Authors: JAMES ALEXANDER Thom
“How went the muster?” he asked, returning their homespun salutes.
“Real good, George,” drawled Leonard Helm, a bow-legged, barrel-chested man with a flat red face and tobacco-stained white whiskers. “Nary a one run off last night. Reckon all the chaff’s done blowed off this bunch by now.”
“I surely do hope so. Loaded to go, are we?” George stroked his jaw and looked over the heavily laden boats, which were nuzzling the wharf with their blunt prows. Captain Joseph Bowman, his young first officer, stood waiting in the command boat holding a furled flag. Davey Pagan was in the stern, leaning on the rudderpost, his good eye squinting against the sun. Each of the boats looked like a floating thicket of upraised rifles and oars, with ten to fifteen ruddy, craggy faces peering up at him, shrewd, patient, glum, or mocking. “Boah, he’s some perty, ain’t he?” twanged a voice from a nearby boat. Chuckles began, then stopped instantly when his eyes swept the boat. He stepped quickly to the edge of the wharf and stared through narrowed eyelids into the men amidships, so directly that the man who had made the remark must have thought he was recognized.
“That’s true, boys,” George said loudly, breaking into a grin, “we don’t have cannon and we don’t have cavalry, so we’ll just have to win ’em with our good looks—and that’s why I picked all you beauties!”
A wave of surprised laughter swept through the nearby boats. George leaped nimbly onto the bow thwart of the command boat, and shoved it away from the wharf with a mighty heave. He took the green-and-red-striped Virginia flag from Captain Bowman, unfurled it, erected it in the bow, then stood waving toward the west. “Cast ’em off, boys, we’re headin’ for Kentucky!”
A general cheer went up. The captains scrambled off the dock into their boats; the ten vessels swung off willy-nilly into the current. Then the steersmen strained against their sweeps, oars dipped and found their cadence, and the boats fell into file and headed for mid-channel. A few rifles were fired into the air spontaneously, their puffs of blue smoke dissipating over the river; here and there laughter and war whoops sounded. Davey Pagan started up a chanty, and soon every oar in the convoy was dipping to its rhythm. A fresh morning breeze ruffled the surface of the river and started a cheerful rataplan against the prow of the speeding boat. George stood in the prow bareheaded, looked back at the little oncoming fleet, and watched
the bluish bulk of Fort Pitt diminishing astern. Eager fellows, he thought. But what an assortment.
He looked them over carefully. Half the men in each boat were rowing, bareheaded and stripped to the waist. Their sinewy white shoulders and backs were beginning to shine with sweat in the sun. He could feel the forward surge of the boat each time they stroked in unison. If they’re not slackers now at this work, he thought, I reckon they’ll strive when they learn I’m leading them straight against the scalp-takers. Vengeance is a good wage to work for. How I wish I could tell them now! But I don’t need to yet. They’re getting to know each other. And they’re going to like me a great deal if I can manage that. By Heaven, they’ll want for discipline; most every one is used to being a law unto himself. Look at ’em. Not one I’d reckon thinks he’s an ordinary man. Let ’em get a triumph or two under their bonnets, and they’ll have the worst case of swaggers you ever did see.
He had watched that kind of spirit evolve during the defense of the Kentucky settlements the year before. Even in the most desperate days, when the women were running ammunition in skillets and there was nothing in the forts to eat but tainted meat and musty corn, every repulse made the defenders celebrate themselves as charmed beings, superior to the folks back on the seaboard side of the mountains. He had seen the survival-cockiness of the long hunters; he had seen that giddy sense of invincibility develop in farmers who had conserved their own hair a few times while snatching an Indian scalp or two instead.
Most of the men in this string of boats now were already veterans of such tests. He had interviewed each recruit personally at Redstone Fort or at Fort Pitt, and knew there was scarcely a greenhorn among them. They were trail-hardened and cunning and knew how to shoot the eyes out of a squirrel. Hardly a one had the look of a soldier about him, but they were, he knew, dangerous as a den of bobcats.
All they need to learn, for our cause, is how to follow orders and fight together, not as individuals, he thought. I could lose too many if each one tried to fight his own war, and I can’t afford to lose any.
