1824: The Arkansas War

by Eric Flint

  The young man’s New England accent irritated the steamboat captain, who had been born and raised in Georgia and now made his home in New Orleans. But the extra money offered was too much to pass up.

  “All right, then. We’ll find you a berth somewhere’s aboard. Though I’m blasted if I understand why a poet wants to go upriver in these times. I’ve half a mind not to myself. Wouldn’t, if I didn’t have a contract I got to meet.”

  The New Englander shrugged. “I thought I’d try my hand at some frontier extravaganzas and the like. Perhaps an epic, if I can find a suitable topic. New York publishers love the stuff, and a poet needs an epic to cement his reputation. I might even be able to sell it in Europe, too.”

  He didn’t seem inclined to explain further. He was practically talking ancient Greek anyway, as far as the captain was concerned. Poetry. New York publishers. Europe. Epics, no less!

  “Come aboard, then.”

  The poet found a convenient chair toward the rear of the deck and set himself up. There was an overhang to shelter him in case of rain, which would likely be handy. He’d have to sleep in that chair also, the craft being such a small one. But the blanket in his trunk should suffice to keep him warm, this far south and still being in early fall.

  Since it would be a day, at least, before the steamboat neared the scene of the activities he was interested in, he decided he might as well work on “Thanatopsis” further. It had been his most famous and popular poem since he’d first gotten it published in 1817 in the North American Review. But he’d actually written it in 1811, still one month short of his seventeenth birthday, and he’d never been satisfied with the end result.

  Sadly, he’d soon be forced to put aside poetry, for the most part. There was just no money in it, and now that he was almost thirty years old he needed to find an occupation that would support a family. He had one daughter already and would no doubt soon have other children to care for.

  Find another occupation, rather. He’d done well enough as a lawyer but had discovered that he detested the work. Lawyers spent most of their time dealing with people they rarely liked and often loathed. Even the few whose company they might otherwise have enjoyed, they encountered under bad circumstances. So, with the support of his wife, Fanny, he’d decided on journalism, being interested in public affairs. And, now, found himself blessing the impulse that had taken him to the west to write some essays on the new Confederacy. There was quite a bit of fascination with the subject in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania.

  Talk about perfect coincidence!

  That evening, the captain came by for a brief visit.

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Bryant, Captain. William Cullen Bryant.”

  At four o’clock the next afternoon, the first corpse drifted past the steamboat. By noon, two more had done the same.

  Horrid-looking things. But not as horrid—not nearly—as the corpse they passed on the riverbank. The man—apparently an Indian, although it was difficult to tell—had been spread-eagled on the wheel of an old wagon, flayed, and disemboweled. His intestines—what was left of them, after the birds and animals—trailed on the ground.

  Bryant didn’t vomit over the side, however, until they passed the corpses of the woman and child who’d been impaled. Both bodies were naked. The woman’s breasts had been cut off and…something had been done to her groin. Thankfully, the details were impossible to discern in the twilight. From the blood caked in the area, the boy had had his genitals severed. He was perhaps eight years old, as near as Bryant could tell from the distance.

  “Boys are bein’ right rambunctious,” the captain said, shaking his head. “Don’t really hold with it myself, though I understand how they feel.”

  Tight-lipped, trying to control his stomach, Bryant said nothing.

  “Thanatopsis.” A teenage boy’s poem on death. It all seemed very distant, now.

  Journalism, however, did not. That night, on a steamboat deck by lamplight, he began writing in earnest the first article of An Account of the Current Situation in Arkansas.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Mississippi River, south of Hopefield, Arkansas

  OCTOBER 3, 1824

  Taylor never saw any bodies in the river, coming down from Memphis, since the current would have taken them away. But he didn’t much doubt there had been some. The news of Crittenden’s expedition had spread throughout the area. While the main body of freebooters might be coming into Arkansas from the south, there were plenty of adventurers—border ruffians, to call them by their right name—from Missouri and Tennessee and Kentucky who were eager to throw themselves into the fray. Give it a week, and they’d be coming from Mississippi; two weeks, Alabama; a month, if it kept up, from Georgia and the Carolinas; two months, from all over the country, especially the South.

  From what he could see from the deck of the steamboat he’d hired—well, commandeered in all but name—some hundreds of freebooters had already passed through the area. And they were being just as rough on anybody they ran into as you’d expect from such men.

  When Taylor’s steamboat reached Hopefield just after dawn, he discovered the settlement had been deserted, with most of its cabins burnt. And Hopefield had been a white settlement. Taylor had seen two burned-out woodcutters’ cabins in the miles they had gone since, and their owners would have also been white people. Some of them, at any rate. They might have been mixed families, whites and Indians, which was a lot more common on the frontier than many people liked to admit.

  It didn’t matter. By now, over four years after the treaty, it was the firm opinion of white Southerners of the type who’d be attracted to this adventure that any white man who voluntarily settled in Arkansas—anywhere in the Confederacy—was a damned nigger-lover. No better than an abolitionist or one of those detestable New England missionaries who were always prattling nonsense about the “rights of Indians.”

