THE General goes to Fayettesville, and orders Colonel Coffee with his
eager five hundred to Huntsville, as a point nearer the heart of savage
war. Volunteers, each bringing his own rifle and riding his own horse,
join Colonel Coffee, who sends back inspiring word that his five
hundred have grown to thirteen hundred, all thirsting for Creek blood.
Meanwhile, the General, weak and worn to a shadow, can hardly keep
the saddle, and must be bathed hourly in whisky to hold soul and body
together. Unable to eat, he lives by his will alone. The shot-shattered
left arm, lest he faint with the awful agony which attends its least
disturbance, is bound tightly to his side.
The General takes the field, and presently comes up with the Creeks. He
smites them hip and thigh at Tallushatches, Talladega, and divers other
places of equally complicated names, slaying hundreds while losing few
himself. The Creeks give way before the invincible General. Wherever he
goes they scatter like an affrighted flock of blackbirds.
The Indian is terrible only when he is winning. He is not upholstered,
whether mentally or morally, for an uphill, losing war. The General
would like it better if this were otherwise. Could he but coax his
evanescent enemy into a pitched battle, he would break both his heart
and his power with one and the same blow.
Chief Weathersford is as well aware of this defect in the Indian make-up
as is the General. He himself is half white, and knows what points of
strength and weakness belong with either race. Wherefore, when now his
Creeks have been beaten, and their hearts are low in defeat, he makes
no effort to lead them against the General's front; but breaks them into
squads and little bands, with directions to harass the hunting-shirt
men and hang about their flanks in the name of flea-bite annoyance and
isolated scalps. Thus is the General plagued and fatigued nigh unto
death, without once being able to lay hand upon those skulking, hiding,
flying foot-Parthians against whom he has come forth.
Also, he and his hunting-shirt men are getting farther and farther
from anything that might be termed a base of supplies. At last, many a
pathless mile through wood and swamp, and many an unbridged river, lie
between the nearest barrel of flour and their stomachs clamorous for
food.
The military stomach is the first great base of every military
operation. The war-wise Frederick had it for his aphorism, that an
army is so much like a snake it can move forward only on its belly.
The General is made painfully aware of this truism when he and his
hunting-shirt men find themselves penned up with starvation at Fort
Strother. In the teeth of his troubles, however, he makes shift to send
home an orphaned papoose for the blooming Rachel to raise.
Famine takes command at Fort Strother, and the General writes: “He is
an enemy I dread more than hostile Creeks--I mean the meager monster,
Famine!” There is murmuring among the hunting-shirt men, who have, with
the appetite common to bordermen, that contempt of discipline which
belongs to their rude caste. They are reduced to roots and berries, with
an occasional pigeon or squirrel, which latter diminutive deer no one
waits to cook, but devours raw. One day a backwoods boy, whose appetite
is even with his effrontery, waylays the General on his rounds and
demands food.
“Here is what I was saving for supper,” says the General; “you may have
that.” And he tosses the hungry one a double handful of acorns.
The starving hunting-shirt men mutiny; they draw themselves up
preparatory to marching north, to find that home-fatness which waits
for them on the Cumberland. At this the General changes his manner.
Heretofore he has been the symbol of fatherly sympathy and toleration.
He can make excuses for the grumbling of hungry men, and makes them. But
this goes beyond grumbling, which, when all is in, comes to be no
more than a healthful blowing off of angry steam; this is desertion by
wholesale.
As the lean-flanked, rancorous ones line up to begin their homeward
march, the General, haggard and emaciated by those Benton wounds and a
want of food, rides out in front. Halting forty yards from the foremost
mutineers, he swings from the saddle. In his right hand he carries a
long eight-square rifle. This, since he has no left hand to support
his aim, he runs across the empty saddle. Being ready, he calls on the
hunting-shirt men to give the order to march, if they dare.
“For by the Eternal,” says he, “I'll shoot down the first of you who
takes a forward step!”
The sulky, hungry hunting-shirt men scowl at the General. He scowls back
at them, with the wicked ferocity of a tiger and an iron determination
not to be revoked. And thus they stand glaring--one against hundreds!
Then the courage of the hungry hundreds oozes away, and they fall back
before that menacing apparition which glowers at them along the rifle
barrel. They melt away by the rear, those hunting-shirt men, and lurk
off to their quarters--ashamed of their weakness, yet afraid to go on.
At last, a herd of beef, quite as gaunt as the starved hunting-shirt men
themselves, arrives. Fires are set going and knives drawn. There is a
measureless eating. Belts are let out to the full-fed holes of other
days; mutiny, like an evil spirit, takes its flight. The gorged
hunting-shirt men, as though in amends for their scowl-ings and mutinous
grumblings, beg to be led instantly against the Creeks. This the General
is very willing to do, since he suspects the Creeks of possessing corn.