The sound of a child’s voice from one of the boats reminded him of the presence of another element he had not initially planned for: the families of several of his recruits. There were about twenty families in the convoy. Some of the militiamen had signed up mainly because they were interested in Kentucky
as a destination, or because they had friends or relatives already in Kentucky; some had had to bring their families simply because they were adrift and landless and had nowhere to leave them. Helm and Bowman, finding recruits so scarce, had signed up some such family men, on the condition that they could bring their families at least as far as Redstone Fort. George himself had invited two likely-looking adventurers who had been hanging about at Redstone, and had agreed to bring their families along part of the way in return for three months’ service in the militia. The scarcity of recruits had been that desperate. At first the presence of these women, children, and oldsters had seemed to be an unwanted burden, but then the idea had come to him that they might instead prove an asset. They could do planting and other work at the new base camp and thus free all the men for drill. George knew of course that he could not have made these dependents stay behind anyway, as they were as free as himself to venture to the frontier; he had no authority to order them back. Better to have them come along under our protection than follow at a distance, he thought. Besides, every family that settles in Kentucky helps to solidify Virginia’s frontier.
So there they were, huddled in the prows of several of the boats, these little homeless families with their precious pots and tools and bags of seed corn—all they would really need to start new lives. They were some added baggage for the military expedition, but not really very much. And their presence for the meantime would help keep the men civilized.
The oars steadily munched the river and the sun rose toward its zenith. The planks of the boats grew hot to the touch. At noon George ordered the rowers relieved, and the boats drifted on the current for a few moments while men changed positions in the cramped spaces. Murmurs, curses, and laughter, bumping and scraping sounds drifted with strange clarity across the water. Those going off the oars blew and sighed happily like pack horses, stretched and flexed their arms, pinched sweat out of their eye sockets, stood at the gunwales breaking wind and pissing over the side. Those going into the rowers’ seats now removed their shirts and hats, and some of them had tied rags around their heads to absorb the sweat of their brows.
In minutes the vessels were underway again, awkwardly at first, with some clumsy clacking of oars and good-humored taunts, until all had found the rhythm and the going became mechanical. George lounged now in his shirt-sleeves, quietly observing
the men and contemplating their suitability for the expedition.
Here and there among the soiled tan buckskins and homespun hunting shirts he had seen a blue military coat, but these were frayed, patched vestiges of some earlier service, or secondhand articles which somehow had worked their way into the possession of these civilians. George entertained the suspicion that a few of the men might be deserters from the discouraged and unlucky armies of the east, but there was neither means nor reason to prove those suspicions. Anyone who might have left that service only to enlist in this won’t find it a bargain, he thought. They shan’t avoid serving their state, in any case. He studied faces. Most of the men were older than he was. Many of the faces were gaunt as skulls, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. The faces were leathery from years of exposure, with deep seams under high cheekbones and wrinkles radiating about the eyes from seasons and seasons of squinting into sunlight or brilliant snow. There were eyes fierce as a hawk’s or merry as a chipmunk’s. There were full beards or grizzled chin-stubble; here and there was a lipless thin mouth that grinned perpetually like a fool’s. Many a face had its perpetual quid-lump like a carbuncle in the cheek; those heads would turn periodically and spit brown gobs into the river.
Despite the sun’s heat hammering down on the boat, George suddenly shivered with a cold chill of pure, savage anticipation and looked down the broad fluid avenue of the river. He scanned the distant banks, where only the white branches of sycamores and the fuzzy-looking, pale flower catkins of cottonwoods broke the dense green foliage of the towering hardwood forest. A shrill cacophony of birdcalls and cicadas pervaded those leafy walls. Distant tanagers and jays flickered like orange or blue sparks against that backdrop of green; now and then a heron with slow, flopping wingbeats would rise from one place along the shadowy banks and skim a few yards to settle again. Far downstream a cloud of black smoke appeared to be swirling above the river, but it soon swept near and turned rainbow-iridescent in the sunlight, proving to be not smoke but a cloud of hundreds of thousands of passenger pigeons. They vanished over the trees with a velvety thunder of wings. On a putty-colored estuary at the mouth of some nameless creek a family of three black bears on a fishing expedition paused and looked up to watch the strange passing convoy with its rising and falling oars.
