1824: The Arkansas War

CHAPTER 35

Being one of the few men in the Arkansas forces who was riding a horse, Sam had a fairly good view of what was developing, even though he was positioned behind the 3rd Infantry. So did Winfield Scott and William Cullen Bryant, who were riding next to him.

The reporters occupied a somewhat peculiar position. As noncombatants-and technically enemy civilians-they wouldn't be privy to any of the Arkansas Army's battle plans, of course. On the other hand, given the importance to Arkansas of getting American newspaper coverage that was as favorable as possible, Driscol was bending over backward to accommodate them.

Naturally, he'd handed Houston the job of keeping the two reporters happy but ignorant.

Sam couldn't honestly complain, though. He wouldn't have much to do in this battle until and unless what they'd taken to calling the Georgia Run became possible. Colonel H. Spencer Street, the commander of the 2nd Arkansas Infantry, didn't need Sam to tell him how to handle the regiment in a battle.

If the Georgia Run took shape, things would be different. Meaning no disrespect to Colonel Street, but Driscol wanted a more experienced commander in charge in the event that a complex maneuver became possible. At that point, of course, keeping Winfield Scott and Cullen Bryant happy but ignorant would be a moot point. What was about to transpire would be blindingly obvious to anyone.

Street had been perfectly happy with the arrangement. Spence, as everyone called him except in the field, was an unassuming officer. One of Charles Ball's naval gunners from the Capitol, later the Iron Battalion at New Orleans, he'd steadily worked his way up the ranks in the Arkansas Army because he was immensely reliable and cool under fire. But he wasn't the man to pull off something that required flair and initiative, and he knew it himself.

The formalities were being respected, anyway. Street would remain in command of the 2nd. Houston would officially assume overall command of a maneuver that involved one of the batteries from the 3rd Battalion as well as Spencer's regiment. An impromptu miniature brigade, as it were.

He glanced over to make sure the battery was maintaining position. When he did so, his eyes met those of John Ridge. The newly commissioned Cherokee lieutenant had been assigned to the artillery, as had his cousin. Major Ridge had insisted on that. The way the Cherokee chief looked at it, if his oldest son and his nephew were bound and determined to put on the green uniform of Arkansas, then they'd damn well learn to use the big guns while they were at it.

Sam didn't blame him. Who could know what the future might hold? One of the biggest military weaknesses of any Indian tribe was that they had no artillery at all and wouldn't really know how to use it if they did. Soon enough, whatever else, that would no longer be true of the Cherokees.

John Ridge gave Houston a nod. Then he went back to paying attention to what Callender McParland was explaining to him. For this battle, as new as he was, John's rank was a formality. In practice, he'd be watching McParland to see how it was done. His cousin Buck Watie had an identical position with Lieutenant Thomas Talley, who commanded the other battery that had come with the expedition.

John would be the one who got all the excitement if the Georgia Run happened. His cousin Buck would be stuck with the unglamorous-and deadly brutal-business of slugging it out alongside the 3rd Arkansas against the American regulars.

Sam didn't envy them. That was likely to get purely murderous before it was over.

Movement in the distance caught his eye. Looking up, he saw what appeared to be three people scuttling through one of the little groves that dotted the plain. He thought they were black but couldn't really be certain. Perhaps sixty or seventy yards behind them, he could see two more people. Definitely Chickasaws, from the costumes. One of them appeared to be a woman; the other, an old man brandishing some sort of weapon. Sam couldn't tell what it was, exactly, this far away. Perhaps a spear, perhaps an antique long-barreled musket.

"What's that all about?" asked Winfield Scott. The former American general was squinting at the same distant little drama.

"At a guess, some of the Chickasaw slaves just ran off, figuring they could make it to New Antrim before the Chickasaw warriors in the Post could get on their trail." Sam nodded toward the woods. "Most of the Chickasaws are out there in hiding. The noncombatants, that is. They've got, at most, seven hundred warriors. That's enough in itself to pack the Post fuller of men than it should be. No room for women and children, so the Chickasaws sent them off into the woods. That means women and old men, watching over maybe a thousand slaves."

Sam gave his head a slight backward jerk. "With freedom and sanctuary not much more than a hundred miles upstream. You can figure out what the odds are that they'll be able to keep things under control."