The General's scouts tell him that the scattered Creeks are collecting
in force at the Horseshoe. Upon this news, one bright morning the
General rides out of Fort Strother, and his recuperated hunting-shirt
men, two thousand strong, are at his back.
The Horseshoe is a loop-like bend in the Tallapoosa, which incloses a
round one hundred heavily-timbered acres. Across the open end, three
hundred and fifty yards wide, the British engineers have taught the
Creeks to throw up a fortification of logs. Behind this bulwark is
gathered the fighting flower of the Creeks, more than one thousand
warriors in all.
Arriving in front of the log bulwark, the General, with the experienced
Coffee, pushes forward to reconnoiter.
“We can thank the British for that,” says the General, tossing his
indignant right hand toward the Creek defenses. “Billy Weathers-ford,
even with the half-white blood that's in him, would never have designed
it.”
The astute Coffee makes a suggestion and, acting on it, the General
dispatches him by a roundabout march to take the Creeks from behind. The
fatuous savages flatter themselves that the wide-flowing Tallapoosa will
defend their rear. All they need do, they think, is lie behind those
English-log breastworks and knock over whatever obnoxious paleface shows
his head. This is an admirable programme, and comforting to the cockles
of the aboriginal heart. There is but one trouble; it won't work.
As the circuitous Coffee begins to swing wide for his stealthy creep
to the rear, the General covers the strategy with a brace of brawling
nine-pounders. Inside the log breastworks, he hears the “tunk! tunk!”
of the “medicine” drum, and the measured chant of the prophets promising
victory. In the midst of the prophetic chantings and the dull thumping
of the tomtoms, the nine-pounders roar and bury their shot in the log
breastworks. The shot do no harm, and serve but to excite the ribald
mirth of the Creeks. The latter can speak enough English for the
purposes of insult, and scoff and jeer at the General, whom they
describe--having in mind his lean form--as a lance shaft, harmless,
because wanting a keen head. They storm at him with opprobrious epithet,
and invite him, unless he be a coward, to come to them over their
breastworks. The General pays no heed to the contumely of the Creeks;
he is bending his ear to catch, above the din of his nine-pounders, the
earliest signal of the redoubtable Coffee's attack.
Colonel Coffee and his riflemen, horses at a walk, pick their difficult
way through the woods. It is a matter of no little time before they find
themselves at the toe of the Horseshoe, and in the ignorant rear of the
Creeks. Between them and those one hundred tree-grown acres held by the
enemy flows the Tallapoosa--turbid, wide and deep. Across, they see the
canoes, which the stupidity of the Creeks has left without so much as a
squaw or a papoose to guard them. In a moment, a score have thrown
off their hunting shirts, and are in the river. They swim like so many
Newfoundlands, and come out dripping, but happy, on the farther side.
Presently each of the swimming score is upon his return trip, towing a
dozen of the largest canoes.
Leaving a horse guard to look after the mounts, Colonel Coffee embarks
his command in the canoes; ten minutes later, the last fighting man jack
of them is on the other side. They hear the boom of the nine-pounders,
and the yells and war shouts of the Creeks. Also they discover the
wickiups of the Creeks, hidden away, with their squaws and papooses, in
a thickety corner of the wood.
Colonel Coffee, who, for all he is a backwoodsman, is not without
certain sparks and spunks of military skill, sets fire to the wickiups,
as an excellent sure method of wringing the withers and distracting the
attention of the fighting Creeks at the front. The flames go crackling
skyward; the squaws and papooses rush yelling from the slight houses
of wattled willow twigs and bark, and scuttle into the underbrush like
rabbits. Unlike rabbits, being in the underbrush, they set up such a
dismal tempest of howls, that those rearmost Creeks who hear it come
running to learn what disaster has seized upon their households.
Before they can make extensive inquiry, Colonel Coffee and his riflemen
open on them with a storm of bullets; and next, each man takes a tree.
The war now proceeds Creek fashion, every man--white and red--fighting
for himself. There is a difference, however; for while the hunting-shirt
men are dead shots, the Creeks prove themselves such wretchedly bad
marksmen--not understanding a rear sight, which article of gun furniture
is a mystery to the Indian mind even unto this day--as to provoke a deal
of hunting-shirt laughter.
Slowly but surely the Creeks give way before that low-flying sleet
of lead. As they give way, running from one tree to another, their
hunting-shirt foe presses forward--as deadly a skirmish line as ever
commander threw out!
