1824: The Arkansas War

by Eric Flint

  Since that also struck to Shreve’s pride, he didn’t say anything. From what Anthony could tell, in the poor lighting provided by the lamps on deck, the disgruntled expression still on his face was more a matter of stubbornness than anything really heartfelt.

  “And what’s this ‘we’ business?” Shreve asked sourly. “If you’re planning to come along, Patrick, I’m backing out right now. No way I’m letting a mad Irishman—”

  “Oh, leave off. Of course I’m not coming. I’ve got an army to command.” He turned toward Anthony. “Captain McParland here will lead the expedition. He knows exactly where Ball can be found.”

  To Anthony, directly: “Tell Charles I want him to stay there. And be ready for Crittenden’s men—a lot of them—to be coming down that river sometime around late afternoon. Rowing like their lives depended on it, which they will be.”

  “Yes, sir. And what—”

  “Don’t ask silly questions. Charles knows what to do. You already saw him do it. Crittenden and his men are nothing but pirates and brigands. The penalty for piracy is death by hanging. I’m not fussy, though, so if it works better to just shoot them down like mad dogs, have at it. I don’t care. So long as not one man from that crowd ever makes it back alive to Alexandria.”

  He gave his shoulders a little shake, like a dog shedding water. “Well…all right. I’ll be reasonable. Some of them are bound to escape. Might even be to the best, letting them spread terror through their circles. But if I find out it’s more than a handful, I shall not be a happy man.”

  He smiled then, more thinly than ever. “Not that you need to give Charles any such explanation. I’d not insult him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Be at it, then. Get the guns ready to rake Crittenden as you steam past. Don’t linger, though—and don’t aim for his army. Wreck as many of his boats as you can. Remember that, Anthony. Shoot up the boats. You can leave the killing to me. Just make sure they’ve got as little to make an escape with as possible.”

  “Yes, sir. Do you want me to take the corporals with me?”

  Driscol frowned for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. You’ve no real need for them, not with gun crews from the battalion on the Hercules. They’re not really trained artillerymen anyway, being in Colonel Jones’s regiment. From your report, they’ve done very well for themselves. But with a battle coming on the morrow, it’d be best for them to be back in their ranks. I’ve got hopes for both of those youngsters, but they need real blooding on a battlefield. There’s never a substitute for that, in war.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When he told the two corporals, they both seemed more relieved than anything else.

  As Anthony watched them march off the gangplank to join their 3rd Regiment, now mustering somewhere in the darkness, he found himself envying the boys. Not for the moment, but for the past memory. On the eve of Anthony’s first battle, he’d been frightened out of his wits. Of course, it hadn’t helped any that he’d been executed by Driscol not so many days earlier.

  He grinned, then. It was an odd world. Now that he was looking toward his fourth decade of life, in just a few years, he found that he had a more insouciant view of the world than he’d had as a teenager. Death had been a mysterious terror, then. Today it was just a familiar enemy—and he still had the world’s meanest troll on his side.

  CHAPTER 17

  Arkansas Post

  OCTOBER 6, 1824

  “Imogene! Adaline! You come down from there right this minute! You hear me?”

  The twins standing on the gun platform above her tried for a moment to pretend they hadn’t heard their mother.

  “This second! I ain’t foolin’!”

  Imogene stamped her foot. Watching, it was all Zack Taylor could do not to laugh.

  “Mama! It’s exciting.”

  “Won’t be excitin’ you get a bullet in your head! Or be too excitin’ altogether. Get down here. I ain’t sayin’ it one more time.”

  Reluctantly, the two girls obeyed Julia, clambering down the ladder that led up to the platform with the peculiar combination of grace and awkwardness that seemed to be the uniform property of twelve-year-old girls. Most of all, that blithe indifference to propriety. Taylor’s oldest daughters Ann and Sarah were about the same age as Julia’s twins. Imogene and Adaline were just at the point in their lives when they were starting the transition from girlhood to womanhood. It simply hadn’t registered on them yet that proper young ladies didn’t give the world such an exposure of leg and ankle as they came down a ladder wearing dresses.