  And there was some truth to the charge, at least if you removed the loaded terms. White opinion on the subject of race, especially when it came to Indians, had never been uniform. In some ways, because contact was so much closer, even less so in the South than the North. True, there were very few white Southerners who’d admit to having any African ancestry, and none of them willingly, since the legal repercussions were so harsh. However absurd it might be, they’d try their best to use a subterfuge term like “Portuguese.” But there were plenty who’d admit to having some Cherokees or Creeks or Choctaws perched in the family tree. Brag about it, in fact—even though everybody in the South knew perfectly well that the southern tribes didn’t maintain the same sharp and everlasting barriers to the absorption of negroes that whites officially did. A “full-blood Cherokee” might very well be someone whom Southerners would have labeled a “quadroon” or “mulatto” if he’d been white instead of Indian.

  Such white folks would be willing to move to Arkansas readily enough. There were advantages, after all. Just for starters, the treaty had among other things finally removed the legal headaches left over from settling disputed Spanish land grants and insurance claims from the great earthquakes of 1811 and 1812. The Confederacy—or the chiefdom of Arkansas—could issue legal land titles, now. For another thing, within a short time the danger of Indian attacks had receded sharply. The Cherokees were pretty well disciplined, Driscol’s people even more so—and they proved soon enough that they could handle any Osage raiding parties.

  The land in the Arkansas Delta was rich, once you got past the swamps along the rivers. Good land for livestock and good land for cotton. Slavery was a handy way to organize cotton agriculture, but it was by no means essential. And if Driscol’s regime forbade slavery, the Bank of Arkansas was a lot easier to deal with than the Second Bank of the United States, at least if you were a poor white man. Especially since everybody knew that in a pinch, a man could always satisfy a bank debt by serving a term in the Arkansas Army—something that positively infuriated the likes of Crittenden.
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br />   Julia came out on deck, interrupting Taylor’s musings. Her two daughters were following right behind her.

  “How does it look, Zack?”

  The question—even more so, the sight of Imogene and Adaline—made up the colonel’s mind. The twins were twelve years old, nearing thirteen. Still girls, yes, but already very pretty and entering womanhood. They’d be particularly attractive to slave hunters.

  “It’s too chancy,” he announced. “By now, from all reports I’ve gotten, the freebooters will have dozens of craft moving up into the Arkansas. Steamboats, keelboats, rowboats, sailboats, canoes, even flatboats—hell, you name it.” He gave their own steamboat a quick survey. “No way to fend them off from this thing, not if we get trapped in the river. Not with as few men as I’ve got. We’ll need to disembark at the nearest suitable spot and ride cross-country to Arkansas Post. That should still be safe enough.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  The confluence of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers

  OCTOBER 3, 1824

  “Oh, dear,” said Eliza Ross. Her husband thought the comment was outstandingly low-keyed under the circumstances. Very much “stiff upper lip,” to use the expression that had started coming into vogue during the Napoleonic Wars.

  He would have been amused, except there was nothing amusing about the sight of the two riverboats heading for their steamer. Longboats, the British navy would have called them, although Robert had no idea what the correct term was for them here.

  True, the boats were oar driven, but with multiple oars and the advantage of the current, they would arrive long before the steamboat could turn itself around and head back to the south. They’d emerged suddenly from the mouth of the Arkansas, just as the steamboat came up. Much as if they’d been lying in ambush.

  Which was probably true. Not because the freebooters were targeting their steamboat in particular, but simply because they’d been left behind to seize any steamboat that came along. The freebooters’ supply train—if such a term could be used at all—was not likely to have been well planned and organized. By now, especially as scattered as his forces must have gotten from their frenzy of plundering and mayhem as they went upriver, Crittenden must be getting worried about his logistics. Having an extra steamboat would be invaluable, especially one as big as the Comet.

  “Oh, dear,” his wife repeated, as she watched the approaching craft. “What shall we—”

  Her question was interrupted as well as answered by Charles Ball’s emergence onto the deck.

  General Ball, now. The slave disguise was gone, with a vengeance. Ball was wearing his full uniform. The hussar-style uniform had the green pants of an officer, unlike the white ones of enlisted men, with a much fancier green coatee trimmed with black, and the distinctive fur cap. It was something of an odd-looking uniform to Ross, accustomed as he was to the continental styles. But he knew Driscol had had it patterned after the uniforms worn by Canadian voltigeurs, and it was probably more practical in this terrain.

  Anthony McParland had emerged alongside him, wearing a uniform that was very similar except for the officer’s insignia. Right after them came the two corporals, both in enlisted men’s uniforms and both carrying muskets. Young as they might be, Callender and Sheffield seemed to be very familiar with the firearms. Knowing Driscol, Ross was quite sure they’d been thoroughly drilled by now.

  Still, while the four of them made a resplendent showing on the upper deck of the Comet, there were only four of them—and there were at least a dozen men in each of the approaching boats.

  David came out on deck, holding a weapon in each hand. “I’ve brought our pistols, Father.”

  Six men, then—but two of them armed merely with pistols.

  But Robert discovered that he’d underestimated Ball. Most of the Kentucky flatboat men had left the Comet the day before, not wishing any further involvement. The men who had remained behind had been the eight black ones and the three poorest-looking of the whites. The most indigent of the lot, Robert had assumed, unable to forgo the free passage no matter what the risk.

