Rifles for Watie

by Harold Keith

  Jeff remembered Joe Grayson, the Cherokee boy, telling how his mother had lost her home in Georgia.

  “What do you mean, mam, that my country is getting ready to do it again? Jackson was a Democrat. My government is Republican.”

  She bit her lower lip. “That doesn’t change anything. During the 1860 campaign, Seward, your leading Republican, wanted to seize our lands and fill them with white settlers. For years, the people of Kansas have wanted to get rid of their Indian tribes. Where do you think they’d send them, to Nebraska, or Missouri, or Colorado? They’d send them to our country and force us to give or sell to them cheaply our lands here. So why should we remain loyal to you? Besides, your government deserted us when the war started.”

  “It’s true, mam,” Jeff admitted, “that we had to take out our soldiers to keep them from being captured. We weren’t prepared for war. We weren’t planning a war. The South was. They were organizing home militia and making treaties with the Indians.”

  Lucy lifted her chin proudly. “And it was the finest treaty we ever got. We can partition or sell our surplus lands. We can sell our personal property. We can move out intruders whenever we wish and the Confederate army will help us. No agent can be assigned to us without our consent. Funds that the United States owes us and won’t pay us will be paid in full by the Confederacy. We have been given our own judicial district, just like any Confederate state. We are allowed our own delegate to the Confederate congress. All these things have been denied us by your United States government.” She had almost finished stitching on the last button. Her fingers began to tremble.

  Jeff’s lips compressed. Now she had him going. What a stupid war it was. To him, the issues seemed all mixed up. Each state in the Union seemed to have a different reason for fighting. In Kansas, it was the Free State party versus the proslavery people. In Missouri, the Union faction living in the southern part of the state was fighting the rebels living to the north. In the Cherokee Indian Nation, it was the Stand Watie Cherokees fighting the John Ross Cherokees over the old removal bitterness, and slavery seemed very little involved. In fact, he had heard that John Ross, leader of the Northern Cherokees, owned a hundred Negro slaves and apparently was satisfied with the custom. And in all the states and territories, gangs of bushwhackers who didn’t know what they were fighting for, roamed and pillaged the war-torn country, defying both the Union and rebel armies.

  “Mam, I had no idea all this had happened. It does seem that my government has treated your country badly. But . . .”

  Jeff saw that she had grown suddenly pale. Her lips parted as if to speak. She took a long, tremulous breath.

  She said, “What do you mean, it seems so? You raid our country, rob us of our valuables, despoil our property. Your officers are insolent and make us cook for them. Your soldiers, like those this afternoon, insult us. If my father or my brother wants to see us, they have to slip across the river like thieves in the night and risk being captured or shot. . . .” Her low voice, vibrant with passion, failed. She began to sew faster than ever. Jeff didn’t dare speak.

  Tears welled into her eyes. Suddenly she flinched and gave a little gasp of pain. A tiny spot of blood appeared on her finger. She had accidentally stuck it with the needle. Throwing his coat upon the floor, she ran weeping from the room.

  Shaken, Jeff stood, looking after her in wonder and pain. Finally he stooped and picked up his coat. Clumsily he broke the remaining thread off the second button, noticing it was sewn on strongly and neatly. He thrust Lucy’s needle into the padded top of her sewing basket, where she could find it, and stood indecisively. Corn, he’d never seen such a peculiar, independent girl.

  Always foamed up about the war. In any war, there were robbing and killing and despoiling by both sides. Surely she knew that. Sighing, he shook his head helplessly. He had wanted to comfort her, but his courage had failed him.

  Resignedly he drew a long breath and looked resentfully around the room with its elegantly upholstered furniture and its large Bible bound in blue leather with the name “Levi Washbourne” engraved proudly on it in silver letters.

  He felt miserable. He guessed he was head over heels in love with Lucy. But he might just as well be in love with some girl living on a star. The only thing they had in common was the war, and they were hopelessly crossed on that. Why had he been so foolish as to fall for a rebel girl?

  He put on his coat and buttoned it. Lucy did know a lot about politics. He had learned more in the last five minutes about the Cherokee Indian Nation than he had ever dreamed existed. He hadn’t realized the Cherokees had a small republic of their own within the United States.