  Anywhere—much like a fort full of soldiers. Especially girls as pretty as these two seemed likely to be.

  Julia knew it, of course. As soon as the girls arrived on solid ground, she was looming over them, shaking a finger in their faces.

  “You bein’ a disgrace! If your father had seen this!”

  As stern a disciplinarian as their mother was, the girls—especially Imogene, whom Taylor had already recognized as the more rambunctious of the two—weren’t ready to give in yet.

  “It’s gonna be a battle, Mama!” Imogene protested. “We oughta be able to watch it!”

  The shaking finger now concentrated on her alone. “And watch your language, young lady! Your daddy ain’t sending you to no expensive school so’s you can talk about ‘gonnas’ and ‘oughtas’!”

  Blithely indifferent, of course, to the fact that Julia’s own lingo was every bit as colloquial as that of most frontier women. But the thought was simply one of amusement, not condemnation. Being the father of four girls himself, Taylor had more than once fallen back upon that most ancient and reliable staple of parenting: Do as I say, blast it, not as I do.

  Imogene was nothing if not stubborn. “ ’Sides, I’m worried about that young corporal. The one who sings so pretty.”

  Adaline even pitched in, though she was normally the more obedient of the two. “And I’m worried about th’other one.” She and her twin exchanged glances. “Me and Imogene already decided.”

  “Decided what? ” Julia’s expression could by now only be described as a glower. The finger shaking increased its tempo. “Don’t you two be thinkin’ about no boys! You too young for that! Way too young! Only thing you best be thinkin’ about—I’ll smack you, so help me I will!—is your lessons in school.”

  “School ain’t started yet,” Imogene said sulkily.

  Smack. “Don’t you sass me, girl! And don’t you be usin’ no ‘ain’ts,’ neither!”

  Chuckling, Taylor turned away from the scene. The sun hadn’t even come up yet, but daylight was starting to fill the sky. He foresaw a frenzied day for Julia, trying to keep her spirited daughters from finding ways to watch the battle that was about to unfold.

  Zack Taylor, on the other hand, was long past the age where he had a mother to answer to. Which was fortunate, because he had every intention of watching the battle himself. Not from simple curiosity, in his case, but from professional necessity. It wouldn’t surprise him at all if he found himself someday having to face the army of Arkansas. He wanted to get as good an estimate as he could of its capabilities.

  Since there was no point in skulking about, however, he’d simply join Major Totten in the blockhouse, which had the best view of the cleared ground on the riverbank opposite the fort. It was possible that Totten would order him to leave, but Taylor didn’t think so. As polyglot as it might be, he’d already gotten enough sense of the spirit that infused the Confederate army—its Arkansas portion, anyway—to think that Totten and his officers would consider it ungallant to refuse a fellow officer such a straightforward courtesy. Enemies they might be on the morrow, but today was today, and protocol was important for its own sake.

  He hoped he was right. The battle that was about to unfold was going to be fought by such rules as any Hun or Mongol would accept. But it was Taylor’s growing belief—certainly his personal desire—that if a war did erupt between the United States and the Confederacy, such savagery cou
ld be avoided in the future. And, if so, his own behavior and conduct today might make a difference.

  No skulking, then, and no spying. Just a straightforward request by an officer of one army to observe a battle being conducted by another. Who was to say, after all? The time might also come when the United States and the Confederacy were allies.

  When Taylor arrived in the blockhouse, Major Totten looked away from the firing slit he was peering through and gave him a courteous nod. “You’re just in time, Colonel. It appears that the Laird—ah, General Driscol—plans to start the battle by ravaging the enemy’s fleet.”

  He turned to one of his aides. “Lieutenant Morton, be so good as to lend Colonel Taylor your eyeglass. And please make room for him while you’re at it, so he can get a good view.”

  So.

  “Slow down, Henry!” shouted Captain McParland.

