IN WHICH THE SOLDIERS MAKE A MAP
The forbearance of the captors to disturb their prisoners was puzzling
to the three soldiers huddled together on the point of rocks. Through
the telescope the men could now be plainly seen, in their rough
mountain dress, moving to and fro on their stations, and apparently
keeping under cover where trees or outhouses were available as a mask.
At one point several men were grouped together behind a fodder-stack,
as if in consultation, and on the road could be seen one who seemed to
be watching impatiently for some expected arrival.
Holding the telescope soon grew tiresome, and they passed it from one
to another, that no movement in the gruesome pantomime might escape
their observation; and the observer for the time being broke the
silence at intervals with details of what he saw.
"There!" cried Philip, at last, "the men are getting lively behind the
fodder-stack. Now the fellow in the road is waving his hat. Hold on!
There comes a man--two men--on horseback. Now the sentinels are moving
in toward the cabin."
Thus the cordon was drawn close about the house, in which the inmates
still showed no signs of life. The horsemen dismounted and tied their
horses to the fence, and then, with an armed guard, advanced to the
door. Lieutenant Coleman looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes
after seven. At seven twenty-eight the old mountaineer appeared, and
was passed down the line to the road. Next came the three officers,
one after the other, and they were removed to one side under guard.
Then the four women seemed to be driven out of the house by the
soldiers, and forced along by violence into the road. Some of the men
appeared to be breaking the windows of the cabin, and others were
running out of the open door, appropriating some objects and ruthlessly
destroying others. For the first time the soldier exiles realized how
far they were removed, by their own will, from a world in which they
had no part. The sufferers were their friends whom they knew not, and
to help whom they had no power. They were like spirits looking down
from a world above on the passions of mortals--as helpless to interfere
as the motionless rocks.
After a brief consultation the mounted men rode away to the north,
while the prisoners, with their guards, advanced in the opposite
direction and soon disappeared behind that ridge up which Shifless had
climbed to look over in the gray of the morning of the day before. A
puff of smoke burst from the deserted cabin and rose like a tower into
the frosty air. Fire gleamed through the broken windows, and red
tongues of flame licked about the dry logs, and lashed and forked under
the eaves and about the edges of the shingled roof. The reflection
from the flames reddened the snow in the little clearing. The stacks
caught fire. The boughs of the orchard withered and crisped in the
fierce heat.
Now, as if satisfied with their work of destruction, the men who had
remained at the house joined the others behind the ridge, and the armed
guards, with their miserable prisoners, soon reappeared, moving over
the snow under the bare trees. The three soldiers lay out on the rocks
above to watch the poor captives picking their way down a stony,
winding trail, forming one straggling file between two flanking columns
of mountaineers. Knowing something of the stoical ways of these
people, they could feel the silence of that gloomy progress. They even
fancied they could hear the crunching of the snow, the rolling of
displaced stones on the frosty hillside, the crackling of brittle twigs
under foot, and the subdued sobbing of the women.
Steadily the procession of ill omen moved along over the snow under the
thin trees, disappearing and reappearing and dwindling in the distance,
until it was lost behind the spurs of the mountain called Chimney Top.
By this time the roof of the house had fallen into the burning mass
between the two stone chimneys; the sun had risen, and the dense column
of smoke cast a writhing shadow against the snowy face of Sheep Cliff.
When the glass was brought to bear on the house and road below, it
revealed Shifless and the Cove postmaster riding quietly home on their
mules, doubtless well satisfied with the evil deed their heads had
planned.
As the three soldiers turned back in the direction of their house,
Bromley was in a rage, and Philip could no longer command himself. All
three were worn and haggard with loss of sleep, and depressed by the
outcome of the affair in the valley.
In fact, the disheartening effect of the experiences connected with
this first Christmas continued to oppress our exiles well into the next
year. If, in the narrow valley on which they were privileged to look
down, three officers of the old armies had been thus hunted and dragged
off before their eyes, they had reason to believe that fragments of
those armies were receiving similar or worse treatment wherever they
might be found. Time and their daily work gradually calmed their minds
and helped them to forget the pain of what they had seen. They missed
the company of the bear, too; for even before this great disturbance of
their tranquillity that amusing companion of their solitude had
burrowed himself away, to consume his own fat, where not even their
telescope could discover him for several months.
Presently the winter snows became deeper on the mountain, and they were
confined more and more to the house. The Slow-John was frozen up in
the branch, and the fowls, which could no longer forage for their own
living, hung about the door for the scraps from the table and an
occasional handful of corn. They roosted in the cabin of the old man
of the mountain, and now and then, in return for their keep, laid an
egg, which was often frozen before it was found.
[Illustration: "THE FOWLS HUNG ABOUT THE DOOR."]