"Ah." The general gave Houston a quizzical look. "You don't seem much disturbed by the prospect that your Chickasaw allies will soon be very disgruntled allies."

"Frankly, who cares?" Sam's face felt tight. "Everybody in Arkansas, including me, is sick and tired of Chickasaws. For over a hundred years, the bastards have picked fights with everybody and made slaves out of anybody they could. So fuck 'em if they're finally between the hammer and the anvil."

"Yes, I understand. But I'd think it would cause you a great deal of trouble. With the rest of the Confederacy, I mean."

Sam shrugged. "Yes and no. The Cherokees and Creeks are none too fond of Chickasaws, either. The Choctaws purely hate them, even if they do speak the same language. Besides, the Choctaws have never engaged much in slavery, not even their mixed-bloods. The Cherokees and Creeks have, but most of the ones who own slaves"-again, that little backward jerk of his head-"are way back there in Oklahoma. The Cherokees and Creeks who live in Arkansas-we figure there's now about six thousand and two thousand, respectively-don't own slaves to begin with. Besides, by now I think it's an open question which way they'd swing in the event of a real clash."

He looked over at Scott and Bryant. "Finally, there are all the pure-blood traditionalists. They don't own hardly any slaves, not even the Chickasaw ones. So what do they care if some rich mixed-bloods have to start working for a living?"

He started to add a comment about people like The Bowl and Chief Aktoka but broke off when he heard Colonel Jones's shout from ahead.

"Quick march! Artillery UP!"

"And here we go," he said.

Fifty yards behind Houston and the other battery, Lieutenant Buck Watie was feeling nervous. More nervous than he'd ever felt in his life.

He wasn't scared, exactly. But that was simply because fear seemed completely inadequate to the situation. Buck knew the battle plan-he'd been one of the officers at the back of the mess hall when Driscol and Ball explained it-and he knew what the role of his battery would be.

It wasn't complicated, to put it mildly. They'd stand with the 3rd Infantry and go toe-to-toe with the American regulars, while Houston and the 2nd Infantry-and his cousin's battery, talk about having all the luck!-kept an eye out for the Georgia Run.

A man got scared when he contemplated taking a risk. This wasn't a risk. This was that crazy white man's way of fighting a battle. Plant yourself-standing straight up, right out in the open!-in plain sight of your enemy, and then swap gunfire until one or the other of you quit. And the reason you quit was because you'd been bled dry.

Madness was what it was. There was no skill involved, no way a man could use his reflexes and cunning. The "risk" was no risk at all, but a certainty. Such-and-such percentage would die; such-and-such percentage would be mortally wounded; such-and-such percentage would survive but would be permanently maimed or disfigured; such-and-such percentage would suffer temporary wounds; and such-and-such percentage would somehow, miraculously, emerge entirely unscathed.

The only question was which one of those percentages you wound up falling into. Which was determined by nothing but pure, blind, stupid luck.

"You white people are insane," he muttered to his fellow lieutenant and instructor, Thomas Talley.

Belatedly, he remembered. Talley's answering grin was all the brighter because the white teeth stood out so sharply against skin the color of old coffee.

"You right," Talley said. "We is definitely crazy. On the other hand, we ain't color-blind."

Harrison was up on his horse by now. Everyone-except the Arkansans-was moving too slowly.

Much too slowly. He had the sick sensation a man gets while watching a carriage sliding off a bridge. Every moment of the disaster as clear as crystal, and seeming to take forever. But with no way to move fast enough to stop it from happening.

"God damn it! Get that artillery over there!"

The familiar clap of six-pounders jerked his eyes to the front. He saw two companies of the 1st Infantry staggering back from the enemy. McNeil still hadn't gotten them into a proper line, and already the Arkansan artillery had hammered his lead companies with a volley. Canister, from the looks of it.

Thankfully, Arbuckle's regiment was almost in position. Within a few minutes, that leading Arkansas regiment would be matched up against two American ones, and good ones at that. Coming around the fort the way they were, the Arkansans were hemmed in, too. Even with understrength regiments, McNeil and Arbuckle would have that leading enemy regiment outnumbered, without enough room for the Arkansans to bring their other regiment into play very quickly or easily.

It'd be brutal, though, if the Arkansans stood their ground. Brutal as all hell.

