Custer—his fate is yet fresh in the minds of the living. In the war between whites he was the equal of Wheeler. With as many men and far better equipped than Jackson ever dreamed that men could be, he attacked a mere handful of Indians compared to the great wilderness of them. Jackson marched into and conquered, and yet they killed Custer, and every man of his brave but unthinking force. “Twenty-five hundred men and thirteen hundred horses on the bluffs of the Tennessee,” writes Parton, “on the borders of the civilization, about to plunge into pathless woods and march, no one knew how far, into the fastnesses and secret retreats of a savage enemy! Such a body will consume ten wagon loads of provisions every day. For a week’s subsistence they require a thousand bushels of grain, twenty tons of flesh, a thousand gallons of whisky, and many hundredweight of miscellaneous stores.” Yet Jackson fed them, with little aid from any outside source, often eating nothing but parched acorns himself. His pathetic letters begging, commanding, beseeching the governors of Tennessee and Georgia for food for his troops are written with an ink of fire. “There is an enemy I dread more than I do the hostile Creeks,” he wrote, “and whose power, I am fearful I shall first be made to feel. I mean that meager monster, famine. I shall leave this encampment in the morning direct for Ten Islands, and hence with as little delay as possible to the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, and yet I have not on hand two days’ supply of breadstuffs.”
Hunger and mutiny—what would Custer and Crook and Canby and Miles have done had these been added to the Indians? He ate acorns, and with a single rifle barring the path of his starved and mutining troops, he literally bluffed and drove them on. Seeing it all clearly now, his victory over the Indians was the lesser one.
Fighting Indians, fighting mutiny, fighting famine, fighting the terrible enervating, blood-sucking disease that preyed on his very vitals—this was the Andrew Jackson in the pitiless forests of that pitiless age, with one arm in a sling, sallow, bloodless and emaciated, resting his rifle across his horse’s neck in front of the column of starved and mutinous troops homeward bound and with eyes blazing, his grizzled hair bristling with fury, exclaiming: “By the Eternal, I will blow the first damned villain into eternity that advances another step! I will hold this fort if only two men will stay with me!”
Here are two pictures of him, then that go into you and stay—one of his innate tenderness, the other his undying grit. At the battle of Tallushatchee an Indian mother was found dead with a half-starved babe at her breast. “Let it die,” said the other squaws; “all its people are dead. It is the law of our race.” Jackson had it taken to his own tent and found a little brown sugar to make it a tea. He had it cared for, took it home, adopted it, raised and educated it. It knew no father or mother save the conquering Jackson and the good Aunt Rachel.
Imagine Caesar coming out of Gaul with a fair-haired white child in his tent! This man was greater than Caesar, ay, than ten Caesars.
The other was his grit. Unable to eat what little he had, unable to sleep, there were times even when he could not sit his horse for the griping pains of an outraged stomach. Only one thing gave him relief, and how he discovered it no one ever knew. Down from his horse he would slide, have a young sapling bent down, and hang over it, head down, till he deadened the terrible pain. Imagine Alexander’s Greeks marching across Asia and beholding their god hanging over a young tree, head down, racked with the pain of a woman.
On Lake Tensaw, near Fort Mims. It was here Jackson camped on his way to Fort Mims, after the massacre.
The finish came at Tohopeka (the Horse Shoe) on the banks of the sweet-running Tallapoosa, as beautiful to-day as then. Never had Indians fortified before—breastworks invulnerable, with portholes. Behind that, logs and brushwood, from behind which Indians love to fight, and all unseen. And the Creek Nation died there almost to a man and a woman.