The soft, clean husks of the corn, added to the pine boughs, made
comfortable beds, and the tents spread over the blankets provided
abundant covering. Great bunches of catnip and pennyroyal for tea hung
from the rafters, and even the wild gentian, potent to cure all
ailments, was not forgotten in the winter outfit.
The prayer-book and Army Regulations, which formed their library, were
read and re-read, and discussed until theology and the art of clothing
and feeding an army were worn threadbare. Philip, who was blessed with
a vivid imagination and great originality, made up the most marvelous
ghost-stories and the most heartrending and finally soul-satisfying
romances, which were recited in the evenings before the fire, to the
huge enjoyment of his companions. If it was romance, a fat pine-knot
thrust between the logs illumined the interior and searched the
farthest corners and crannies of the room with a flood of light; and in
case it was a ghost-story, the logs were left to burn low and fall
piecemeal into the red coals before the eyes of the three figures
sitting half revealed in sympathetic obscurity.
[Illustration: "PHILIP MADE UP THE MOST MARVELOUS STORIES, WHICH WERE
RECITED BEFORE THE FIRE"]
One of the most interesting incidents of the first winter was the
construction, by Lieutenant Coleman, of a map of the "old United
States," and the plotting thereon of the Confederacy as they supposed
it to be. When it is remembered that the map was drawn entirely from
memory, the clear topographical knowledge of the officer was, to say
the least, surprising.
The first reference to the map is found in Lieutenant Coleman's entry
in the diary for the 24th of January, 1865:
"As we were sitting before the fire last night, George introduced a
subject which, by common consent, we have rather avoided any reference
to or conversation upon. This related to the probable boundaries of
the new nation established by the triumphant Confederates. We had no
doubt that the Confederacy embraced all the States which were
slaveholding States at the outbreak of the Rebellion; and as they
doubtless had made Washington their capital, it was more than probable
that they had added little Delaware to Maryland on their northern
border. We assumed that so long as there were two governments in the
old territory, the Ohio River would be accepted as a natural boundary
as far as to the Mississippi; but we were of widely different opinions
as to the line of separation thence.
"George, who is inclined to the darker view, is of the opinion that the
Southern republic, if it be a republic at all, would certainly demand
an opening to the Pacific Ocean, and therefore must embrace a part, if
not the whole, of California.
"February 16. We have been confined to the house two days by a driving
snow-storm, and the territorial extent of the Confederacy has come up
again, not, however, for the first time since the discussion on the 23d
of January. As we still have one stormy month before the opening of
spring, I have determined to enter upon the construction of a map which
shall lay down the probable boundaries of the two nations. When George
and I are unable to agree, the point in dispute will be argued before
Philip, and settled by the votes of the three."
On February 17, then, this map was begun on the inner side of one of
the rubber ponchos after buttoning down and gluing with pitch the
opening in the center. It was stretched on a frame, and thus provided
a clean white canvas five feet square on which to draw the map.
If Lieutenant Coleman and his companions had known that General
Sherman, after whom they had named their island in the sky and whom
they mourned as dead, was that very morning marching into the city of
Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, with all his bands playing and
flags flying, the map would never have been made, and the life on the
mountain would have come to a sudden end. Fortunately for the
continuance of this history, they were ignorant of that fact, and
Lieutenant Coleman on this very day began plotting his map with
charcoal. After going over the coasts and watercourses and
establishing the boundaries of States, and that greatest and most
difficult of all boundaries, the one between "the two countries," he
would blow off the charcoal and complete the details with ink. Of this
necessary fluid there was a canteen full, which had been made in the
fall from oak-galls (lumps or balls produced on the oak-leaves by tiny
insects) and the purple pokeberries which had been gathered from the
field below the ledge. The oak-leaves had been steeped in warm water,
and this mixture, together with the berries, had been strained through
a cloth and bottled up in the canteen.
While at West Point, Cadet Coleman, of the class of '63, had devoted
himself to mapping, and he believed he was tolerably familiar with his
subject until, at the very outset, difficulties began to arise. He
found that his knowledge about the Northwestern Territories was shaky,
and it was difficult to convince Bromley that Arkansas was not west of
Kansas.
They finally gave little Delaware to the Confederacy, accepting the bay
and river as a natural geographical separation. Thence they followed
the southern boundary of Pennsylvania to the Ohio River, the Ohio and
Mississippi to the southern boundary of Iowa, and thence west and south
on the northern and western frontiers of Missouri. The Indian
Territory became the first point of disagreement.
Under date of March 1, 1865, Lieutenant Coleman says:
"With the aid of Philip, I pressed the boundary line south to the Red
River. We all conceded Texas to the Confederacy. I was disposed to
establish the extreme western boundary of the Confederacy as identical
with the western frontier of Texas. George allowed this so far as the
Rio Grande formed a natural boundary along the frontier of Mexico, but
stoutly insisted that the successful Southerners would never consent to
a settlement which did not extend their borders to the Pacific Ocean.
