Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  And it was like very school-lads that many of us behaved, making of this serious and hazardous expedition a silly pleasure jaunt. I have since thought that perhaps the sombre and majestic menace of a sunless and unknown forest reacted a little on us all, and that many found a nervous relief in brief relaxations and harmless folly, and in antics performed on its grim and dusky edges.

  For no one, I think, doubted there was trouble waiting for us within these silent shades. And the tension had never lessened for this army, what with waiting for the Right Wing, which had not yet apparently stirred from Otsego; and the inadequacy of provisions, not known to the men but whispered among the officers; and the shots already exchanged this very morning along the river between our outposts and prowling scouts of the enemy; and the daily loss of pack-animals and cattle, strayed or stolen; and of men, too, scalped since they left Wyoming, sometimes within gunshot of headquarters.

  But work on the four block-forts, just begun, progressed rapidly; and, alas, the corps of invalids destined to garrison them had, since the army left Easton, increased too fast to please anybody, what with wounds, accidents in camp from careless handling of firearms, kicks from animals, and the various diseases certain to appear where many people congregate.

  There were a number of regiments under tents or awaiting the unfinished log barracks at Tioga Point; in the First Brigade there were four from New Jersey; in the Second Brigade three from New Hampshire; in the Third two from Pennsylvania, and an artillery regiment; and what with other corps and the train, boatmen, guides, workmen, servants, etc., it made a great and curious spectacle even before our Right Wing joined.

  Every regiment carried its colours and its music, fifes, drums, and bugle-horns; and sometimes these played on the march when a light detachment went forward for a day’s scout, or to forage or to destroy. But best of all music I ever heard, I loved now to hear the band of Colonel Proctor’s artillery regiment, filling me as it did with solemn, yet pleasurable, emotions, and seemingly teaching me how dear had Lois become to me.

  The scout, sent out the day before, returned in the afternoon with an account that Chemung was held by the enemy, which caused a bustle in camp, particularly among the light troop.

  Headquarters was very busy all day long, and sometimes even gay, for the gentlemen of General Sullivan’s family were not only sufficient, but amiable and delightful. And there I had the honour of being made known to his aides-de-camp, Mr. Pierce, Mr. Van Cortlandt, and Major Hoops. I already knew Captain Dayton. Also, of the staff I met there Captain Topham, our Commissary of Militia Stores, Captain Lodge, our surveyor, Colonels Antis and Bond, Conductors of Boats, Dr. Hogan, Chief Surgeon, Lieutenant R. Pemberton, Judge Advocate, Lieutenant Colonel Frasier, Colonel Hooper, Lieutenant Colonel Barber, Adjutant General, the Reverend S. Kirkland, Chaplain, and others most agreeable but too numerous to mention. Still, I have writ them all down in my diary, as I try always to do, so that if God gives me wife and children some day they may find, perhaps, an hour of leisure, when to peruse a blotted page of what husband and father saw in the great war might not prove too tedious or disagreeable.

  In this manner, then, the afternoon of that August day passed, and what with these occupations, and the catching of several trouts, which I love to do with hook and line and alder pole, and what with sending to Lois a letter by an express who went to Clinton toward evening, the time did not seem irksome.

  Yet, it had passed more happily had I heard from Lois. But no runners came; and if any were sent out from Otsego and taken by the enemy I know not, only that none came through that day, Thursday, August the 12th.

  One thing in camp had disagreeably surprised me, that there were women and children here, and like to remain in the block forts after the army had departed from its base for the long march through the Seneca country.

  This I could not understand or reconcile with any proper measure of safety, as the cannon in the block-houses were not to be many or of any great calibre, and only the corps of invalids were to remain to defend them.

  I had told Lois that no women would be permitted at Tioga Point. That these were the orders that had been generally understood at Otsego.

  And now, lo and behold, here were women arrived from Easton, Bethlehem, Wyalusing, and Wyoming, including the wives and children of several non-commissioned officers and soldiers from the district; widows of murdered settlers, washerwomen, and several tailoresses — in all a very considerable number.

