Long Knife (64 page)

The first day Fernando had seen her with them after Maria’s death, he had swelled up with a wave of shame and anger, thinking for a moment that one who had thrown her virtue away was not fit to look after his daughters; he had thought for a moment of forbidding her to spend time privately with them.

But immediately his censure had been swept away by a warm rush of compassion.

Her only sin, he thought, was to give everything she had—even her honor—to the noblest and dearest man she had ever known.

And that, after all, he thought now as he looked at his sister, was in a way no more than he himself had done.

E
ARLY IN THE FALL OF
1779,
COLONEL
D
AVID
R
OGERS, ONE OF
George’s cousins, brought a large boat up the Ohio to the Falls, carrying a valuable cargo of clothing, flour, and ammunition obtained from the Spanish at New Orleans and destined for the defenders at Fort Pitt. He had somehow managed to slip past the British posts at Manchac and Natchez on the Mississippi. George provided him with an escort of twenty-three veterans of the Illinois campaign to help ensure his passage the rest of the way up the Ohio. At the head of this detachment was Lieutenant Abraham Chapline. George went to the river one September morning and bade these old comrades goodbye, and watched the convoy go up the river.

In October one of the boats returned, its squad of men heavy with despair. On the fourth, they reported, Colonel Rogers and his party, numbering sixty men, had fallen into an ambush above the mouth of the Licking River. Over a hundred and thirty Indians led by the renegade Girty brothers had killed most of the party, taken the supplies, and captured Lieutenant Chapline and a few others. Colonel Rogers had died of wounds soon after the battle. Only this one boatload of men had escaped. For days thereafter, George was benumbed by grief for the loss of so many of his beloved heroes, and by the futility of Rogers’ brilliant odyssey.

In November, nine months after capturing Henry Hamilton, George sent his conductor-general William Shannon to Williamsburg with a precious cargo of papers for the state auditor of Virginia: All his original vouchers, the twenty thousand papers of receipt and disbursement covering the entire Illinois campaign, that great and worrisome burden of meticulous records he had carried from one place to another. Here at last
would be the settling of his public accounts and the clearance of all those innumerable liabilities to which he had signed his own name. The letter of passage told Shannon to wait on Governor Jefferson, then return to Louisville as quickly as possible with the auditor’s receipt. George watched Shannon and his escort ride off through the snow, and felt as if a boulder had been lifted from his shoulders.

The winter of 1779–1780 was to be remembered for many years as “the hard winter.” Snow did not melt for three months; streams froze to the bottom. Most of the settlers’ cattle died, and innumerable buffalo, deer, wild turkeys, and other animals perished. Hunters were reduced to digging frozen animal carcasses out of the snow. People thawed the frozen meat of their dead horses. The price of corn quadrupled everywhere on the frontier. The typical meal for a Kentucky family was a fistful of hard johnnycake. John Sanders, released from military service, had gone into business with a group of hunters to serve as procurers of meat for the settlement and its garrison, but that winter they did precious little business. Many families starved to death trapped in their remote cabins, and many of the survivors suffered frostbite. The steel of axes and splitting wedges grew so brittle in the cold that they broke on striking. Trees split at night under the brilliant cold stars with cracks like rifle shots. The new settlement of Louisville at the Falls of the Ohio went on hard rations under George’s orders, as nothing could be brought down the frozen Ohio, and messages between the winter-locked outposts almost stopped.

George yearned in vain for a thaw that might enable him to attempt a journey up to St. Louis, and had to content himself with reveries. He would sit late by the fire, maudlin with bad rum, roll the little silver runner’s medallion between his thumb and forefinger, and try to imagine that Teresa with its mate was receiving his thoughts hundreds of miles away.

Little could be learned about the condition of the British posts and the Indians to the north, and he could only presume that something was being done to rebuild the power center he had shattered by his defeat of Hamilton. General Sullivan’s expedition against the lakes country had petered out far short of its goals; that much George had learned before the winter had cut off the travels of his spies, and it had come as no surprise. It left Detroit as his objective.

