Drums Along the Mohawk (56 page)

To keep himself from thinking about it, George used to try to think about his family. It came easier to-night because the jailer had said it was snowing outside. George thought what a nice thing it would be for his family if he could write them a letter saying that he was not dead.

The same snow that the jailer at Chamblée told George Weaver was falling over the valley of the Richelieu River, in the woods south and west of Cherry Valley took the form of sleet. The scout of twelve men and a sergeant ten miles out on the Beaver Dam road decided that there was no sense in running a scout at all on such a night. The sergeant was sure that he was getting up the beginnings of a chill. He had never been able to stand being in the woods anyhow; and when darkness began to filter through the sleet, he gave orders to halt on the next dry spot, or drier spot, or spot less wet was what he meant, and light one hell of a big fire.

Only one man asked if it was wise to light a fire near the road; the rest laughed or cursed, according to how wet they felt, and began breaking off dead spruce limbs. But the sergeant thought that he ought to take cognizance of such a remark. He set about explaining to the private that they had had rumors all fall of a raid on Cherry Valley, and it hadn’t come, had it? What if Colonel Ichabod Alden had sent them out; he had to do something, hadn’t he? But he wasn’t worried, was he? He was sleeping in the Wells house, four hundred yards from the fort, wasn’t he? Him and Colonel Stacia and Major Whiting—and if the private thought that that looked as if the officers expected a raid, he was entitled to think so or to drain himself in the creek, or to kiss the sergeant’s great-aunt if he liked. The private responded that to him it didn’t matter a damn if the whole General Continental Staff slept in the Wells house so long as Mr. Wells raised no
objections; the officers always slept in the houses where there were pretty girls, didn’t they? Well, said the sergeant, he wasn’t himself going to stand under an eternal and universal piddle while Colonel Ike lay in a feather bed, and not build a fire anyway, and to hell. He sneezed.

In ten minutes they had a great fire going, shooting the sparks up through the drizzle-soaked boughs, and they stood around it, dripping and steaming and feeling sorry for themselves, with the light red on their faces, and their guns stacked under a near-by hemlock tree.

All the Indians under the advance scout of Ranger Captain Adam Crysler had to do was to give a couple of yelps and step in and pick the guns up. The Continental scout of Massachusetts men never offered to leave the fire. They stared and gawped. These were the first Indians many of them had ever seen, painted Senecas with their heads bare to the wet and their blankets sopping dismally about their sides. They looked bulky and stuffed out under their deerskin shirts, but for all that they looked damned ugly, too. The ugliest thing they did was to herd the prisoners away from their own fire and take their places.

The first the Continental scout knew of a hostile British army was when a distant whooping answered the Indians who had captured them. Then for a long time there was not a sound except the crackle of spruce on the fire, the muttering of the Indians, and the everlasting drip and piddle from the branches. Then more Indians came through the woods, more Indians than these Massachusetts men believed existed. They seemed like a thousand. There were five hundred of them. They gathered round and started building new fires. Soon the little valley glowed with light, like a hillside in a dripping sort of hell. Into this infernal glow penetrated the steady beat of shod men marching.

The marching soldiers followed a slender man, swarthy as an Indian, without paint, whose lank hair clung to the back of
his neck in wisps. He looked drawn and cold and tired. Behind him came one hundred and fifty men in green campaign coats and black leather skullcaps. Behind them marched fifty British regulars in red. Some of the regulars were even keeping step. All at once the woods had overflowed with living men. It seemed a miracle that they were there.

It was almost a miracle. On the Chemung River the Rangers had been watching the movements of the Eleventh Pennsylvania Regiment. The Continentals had penetrated nearly to Tioga before turning back to garrison Wyoming. Then Walter Butler, young, headstrong, and consumed with his ambition, decided to make a late fall march on Cherry Valley. All year the Canadian command had been making useless plans for taking Cherry Valley, one of the military depots for the Continental army, a frontier fort, and a menace to their own base at Unadilla. It was late in the year to make a start. He had insufficient supplies for his troops, and he had only two hundred men. But he put it up to them and they answered by offering to start next day.

