1824: The Arkansas War

by Eric Flint

  He gave her a smile that he hoped looked confident. Assuming she could see it at all, in the light thrown off by a single lamp. “But the thing is, Miz Julia, the U.S. Army is mostly designed for peacetime. The main thing they do is build dams and the like. And since that sort of civil engineering requires advanced mathematics—the artillery also, to some extent—it draws the best educated men.”

  He shrugged. “Which I’m not. But the Laird doesn’t look at it the same way, in any event. Neither does General Ball. Arkansas is mountain country, from a military point of view.”

  “Most of the people don’t live up there,” Adaline objected.

  “Yes, I know, Miss Johnson. Most people in Arkansas live in New Antrim, the Fort of 98, or somewhere in the river valley. But that’s not where any big war will be decided. Our enemies can probably take the Delta and the lower river valley, if they try hard enough. Maybe even New Antrim. They can’t take the Ozarks and the Ouachitas. That’s where Arkansas lives and dies—and that’s infantry country.”

  They’d reached the boardinghouse. “Arkansas has the best infantry in the world. That’s our opinion, anyway—and we aim to prove it, sometime in the next week or so.”

  Sheff held the lamp a little higher to allow the women a good view of the short staircase. “It’s been a pleasure, ladies.”

  “Be careful, Sheff!” Imogene blurted out. “Please be careful!”

  In the dim lighting, right then, she looked much older than she was. A young woman instead of a girl. Sheff thought his heart might have skipped a beat or two.

  Or three. Lord, she was pretty.

  “Please be careful,” she repeated.

  “Imogene, stop carrying on,” her mother scolded her. But there wasn’t much heat in it.

  “Thank you for the courtesy, Lieutenant. We’ll be going in now. Please take our best wishes with you. And…Well. Be careful.”

  A moment later, she was shooing the girls into the boardinghouse. Sheff waited until the door closed, and then went on his way.

  As soon as they got into the house, Imogene raced over to the small window that gave a view of the street outside. Within a second she had her nose pressed to the pane.

  “Imogene, stop carrying on!”

  “He’s gonna get hurt, Mama,” the girl whispered. “I just know he is. Maybe even kilt.”

  “It’s ‘going’ to get hurt, not ‘gonna.’ And if I hear you say ‘kilt’ again, you’ll be the one kilt. And take your face out of the window!”

  Imogene’s nose didn’t budge.

  “Oh, Mama, please. I really like Sheff.”

  Julia sighed. She wasn’t really up for this battle. The problem was…

  She liked Sheffield Parker herself. Quite a bit, in fact. He seemed like a very levelheaded and reliable young man. Quite well suited to Imogene, actually, who was a bit too high-strung.

  But it just wouldn’t do. Richard would have conniptions at the idea. And while Julia didn’t have the same emotional reaction, she didn’t really disagree with him. A person had to be cold-blooded about these things. The best chance Imogene and Adaline would have in this world, with everything else they had against them, would be to marry white men. Not a negro boy whose skin was almost literally as black as coal. It didn’t matter what else might be true about him. Not until the afterlife, at any rate.

  “He’s going to get hurt,” Imogene said. “Oh, Mama, I just know it!”

  Under the circumstances, Julia decided to settle for the grammatical victory.

  CHAPTER 33

  The Arkansas River

  Three miles downstream from Arkansas Post

  JULY 22, 1825

  Gloomily, Major General William Henry Harrison watched men from one of the batteries of the 1st Artillery struggling with a six-pounder whose carriage had gotten stuck in the mud by the riverbank. They were having to manhandle the thing up onto dry land—drier land, rather—because the footing was so bad that trying to use horses for the purpose would have been more trouble than it was worth.

  “Wish we had some oxen.” That came from Stephen Fleming, one of the young lieutenants who served as an aide to the general.