  He was wasting his breath, of course. He’d yelled out of simple frustration. Even if Shreve could have heard him over the sound of the engines, in the pilothouse, Anthony knew perfectly well he wouldn’t obey. Shreve wasn’t under military discipline, and he was a lot more concerned about keeping his beloved Hercules intact than he was over such petty minutiae as making sure they inflicted as much damage as possible on the enemy flotilla.

  “Don’t worry, Anthony,” said Crowell, leaning on his sponge staff. “We’ll manage, well enough—and there ain’t no way Henry’ll pay attention nohow. He do surely love this boat.”

  The steamboat was almost in range. If nothing else, the speed Shreve was making had the advantage of increasing the element of surprise. And Anthony would allow that the steamboat designer was at least not trying to keep to the very middle of the river. In fact, he was skirting the southern shoreline more closely than Anthony would have himself. Of course, he was a lot more familiar with the river.

  “And will you look at ’em!” came a gleeful shout from another member of the gun crew. “Scurryin’ like chickens!”

  It was true enough. Any commander with any brains—or one who wasn’t being constantly distracted by the sort of squabbles that were bound to plague a force like Crittenden’s—would have seen to it that the river was patrolled by picket boats for hundreds of yards upstream and downstream. And would have had sentries along the shore extended just as far.

  But they’d seen none of that. No picket boats at all, and the one and only sentry they’d spotted had been fast asleep. Now that the Hercules was almost on the enemy flotilla tied up to the shore, of course, the sound of its engines was waking everybody up. But the men sleeping on those boats quite clearly had no thought at all except to either run or gape.

  McParland’s eyes swept the riverbank ahead, looking for the battery. It had to be there, somewhere. Not even an amateur like Crittenden would have been dumb enough not to move his few cannons into position during the night.

  Anthony spotted it, then, and had to suppress a gleeful shout of his own. A genuine battery, sure enough. Sheltered behind an earthen berm, just like it should be. A great big one, too—bigger than Anthony would have thought Crittenden’s mob could have erected in the dark.

  Unfortunately, whether from inexperience or simple enthusiasm, they’d made it too big. Crittenden’s guns could fire on Arkansas Post across the river, but they couldn’t lower the elevation enough to hit anything on the river itself.

  “You know what to do,” Anthony said to the gun crew as he headed toward the pilothouse. “I’m going to go try and talk some sense into Henry.”

  He’d just reached the pilothouse when the four-pounder toward the starboard bow cut loose. He didn’t turn to see what effect the shot had, though. The whooping and hollering coming from the gun crew made that plain enough.

  He opened the door and stuck his head in. “Tarnation, Henry, their battery’s too high to shoot at us, anyway. Slow down.”

  Shreve was squinting through the eyeslit, peering ahead toward Crittenden’s battery. Normally, of course, there’d have been a full window there. But he’d had most of the pilothouse fortified by timbers in the course of the voyage down from New Antrim. The planks wouldn’t stop a cannon shot, but they’d handle musket fire pretty well.

  “Sam Hill, if you aren’t right.” A sudden and very wicked grin came to the steamboat designer’s face. “Tell you what, Anthony. I’ll go you one better. Get on back there, now! You’re going to be a busy man for a bit.”

  As he turned back toward the gun crews, Anthony heard a sudden change in the noise coming from the engine. An instant later, he felt the Hercules starting to shudder a bit. Shreve, he realized, was reversing the thrust on the stern paddlewheel. He was going to bring the boat to a complete stop—right smack in front of the whole flotilla.

  “Hot damn!” shouted the gunner on the rear four-pounder. That crew had just fired its own first shot. “Boys, I want to see this gun firing till it melts! Move it!”

  The bow gun fired again, jerking back against the recoil lines. The round struck the stern of one of Crittenden’s keelboats and caved it in. It also slaughtered, in the process, the one man who’d been either too slow or too dumb to get off the boat in time. A big splinter flew into his back as he was trying to clamber ashore and ripped open most of his rib cage. Blood and bone bits went flying everywhere. The corpse hit the muddy bank like a sack of meal.