  And I hoped to heaven that Lois might not hear of this mischievous business and discover in it an excuse for coming as the guest of any lady at Otsego, or, in fact, make any further attempt to stir until the Right Wing marched and the batteaux took the ladies of Captain Bleecker, Ensign Lansing, and Lana, and herself to Albany.

  After sundown an officer came to me and said that the entire army was ordered to march at eight that evening, excepting troops sufficient to guard our camp; that there would be no alarm sounded, and that we were to observe secrecy and silence.

  Also, it appeared that a gill of rum per man had been authorized, but I refused for myself and my Indians, thinking to myself that the General might have made it less difficult for me if he had confined his indulgence to the troops.

  About eight o’clock a Stockbridge Indian — the one who had been with the scout to Chemung — came to me with a note from Dominie Kirkland.

  I gave him my hand, and he told me that his name was Yellow Moth, and that he was a Christian. Also, he inquired about the Mole, and I was obliged to relate the circumstances of that poor convert’s murder.

  “God’s will,” said the Yellow Moth very quietly. “You, my brother, and I may see a thousand fall, and ten thousand on our right hand, and it shall not come nigh us.”

  “Amen,” said I, much moved by this simple fellow’s tranquil faith.

  I made him known to the Sagamore and to the two Oneidas, who received him with a grave sincerity which expressed very plainly their respect for a people of which the Mole had been for them a respectable example.

  Like the Mole, the Yellow Moth wore no paint except a white cross limned on his breast over a clan sign indecipherable. And if, in truth, there had ever really been a totem under the white paint I do not know, for like the Algonquins, these peoples had but a loose political, social, religious, and tribal organization, which never approached the perfection of the Iroquois system in any manner or detail.

  About eight o’clock came Captain Carbury, of the 11th Pennsylvania, to us, and we immediately set out, marching swiftly up the Chemung River, the Sagamore and the Yellow Moth leading, then Captain Carbury and myself, then the Oneidas.

  Behind us in the dusk we saw the Light Troops falling in, who always lead the army. All marched without packs, blankets, horses, or any impedimenta. And, though the distance was not very great, so hilly, rocky, and rough was the path through the hot, dark night, and so narrow and difficult were the mountain passes, that we were often obliged to rest the men. Also there were many swamps to pass, and as the men carried the cohorn by hand, our progress was slow. Besides these difficulties and trials, a fog came up, thickening toward dawn, which added to the hazards of our march.

  So the dawn came and found us still marching through the mist, and it was not until six o’clock that we of the guides heard a Seneca dog barking far ahead, and so knew that Chemung was near.

  Back sped Tahoontowhee to hasten the troops; I ran forward with Captain Carbury and the Sagamore, passing several outlying huts, then some barns and houses which loomed huge as medieval castles in the fog, but were really very small.

  “Look out!” cried Carbury. “There is their town right ahead!”

  It lay straight ahead of us, a fine town of over a hundred houses built on both sides of the pretty river. The casements of some of these houses were glazed and the roofs shingled; smoke drifted lazily from the chimneys; and all around were great open fields of grain, maize, and hay, orchards and gardens, in which were ripening peas, beans, s
quashes, pumpkins, watermelons, muskmelons.

  “Good God!” said I. “This is a fine place, Carbury!”

  “It’s like a dozen others we have laid in ashes,” said he, “and like scores more that we shall treat in a like manner. Look sharp! Here some our light troops.”

  The light infantry of Hand arrived on a smart run — a torrent of red-faced, sweating, excited fellows, pouring headlong into the town, cheering as they ran.

  General Hand, catching sight of me, signalled with his sword and shouted to know what had become of the enemy.

  “They’re gone off!” I shouted back. “My Indians are on their heels and we’ll soon have news of their whereabouts.”

  Then the soldiery began smashing in doors and windows right and left, laughing and swearing, and dragging out of the houses everything they contained.

  So precipitate had been the enemy’s flight that they had left everything — food still cooking, all their household and personal utensils; and I saw in the road great piles of kettles, plates, knives, deerskins, beaver-pelts, bearhides, packs of furs, and bolts of striped linen, to which heaps our soldiers were adding every minute.