  “All right, boys!” Ball shouted. “Time to show the bastards what’s what, don’t you think?”

  The eleven “flatboat men” on the lower forward deck grinned up at him. In an instant, any trace of lackadaisical, undisciplined civilians vanished. Before Robert quite understood what they were doing, six of the men were hauling two guns from somewhere below. Four-pounders, in naval carriages.

  Rummaging in his memory, Robert recalled seeing a pair of large hatches down there on one of his tours of the boat. Storage, he’d assumed.

  Indeed, “storage” it had been. The other five men were bringing forth powder and balls.

  Starting to, rather. Seeing what they were carrying, Ball hollered at them.

  “Canister, damn you! Think we’re fighting a siege? Canister—and be damn quick about it!”

  Hastily, the two guilty parties scurried back out of sight. They emerged just a few seconds later carrying a tin of canister each.

  “Good, boys! Good!” Ball’s tone had gone from fury to praise in a heartbeat. “I want to see the bastards bleed!”

  By the time the ammunition carriers got the canister tins to the front, the rest of the men already had the guns laid and were training them on the approaching boats. They’d also done something to the steamboat front rail—the guard, as it was called—that had lowered a section of it on hinges. That allowed a clear line of fire while leaving the thick stanchions necessary to attach the recoil slings. And there were eyebolts already in place for that purpose. Robert had noticed them earlier but had not thought much about their function. Tying up the boat, he’d assumed, even though that was not normally done at the bow.

  Robert understood at once that the Comet had been prepared for such a battle—and that Ball must have brought with him the cream of the Iron Battalion’s gun crews.

  He didn’t know whether he should be gratified or furious. It was clear enough, now, that Ball had been expecting such an encounter even before they left New Orleans. Half expecting it, at the very least.

  Patrick, too, for that matter.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he decided on gratification. Why not? It wasn’t as if, deep down, he hadn’t always known his wife was right.

  “See?” she demanded, as if to prove the point. But there didn’t seem to be any condemnation in her tone, either. Eliza had been a soldier’s wife for decades, a fair bit of which time she’d spent with her husband in the field in Iberia. She was probably remembering Spanish and Portuguese officers she’d cursed in the past. For not being able to do a tenth as much in ten hours as Ball and his men had just shown themselves capable of doing in a few minutes.

  And while she didn’t have Robert’s experience with battles—never having actually been at any of them, thankfully, if not so many miles distant—the sight of those two cannons would have cheered even the most naïve of civilians.

  Robert himself was cheered immensely. True, they were both four-pounders. It would have been foolish to bring any larger ordnance. As big as it was, by steamboat standards, the Comet lacked the sheer bulk and bracing that warships had to have to withstand the recoil of heavier guns.

  But, in the here and now, four-pounders should do very nicely, he thought. Those two approaching longboats were even further removed from ships of the line. Cockleshells, practically, and jammed full of men.

  Worried men, now. The freebooters were close enough to have spotted the cannons—which they quite obviously hadn’t been expecting.

  “Hey!” one of them shouted, half rising to his feet in the lead boat. “You there in the—”

  “Fire!” Ball bellowed.

  Belatedly remembering some of the realities of cannon fire—the wind was blowing the wrong way, too—Robert hissed: “Eliza! David! Close your eyes!”

  He did the same himself. The sharp double clap of the four-pounders was followed, very quickly, by the familiar feel of unburned
powder and smoke on his face. Along with, of course, that very familiar smell.

  As it always did, the odor roused something deep and primitive in Robert Ross. As soon as he felt the gust passing, he opened his eyes. Only with great effort was he able to restrain himself from shouting the sort of praise and encouragement he would have shouted, in years past, to his own soldiers.

  The man who’d been half standing in the bow of the lead ship was nowhere to be seen. Not surprising, that. The bow itself had been badly splintered by canister balls. Not shattered, since Ball’s guns hadn’t been using round shot, or even the heavy shot that naval men called grapeshot. But it hardly mattered. Canister rounds weighed three ounces each: twice the weight of a musket ball. At that range, a three-ounce ball wouldn’t destroy a wooden boat, but it would do a very nice job of shredding it some. And even a four-pounder fired a lot of them at once. Like a huge shotgun, for all intents and purposes.

  The men in the bow of that lead boat had all been killed or mutilated. Or both, mostly. The ones toward the rear who’d survived had done so simply because their comrades had absorbed most of the fire—and not all of them had come off it uninjured.

  Three of them were just sitting in the boat, screaming, covered with blood. How much of it was theirs was impossible to determine. The rest were already throwing themselves overboard and starting to swim toward the west bank of the river, over a hundred yards distant.

  The second boat was desperately trying to turn around. Clearly enough, that crew had no intention of risking all in a fierce boarding attempt.

  Wisely, Robert thought. Even if they could have reached the steamboat before another volley was fired from the cannons, they no longer outnumbered Ball’s men by any significant margin. And he didn’t doubt for a moment that every one of those so obviously experienced gunners was just about as skilled with pistols and hand weapons.