  He had picked up his cap and turned to go when Mrs. Adair came into the room.

  “Where’s Lucy?” she asked, surprised.

  Sheepishly Jeff shook his head. “We were arguing about the war, mam, when she stuck her finger with the needle. She began crying and ran from the room.”

  Mrs. Adair stared at him thoughtfully, her hands clenched tightly in front of her. Jeff could tell she felt sorry for him. He guessed she could tell by his face how smitten he was on Lucy. But there was something else in her face, too. Something that bordered on fear. Lucy’s sister seemed to be hesitating, as though weighing something carefully in her mind.

  She said impulsively, “Mr. Bussey, even though you are in the Union army, I feel that I can trust you and that some explanation of Lucy’s conduct is due you. We’re all worried frantic about our brother Lee. We haven’t told Mother yet, but he’s been missing two weeks after being out on scout. Lucy, especially, has been prostrate with worry and fear. She and her brother are very close. She has a horror of Lee or Father being killed. That’s why she can never talk rationally about the war.”

  Jeff swallowed hard. No wonder Lucy hated the sight of a blue uniform. He’d never be able to make her like him so long as the war lasted, and it would probably last a long time.

  He turned glumly toward the door, cap in hand. “Mam, please tell her that I’m grateful to her for sewing on my buttons. I mean her buttons. I mean her father’s buttons. And that I’m sorry we have to fight against her brother and her father. And I hope her brother gets back safely from his scout.”

  Mrs. Adair nodded. Tears came to her eyes, but her voice was steady. “Thank you. I’ll tell her.”

  As Jeff walked up the road, he wished he could help the Washbournes find Lee. But how would you go about trying to find an enemy missing on scout? The Union couldn’t even keep track of its own men missing on scout.

  15

  Fate of the Brandts

  A week later Jeff was standing at dusk near the north gate of Fort Gibson when he heard wagon wheels rumbling and hundreds of slow hoofbeats.

  His heart leaped hopefully. Maybe it was a food train. Forage and provisions were running low. With Watie raiding so widely, no corn had been raised in the Cherokee country. The fort was wholly dependent now upon the food freighted overland by mule train from far-off Kansas, and upon the small acquisitions of flour and meal ground at Hildebrand’s mill on Flint Creek from corn and wheat secured by stealthy dashes into nearby Arkansas. Weeks had passed since a supply train had come from Fort Scott. Everybody was tired of the weevily meat and the quarter rations of salt horse.

  Besides, ten thousand rebels stationed along the south bank of the Arkansas River from Webbers Falls to the north of the Grand were poised for an attack. The fort’s plight had become desperate. Jeff kicked at a small rock embedded in the ground. Federal blunders and indifference had done it. Located hundreds of miles west of the main theater of war, the fort had been virtually abandoned by Union authorities at St. Louis.

  A double column of dusty figures rode horseback through the fort’s great wooden gate. Their black campaign hats and their blue shoulders bobbed over the top of the fort’s sharply pointed, close-set log palisades. As they drew closer, Jeff saw they were cavalry. Their faces were raw and swollen from the stings of horseflies and the scratches of tree
branches striking them as they traveled through the woods. They looked as though they had been choking in their own dust all the way from Kansas.

  Disappointed, he walked out to meet them, hoping they were escorting at least part of a food train. But only their own baggage wagons followed, and when he saw how easily the tired mules pulled the wagons, he knew they were loaded only lightly. When he tried to question them about where they had come from and how the war was going in the east, they stared at him and never spoke. Unabashed, he walked with them as they rode past the new stone supply buildings covered with slate that Colonel Phillips had ordered constructed atop the bluff overlooking Grand River. Moving on to the lowlands, they halted near the site of the original fort, now two decaying blockhouses.

  There they dismounted slowly and, once on the ground, staggered unsteadily and stomped their feet to restore the circulation. With their hands they beat clouds of dust off their pants and blouses. Some of them hawked deeply and noisily spat the dust from their throats. Others gave gruff commands to their horses and clomped about in their boots, their brass spurs jingling as they began to set up camp.