They started late in October, through the cold rainy days, following down the Chemung, then turning up the Susquehanna, on which they met Brant returning towards Canada.

John Wolff would never forget that meeting on the banks of the river, filled with floating sodden leaves and driftwood: Brant at the head of his five hundred Indians, Butler with his two hundred men, showing an order from Haldimand that gave him sole command of any expedition undertaken against Cherry Valley and requested aid from all and any British officers. Brant demanded the command as senior captain. Butler curtly refused. There was a long argument before Brant, bitter and silent, turned his Indians to the northeast ahead of the white troops, and the long march was continued.

A hundred and fifty miles through swamps and along riverbanks and over hills, up the Susquehanna to Otsego Lake, thence overland to strike this road. There was little talking in the company of Rangers. They marched with a dogged, damp, and dreary sullenness. But they never stopped, for always they had the indomitable nervous figure of Butler ahead of them.

The Indians were unfriendly as Brant himself. They did not know why they had to come. They hated the rain. They wanted to go home. Many of the Senecas had been out all summer. The Indian scouts all said it was impossible to take Cherry Valley. There were two hundred and fifty men in garrison; there were three hundred more at Schoharie and nearly five hundred at Johnstown. Better to make a raid in the upper, unprotected valley.

But Butler was stubbornly setting his heart on Cherry Valley; his winter in prison seemed to have given him a bitter power. He drove the Indians on; even Brant, wrapped in his blanket, his gold-lace hat a sodden scarecrow mockery of himself, no longer argued.

John Wolff, marching in the last squad of the Ranger company, had fits of nervous fear when he saw the Indians all around them. He and some of his company thought it likely that the Indians might turn on them. Once a scalp was taken off a head, you couldn’t tell whose head it had come off of. The white men were so much easy money for the Indians, if they chose; and stories went round that that had happened in a small way with St. Leger’s retreating army, and that Bolton in Niagara had paid eight dollars for more than one member of the Eighth King’s Regiment.

It was a nightmare march, with insufficient food. War had driven the deer far off the trails, and the wolves had begun running. They heard them at night in the hills above Unadilla as they came by.

November eighth and ninth and tenth they came through the Tryon country. It was on the tenth that they rounded up the twelve scouts with the sergeant and learned that the officers were at the Wells house. The scouts were willing to talk. Any man would have been willing with all those predatory Senecas squatting round him in the rain. They crowded close to Butler and answered questions.

Wolff heard the order to march as if it were part of a dream. Darkness no longer had any bearing on his thoughts. He shouldered his gun and took his place, and presently his feet began to take him forward through the rain. They had gone a mile when the rain gave up for a breath. The night seemed suddenly to clear and the marching feet left a dark track in the dark, and the mud felt cold and brittle. “It’s freezing,” said the man next to Wolff. “I hope to God my shoes hold out.” Then from the north a flake drifted down, and another flake. The ground whitened under the trees. A luminous imitation of light was counterfeited in the woods.

At twelve o’clock they halted, filed off the road, and entered a swamp. Through the trees on the edge of the swamp they saw white hills dimly rising against the sky, one a steep cone, like a sugarloaf. The word came down the line, “No fires to-night.” The men stood crowded close together for what warmth their clothes could give off. The sleeve of Wolff’s coat stiffened with frost.

“We’ll be lucky if half this army gets back to Niagara.”

The man beside Wolff was talking. Wolff did not hear him. He was so cold that even his brain was numb. He did not even think.

At daylight the snow unexpectedly turned to warm rain from the south. A mist that was more like steam rose over the snow and hid the valley. Low orders were given: Eighty men with Captain Crysler to cut off the Wells house and take the officers; the rest to charge the fort, Butler leading the main group;
the Indians to circle the fort and rake the palisade from the far side. Brant appeared and disappeared. A whistle sounded and the army moved.

