1824: The Arkansas War

CHAPTER 14

The Arkansas River, south of Arkansas Fort

"I'm starting to get a little worried, Scott," Ray Thompson confided to his friend. The two of them were resting in a field, leaning against a tree stump, watching what remained of a small farm cabin burn to the ground. By now, it was mostly embers.

"You're just starting to get worried?" Powers jibed. "Gol dern, I wonder why. Could it be that it just dawned on you that Crittenden set off without having any resupply figured out? Oh, but I forget. We were gonna 'live off the richness of the land,' weren't we?"

He half leveled his musket at the smoldering cabin. "Insofar as a nigger's ain't-got-a-pot-to-piss-in shack qualifies as 'the richness of the land.' Insofar as it would have, I mean, if these crackers and yahoos weren't burning everything down the moment they come to it."

Thompson couldn't help but smile a little. He wasn't any fonder of most of their "compatriots" than Powers was. Both of them-quietly and privately, of course-had shared a laugh after four of Crittenden's men had been blown to shreds at Brown's tannery and another half dozen had been injured. It turned out that the damned abolitionist had left kegs of gunpowder behind, strategically situated. When the mob started burning down the tannery without investigating the premises first, the charges had exploded.

But the smile faded very quickly, and Thompson returned stubbornly to the subject. "Quit making jokes, Scott. Or have you got some magic sack full of food I don't know about?"

Powers sucked his teeth, idly watching a group of men raping one of the two black women they'd found in the shack. That was the young one. The older of the two-presumably her mother-was huddled over the corpse of a middle-aged black man lying in the dust some ten yards away. She was weeping softly, seemingly oblivious to everything else around her.

"No, I don't," he admitted. "But we'll find what we need at Arkansas Post." He nodded toward the corpse. "I figure he wasn't lying none. Not after his ears were cut off."

Gloomily, Thompson studied the body. Other than the skin color, it was impossible any longer to tell much about the man. His nose had been cut off also, along with his genitals and both of his hands. After the group that had been torturing him at Crittenden's command to get information were done, there hadn't been any point in keeping him alive. You'd have had to offer money to get anyone in the slave market at New Orleans to take him. So, the crackers had amused themselves for a time before he finally bled to death.

Crittenden might have told them to stop wasting time, but he'd left right after the negro had told them of the storehouses in Arkansas Post. Of course, whether they'd have listened to him or not was another question. Except for the men under the command of the Lallemand brothers, Crittenden's army was to discipline what a tornado was to decorum.

Well:it wasn't quite that bad. Most of the men belonged to groups of one sort or another. Even if the lines of authority were loose and informal, they existed at least on that level.

As was demonstrated, in fact, just that moment. Another man came up, wearing an outfit that bore a passing resemblance to a uniform if you squinted and were willing to make some allowances. He had a real sword, too, not one of the big knives that usually did for one on the frontier.

"Cut it out!" he shouted, grabbing the current rapist by the scruff of his neck and hauling him off the woman. There was something downright comical about the look on the rapist's face: a combination of outrage, frustration, and surprise.

"Just relax, boys. We'll be fuckin' her all the way down the Mississippi," the "officer" said, in a friendlier tone, lifting the man to his feet. "You betchum. We want that nigger pregnant by the time we put her up on the block. But we got to get going, before somebody else grabs the boat I got us."

That was standard procedure for slavers. Thompson had served for two years on the crew of a slave ship. That's where he'd first met Scott Powers, who'd been an officer of the ship. Even though the international slave trade had been illegal in the United States since 1808, it still went on despite the risk. Mostly, of course, for the profits involved; but there were also the perquisites and the side benefits. Young black women would be segregated from the rest of the cargo and raped all the way across the Atlantic. Entertainment for the crew during the voyage-and a pregnant female was worth more on the slave block when they arrived. "Two-for-one" for the buyer-and, more important, proof that the female was good breeding stock.

Grudgingly, the little crowd around the young black woman obeyed their commander. Two of them hauled her to her feet, one of them taking the time to yank her torn and dirty dress back down to her knees. The woman's eyes seemed vacant until, wandering, they fell on the corpse lying in the dirt. Then she let out a wail before one of the men holding her slapped her face.

"What do we do with this one?" another man asked, pointing with his pistol at the older woman still clutching the corpse.

The commander studied her for a moment, then shrugged. "May as well leave her. She's too old to bring much, and we ain't got enough food to begin with."

The man who'd asked the question looked back down at the woman. Then, cocked his pistol and shot her in the back of the head.

The younger woman wailed again, and got another slapping.

"Runnin' low on powder, too," the commander said sourly. But he didn't carry the chastisement any further.

Thompson didn't blame him. Killing the woman had been pointless, but control over a crew like this was always a chancy thing. As excited and fired up as they were, Crittenden's army had been killing, burning, raping, and torturing anyone they ran across almost since they left Alexandria. Crittenden had barely been able to keep them in check until they passed beyond the borders of Louisiana-and then, only when they came across white people.

Some of those activities had had a conscious purpose-especially the ones aimed at the Choctaw-but most of them had been as mindless as a shark's feeding frenzy. Just the way it was, with expeditions like this, as a rule. The Lallemands' men were under better discipline, but Crittenden wasn't so much leading this army as he was trying to half steer a raft through turbulent rapids.

Thompson and Powers watched the group as they dragged the woman into a keelboat and shoved her onto a bench alongside two other negroes they'd caught. Both young boys, in this case. Then, at a command from their leader, they pushed off from the bank and starting rowing down the Arkansas toward its junction with the Mississippi.

"Damn fools," Powers said. "For the price of three slaves! You won't catch me heading off without enough men around to handle Choctaws. I don't care if I find me a pot of gold. They'll be riled right good, by now."

Thompson grunted his agreement. What concerned him, however, was that he was pretty sure a lot of the men in Crittenden's force weren't going to have the same horse sense. This was likely to be just the first of many small groups peeling away from the expedition once they'd gotten their hands on a few slaves. Not all of the men who'd come with Crittenden were looking to set up plantations in the northern part of the Delta. That took some money, no matter what else-access to loans, at any rate-and plenty of these boys didn't have any more of a pot to piss in than a negro did. A fair number of them were, quite literally, former pirates.

But there was nothing they could do about it, so he levered himself onto his feet, using the musket as a brace. "Come on, we may as well catch up with Crittenden."

"Our own veritable Napoleon," Powers sneered. But he was getting to his feet also. There wasn't really any alternative, no matter what qualms and reservations they were both starting to have. Even leaving aside the risk of encountering Choctaws, the land behind them had been so thoroughly ravaged that they wouldn't find enough food to get them back to Louisiana.

The confluence of the Arkansas and the Mississippi