During the morning’s passage, there had been breaks in the forestation of the riverbank: small, stump-dotted clearings running down to the river’s edge, with rows of waxy-green young corn standing knee-high, perhaps a human figure standing in a field or in a cabin door, brushfire smoke climbing lazily out of a newly cleared field. Then as the miles were consumed and the river led steadily away from the Fort Pitt outpost, those few riverside farms had appeared empty, the fields overgrown with brush, here and there a scorched chimney standing amid the collapsed timbers of a burned cabin. George had watched the sullen interest of the men in his boats as they rowed past these mute scenes.
And now as the midafternoon sun burned its way down through the hot pearl-blue of the western sky there were no more clearings at all, only the unbroken wilderness. Likely there were Indians along this riverbank, invisible, peering out, watching this handful of armed boats go by.
George had ordered his captains to stay in midchannel. The width of the river itself was the best defense against any ambush; boats in the middle of this wide stream were barely within the range of the smooth-bore muskets of the Indians, who usually had a tendency to undercharge their weapons anyway because of their perennial shortage of gunpowder.
Joseph Bowman, sitting on a powder keg and leaning on the gunwale on one elbow, seemed to keep his gray eyes trained on the riverbank constantly, as if trying to penetrate the foliage. His pupils were so pale he sometimes gave the impression at a distance of being sightless. With those ghostly orbs he could deliver a most eerie and disconcerting stare, and had learned to use the feature as an instrument in leadership; with an unwinking stare he could usually rattle or intimidate any unruly subordinate and thus regain control over him without a word. Bowman wore a three-cornered felt hat which now shaded those eyes and his small sharp triangle of a nose. His lank yellow hair, not pigtailed, hung loose over his collar.
He turned his gaze inboard now, stretched with intense effort, sighed, then leaned close to George. “If you was a savage, in the business of purveying American scalps for a British lord named Henry Hamilton, and you seen this great armada floatin’ nice an’ sassy down this river, what might you think?”
“Well, I expect I might count how many people were in these boats, then I’d tot how much a hundred and seventy scalps would amount to in British mirrors and knives and trinkets, and
then I’d set foot to Chillicothe or Piqua to enlist some help in acquiring those scalps.”
Bowman grinned, but shook his head. “I wouldn’t,” he said. “I’d more likely say t’ m’self, ’Now, lookie, Red Eyes, that ain’t no simple ordinary passel o’ Virginia gentry goin’ down to put in a corn crop in th’ Ohio bottoms, that there’s a war party.’ Then I reckon I’d go a-trottin’ off to Detroit and tell Big Chief Hamilton what I seen.”
George smiled and raised his eyebrows, then gazed off toward the shore. “What is it, Joseph? D’you feel you’re being watched?”
“I do that,” Bowman said. “Six times this mornin’ I’ve felt my back draw up.”
“Six exactly, hm? What a remarkable faculty! Maybe we needn’t post sentries, having you.”
Bowman’s tense look softened; he grinned and fell back to his scrutiny of the far shore. “I don’t reckon a party our size has much worry,” he muttered.
“No. Not till we draw near the Shawnee country. For now, Joseph, I’d recommend you enjoy the scenery. While you may.”
The boats swung into a great bend in the river now; the sun, which had been burning on George’s side throughout the afternoon, now beat upon his shoulders. He turned and gazed straight ahead. This I remember, he thought. Some twenty miles now we’ll wind to the west and then run south a hundred or so. We’ve made about thirty-five miles already. That isn’t anything to be ashamed of.
I’d reckon there’s enough daylight left to make it to the next big bend before making camp tonight, he thought. He turned and looked at the straining backs of the rowers.
“Hey, gents!” he roared. “I’d say we’re warmed up by now; what d’you say we hit a stride now, like we were goin’ to someplace nice!”
A few groans came in reply, then curses and a laugh or two, and Pagan began chanting in a quicker time.
“Haaay-up!
Haaay
-up!
Ho!” The rowers swung the oars at the harder pace; the boat thrust ahead toward the afternoon sun, and the other vessels sped up to maintain the file.