What trade there was had reverted to barter, with skins or tobacco being used as a currency, as the value of an American
dollar had dropped to less than a cent. In a way, therefore, severe and oppressive as the winter was, George dreaded the coming of spring, when he would have to begin the activities that would tax all his resourcefulness: holding the vast territory he had won. With the thaw, he was sure, would come a renewed wave of Indians led by British. He had confounded them for one year but knew that the effect could not last.

The winter broke suddenly and dramatically in February, and a spring as lush and invigorating as the winter had been severe surged into the territory. And virtually on the flood of the melting river came boats bearing American adventurers with their families. News in the East of Colonel Clark’s taming of the Northwest Territory precipitated a flow of land-hungry settlers. Before May, three hundred boatloads of families had arrived at the Falls of Ohio. Half a dozen settlements sprang up on the Bear Grass, near where the courier William Myers had died a lonely death at the hands of Indians just a year earlier.

George watched this influx of immigrants with mixed feelings. Here was manpower aplenty for his offensive against Detroit, but he had not studied them long before he realized that they were not like the seven score men he had brought down the river two years earlier. These men were intent on gaining land, not defending it. Many seemed to have come to escape military service in the East, or to avoid taxation. Many were Pennsylvanians, prejudiced against Virginia and ready to dispute her Old Dominion claims and resist her government. It was not difficult to see the land-madness and its potential troubles growing. Soon the immigrants were disputing Virginia’s jurisdiction over the Kentucky lands, and in this they were encouraged by the great land-scheme companies, whose agents quietly urged them to petition Congress to claim the territory and proclaim it a new state. As Virginia’s commandant, George knew that he must resist this, and it was not long before powerful resentments began to build between the Virginians who had won the country and the newcomers who were compelled to help man and supply this desperate little force.

In the meantime, William Shannon returned, bringing George the auditor’s receipt and authorization from Governor Thomas Jefferson to use his own discretion in the coming months; he could try to raise a force and go against Detroit, or build a fort at the mouth of the Ohio as suggested in Patrick Henry’s original orders. The Revolution in the East was static, Shannon reported. Spain having entered the war against England, Governor
Galvez was capturing one British fort after another in the lower Mississippi. “It’s good news now,” George mused. “But once we’re done with the British I fear we’ll have Spain to put out.”

A
S PREDICTABLE AS THE NATURAL QUICKENINGS OF SPRING, THE
Shawnee raiding parties began sweeping southward and attacking the settlements. Their forays seemed exceptionally furious in this spring of 1780; the Indians were inflamed by the tide of white men pouring down the Ohio, were wanting revenge for the death of their great chief Black Fish, who had died of wounds suffered in John Bowman’s attack the year before, and were once again being incited and equipped by Governor Hamilton’s successors at Detroit. After several murderous raids had scattered settlements, the Kentuckians started beseeching George to lead a retaliatory expedition against them.

“No,” he argued. “That would be like fanning the stink while letting the carcass lay. You gentlemen give me a thousand men and five months’ provisions, and I’ll take Detroit. And then you’ll have
permanent
peace.” Most of the county leaders, though, failed to see beyond the immediate threat and insisted that he go against the Shawnee towns. Now with the backing only of his veterans, he set workmen—on promise of eventual pay—to building a large number of boats for the Detroit offensive.

In the meantime, there was still a fort to be built at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, which would be the nucleus for the defense of the western rivers. It would control English river traffic. It would throw a net to capture the large numbers of Tories and deserters who had been escaping downriver, and would guard the channel of commerce and communication between Spain and the Colonies. But the most urgent reason was that the British were working hard to regain the support of Indians to recapture the Illinois country that he had held for two years; a strong fort there would be an invaluable defense against that threat. George knew he would get no help from impoverished Virginia in this matter. Governor Jefferson’s letter had directed him to build the fort but added:

… The less you depend for supplies from this Quarter the less
you
will be disappointed by those impediments which distance and a precarious foreign Commerce throws in the way …. Take such care of the men under you as an economical house holder would of his own family doing everything
within himself as far as he can and calling for as few supplies as possible.