"Fire!" Sheff yelled, echoing Captain Dupont's command. He did his best to emulate that high-pitched, piercing tone that both Driscol and Ball had mastered on battlefields. With his natural tenor voice, he thought he did pretty well, too.

Not that anyone-including him-could possibly tell. The whole regiment fired the volley on cue, as if six hundred and fifty men had one single brain and one single trigger finger. Anyone's voice, in that incredible white-clouded thunderclap, vanished without a trace.

His ears were ringing, worse than he remembered them doing at the earlier battle at Arkansas Post with Crittenden's army. That was probably because he, now an officer, was standing slightly in front of the line of muskets instead of being part of them. A bit off to the side, of course, but that didn't compensate.

His brain felt muzzy, too. He shook his head to clear it, squinting at the gunsmoke that obscured everything. They should be The answering clap came. Not as loud, perhaps oddly.

Sheff sensed a bullet whizzing by his head. Felt something-another bullet, maybe-that seemed to tug briefly at the uniform which was slightly bunched at his waist.

Other than that, he was quite uninjured. Glancing behind, he could see that at least three of his men had been hit. But looking farther down the line, he was relieved to still see his uncle Jem, now a sergeant in the company, urging the men forward as if he were Samuel himself.

These were no border adventurers they were fighting today. These were U.S. regulars. Wretched men, as a rule, taken one at a time. Recent immigrants, at least half of them, mostly from Ireland or Germany. Drunkards, gamblers, blasphemers; life's failures; flotsam and jetsam.

It didn't matter. They were professional soldiers, trained to do a job and able and willing to do it. Crittenden's men had crumpled under a single mighty blow. These wouldn't. The regulars would stand and fight.

The regiment had reloaded.

"Ten paces forward!" Sheff led them into the gunsmoke.

Houston was standing in the stirrups, straining to get as good a view as possible.

No use. The damn fort was in the way! Somehow, in all the planning, nobody had thought of that. He could see the two regiments of U.S. regulars that Harrison had brought out to meet the 3rd Arkansas on the road. And it was obvious just from the gunfire and the shouting and shrieking that the other two enemy regiments had broken into the Post and were fighting its Chickasaw defenders.

But he had no idea at all where the Georgia and Louisiana militias might be found. They were hidden from his view, somewhere behind that hulking fort.

Driscol and Ball trotted up.

Patrick had a wry smile on his face. "Never fails, does it, lad? Scheme all you want; the god of battles will roll his dice."

Ball was scowling. "Very funny. Patrick, we can't risk it without knowing. If they're too close to the regulars, we'll get torn to pieces. Especially after Harrison pulls the rest of the regulars out of the Post. Which"-Ball pointed at the fighting on the road ahead-"he will. He'll have to."

Sam was already studying that fight and had come to the same conclusion. The U.S. regulars were accounting adequately for themselves, true. No signs of panic, at least not yet. But they'd been caught off guard by the speed of the Arkansas attack, and they still hadn't recovered. Even as Sam watched, another perfectly timed Arkansas musket volley went off, followed by an almost equally perfect volley of canister from the six-pounders McParland had positioned slightly to the north.

Whichever that American regiment was, up in the front, it was being hammered very badly indeed. Its companion regiment had been partly shielded from the Arkansas muskets, but McParland was concentrating his guns on them.

The solution was obvious. It wasn't as if Sam really had any other duties, anyway, unless the Georgia Run was on.

"I'll reconnoiter," he said. He spurred his horse into a trot, not bothering to wait for permission from the two generals. He and Patrick and Charles went a long way back together, now. Ten years and counting. After a point, formalities were just silly.

Harrison's horse was shot out from under him by a volley from the six-pounders. Caught by surprise-he'd been looking at the Post, trying to gauge from the outside how well that fight was going-he couldn't free one of his feet from the stirrups in time.

Fortunately-great good fortune-the horse's knee crumpled under the carcass. Just enough to leave him room to kick his boot free.

He'd lost his sword. Where Lieutenant Fleming came up with it. "Here, sir." The youngster even had the presence of mind to proffer it hilt first. "Are you all right?"

He was helping Harrison to his feet as he asked the question.

