CHAPTER IX—THE GENERAL AT THE HORSESHOE
THE General goes to Fayettesville, and orders Colonel Coffee with his eager five hundred to Huntsville, as a point nearer the heart of savage war. Volunteers, each bringing his own rifle and riding his own horse, join Colonel Coffee, who sends back inspiring word that his five hundred have grown to thirteen hundred, all thirsting for Creek blood. Meanwhile, the General, weak and worn to a shadow, can hardly keep the saddle, and must be bathed hourly in whisky to hold soul and body together. Unable to eat, he lives by his will alone. The shot-shattered left arm, lest he faint with the awful agony which attends its least disturbance, is bound tightly to his side.
The General takes the field, and presently comes up with the Creeks. He smites them hip and thigh at Tallushatches, Talladega, and divers other places of equally complicated names, slaying hundreds while losing few himself. The Creeks give way before the invincible General. Wherever he goes they scatter like an affrighted flock of blackbirds.
The Indian is terrible only when he is winning. He is not upholstered, whether mentally or morally, for an uphill, losing war. The General would like it better if this were otherwise. Could he but coax his evanescent enemy into a pitched battle, he would break both his heart and his power with one and the same blow.
Chief Weathersford is as well aware of this defect in the Indian make-up as is the General. He himself is half white, and knows what points of strength and weakness belong with either race. Wherefore, when now his Creeks have been beaten, and their hearts are low in defeat, he makes no effort to lead them against the General's front; but breaks them into squads and little bands, with directions to harass the hunting-shirt men and hang about their flanks in the name of flea-bite annoyance and isolated scalps. Thus is the General plagued and fatigued nigh unto death, without once being able to lay hand upon those skulking, hiding, flying foot-Parthians against whom he has come forth.
Also, he and his hunting-shirt men are getting farther and farther from anything that might be termed a base of supplies. At last, many a pathless mile through wood and swamp, and many an unbridged river, lie between the nearest barrel of flour and their stomachs clamorous for food.
The military stomach is the first great base of every military operation. The war-wise Frederick had it for his aphorism, that an army is so much like a snake it can move forward only on its belly. The General is made painfully aware of this truism when he and his hunting-shirt men find themselves penned up with starvation at Fort Strother. In the teeth of his troubles, however, he makes shift to send home an orphaned papoose for the blooming Rachel to raise.
Famine takes command at Fort Strother, and the General writes: “He is an enemy I dread more than hostile Creeks—I mean the meager monster, Famine!” There is murmuring among the hunting-shirt men, who have, with the appetite common to bordermen, that contempt of discipline which belongs to their rude caste. They are reduced to roots and berries, with an occasional pigeon or squirrel, which latter diminutive deer no one waits to cook, but devours raw. One day a backwoods boy, whose appetite is even with his effrontery, waylays the General on his rounds and demands food.
“Here is what I was saving for supper,” says the General; “you may have that.” And he tosses the hungry one a double handful of acorns.
The starving hunting-shirt men mutiny; they draw themselves up preparatory to marching north, to find that home-fatness which waits for them on the Cumberland. At this the General changes his manner. Heretofore he has been the symbol of fatherly sympathy and toleration. He can make excuses for the grumbling of hungry men, and makes them. But this goes beyond grumbling, which, when all is in, comes to be no more than a healthful blowing off of angry steam; this is desertion by wholesale.
As the lean-flanked, rancorous ones line up to begin their homeward march, the General, haggard and emaciated by those Benton wounds and a want of food, rides out in front. Halting forty yards from the foremost mutineers, he swings from the saddle. In his right hand he carries a long eight-square rifle. This, since he has no left hand to support his aim, he runs across the empty saddle. Being ready, he calls on the hunting-shirt men to give the order to march, if they dare.
“For by the Eternal,” says he, “I'll shoot down the first of you who takes a forward step!”
The sulky, hungry hunting-shirt men scowl at the General. He scowls back at them, with the wicked ferocity of a tiger and an iron determination not to be revoked. And thus they stand glaring—one against hundreds! Then the courage of the hungry hundreds oozes away, and they fall back before that menacing apparition which glowers at them along the rifle barrel. They melt away by the rear, those hunting-shirt men, and lurk off to their quarters—ashamed of their weakness, yet afraid to go on.