  Despite their lack of hospitality, Jeff was impressed with the careful way they attended to their horses before they ate a bite of supper themselves. They removed the saddles, permitting the animals to roll on the ground. They shook out the brown saddle blankets and began to groom the horses briskly. Standing well away and leaning hard on the currycombs and brushes, they wiped the dry mud and the scurf from the horses’ skin. Then they hand-rubbed the horses’ legs and sponged out their nostrils and docks. Only after they had cared for their mounts and fed them hay and grain did the weary men unbuckle their saber belts and head gratefully for the mess halls at the top of the bluff.

  “Jeff!”

  One of the cavalrymen trudging up the rise left the column and ran awkwardly in his boots toward Jeff. Jeff didn’t recognize the husky young fellow with orange freckles all over his face who grasped his hand in both of his. On the front of his soiled black felt hat was a brass insignia of swords crossed. He wore low, reddish sideburns, and his eyebrows were heavy and white as corn silk.

  “Goshallmighty, Jeff, don’t you know me? I’m David Gardner.”

  A glad grin spread over Jeff’s face. “David!” he blurted. He couldn’t get over how David had grown. “Where’d you come from?”

  David spat a big chew of tobacco into one of his freckled hands and hurled it onto the ground behind him. He was grinning happily, too. “From Fort Scott.”

  “When’s the next supply train coming out?”

  David pointed back up the road. “It’s only about two, three days behind us.”

  “Been home lately?”

  David shook his head. “Not since that mornin’ you caught Ma and me jawin’ in th’ yard.” He looked thoughtfully at the ground. “I ’spect Ma’s had a hard time th’ last two years.”

  “You haven’t heard word from any of my folks, have you?” Jeff asked hopefully.

  David took off his hat. He whipped it across his knee, and the trail dust flew. “Naw. I met a conscript from Sugar Mound several months ago when I was on the ditch crew at Rolla. He told me they’d had plenty o’ rain back home the last two years. Finally busted the drouth. No more desertin’ for me, Jeff. I worked out my punishment. Now I’m reinstated. You and Ma was right.”

  David’s voice was deeper, and there was an air of assurance and competency about him. He didn’t look anything like the lonely, scrawny, homesick fellow Jeff had known back at Fort Leavenworth.

  David’s glance shifted back to the horses. His forehead wrinkled in surprise. “Hey, what’s she doin’ that for, Jeff?”

  A thin-faced Indian girl carrying an empty pan glided up where the newly arrived horses were eating and began timidly to pick up from the ground the grains of corn dropping from the horses’ mouths.

  “She’s hungry,” Jeff explained. “She’ll take the corn home and wash it. Then they’ll parch it and eat it. We’ve got more than six thousand Indian refugees here, mostly women and children, lying under trees, most of them sick and half starved. They had to come to the fort for protection. The whole country’s thick with rebels and bushwhackers robbing and killing people.”

  David began to fan himself thoughtfully with his hat. “I didn’t know things was that bad. Le’s go up to the fort, Jeff, and git some drinkin’ water. I’m drier than a cork leg.”

  “How’d you get in the cavalry?” Jeff asked as they walked along.

  “They’re convertin’ lots o’ infantry into cavalry at Fort Scott now,” David said. “We brought several cavalry instructors out with us. One of ’em is Lieutenant Foss. You otta see that feller ride, Jeff. He sets up there as easy as a hossfly on a mule’s ear. They’re gonna convert lots of your infantry here into cavalry, too. How would you like that, Jeff?”

  “Corn, David, I’d like it.” Jeff had always wanted to be in the cavalry. “Only I still don’t have a horse.”

  David scoffed, “Goshallmighty, Jeff, that won’t keep you out no more. We got hosses to burn now. The supply train escort is bringin’ a thousand head down with them. It’s men the cavalry needs now, not hosses. We hear they’re gonna start trainin’ you in a week.”

  Instead, they started in three days. Jeff enjoyed the look of surprise on Noah’s somber face when he told him about it at breakfast a full day before it was announced at the fort.

  Noah frowned, stirring his coffee. “I’d druther stay on the ground. Ridin’ a hoss makes my head spin an’ my feet hurt. But it’s a wise move. Cavalry is more important out here in the West than it is back East. Here the distances are greater, and the rival armies smaller. If a blow needs to be struck here, it might take the infantry several days to walk to where it’s goin’ but cavalry could get there in a few hours. Wonder where they gonna train us?”