In other words, George thought, I’ll get about as much help from there as I’ve got in the last two years, that being virtually none, but now for a change I’m to be forearmed by the knowledge that hope and patience are useless. Well, in that sense I prefer Jefferson’s way to Patrick Henry’s; I can be realistic.

Late in April, with a convoy of troops and workmen, he arrived at the wide juncture of the mighty rivers and began surveying for a feasible site. Several great drawbacks immediately became apparent. To build the fort just below the confluence would be to put it directly in peril of being washed away by seasonal floodwaters; too, the lowlands here were humid; malarial, and unhealthful. Moving through brush and dense cane down the floodplain on the east bank of the Mississippi, his party at last came to a bluff which stood well above any flood danger. Though it was nearly five miles below the juncture of the two rivers, it commanded an immense view of the lowland and the broad, curving sheets of water. The bluffs were streaked with rusty red, which convinced him that it was the place the French river travelers had called the Mine au Fer, and the Americans the Iron Bluffs.

Drawing on everything he had learned about fortifications, George laid out plans for a good log fort with blockhouses covering each other and thick earthen redoubts, and his workmen and soldiers began a vigorous and well-organized construction project. Settlers began arriving soon by boat, attracted by the promise of four hundred acres of land to each family at a favorable price to be fixed by the General Assembly. In the mild spring weather, axes and mauls and hammers began chunking at daybreak each day and continued until the westering sun burnished the sluggish surface of the wide river. Oxen and horses dragged logs and stones and great wooden sledges of earth to and fro. At night the weary laborers rejuvenated themselves with fiddle and pipe music and tall tales, whooping and stomping dances, and athletic contests.

To gather an adequate force of men for this new stronghold, George sent orders to Fort Patrick Henry at Vincennes calling for the Americans there to leave that place garrisoned by a company of French militia and come to the new fort. He also sent orders to Colonel Montgomery to retire most of the American troops from the Illinois villages. Montgomery began making
preparations for the pullout, and it was a move viewed with relief both by the Americans and the French; in the ten months since Colonel Clark’s departure from Kaskaskia, the passionate friendship between his soldiers and the French inhabitants had been eroded steadily by disputes over the provisioning of the garrison. The impoverished Americans had virtually no buying power, and had been forced now and then to take food, provisions, and animals from the inhabitants against their will.

But before that evacuation from the Illinois villages could be effected, an alarming series of messages came to Colonel Clark from several quarters. Traders and spies came down from the north with reports of a stirring of British military activity. They said that Lieutenant Governor Patrick Sinclair at Michillimackinac was gathering loyalist traders and chiefs of northern and western Indian tribes for war councils. Along the upper Mississippi, tribesmen of several Indians, including the Ottawa, Winnegabo, Sauk, and Fox, were gathering in large numbers and being harangued about the presence of Americans in the Mississippi valley. The Indians were being incited to anger also against the Spaniards, who were now at war with Great Britain. Sinclair, the reports said, was promising exclusive control of the rich Mississippi fur trade to those traders who would help him regain control of the valley. A great Sioux chief named Wabasha was being assigned to attack the American rebels at Kaskaskia and then sweep on down the Mississippi as far as Natchez. A trader, Emanuel Hesse, was being authorized to seize and control St. Louis, and was collecting a mixed force of traders, servants, and Indians that was reported to number a thousand at least. A support party of Indians and Canadians, under the dreaded Indian partisan Captain Charles Henry Bird, was setting out from Detroit to go through the Shawnee country, gather warriors along the way, capture Clark’s fort at the Falls of the Ohio, and then descend upon the central Kentucky settlements.