  “And what good would that do?” Harrison almost snarled the words. He pointed a finger at the battery, whose three other guns and two howitzers had finally been dragged clear of the muck on the riverbank. “That’s supposed to be field artillery, you—”

  He bit off the rest. Then, after a moment to steady his temper, continued in a more even tone. “The whole point of light artillery, Lieutenant Fleming, is to be able to maneuver with it on a battlefield. Maneuver—with oxen! Do you know how fast a team of oxen can pull a cannon? Any cannon, whether it’s a four-pounder or a siege gun?”

  Abashed, the young lieutenant avoided his commanding general’s gaze. “Uh. No, sir. I don’t.”

  “One. Mile. An. Hour.” Harrison shifted his glare from the hapless officer to the battery crew still struggling with the six-pounder. “Which is just about what we’re managing as it is.”

  He looked up at the sun to gauge the time, rather than taking the trouble to pull out his watch. It was already at least an hour past noon. No way to begin the assault on Arkansas Post until the morrow, at the earliest. They’d lost another day.

  The whole campaign, thus far, seemed to be nothing more than one lost day after another. Silently, Harrison spent the next few seconds cursing Thomas Jesup and the Arkansas Delta in about equal proportions.

  That done, he spent considerably more time cursing militiamen in general and the Georgia militia in particular. Their slack habits, near-constant drunkenness, and indiscipline had cost him at least as much in the way of lost days as fouled-up logistics and soggy terrain.

  He’d been warned about them by Andrew Jackson himself, when he’d paid the Tennessee senator a visit at the Hermitage in mid-April. Harrison had decided he could afford to take the time to do so, since his supplies were so badly snarled it would be at least two weeks before anything got moving again.

  Jackson had been cordial, and the visit had gone smoothly. There was no love lost between the two men, to be sure—never had been—but Jackson was being careful. The running stream of caustic and excoriating comments he was having published in the nation’s newspapers concerning “Clay’s War” were always aimed entirely at Henry Clay and John Calhoun and the politicians around them. Toward the U.S. Army itself, Jackson’s stance was friendly and supportive. In public, at least—and in private as well, if the tenor of Harrison’s visit with him was any gauge.

  “No militia’s worth much, of course, unless you’ve got time to train them thoroughly—which you usually don’t, because their terms of enlistment are so short. But the Georgians are the worst of all.”

  They’d been standing in the front yard of the Hermitage when Jackson made the comment. He pointed to an aged hound lying in the shade by the wall of the house. “Old Hussar, over there, is no lazier. The difference is, he don’t drink, he don’t gamble, he don’t steal—well, not much; nothing compared to what a Georgian will—he don’t rape all the womenfolk he can get his paws on, he don’t sass you, he don’t argue every blasted thing under the sun”—Jackson took time for a breath—“and he don’t run off in a panic if a rooster crows or a cat hisses at him.”

  “That bad?”

  Jackson nodded. “That bad. The worst of it is they’re also the biggest braggarts in the country. If you didn’t know better, just listening to ’em, you’d swear that their forefathers whupped Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and their own martial accomplishments put those to shame.”

  Jackson barked a sarcastic laugh. “Southron valor, they call it. Bah. I wouldn’t trade a whole company of Georgia militia for one Tennessean or two Kentuckians. Well. Three Kentuckians. You always got to subtract one Kentuckian on account of the whiskey consumption.”

  At the time, Harrison had thought Jackson was exaggerating. The man was notorious for his vindictive temper and his unrelenting feuds, a
fter all. The stories of his clashes with Georgia militiamen during the war with the Creeks were well known.

  Now, three months later, Harrison was more inclined to think Jackson had been light-handed in his condemnation. Evenhanded, for sure. The bastards were that bad.

  He’d had the unit that committed the outrages on the Quapaws put under arrest as soon as he heard about the incident. But he was sure there’d still be Sam Hill to pay when the newspapers got hold of the story. Which they surely would, as many pestiferous reporters as the army had hanging around it, like flies on a horse.

  Harrison took a few more seconds to silently curse newspapers and newspapermen. And the abolitionist maniacs and bedlamites who were egging them on. What had the world come to, when a military campaign against Indians and rebellious negroes had to worry about maintaining a so-called good press?