At last, a herd of beef, quite as gaunt as the starved hunting-shirt men themselves, arrives. Fires are set going and knives drawn. There is a measureless eating. Belts are let out to the full-fed holes of other days; mutiny, like an evil spirit, takes its flight. The gorged hunting-shirt men, as though in amends for their scowl-ings and mutinous grumblings, beg to be led instantly against the Creeks. This the General is very willing to do, since he suspects the Creeks of possessing corn.
The General's scouts tell him that the scattered Creeks are collecting in force at the Horseshoe. Upon this news, one bright morning the General rides out of Fort Strother, and his recuperated hunting-shirt men, two thousand strong, are at his back.
The Horseshoe is a loop-like bend in the Tallapoosa, which incloses a round one hundred heavily-timbered acres. Across the open end, three hundred and fifty yards wide, the British engineers have taught the Creeks to throw up a fortification of logs. Behind this bulwark is gathered the fighting flower of the Creeks, more than one thousand warriors in all.
Arriving in front of the log bulwark, the General, with the experienced Coffee, pushes forward to reconnoiter.
“We can thank the British for that,” says the General, tossing his indignant right hand toward the Creek defenses. “Billy Weathers-ford, even with the half-white blood that's in him, would never have designed it.”
The astute Coffee makes a suggestion and, acting on it, the General dispatches him by a roundabout march to take the Creeks from behind. The fatuous savages flatter themselves that the wide-flowing Tallapoosa will defend their rear. All they need do, they think, is lie behind those English-log breastworks and knock over whatever obnoxious paleface shows his head. This is an admirable programme, and comforting to the cockles of the aboriginal heart. There is but one trouble; it won't work.
As the circuitous Coffee begins to swing wide for his stealthy creep to the rear, the General covers the strategy with a brace of brawling nine-pounders. Inside the log breastworks, he hears the “tunk! tunk!” of the “medicine” drum, and the measured chant of the prophets promising victory. In the midst of the prophetic chantings and the dull thumping of the tomtoms, the nine-pounders roar and bury their shot in the log breastworks. The shot do no harm, and serve but to excite the ribald mirth of the Creeks. The latter can speak enough English for the purposes of insult, and scoff and jeer at the General, whom they describe—having in mind his lean form—as a lance shaft, harmless, because wanting a keen head. They storm at him with opprobrious epithet, and invite him, unless he be a coward, to come to them over their breastworks. The General pays no heed to the contumely of the Creeks; he is bending his ear to catch, above the din of his nine-pounders, the earliest signal of the redoubtable Coffee's attack.
Colonel Coffee and his riflemen, horses at a walk, pick their difficult way through the woods. It is a matter of no little time before they find themselves at the toe of the Horseshoe, and in the ignorant rear of the Creeks. Between them and those one hundred tree-grown acres held by the enemy flows the Tallapoosa—turbid, wide and deep. Across, they see the canoes, which the stupidity of the Creeks has left without so much as a squaw or a papoose to guard them. In a moment, a score have thrown off their hunting shirts, and are in the river. They swim like so many Newfoundlands, and come out dripping, but happy, on the farther side. Presently each of the swimming score is upon his return trip, towing a dozen of the largest canoes.
Leaving a horse guard to look after the mounts, Colonel Coffee embarks his command in the canoes; ten minutes later, the last fighting man jack of them is on the other side. They hear the boom of the nine-pounders, and the yells and war shouts of the Creeks. Also they discover the wickiups of the Creeks, hidden away, with their squaws and papooses, in a thickety corner of the wood.
Colonel Coffee, who, for all he is a backwoodsman, is not without certain sparks and spunks of military skill, sets fire to the wickiups, as an excellent sure method of wringing the withers and distracting the attention of the fighting Creeks at the front. The flames go crackling skyward; the squaws and papooses rush yelling from the slight houses of wattled willow twigs and bark, and scuttle into the underbrush like rabbits. Unlike rabbits, being in the underbrush, they set up such a dismal tempest of howls, that those rearmost Creeks who hear it come running to learn what disaster has seized upon their households.
Before they can make extensive inquiry, Colonel Coffee and his riflemen open on them with a storm of bullets; and next, each man takes a tree. The war now proceeds Creek fashion, every man—white and red—fighting for himself. There is a difference, however; for while the hunting-shirt men are dead shots, the Creeks prove themselves such wretchedly bad marksmen—not understanding a rear sight, which article of gun furniture is a mystery to the Indian mind even unto this day—as to provoke a deal of hunting-shirt laughter.
Slowly but surely the Creeks give way before that low-flying sleet of lead. As they give way, running from one tree to another, their hunting-shirt foe presses forward—as deadly a skirmish line as ever commander threw out!