To this claim on the part of the South he contended that the imbecility
of Congress and the timidity of Northern leaders would offer little or
no opposition. He held that if they took part of California, they
might as well take the whole; and in either case they would take New
Mexico and Arizona as the natural connection with their Pacific
territory.
"I contended that California had never been a slave State, and would
never consent to such an arrangement. To this George replied that
California was without troops, and that her wishes would not be a
factor in the solution of the problem; that the South, flushed with
victory, could not be logically expected to content itself with less;
that it would be a matter to be settled between the two governments,
and that, for his part, he saw no reason to believe that the North, in
view of its blunders civil and its failures military, would have the
power or the courage to prevent such seizure by the enemy. Philip
leaned to this view, and was even willing to throw in Utah for
sentimental reasons."
Bromley showed great skill and cleverness in advocating his peculiar
views. When he had a point to gain, with the natural cunning of a
legal mind, he took care to begin his argument by claiming much more
than he expected to establish. Thus, not content with the concession
of California and the southern tier of Territories leading thereto, he
called the attention of the others to the great Rocky Mountain range,
offering itself, from the north-western extremity of Texas to the
British possessions, as a natural geographical wall between nations.
He admitted that the Western men had been the bone and sinew of the
late fruitless struggle; but they were the hardy soldiers of Illinois,
Wisconsin, Iowa, and Kansas, still far to the east of the great
mountain-range, with vast uncivilized Territories between.
To this view Lieutenant Coleman opposed the jealousy of the great ally
of the South as not likely to favor an unequal partition; he said that
England would certainly not lend her aid to bringing the more
aggressive of the two nations up to her own colonial borders. Besides,
he contended, the South was without a navy, and at the outset could
never defend such a great addition to her already vastly superior
coast-line.
This long argument resulted in a compromise, and by the decision of
Philip, California, Arizona, and New Mexico were given to the
Confederacy, and half the Pacific coast was saved to the old government.
Bromley's matter-of-fact character had no sentimental side. He was a
worker, and no dreamer. He threw himself with all the weight of his
convictions and the force of his well-trained mind into the discussion
of the extent of the Confederate victory; but the moment the boundary
was settled he seemed to forget the existence of the map and to lose
himself in the next piece of work.
After completing the outlines of the map in ink, Lieutenant Coleman
began laying a tone of lines over the whole Confederacy. As the work
progressed, the three soldiers watched the new power creeping like an
ominous shadow over the map. The one break in the expanse of gloom was
the white star at the northwestern corner of North Carolina, which
marked the location of Sherman Territory. When the map was finished
and hung on the logs, the Confederacy looked like nothing so much as a
huge dragon crouching on the Gulf of Mexico, with the neck and head
elevated along the Pacific and the tail brushing Cuba.
[Illustration: MAP OF THE UNITED STATES AND CONFEDERATE STATES BY
FREDERICK HENRY COLEMAN (LATE USA) SHERMAN TERRITORY A.D. 1865.]
Although they accepted the map without further discussion, its white
face, looking down on them from the wall as they sat about the evening
fire, provoked many a talk about affairs in the world below. The time
for the election of a new President had passed since they had been on
the mountain. After the complete and pitiful collapse of Lincoln's
administration, they had no doubt that McClellan had been elected.
Philip thought the new capital should be located at Piqua, Ohio (which
was where his uncle lived), as it was near the center of population!
But Bromley favored the city of Cleveland. Ohio, he pointed out,
extended entirely across the Union, and, as the State which linked the
two parts together, it would need to be strongly guarded, and the
capital with its troops and fortifications would strengthen that weak
link in the chain. Cincinnati was too close to the enemy's territory
to be thought of as a capital.
Shortly before undertaking the map, Lieutenant Coleman had the good
fortune to bring down a large gray eagle, which, although soaring high
above the valleys, was but just skimming the mountain-top. This was a
fortunate event, because the very last steel pen had become very worn
and corroded. Lieutenant Coleman had been longing above all things for
quills, and now that he wrote again with an easy and flowing hand, he
seems to have forgotten that his supply of paper was limited. In the
controversy over the map the entries are of unusual length, and then
suddenly they become brief and cramped, and are written in so small a
hand that there can be no doubt the writer took sudden alarm on
discovering how few blank pages were left in the book.
Since Christmas the telescope had rarely been taken from its place on
the chimney, and if they looked over into the Cove or the valley
without it, those snow-covered regions below were far-off countries,
where the houses showed only as rounded forms, and the human ants who
lived in them were scarcely visible.