  Crowell was at that lead gun and already had it swabbed out by the time Anthony looked back. The crew hauled the gun back into position, took cursory aim, and fired again.

  The aim hadn’t been as cursory as it looked, though. Or maybe they’d just been lucky. That shot hit one of Crittenden’s few steamboats. A little too high, unfortunately, so it simply smashed in part of the main deck instead of holing the hull. But it was enough to send the men gawking there racing to get off the boat, even if none of them looked to have been injured any.

  Good enough. There was no chance, other than by a fluke, that four-pounders would be able to destroy any of the steamboats in Crittenden’s flotilla. Not badly enough to prevent them from being repaired, at least. But repairs would take time, and time was one thing Crittenden’s army now had in short supply.

  Very short supply. In the lulls between cannon fire, Anthony could hear the faint sounds of the Laird’s regiments coming. The tone of voices raised in command, if not the words themselves; most of all, that unmistakable jingle-jangle of their gear that masses of soldiers made, approaching at a fast march.

  The four-pounder in the rear went off again, followed closely by Crowell’s gun. The same steamboat took another hit, this one in the hull. A keelboat rocked wildly, breaking loose its tether and starting to drift with the current. With that hole torn in its side, though, it likely wouldn’t drift more than a few miles.

  Didn’t matter. A few miles would be enough, even if the boat didn’t sink at all. The sounds of the Laird coming were starting to fill the dawn. There was no time at all, now, for Crittenden and his men. No time at all.

  “All right, Henry!” Anthony shouted. “You can get us under way again!”

  In the blockhouse, Zachary Taylor had come to the same conclusion. And he made it a point to jot down in his unwritten mental notebook that the two oncoming regiments of the army of Arkansas were able to march faster and for longer than any regiment of the U.S. Army he’d ever known. It remained to be seen how well they’d been trained in battlefield tactics. But one thing was now sure and certain. Driscol must have had them practicing marches—relentlessly—for months.

  Taylor was not guessing. He was one of the few field-grade officers in the U.S. Army who was adamant himself about keeping troops well trained and in good condition. Part of the reason his whole career had been spent on the frontier, with none of the usual assignments to Washington that might have advanced him more rapidly, was that he had a reputation for being a commander who could be sent to a poorly trained and dispirited garrison stuck in a fort out in the middle of nowhere and rapidly bring order and discipline to what had been not much more than a h
alf-trained and three-quarters-drunk mob of gamblers, whoremongers, and idlers.

  From what Taylor could determine thus far, on the other hand, Driscol’s tactics didn’t seem particularly sophisticated. Not that Taylor was fond himself of fancy tactics on a battlefield. But still, this was about as crude and blunt as it got.

  Driscol had shifted his regiments from column march into lines, not more than three hundred yards from the outlying units in Crittenden’s army. Risky, that. Taylor himself wouldn’t have chanced getting that close to an enemy while still in column formation. Not regular troops, at any rate. It took even a well-trained army two minutes or more to shift from column to line formation, during which time it was vulnerable to a vigorous counterattack.

  Against a force like Crittenden’s, admittedly, there wasn’t much risk. They were just as sluggish as they were brutal and undisciplined. But trained soldiers under good officers would have been able to take advantage of that recklessness on Driscol’s part.

  And now that he had his two regiments formed up, Driscol was just advancing them forward, side by side. No cavalry screen on the flanks—in fact, he didn’t seem to have any cavalry at all—and not even any use of light infantry as a substitute. He did have a small battery of four-pounders, but those were still a considerable distance to the rear. The artillerymen were trying to bring them up on the flank, but the horses were having a rough time of it. The terrain was awfully soggy this close to the river.

  Clearly enough, though, Driscol had no intention of waiting until he could bring his artillery to bear. He’d go at Crittenden with his infantry alone, relying on discipline and impact to keep his enemy off balance and prevent them from using their own artillery to good effect.

  It was going to be a pure and simple slugging match. A sergeant’s sort of fight. About twelve hundred men under Driscol’s command, against a slightly larger force of Crittenden’s.