Blood at Dawn

by Jim R. Woolard

  Erin, clinging to my elbow, overheard, and her head began shaking. “No,” she protested, “I will not be separated from him, not ever.”

  Overcome with joy and hardly believing my ears, I shoved the sergeant aside and pulled her against my chest. She came willingly, a longing and wanting showing on her beautiful, powder-blackened face that equaled my own. And this time, making sure I helped myself to a deep breath first, I kissed her, losing the pain and suffering of the whole nightmarish day in the warmth and taste of her.

  The repeated call of someone to “Clear a path for the major” and the admiring whistles of the infantrymen sounded miles and miles away.

  Epilogue

  Eden’s Fork, Ohio

  16 August 1822

  To: Phineas Augustus Trabue,

  Owner, Publisher & Editor

  Montgomery County Register & Gazette

  My Dear Sir:

  I am aware of your desire to acquire the St. Clair recollections I have been compiling these recent months. I share as keen an interest in having my recollections of that campaign printed and distributed by a reputable sheet such as yours. Understand, I would not anticipate the receipt of any significant revenues from this endeavor. I would, howsomever, insist upon two conditions. First, you must present my recollections in their entirety without changes or deletions. Secondly, I must be allowed to complete additional pages that relate the fate of certain survivors near and dear to me whose following years were forever altered by their connection with the bloodiest defeat in the history of our nation’s military forces. Some of those involved, my dear sir, were unfairly judged at the time by military authorities and treated with an undeserved harshness by the general public. That record has yet to be put straight in the sake of fairness and proper justice.

  It would not be a distillation of the truth to claim that my father, Caleb Downer, was first and foremost among those whose reputation and character was forever tainted and sullied by the disaster of 4 November. The murder of Cyrus Paine, the killing of Dyson Barch and Court Starnes by my own hand, and the death of Ensign Andy Young during Colonel Darke’s retreat on the left flank from the creek bluff left no one alive who had witnessed the treachery of the Duer men. And so thorough was the destruction of vital paper documents, first by Dyson Barch and Court Starnes, then by the Shawnee on the battlefield, no credible evidence was ever found to prove conclusively whether my father did or did not swindle the army with William Duer and his fellow conspirators. Thus, Paw was never brought to trial or imprisoned, but his punishment, for an innocent man, was no less severe.

  In his rush to personally shed blame for the loss of hundreds of soldiers, General St. Clair conveniently forgot the visit Paw and Andy Young made to his tent at Fort Jefferson and condemned all civilian contractors out of hand. His condemnation gained great currency with a public terrified the Shawnee would shortly besiege Cincinnati and Fort Washington. With no witnesses or evidence to the contrary, and winter fast approaching, Paw had no choice but to return home where my mother and sisters were in dire need of him. His sudden departure from Cincinnati with the starving army awaiting supplies from upriver, supplies he learned Quartermaster Hodgdon had never procured, was seen as another sign that Paw was guilty of the charges leveled by the general.

  By the time I arrived at Cincinnati in mid-December 1791 from Fort Hamilton with Starkweather, Erin Green, her mother, Annie Bower, and Tap Jacobs, Paw had already departed for the Downer plantation in Kentucky. But in the immediate days thereafter, while involved with the captain in the forceful calming of the recently discharged levies and restoration of order in the city, I heard rumors and falsehoods about Paw everywhere. And with each passing month, as the enormity of St. Clair’s losses in men and equipment became common knowledge, those rumors and falsehoods spread the length of the Ohio and forever branded him a thief.

  Each week I meant to write to Paw, but some demand or event always seemed more important than the letter. I wasn’t embarrassed about him or for him. He had hurt me grievously the night he disowned me, and I was too mule stubborn to forgive him as yet. Then the weeks and months became years, and I was embarrassed, personally so, for being too small of heart to forgive him earlier.

  My beautiful, wondrous wife solved my dilemma before I couldn’t sleep at all. Erin Green had the habit of talking with me at night in the privacy of our bedchamber while sipping a glass of wine and wearing delicate fineries scanty of layer. She was so successful with this ploy, she convinced me in the winter of 1793 to employ the detestable Gabe Hookfin. The penniless beanpole appeared in our dooryard skinnier than air with his clothes and boots in tatters. His jaw had healed crookedly, and he spoke as if talking around a corner. He blamed my sucker punching of him for the woeful luck and misfortune that had befallen him. He asked, he contended, only for a bed in the stable and board in return for tending the riding and breeding stock owned by the newly promoted Major Starkweather and me. I, of course, slammed the door in his ugly, slit-mouthed face, but that night Erin did her female thing. She informed me that Hookfin was not an animal to be sent off to freeze to death. And was I not rejoining General Wayne’s army on the morrow? Who else was readily available to help Tap with the outside work in my absence while she and her mother saw to the inn we owned with Major Starkweather, the major’s daughter, and our own child? When I began disputing Hookfin’s trustworthiness, she simply smiled, sat her wineglass aside, and snuffed the candle. Needless to say, I located Hookfin bright and early the next morning. In his years of service he was never a disappointment.

  The same tableau unfolded the night she indicated she wanted to journey to the Scarlet Knight in Cincinnati for the New Year’s celebration of 31 December 1799. By then we had abandoned the summer heat, dirt, mud, and flying varmints of the city for the open country about McHenry’s Ford near Ludlow’s Station, still operating an inn, farming, and raising horses in conjunction with Starkweather. Erin ignored my arguments that the weather was rotten and that she was just with child, our third, hopefully a son. Again, the glass was set aside, the candle snuffed, and the next morning we headed for Cincinnati in the sleigh Hookfin had built as a gift for her, the beanpole himself at the reins of our matching sorrels.

  The sorrels covered the miles of frozen road without incident, and we swooped from the giant’s brow down into the city in late afternoon. Already bonfires burned along the river and high-spirited revelers populated the trashlittered streets. We drew up in front of the Scarlet Knight, and Hookfin helped Erin from the sleigh. As was to be expected, her entrance brought forth the owner, Saul Bartlett, and he led us around the wide, square bar that squatted before the tall stone fireplace, Erin preferring a table on the rear wall close to where Cyrus Paine had sat the night of his murder.

  The gentleman leaning on the bar with both elbows nearest our intended table looked strikingly familiar, even from the side. The ruffles of his shirt stuck from the neck of his broadcloth coat. He wore whipcord breeches, black riding boots, and a fawn-colored, flat-crowned hat stiff of brim. Damned if it wasn’t Paw except for the iron-gray hair, the sunken cheekbones, and the white scar disfiguring the gentleman’s jaw. Paw had been dressed thisaway the morning he and Court Starnes had come to our camp north of Fort Hamilton nine years ago.

  At my approach, the gentleman’s head turned and stopped my feet dead. There was no mistaking those fierce, deep brown eyes. I saw them every morning when I shaved. Paw’s nod of recognition was extremely slow, like he was afraid I might bolt and run on him. His “Hello, Ethan” was a mere whisper.

  I stood dumbfounded till nudged in the back from behind. I stepped forward one stride, then another, praying he was proud of his son, who was wearing at his wife’s insistence his dress uniform, that of a captain, United States Army. Paw nodded a second time and stepped to meet me, his arms opening. I went into them, and suddenly I was crying on his shoulder. He embraced me, and I was home, home at last.

  Later that evening, when we were alone in o
ur upstairs room, that wondrous woman of mine shared with me the letter she’d dispatched south to Kentucky the previous autumn.

  Respectfully awaiting your reply,

  Colonel Ethan Downer