The bushwhackers & other stories

by Charles Egbert Craddock

For the last three days the command, consisting of some twenty-six hundred men, had been advancing by forced marches, despite the deterrent weather. Setting out on the 7th of June from Fort Prince George, where the army had rested for ten days after the march of three hundred miles from Charlestown, Colonel Grant encountered a season of phenomenal rain-fall. Moreover, the lay of the land,—long stretches of broken, rocky country, gashed by steep ravines and intersected by foaming, swollen torrents, deep and dangerous to ford, encompassed on every hand by rugged heights and narrow, intricate, winding valleys, affording always but a restricted passage,—offered peculiar advantages for attack. Colonel Grant, aware that these craggy defiles could be held against him even by an inferior force, that a smart demonstration on the flank would so separate the thin line of his troops that one division would hardly be available to come to the support of the other, that an engagement here and now would result in great loss of life, if not an actual and decisive repulse, was urging the march forward at the utmost speed possible to reach more practicable ground for an encounter, regardless how the pace might harass the men. But they were responding gallantly to the demands on their strength, and this was what he had hardly dared to hope. For during the previous winter, when General Amherst ordered the British regulars south by sea, many of them immediately upon their arrival in Charlestown, succumbed to an illness occasioned by drinking the brackish water of certain wells of the city. Coming in response to the urgent appeals of the province to the commander-in-chief of the army to defend the frontier against the turbulent Cherokees who ravaged the borders, the British force were looked upon as public deliverers, and the people of the city took the ill soldiers from the camps into their own private dwellings, nursing them until they were quite restored. No troops could have better endured the extreme hardships which they successfully encountered in their march northward. So swift an advance seemed almost impossible. The speed of the movement apparently had not been anticipated, even by that wily and watchful enemy, the Cherokees. It has been said that at this critical juncture the Indians had failed to receive the supply of ammunition from the French which they had anticipated, although a quantity, inadequate for the emergency, however, reached them a few days later. At all events Colonel Grant was nearly free of the district where disaster so menaced him before he received a single shot. He had profited much by his several campaigns in this country since he led that rash, impetuous, and bloody demonstration against Fort Duquesne, in which he himself was captured with nineteen of his officers, and his command was almost cut to pieces. Now his scouts patrolled the woods in every direction. His vanguard of Indian allies under command of a British officer was supported by a body of fifty rangers and one hundred and fifty light infantry. Every precaution against surprise was taken.

Late one afternoon, however, the main body wavered with a sudden shock. The news came along the line. The Cherokees were upon them—upon the flank? No; in force fiercely assaulting the rear-guard. It was as Grant had feared impossible in these narrow defiles to avail himself of his strength, to face about, to form, to give battle. The advance was ordered to continue steadily onward,—difficult indeed, with the sound of the musketry and shouting from the rear, now louder, now fainter, as the surges of attack ebbed and flowed.

A strong party was detached to reinforce the rear-guard. But again and again the Cherokees made a spirited dash, seeking to cut off the beef herd, fighting almost in the open, with as definite and logical a military plan of destroying the army by capturing its supplies in that wild country, hundreds of miles from adequate succor, as if devised by men trained in all the theories of war.

“The Lord made him—” muttered Ronald MacDonnell, in uncertainty, recognizing the coherence of this military maneuver, and said no more. Whether or not his theory was reduced to that simple incontrovertible proposition, thus modified by the soldier-like demonstration on the supply train, his cogitations were cut short by more familiar ideas, when in command of thirty-two picked men, he was ordered to make a detour through the defiles of a narrow adjacent ravine, and, issuing suddenly thence, seek to fall upon the flank of the enemy and surprise, rout, and pursue him. This was the kind of thing, that with all his limitations, Ronald MacDonnell most definitely understood. This set a-quiver, with keenest sensitiveness, every fiber of his phlegmatic nature, called out every working capacity of his slow, substantial brains, made his quiet pulses bound. He looked the men over strictly as they dressed their ranks, and then he stepped swiftly forward toward them, for it was the habit to speak a few words of encouragement to the troops about to enter on any extra-hazardous duty, so daunting seemed the very sight of the Cherokees and the sound of their blood-curdling whoops.