  Others came to fire the town; and it was sad to see these humble homes puff up in a cloud of smoke and sparks, then burst into vivid flame. In the orchards our men were plying their axes or girdling the heavily-fruited trees; field after field of grain was fired, and the flames swept like tides across them.

  The corn was in the milk, and what our men could not burn, using the houses for kilns, they trampled and cut with their hangers — whole regiments marching through these fields, destroying the most noble corn I ever saw, for it was so high that it topped the head of a man on horseback.

  So high, also, stood the hay, and it was sad to see it burn.

  And now, all around in this forest paradise, our army was gathered, destroying, raging, devastating the fairest land that I had seen in many a day. All the country was aflame; smoke rolled up, fouling the blue sky, burying woodlands, blotting out the fields and streams.

  From the knoll to which I had moved to watch the progress of my scouts, I could see an entire New Jersey regiment chasing horses and cattle; another regiment piling up canoes, fish-weirs, and the hewn logs of bridges, to make a mighty fire; still other regiments trampling out the last vestige of green stuff in the pretty gardens.

  Not a shot had yet been fired; there was no sound save the excited and terrifying roar of a vast armed mob obliterating in its fury the very well-springs that enabled its enemies to exist.

  Cattle, sheep, horses were being driven off down the trail by which we had come; men everywhere were stuffing their empty sacks with green vegetables and household plunder; the town fairly whistled with flame, and the smoke rose in a great cloud-shape very high, and hung above us, tenting us from the sun.

  In the midst of this uproar the Grey-Feather came speeding to me with news that the enemy was a little way upstream and seemed inclined to make a stand. I immediately informed the General; and soon the bugle-horns of the light infantry sounded, and away we raced ahead of them.

  I remember seeing an entire company marching with muskmelons pinned on their bayonets, all laughing and excited; and I heard General Sullivan bawl at them:

  “You damned unmilitary rascals, do you mean to open fire on ’em with vegetables?”

  Everybody was laughing, and the General grinned as Hand’s bugle-horns played us in.

  But it was another matter when the Seneca rifles cracked, and a sergeant and a drummer lad of the 11th Pennsylvania fell. The smooth-bores cracked again, and four more soldiers tumbled forward sprawling, the melons on their bayonets rolling off into the bushes.

  Carbury, marching forward beside me, dropped across my path; and as I stooped over him gave me a ghastly look.

  “Don’t let them scalp me,” he said — but his own men came running and picked him up, and I ran forward with the others toward a wooded hill where puffs of smoke spotted the bushes.

  Then the long, rippling volleys of Hand’s men crashed out, one after another, and after a little of this their bugle-horns sounded the charge.

  But the Senecas did not wait; and it was like chasing weasels in a stone wall, for even my Indians could not come up with them.

  However, about two o’clock, returning to that part of the town across the river, which Colonel Dearborn’s men were now setting afire, we received a smart volley from some ambushed Senecas, and Adjutant Huston and a guide fell.

  It was here that the Sagamore made his kill — just beyond the first house, in some alders; and he came back with a Seneca scalp at his girdle, as did the Grey-Feather also.

  “Hiokatoo’s warriors,” remarked the Oneida briefly, wringing out his scalp and tying it to his belt.

  I looked up at the hills in sickened silence. Doubtless Butler’s men were watching us in our work of destruction, not daring to interfere until the regulars arrived from Fort Niagara. But when they did arrive, it meant a battle. We all knew that. And knew, too, that a battle lost in the heart of that dark wilderness meant the destruction of every living soul among us.

  About two o’clock, having eaten nothing except what green and uncooked stuff we had picked up in field and garden, our marching signal sounded and we moved off; driving our captured stock, every soldier laden with green food and other plunder, and taking with us our dead and wounded.

  Chemung had been, but was no longer. And if, like Thendara, it was ever again to be I do not know, only that such a horrid and pitiful desolation I had never witnessed in all my life before. For it was not the enemy, but the innocent earth we had mutilated, stamping an armed heel into its smiling and upturned face. And what we had done sickened me.