  To be sure, any competent commander would punish soldiers who committed flagrant atrocities, even against savages. But that was simply for the purpose of maintaining discipline. Nobody actually cared that much about the incidents themselves. It wasn’t as if any treatment was being visited on the savages that they didn’t commit themselves, after all.

  But…Harrison did have to concern himself over the business. He’d been given explicit instructions by the president. By the secretary of war, also, but for Calhoun that was obviously just a formality. Henry Clay, on the other hand, had been quite serious about it—and, for once, Harrison didn’t think that had been purely a matter of maintaining his political reputation. The newly elected chief executive had seemed genuinely concerned that the conflict with Arkansas be waged according to civilized rules of war.

  The idiot. Only a man who’d never gotten any closer to a battlefield than—

  Harrison broke off his sour train of thought. The battery had finally gotten the last of the six-pounders clear of the mud. Thank the heavens. Now, maybe they could—

  A different young officer was at his elbow, looking fidgety. John Riehl, his name was, if Harrison remembered correctly.

  “What is it, Lieutenant?”

  “Ah, sir, the commander of the Louisiana militia is complaining that his men aren’t being fed properly. Well. The food’s all right, I guess, but he’s real peeved that the regulars and the Georgia—”

  “Tell that fucking—! No. Never mind. I’ll tell him myself. Where is he?”

  Riehl looked more fidgety than ever. “Ah. Well, that’s the other thing. He and the rest of the Louisiana officers went off afterward—after he chewed on me, I mean—to have lunch on the Chesapeake to get some relief from the heat, and…well.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Harrison said through gritted teeth.

  “Yes, sir. She ran aground on a sandbar.”

  Lieutenant Riehl cleared his throat. “Again.”

  The Arkansas River

  Missouri Territory

  JULY 22, 1825

  Some four hundred miles to the northwest, Colonel Zachary Taylor wasn’t in any better mood. In his case, though, the source of dissatisfaction was far more concentrated. The Missouri militiamen he’d been saddled with weren’t really that much of a problem, and he had no complaints at all concerning the terrain. The plains in that part of Missouri Territory that some people were starting to call Kansas were perfectly dry this time of year, even next to the river.

  It helped, naturally, that the Arkansas River this far upstream from the Confederacy didn’t bear much resemblance to the big river that passed through Fort of 98, New Antrim, and Arkansas Post before it emptied into the Mississippi. The Arkansas was the fourth longest river in North America, with its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains far to the west. But for most of its length—especially in midsummer, after the end of the snowmelt—it was a modest affair.

  No, Taylor’s foul mood was solely and entirely due to one single man.

  Robert Mitchell. Plucked from obscurity as a junior state representative from South Carolina by the secretary of war personally, and foisted on Colonel Taylor’s “Army of the Missouri” as a special commissioner to handle relations with the Indian tribes of the Great Plains.

  It sometimes seemed to Taylor that John C. Calhoun’s madness had no limits. Had the former senator from South Carolina suffered from simple dementia, the dementia itself would have conscribed his sphere of action. But Calhoun’s disease was a mania, more than maniacalism as such.

  So—Heaven grant mercy—it possessed theories. Notions. Schemes. Delusions of certainty, and convictions that were unshakable in direct proportion to their lack of bearing on reality.

  All of which traits were concentrated in the person of Robert Mitchell to a degree that was genuinely breathtaking. As if the man were the distilled essence of lunacy, given two legs to walk about—and, alas, armed with the powers given him by the secretary of war and the president of the United States.

  The division of authority was clear and simple. Colonel Zachary Taylor was in command of all U.S. military forces assembled under the somewhat preposterous name of the Army of the Missouri. To put the matter in less grandiose perspective, he commanded the 2nd and 6th Infantry Regiments and two full batteries from the 3rd Artillery—about fourteen hundred men, all told.