The quick ear of the General catches the firing down at the toe of the Horseshoe. It tells him that Colonel Coffee is busy with the Creek rear. Also, he gets a far-off glimpse, through the trees, of the smoke and flames from those burning wickiups, and understands the message of them.
Drawing off the futile nine-pounders, the General orders a charge, the amateur artillerists taking up their rifles with the others. At the word, the hunting-shirt men rush forward, and go over the log breastworks like cats.
The one earliest to scale the breastworks—quick as a panther, strong as a bear—is Ensign Sam Houston. The Southwest will hear more of him before all is done. That lively youth, however, is not thinking of the future; for an arrow, excessively of the present, has just pierced his thigh, and is demanding his whole attention. Shutting his teeth like a trap to control the pain, he snaps the shaft and draws the arrow from the wound. A moment later, the surgeon bandages it.
The General is standing near, and waxes conservative touching Ensign Sam Houston.
“Don't go back!” commands the General shortly. “That arrow through your leg should be enough.”
Ensign Sam Houston says nothing, but the moment his commander's back is turned rushes headlong over those log breastworks again. Later he is picked up with two bullets in him, which serve to keep him quiet for nigh a fortnight.
Once the hunting-shirt men are across the log breastworks, a slow and painstaking killing ensues. Not a Creek asks quarter; not a Creek accepts it when tendered. It is to be a fight to the death—a fight unsparing, relentless, grim!
“Remember Fort Mims!” shout the hunting-shirt men, working away with, rifle and axe and knife.
The Creeks, caught between the General and Colonel Coffee, hide in clumps of bushes or behind logs. From these slight coverts, the hunting-shirt men flush them, as setters flush birds, and shoot them as they fly. Once a Creek is down, out flashes the ready hunting knife and a Creek scalp is torn off; for the hunting-shirt men, on a principle that fights Satan with fire, have adopted the war habits of their red enemy.
The hunting-shirt men range up and down, quartering those one hundred acres of Horseshoe wood like hounds, killing out in all directions. Now and then a warrior, sorely crowded, leaps into the Tallapoosa, and strikes forth for the opposite shore. His feather-tufted head is seen bobbing on the muddy surface of the river. To gentlemen who, offhand, make nothing of a turkey's head at one hundred yards, those brown bobbing feather-tufted Creek heads are child's play. A rifle cracks; the shot-pierced Creek springs clear of the water with a death yell, and then goes bubbling to the bottom. Sometimes two rifles crack; in which double event the Creek takes with him to the bottom two bullets instead of one.
The slaughter moves forward slowly, but satisfactorily, for hours. It is ten o'clock in the night when the last Creek is killed, and the hunting-shirt men, hungry with a hard day's work, may think on supper. Of the red one thousand and more who manned those British-built fortifications in the morning, not two-score get away. It is the Creek Thermopylae.
The General's triumph at the Horseshoe puts the last paragraph to the last chapter of the Creek wars. Also, it disappoints certain English prospects, and defeats for all time those savage hopes of a general race battle against the paleface, the fires of which the dead Tecumseh so long supported by his eloquence and fed with deeds of valor. By way of a finishing touch, from which the hue of romance is not wanting, the terrible Weathersford rides in, on his famous gray war horse, and gives himself up to the General.
“You may kill me,” says Weathersford. “I am ready to die, for I have beheld the destruction of my people. No one will hereafter fear the Creeks, who are broken and gone. I come now to save the women and little children starving in the forest.”
The hunting-shirt men, not at all sentimental, lift up their voices in favor of slaying the chief. At that the General steps in between.
“The man who would kill a prisoner,” he cries, “is a dog and the son of a dog. To him who touches Weathersford I promise a noose and the nearest tree.”
The General leads his hunting-shirt men by easy marches back to that impatient plenty which awaits their coming on the Cumberland. The public welcomes him with shout and toss of hat, while the blooming Rachel gives her hero measureless love and tenderness. The General's one hundred and fifty slaves, agog with joy and fire water, make merry for two round days. They would have enlarged that festival to three days, but the stern overseer intervenes to recall them to the laborious realities of life.
As the General begins to have the better of his fatigue and sickness—albeit that Benton-wounded left arm is still in a sling—a note is put in his hands. The note is from the War Department in Washington, and reads: “Andrew Jackson of Tennessee is appointed Major General in the Army of the United States, vice William Henry Harrison, resigned.”