"Never mind that!" Harrison pointed at the Post. "Get in there and find out- God damn you, sir! "

Fleming was staring at him empty-eyed. Empty-headed, too. A heavy three-ounce canister ball had caught him right in the forehead. Most of his brains were lying on the ground behind him.

Slowly, he toppled over onto his back. Falling as stiffly as a pine tree.

"Oh, damn you, sir," Harrison repeated. He looked for another aide.

He found Lieutenant Riehl a minute or so later. But John Riehl was equally useless. Another one of those deadly Arkansas canister balls had taken his left hand off at the wrist. Riehl was holding it in his right hand, just staring down at it. Completely oblivious, it seemed, to the blood pouring out of his left stump.

"Bind yourself up, you idiot," Harrison snarled. "Or you'll bleed to death."

Riehl turned puzzled blue eyes up to him. "My hand seems to be no longer attached, sir. What should I do?"

"Bind yourself-Ah! Here!"

Quickly-he was the commanding general, he had no business being distracted like this!-Harrison tore a strip of cloth from Riehl's uniform. That was easy because the uniform was torn. There was another wound somewhere on the lieutenant's ribs. Probably nothing serious, though, judging from the small flow of blood.

He tied the tourniquet roughly, crudely, and most of all quickly.

"Report to the rear, Lieutenant."

"Sir, my hand seems to be no longer attached. What should-"

"Shut up!" Harrison looked for another aide. He'd started the battle with three of them.

Sheff was a little amazed that he still hadn't been hurt at all. Not very amazed, but that was because only a tiny part of his brain was paying attention to the problem.

Which was just as well, since that part of his brain was gibbering like a monkey.

But he simply ignored it. Victory was all that mattered. The regiment was all that mattered.

He looked over and saw that Captain Dupont was lying on the ground. He was groaning and moving a little, so he was still alive. But from the looks of the wound-what Sheff could see of it, which was a coatee blood-soaked above the waist-he might very well not be in a few days. He'd probably been gut-shot.

That put Sheff in command of the company. He raised his sword and went at the enemy.

"Ten paces forward!"

By the time Harrison found a soldier who could substitute for the missing aide and sent him into the Post and got back to the front lines, he knew that the situation was rapidly becoming critical. Outnumbered or not-their other regiment still unused or not-that initial hammering blow from the leading Arkansas regiment had caught his own men off guard and off balance.

They'd been kept off balance ever since. The Arkansans were relentless, despite the heavy casualties they were suffering themselves. They kept coming forward, steadily-ten paces, fire; ten paces, fire-no matter how hard the 1st and 7th fought. By now, the battle was centered just north of the Post, with the Arkansas right and the American left anchored on the fort's wall.

McNeil was dead. He'd been killed just before Harrison returned, a musket ball right in the heart. Arbuckle was still in the fray. He'd even finally managed-God damn him, as well-to get his regiment into line.

McNeil had been succeeded in command of the 3rd by Captain Jeremy Baisden. The major who should have succeeded him had been killed in the same volley that slew the regiment's commander.

Just as well. Harrison had thought the major was an incompetent. Baisden seemed to know what he was about.

"You'll have to hold them, Captain!" Harrison shouted. "Until I can get the 3rd and the 4th out of the Post!"

Baisden waved his hand. Then, calmly, went back to his business.

Good man. Best of all, he didn't talk much. If Harrison had to lose one of his experienced regimental commanders, it was really a pity the Arkansans hadn't killed Arbuckle instead of McNeil.

He needed another horse. Unfortunately, he seemed to have lost all of his young aides. One dead, one maimed-and God only knew where that useless Lieutenant Whatever-His-Name-Was had gotten off to.

The terrain in the Delta was generally flat, but there were small rises here and there. Sam found one of them within a couple of hundred yards that-finally-gave him a decent view of the entire battlefield.

He spotted the militia units right away. They were hugging the river, at least a third of a mile from the regulars, who were now completely tangled up with the 1st Arkansas or the Chickasaws in the Post itself.

"Oh, what a beautiful sight."

There was no need to stand on ceremony. Rising again in the stirrups, he could easily see Patrick and Charles. That meant they could see him also, if they were watching.

He laughed. As if they wouldn't be!

He swept off his hat-a proper one, not that blasted fur cap-and waved it around.

"Come and get it, boys! Dinner's on the table!"

1824: TheArkansasWar