  The training began on the fort’s drill ground located on the open prairie to the west. Despite the unfamiliar routine of the cavalry drills, Jeff liked the change. Back home, he had ridden horses almost before he had learned to walk, so he had no trouble managing the big, slow sorrel checked out to him.

  He discovered that the animal, which had belonged to a cavalryman who had died of dysentery, could teach him more than any of the drillmasters, and without cursing him, too. When the bugles blew “right about” and “left about,” the sorrel knew instinctively what to do and when to do it. He was smarter than any sergeant on the premises.

  But not even the horse could help him when they were introduced to the saber drills. Jeff didn’t like the short, curved cavalry sword known as the saber. In the first place, he couldn’t walk, wearing one, without its barking his legs or tripping him up. On a horse, it was even worse. When he was commanded to draw and brandish it while galloping, it became positively dangerous. He did pretty well with the commands “right cut against infantry” and “left cut against infantry” but when ordered to execute the “rear moulinet” he quickly came to grief.

  At the first pass of the saber behind his back, Jeff slashed a long gash in his new oilskin slicker rolled up on the rear of his saddle. Later, he was reminded of it every time it rained, and cold water rushed through the rent and down his back. And when the command was “front moulinet” he whipped his blade so near the sorrel’s ear that the horse lurched in fright, and he was almost unseated.

  “Do it like this!” bellowed Lieutenant Foss, a tall, leatherfaced Coloradoan, bowlegged as a hoop. He was in charge of the drill and skillfully performed the various passes.

  “Corn!” Jeff marveled to Stuart Mitchell, riding nearby. “He makes that old cheese knife spin like a circular saw!”

  But the lieutenant was the only man in the outfit who could come even remotely close to doing the saber cuts correctly. Jeff decided that if he ever got into a cavalry battle, he would forget about the saber and try to get in all his licks with his one-shot Sharps carbine or his “pepperpot,” as he called the big cap-and-ball pistol he was given to
wear in his belt.

  When he looked over his shoulder at Noah astride a hardmouthed bay, Jeff straightway forgot his own troubles amid the hilarity of watching another’s. Noah was obviously no Cossack. His face turned a chalk white when he first mounted the bay.

  Panic in his face, he dropped his shiny saber in the green prairie grass and lost one of his bridle reins, too. His infantry cap, not much bigger than a postage stamp, had fallen forward over his eyes. His mount was trotting roughly and every time Noah’s gaunt body came down, it bounced so high in the saddle that Jeff could see a foot of daylight under the seat of his pants.

  “Circle yore leaders and keep up the drags!” a former cowboy in the company yelled, giving Noah’s awkward effort the flavor of a cattle stampede.

  Noah’s big feet escaped the stirrups and his long legs, swinging comically far below the bay’s belly, began to churn so violently up and down the sides of the horse that his blue trousers were pushed up high, exposing the legs of his long red underwear. Jeff rode out and caught the horse by the bridle until Noah, cursing beneath his breath, could recover his lost rein, pull down his pant legs and thrust his feet back into the stirrups.

  The new cavalry was quickly pressed into service despite its greenness. The guerilla warfare, that summer of ’63, was increasing in savagery every day. The position of Fort Gibson was critical. When Colonel Phillips sent eight hundred cavalry up the Texas road as an escort to the first Federal supply train that had come through in months, the rebels boldly crossed the Arkansas River and captured more than one thousand Union horses and mules. General Douglas Cooper’s rebels were now camped so close that every night Jeff could see the rebel campfires across the river.

  Groups of Watie’s rebel Cherokee horsemen made raid after raid behind the Union lines in the vicinity of Spavinaw and Grand River, destroying the fields and gardens the Union refugee women and children had planted so laboriously on their small farms. It was Watie’s intention to drive every Union refugee family he could find back upon the protection of Fort Gibson, compelling the fort to feed them from the limited stores hauled at such labor by mule and ox trains from far-off Kansas. And Watie did all in his power to keep those trains from getting through. Thus he hoped to force Phillips to evacuate the fort and return to Kansas, leaving all the Cherokee Nation to the Confederates. It was the duty of the new Union cavalry, of which Jeff was now a part, to prevent those depredations if it could.