At seven o’clock they heard a challenge on the road, and the sudden frantic galloping of a horse. The army moved behind it at the double. Wolff’s squad followed the main force for the gate of the fort. They passed houses. People were stupidly looking out of their doors. The file of eighty men swung off towards the Wells house. Then in the fog ahead of Wolff the palisade loomed like a dark mass, and he saw the closing gate. Musket shots made little orange blobs. A lieutenant cried, “Lie down.” Wolff fell in the slush and felt its cold soak through his coat. He started firing. At the same instant the cannon of the fort discharged over their heads. Behind where the town lay, he heard the wild shrill screeching of the Seneca war cry.

Just ahead of him Captain Butler raised up on one arm to look back. His face was bitter and hopeless. He said distinctly, “Oh, my God. Brant’s taken all the Indians into the town.” There was no firing from the other side of the fort. Every man there knew—both inside and outside the palisade—that the fort was safe. But they fired at each other for three hours, until the burning houses began to show up the Rangers’ position. Whistles shrilled along the line of prostrate, slush-sodden men, and a slow crawling retreat was effected. The men rose up behind the first houses they came to and stayed there in the heat of the burning walls. It was the first warmth they had experienced in forty-eight hours. They began fishing in their wallets for scraps of smoked meat and chewed hungrily. It took them several minutes to realize that the houses burning in front of them must contain better food. And at the same time their numbed consciousness made them aware that the Indians were running amok.

The weary Rangers were mustered and sent to protect the burning houses, but it was then too late. The whooping and
firing had receded into the edges of the woods. Only a few inhabitants were discovered unharmed. All through the settlement were signs of the Indian work, women lying beyond their doors indecently soaked even in their deadness, a child, an old man.

Butler was traversing the road like a madman. He gathered up an old man and his daughter and sent them to the fort with a flag and passed them in. Brant saw them enter too late to stop them. He confronted Butler with the warning that the Senecas demanded that the other prisoners be reserved. He said he could do nothing. He pointed out that if the Senecas were roused, they could and likely would annihilate the little army of whites. His face was expressionless, his voice as casual as if he talked of driving rabbits.

Butler withdrew his Rangers to the woods behind the Wells house, where they found Captain Crysler and his men surrounding forty shivering men and women and children. One of these, a man in a nightshirt, turned out to be Colonel Stacia, second in command of the fort. He reported that Colonel Alden had been killed, and surrendered himself to Butler.

The women huddled together like sheep. They did not move except to turn their heads when Indians whooped in the woods. When the mist began to clear and a colorless November sunlight fell upon them, they still looked cold. The ragged, soaking Rangers regarded them without interest.

After a while the army withdrew to a hillside and made a camp and lit fires. They rounded up some cattle and killed a dozen cows and skinned them and threw the meat in pots as fast as it could be dissected.

The Indians, suddenly returning, took the remainder of the cattle and killed them for themselves. They lay around all day watching the burning settlement and the palisade of the fort with all the firing platforms alertly manned. Butler kept by himself. A little way off Brant camped with a few Mohawks and
watched Butler. John Wolff lay on his back with his comrades and digested food. He was too weary to do more.

They stayed all day, and at night they made windbreaks of bark, and brush, keeping the prisoners in the middle of the white encampment. The mist came up again from the snow, smelling of wet earth and charred wood and rotting leaves.

Early in the morning they skirmished the fort for an hour or two; but the business was half-hearted. They withdrew to their camp, and then orders were passed for the long retreat to Canada. Nothing had happened except the destruction of the houses and the murder of twenty-five noncombatants.

The weather was turning colder and a little after noon the snow began again. Butler unexpectedly sent back thirty-eight of the prisoners under guard and waited till the escort had returned. By then it was too late for the Indians to object. Three hundred miles confronted them, cold days, colder nights, and the steady and inexorable increase of snow, and, yet more bitter, the loneliness of the woods and the consciousness of failure. Only the Indians who had scalps at their belts took any comfort. The rest, Indians and white troops, marched on with the touch of snowflakes on their faces, in dogged silence.