if reptilian eyelids had suddenly veiled them.
“I’ll tell ‘em,” he replied, then went away without telling them.
WHEN GEORGE ROGERS CLARK AND HIS TWO COMPANIONS ARRIVED at the Falls, identified themselves as white men and were admitted, they were astonished to see that the settlement was manned by scarcely more than its basic garrison. “Where in blazes are the people who are supposed to be gathering here to meet Bird’s army?” he raged.
The explanation was that much of the regional population was at Harrodsburg by the Kentucky River, milling about the newly opened land office where entries were being made on a million and a half acres of choice new Kentucky land. “They’re in a fever about it, sir,” said an officer of the garrison. “A call to arms is the last thing in their minds.”
Learning also that Captain Bird’s army had veered away from the Falls into the interior, George quickly outfitted himself in his old uniform, formed an escort, and set off on horseback for Harrodsburg, rankling with indignation over the greed and irresponsibility of these new immigrants.
Galloping into Harrodsburg at midmorning with his troop of old Illinois veterans, George was astonished at the appearance of boom-town disorder. A motley horde of men, in shabby velvet, homespun, Continental uniform remnants, and even some scarcely clad at all, milled around in the compound, lounged at the gates, whooping, buzzing, trading pieces of paper. Many of them were roaring drunk, even though the sun was still over the eastern hills, blazing off the surface of the Kentucky River. The main part of this scruffy mob was concentrated around the land office. They scattered and stumbled out of the way as he rode among them to James Harrod’s house. Some in the crowd recognized him and shouted his name as he rode through, and for a moment his arrival diverted the attention of the land-office crowd. Then they turned back to their business.
Colonel Harrod, grown stockier in his prosperity and beginning to turn gray at his side-whiskers, met George with a mixture of joy and embarrassment.
“You do know that Henry Bird’s somewhere within a hundred miles o’ this place, Jim.”
“That I do.”
“Then why isn’t that crowd out there under arms, man? You’re the county lieutenant!”
“They won’t serve,” Harrod said, his eyes falling.
“Won’t serve?” George exploded.
“They say they won’t defend a country where they have no land yet. They … they tell me your soldiers are paid to defend the state; let you do it …”
George’s fist pounded a cloud of dust out of Harrod’s desk. “Aye, by God, they are right about that! I’m the one that’ll do it! But my men are strung out everywhere from here to the Missipp’, hanging on by their toenails to this empire they’ve won! So now, Jim Harrod, I need more men to keep this Kentucky o’ yours together, and that rabble out there …” he flung his arm in the direction of the land office, “th … they are going to be a good part of it, if I have to shut down that land office to get their attention!”
“You really don’t have the authority to do …”
“Damn having the authority! I’ve had to make my own authority for two bloody mean years now and I’m an old hand at it. Come on. We’re going to walk over their right now.”
Harrod hesitantly got up and followed, not meeting the eyes of his own men or George’s officers as they filed out of the house.
George barged into the land office, followed by a cheer from some of the old-timers, shouldering aside several dickering newcomers who were between him and the land register. This official, a large, rangy, cold-eyed man with gray hair and bored-looking eyes, looked up from his table of deeds and papers to identify the cause of the commotion. He saw the red-haired colonel standing there glowering down on him.
“Yes?” he said.
>
“I’m Clark. I’ve come to request in the public’s safety that you suspend the business in this place!”
“Ah, so you are Colonel Clark. Honored, sir. But I can scarcely close. There are claims in progress …”
George’s eyes narrowed. “I advise you to reconsider, mister, real quick.”
The hubbub in the room fell still as judges, claimants, and brokers became aware that something was happening at this table.
The register bowed his head slightly, smiled with his lips only, looking at George with annoyance, and shrugged. “I’m sorry, Colonel.”
“You’re saying no, I take it? Very well, then if you can’t suspend this business, I can!” Drawing his sword, he used it swiftly to sweep the documents off the table onto the floor. The register cringed before the blade, which George then immediately sheathed, turning to the men who crowded about.
“This court is closed,” he bellowed. “There’ll not be one deed signed while Kentucky is endangered. Out, all of you, out! Get into that yard there and hear me!”
He herded them all out of the building and soon stood on the stoop of the building, as if on a dais, glowering over his unsettled audience. They had come to the land office this morning preoccupied with claims, rights, profits, and grudges, all their myriad self-concerns, but now everybody in Harrodsburg, those who had known him for years and those seeing him for the first time, were attentive to the same thing: the urgent and severe force of his presence.