  Yet, this was scarcely the beginning of that terrible punishment which was to pass through the Long House in flame and smoke, from the Eastern Door to the Door of the West, scouring it fiercely from one end to the other, and leaving no living thing within — only a few dead men prone among its blood-soaked ashes.

  *Etho ni-ya-wenonh!

  [*Thus it befell!]

  By six that evening the army was back in its camp at Tioga Point. All the fever and excitement of the swift foray had passed, and the inevitable reaction had set in. The men were haggard, weary, sombre, and harassed. There was no elation after success either among officers or privates; only a sullen grimness, the sullenness of repletion after an orgy — the grimness of disgust for an unwelcome duty only yet begun.

  Because this sturdy soldiery was largely composed of tillers of the soil, of pioneer farmers who understood good land, good husbandry, good crops, and the stern privations necessary to wrest a single rod of land from the iron jaws of the wilderness.

  To stamp upon, burn, girdle, destroy, annihilate, give back to the forest what human courage and self-denial had wrested from it, was to them in their souls abhorrent.

  Save for the excitement of the chase, the peril ever present, the certainty that failure meant death in its most dreadful forms, it might have been impossible for these men to destroy the fruits of the earth, even though produced by their mortal enemies, and designed, ultimately, to nourish them.

  Even my Indians sat silent and morose, stretching, braiding, and hooping their Seneca scalps. And I heard them conversing among themselves, mentioning frequently the Three Sisters* they had destroyed; and they spoke ever with a hint of tenderness and regret in their tones which left me silent and unhappy.

  [*Corn, squash, and bean were so spoken of affectionately, as they always were planted together by the Iroquois.]

  To slay in the heat and fury of combat is one matter; to scar and cripple the tender features of humanity’s common mother is a different affair. And I make no doubt that every blow that bit into the laden fruit trees of Chemung stabbed more deeply the men who so mercilessly swung the axes.

  Well might the great Cayuga chieftain repeat the terrible prophecy of Toga-na-etah the Beautiful:

  “When the White Throats shall com
e, then, if ye be divided, ye will pull down the Long House, fell the tall Tree of Peace, and quench the Onondaga Fire forever.”

  As I stood by the rushing current of the Thiohero,* on the profaned and desolate threshold of the Dark Empire, I thought of O-cau-nee, the Enchantress, and of Na-wenu the Blessed, and of Hiawatha floating in his white canoe into the far haven where the Master of Life stood waiting.

  [*Seneca River.]

  And now, for these doomed people of the Kannonsi, but one rite remained to be accomplished. And the solemn thunder of the last drum-roll must summon them to the great Festival of the Dead.

  CHAPTER XV

  BLOCK-HOUSE NO. 2

  On the 14th the army lay supine. There was no news from Otsego. One man fell dead in camp of heart disease. The cattle-guard was fired on. On the 15th a corporal and four privates, while herding our cattle, were fired on, the Senecas killing and scalping one and wounding another. On the 16th came a runner from Clinton with news that the Otsego army was on the march and not very far distant from the Ouleout; and a detachment of eight hundred men, under Brigadier General Poor, was sent forward to meet our Right Wing and escort it back to this camp.

  By one of the escort, a drummer lad, I sent a letter directed to Lois, hoping it might be relayed to Otsego and from thence by batteau to Albany. The Oneida runner had brought no letters, much to the disgust of the army, and no despatches except the brief line to our General commanding. The Brigadiers were furious. So also was I that no letters came for me.

  On the 17th our soldier-herdsmen were again fired on, and, as before, one poor fellow was killed and partly scalped, and one wounded. The Yellow Moth, Tahoontowhee, and the Grey-Feather went out at night on retaliation bent, but returned with neither trophies nor news, save what we all knew, that the Seneca scouts were now swarming like hornets all around us ready to sting to death anyone who strayed out of bounds.

  On the 18th the entire camp lay dull, patiently expectant of Clinton. He did not come. It rained all night.