“Hech, callants!” he cried, in his simple joy; and so full of valiant elation was the exclamation that its spirit flared up amongst the wild “petticoat-men,” who cheered as lustily as if they had profited by the best of logic and the most finely flavored eloquence. Ronald MacDonnell felt that he had acquitted himself well in the usual way, and was under the impression that he had made a speech to the troops.

Now climbing the crags of the verges of the ravine, now deep in its trough, following the banks of its flashing torrent, they made their way—at a brisk double-quick when the ground would admit of such progress—and when they must, painfully dragging one another through the dense jungles of the dripping laurel, always holding well together, remembering the ever-frightful menace of the Cherokee to the laggard. The rain fell no longer; the sunlight slanted on the summit of the rocks above their heads; the wind was blowing fresh and free, and the mists scurried before it; now and again on the steep slopes as the vapors shifted, the horned heads of cattle showed with a familiar reminiscent effect as of mountain kyloes at home. But these were great stall-fed steers, running furiously at large, bellowing, frightened by the tumults of the conflict, plunging along the narrow defiles, almost dashing headlong into the little party of Highlanders who were now quickening their pace, for the crack of dropping shots and once and again a volley, the whoopings of the savages and shouts of the soldiers, betokened that the scene of carnage was near.

Only a few of the cattle were astray for, as MacDonnell and his men emerged into a little level glade, they could see in the distance that the herd was held well together by the cattle-guard, while the reinforcements sought to check the Cherokees, who, although continually sending forth their terribly accurate masked fire from behind trees and rocks, now and again with a mounted body struck out boldly for the supply train, assaulting with tremendous impetuosity the rear-guard. So still and clear was the evening air that, despite the clamors of battle, MacDonnell could hear the commands, could see in the distance the lines rallying on the reserve forming into solid masses, as the mounted savages hurled down upon them; could even discern where rallies by platoon had been earlier made judging from the position of the bodies of the dead soldiers, lying in a half-suggested circle.

The next moment, with a ringing shout and a smartly delivered volley of musketry the Highlanders flung themselves from out the mouth of the ravine. The Cherokee horsemen were going down like so many ten-pins. The first detachment of reinforcements set up a wild shout of joy to perceive the support, then flung themselves on their knees to load while a second volley from the Highlanders passed over their heads. The rear-guard had formed anew, faced about, and were advancing in the opposite direction. The Cherokee horsemen, almost surrounded, gave way; the fire of the others in ambush wavered, slackened, became only a dropping shot here and there, then sunk to silence. And the woods were filled with a wild rout, with the irregular musketry of the troops frenzied with sudden success, out of line, out of hearing, out of reason as they pursued the unmounted savages, dislodged at last from their masked position; with the bugles blowing, the bag-pipes playing; with the unheard, disregarded orders shouted by the officers; with that thrilling cry of the Highlanders “Claymore! Claymore!” the sun flashing on their drawn broadswords as they gained on the flying Indians, themselves as fleet;—a confused, disordered panorama of shadows and sunlight, of men in red coats and men in blue, and men in tartan, and savage Chickasaws and Cherokees in their wild barbaric array.

It had been desired that the repulse should be fierce and decisive, the pursuit bloody and relentless. The supply train represented the life of the army, and it was essential to deter the Cherokees from readily renewing the attack on so vital a point. But these ends compassed, every effort of the officers was concentrated on the necessity of recalling the scattered parties. Night was coming on; it was a strange and an alien country; the skulking Cherokees were doubtless in force somewhere in the dense coverts of the woods, and the vicarious terrors of the capture that menaced the valorous and venturesome soldiers began to press heavily upon the officers. Again and again the bugles summoned the stragglers, the rich golden notes drifting through the wilderness, rousing a thousand insistent echoes from many a dumb rock thus endowed with a voice. Certain of the more solicitous officers sent out, with much caution, small details, gathering together the stragglers as they went.