  Special commissioner Mitchell, however, had been given full authority to treat with any and all Indian tribes west of the Mississippi, saving only those who were part of the Confederacy. He had the power to make whatever treaties and arrangements with said tribes he felt would be to the advantage of the mission of the Army of the Missouri, with no regard whatsoever for what the actual commander of that army might think.

  It was sheer madness. The only thing Taylor could figure out was that Calhoun, having—very disapprovingly—seen the way in which, in years past, Sam Houston had transformed a similar special commission into something that bore a definite resemblance to a magic wand, had decided that the magic resided in the title, not the man.

  Sam Houston had been adopted by the Cherokees as a teenager, was intimately familiar with their ways and customs, and was fluent in most of the languages of the southern tribes: Cherokee, Choctaw, and the major dialects of the Creeks. He also had a passing knowledge of some of the Plains Indians’ tongues.

  So, naturally, Calhoun had appointed a man to the post who spoke no Indian languages at all, had never in his life had any real contact with Indians, and was still confused by the fact that the chiefs of the southern tribes wore turbans instead of feather headdresses.

  Sam Houston had also had a detailed and in-depth knowledge of the political factions and political issues in dispute among the Indian tribes he dealt with. Whereas it had never occurred to Robert Mitchell—still didn’t, so far as Taylor could tell—that Indians had any “politics” to begin with. He seemed to think they behaved according to some mystical inner tribal essence, or something.

  But that wasn’t surprising, really. Mitchell was one of Calhoun’s most fervent—say better, fevered—partisans. So far as he was concerned, the only people in the world who really deserved the term “people” at all were white men. All the other breeds weren’t simply lesser ones. They were, in some fundamental sense, not really human to begin with. Semi-intelligent two-legged animals, basically, who managed with great effort and usually ridiculous results to mimic some of the simpler aspects of human society.

  To make things worse, the only trait Mitchell shared as special commissioner with his predecessor Sam Houston was that he was scrupulously honest. So there wasn’t even the hope—usually a near certainty, with Indian agents—that he’d soon be distracted from his Great Mission by the usual vices of peculation and swindling.

  Not that his personal honesty did any good for Indians. Since Mitchell couldn’t speak any of the indigenous tongues, he was forced to rely on the existing network of Indian agents to translate for him and to carry out the ensuing decisions and agreements. Which, of course, they did in their usual corrupt manner.

  Houston had had to deal with them also, of course. The difference had be
en that Houston spoke the languages as well as they did, was approximately five times smarter, and had a network of his own in most of the major tribes that was better than that of his subordinates. He’d overseen them the way a great gray wolf oversees foxes. The foxes had been on their very, very best behavior.

  But worst of all—worse than anything—was the man’s temperament. Mitchell was so infuriatingly chipper.

  “Splendid news, Colonel! The Kiowas have agreed to join our cause!”

  With an air of great self-satisfaction, Mitchell plopped himself down onto one of the stools in Taylor’s command tent. Taylor was still using the tent for his headquarters until the fort’s construction was finished, even though he’d started sleeping in the commander’s quarters of it. This was a big fort being erected on the Arkansas, since it would have to serve as the base of operations for the whole campaign. The noise from the construction work during the day was too much to allow for the conduct of business.

  Mitchell bestowed a beaming smile on the colonel and his two medical officers, who’d been in the tent discussing the health issues facing the army. They were Surgeon John H. Bendel and Assistant Surgeon Charles Stewart.

  Taylor had insisted on having a full medical unit attached to the expedition, all the way down to two ambulances staffed by each of the artillery batteries. He’d known Bendel for years and had specifically requested him. Stewart was a Rhode Islander, new to the service. But in the short time since he’d been with the expedition, Zack had been pleased with his performance.

  As he was again, that moment. He’d come to realize that Stewart had a very sly, very dry sense of humor. Quite different from Zack’s own, but still one he could appreciate.

  The assistant surgeon’s eyes widened. “The Kiowas have expressed a deep concern over the prospect that an independent Arkansas might stir unrest among black slaves in the Carolinas? Who would have imagined?”

  Taylor managed—barely—to choke down a laugh. Bendel didn’t do quite as well.