The quick ear of the General catches the firing down at the toe of the
Horseshoe. It tells him that Colonel Coffee is busy with the Creek rear.
Also, he gets a far-off glimpse, through the trees, of the smoke and
flames from those burning wickiups, and understands the message of them.
Drawing off the futile nine-pounders, the General orders a charge, the
amateur artillerists taking up their rifles with the others. At
the word, the hunting-shirt men rush forward, and go over the log
breastworks like cats.
The one earliest to scale the breastworks--quick as a panther, strong
as a bear--is Ensign Sam Houston. The Southwest will hear more of him
before all is done. That lively youth, however, is not thinking of the
future; for an arrow, excessively of the present, has just pierced his
thigh, and is demanding his whole attention. Shutting his teeth like a
trap to control the pain, he snaps the shaft and draws the arrow from
the wound. A moment later, the surgeon bandages it.
The General is standing near, and waxes conservative touching Ensign Sam
Houston.
“Don't go back!” commands the General shortly. “That arrow through your
leg should be enough.”
Ensign Sam Houston says nothing, but the moment his commander's back
is turned rushes headlong over those log breastworks again. Later he
is picked up with two bullets in him, which serve to keep him quiet for
nigh a fortnight.
Once the hunting-shirt men are across the log breastworks, a slow
and painstaking killing ensues. Not a Creek asks quarter; not a Creek
accepts it when tendered. It is to be a fight to the death--a fight
unsparing, relentless, grim!
“Remember Fort Mims!” shout the hunting-shirt men, working away with,
rifle and axe and knife.
The Creeks, caught between the General and Colonel Coffee, hide
in clumps of bushes or behind logs. From these slight coverts, the
hunting-shirt men flush them, as setters flush birds, and shoot them as
they fly. Once a Creek is down, out flashes the ready hunting knife and
a Creek scalp is torn off; for the hunting-shirt men, on a principle
that fights Satan with fire, have adopted the war habits of their red
enemy.
The hunting-shirt men range up and down, quartering those one hundred
acres of Horseshoe wood like hounds, killing out in all directions.
Now and then a warrior, sorely crowded, leaps into the Tallapoosa, and
strikes forth for the opposite shore. His feather-tufted head is seen
bobbing on the muddy surface of the river. To gentlemen who, offhand,
make nothing of a turkey's head at one hundred yards, those brown
bobbing feather-tufted Creek heads are child's play. A rifle cracks;
the shot-pierced Creek springs clear of the water with a death yell, and
then goes bubbling to the bottom. Sometimes two rifles crack; in which
double event the Creek takes with him to the bottom two bullets instead
of one.
The slaughter moves forward slowly, but satisfactorily, for hours. It
is ten o'clock in the night when the last Creek is killed, and the
hunting-shirt men, hungry with a hard day's work, may think on supper.
Of the red one thousand and more who manned those British-built
fortifications in the morning, not two-score get away. It is the Creek
Thermopylae.
The General's triumph at the Horseshoe puts the last paragraph to the
last chapter of the Creek wars. Also, it disappoints certain English
prospects, and defeats for all time those savage hopes of a general race
battle against the paleface, the fires of which the dead Tecumseh so
long supported by his eloquence and fed with deeds of valor. By way of
a finishing touch, from which the hue of romance is not wanting, the
terrible Weathersford rides in, on his famous gray war horse, and gives
himself up to the General.
“You may kill me,” says Weathersford. “I am ready to die, for I have
beheld the destruction of my people. No one will hereafter fear the
Creeks, who are broken and gone. I come now to save the women and little
children starving in the forest.”
[Illustration: 0127]
The hunting-shirt men, not at all sentimental, lift up their voices in
favor of slaying the chief. At that the General steps in between.
“The man who would kill a prisoner,” he cries, “is a dog and the son of
a dog. To him who touches Weathersford I promise a noose and the nearest
tree.”
The General leads his hunting-shirt men by easy marches back to that
impatient plenty which awaits their coming on the Cumberland. The public
welcomes him with shout and toss of hat, while the blooming Rachel gives
her hero measureless love and tenderness. The General's one hundred and
fifty slaves, agog with joy and fire water, make merry for two round
days. They would have enlarged that festival to three days, but the
stern overseer intervenes to recall them to the laborious realities of
life.
As the General begins to have the better of his fatigue and
sickness--albeit that Benton-wounded left arm is still in a sling--a
note is put in his hands. The note is from the War Department in
Washington, and reads: “Andrew Jackson of Tennessee is appointed Major
General in the Army of the United States, vice William Henry Harrison,
resigned.”