26 Afloat on the Great Rivers
The forces of the West gradually assumed some sort of shape, and the farm lads composing them were divided into companies with officers who had been their comrades on the farms and whose military knowledge they justly despised. Some of us had uniforms, most of us had none; for arms we brought our own hunting rifles, and to these we added our own powder and lead, as the state could furnish neither. Not much of an armament, the trained soldier of Europe would say, but let it be remembered that above all others in the world, save our brethren of Tennessee, we knew how to shoot straight at the mark we wished to hit.
One can not raise an army in a day, and though the messengers flew and the women, with that spirit which the women of the West have shown always, urged us on, the autumn waned and found us still in Kentucky and unready. All the land resounded with the note of preparation, but many of us had a terrible fear that we would find the British, who could come an easy journey by sea in their big ships, intrenched in New Orleans, and several of us at last obtained permission to go south and join the Tennesseeans, who were sure now to start before us, though even after we joined them we would have to come back through Kentucky. In the beginning of November I bade my father farewell, received his command to conduct myself as a gentleman and a soldier, a command given in a low voice and with the moisture in his eyes, and rode away to the southwest with a troop of my comrades to meet the Tennesseeans coming down the Cumberland River.
We rode fast under the gray skies of November and said but little, for I was thinking often of Marian and her answer when I came back again. Would I come back again, and if I came, how?
We reached the hill country in the south of the State through which the Cumberland flows, and there, at a little landing in a wild and almost uninhabited country, found the two flatboats which had been engaged for us. We went upon these, without food and with scanty arms, and awaited the coming of the Tennesseeans.
For two days we stayed there in the river in our boats, and the November rains came before the Tennesseeans; the skies, which had been dark and threatening when we started, opened and poured upon us one unceasing deluge, from which we sought to protect only our arms and ammunition, for protect ourselves we could not. It was a chill torrent too, and as the raw winds of November drove it more fiercely upon us, some of us shivered in the grip of chills and fever, but none would leave the boats and stay. Luckily we had with us a good supply of the favourite beverage of our State, with which we fought the wet and the cold, and just before noon of the third day we heard the Tennesseeans coming.
Though the rain was pouring upon their heads and the wind was cutting their faces, they were singing in the deep-voiced chorus of many hundred men one of their own wild backwoods war songs, and as they swept around a curve and appeared before us in a fleet of boats that covered the river almost from bank to bank they looked as wild as their song sounded. They had not been beautiful at the start hundreds of miles away in Nashville, and since then they had toiled at the boats and sat in the pouring rain until their own mothers would have taken them for savages. Many wore the original dress of the wilderness hunter, the fringed buckskin hunting shirt, the ’coonskin cap, and the tasseled deerskin leggings, but here they were, bold of spirit and strong of body, embarked upon their voyage of two thousand miles to New Orleans, a journey almost as long as the English themselves would have to take from Europe and ten times more arduous.
We took our places in line with them, receiving a Western welcome as we came, all the warmer for me because there in a boat in the second line I saw the faces of my old and true comrades, Mercer and Courtenay, and at the first chance we gripped hands again and told of our campaigns. They had been with Jackson through the Indian war, and then had come north, intending to join the army on the Niagara frontier, when the news of the expedition against New Orleans reached them at Nashville.
“There’ll be a great fight at New Orleans if we get there in time,” said Mercer, “for remember it’s Andrew Jackson who will lead us.”
Then he asked me about Marian, and I told him of her, and was sad a little while for him; though he did not know that I understood.
Courtenay seemed to feel the same confidence in Jackson, and as they had served under him and knew him I began to share it. But we were consumed by a fear that we would not reach New Orleans in time, and another and great trouble was added to it, for I soon discovered that many of the men in the boats had no arms, not even a rifle, trusting that by some good luck they would find weapons awaiting them at New Orleans. Our commander, General Carroll, showed his anxiety in his face, but there was nothing to do save to press on with oar and paddle and current and stout hearts. The rain continued to fall from clouds unbroken by any shaft of blue; from horizon to horizon they rimmed us in, hosts of them, leaden and threatening, and we shivered in the boats and lay upon our precious powder to keep it dry. The country was wild, sterile, and lonely, and for a day at a time we would see no house, only the dark river flowing on between sombre banks, with the leaden clouds stalking in unbroken regiments across the sky. The water turned from dark blue to lead and from lead to a reddish mud; and now came our compensation, for the peaceful Cumberland, flooded by the heavy rains, was changed to an angry torrent rushing on with doubled current to the Ohio and bearing us at double speed upon its muddy bosom. We forgave the rain, for swiftness was what we wished above all things, and the wild songs of the woods were sung again.
There was no sense in that verse, but it and other such were thundered out many a dark and rainy night as we swept along on the muddy current of rushing rivers. On we went to the north and west across the whole State of Kentucky, and then the stream of the Cumberland bore us into the greater Ohio, and the Ohio took us up and carried us on now to the southwest through rich, flat country, and then into the still greater Mississippi, the Father of Waters, now a vast, muddy ditch, flowing between low, soft banks at which the water is forever eating.
The sun came out here, after days of rain, and, clear and brilliant, shone down upon us. The crisp coolness of early winter drove away the fever and the sick rose from their beds, mostly a blanket on the boat’s bottom. But despite the sunshine we floated on through a gray and gloomy country. The banks of the Mississippi below the mouth of the Ohio are not beautiful, with their ragged fringe of bushes and trees and their ugly muddy colour, and the stream itself, a vast expanse of thick viscous chocolate fluid, offers no charm save, that of sombre grandeur. From these miasmatic banks and marshy bottoms the houses flee, and the flowing river took us through the lonely wilderness. As we went on the wilder and more desolate it grew, and, in truth, we would soon be crossing the immense region uninhabited save by a few hunters and Indian traders which stretched between Tennessee and New Orleans. We were Argonauts going to meet a certain foe.
On the second day after leaving the Ohio Courtenay and I were in a boat in the front line, and he suddenly raised his voice and sang out like a sailor:
“Sail ho!”
Far ahead of us, in the middle of the stream, floated a clumsy vessel which looked like a rough imitation of the ark of the Scriptures—a wide, awkward boat, its decks covered with a board roof. It seemed to be lumbering along in the trough of the stream without any definite course, like a drunken man who does not know where he is going.
“A prize!” shouted Courtenay. “A prize for the Captain Kidds of the Mississippi!”
The men in sport took up the cry, for we were young, most of us, many mere boys, and some remarked that the ark must be loaded heavily as she lay deep in the water. The general ordered two or three of our boats to use all the sweeps and paddles available and overtake the strange vessel and see what it was, a command which we obeyed with alacrity, since a chase was an event on those lonely waters.
The prize did not seek to escape us, and when we overhauled her we found that the term we had applied in jest was as true as man ever spoke. A prize she was, the prize of all prizes for us, for she was loaded down with rifles, muskets, and ammunition destined for our forces at New Orleans, shipped at random and without any definite instruction by some lazy State official after the manner of our State officials. One universal shout of joy went up from that little ragged army of floating backwoodsmen, and the whole of the cargo was divided among them, giving every man a rifle or musket and plenty of powder and ball, with a quickness that would have shamed Captain Kidd aboard the richest treasure ship that he ever took. It may be that our capture of that ark saved—but of that hereafter.
Then forward we went, now fully armed and lighter of heart, on our long journey to the South. We passed the mouths of great rivers, flowing from western regions, which no white man had yet entered, and from the eastern shore, too, stream after stream emptied its torrent into the yellow Mississippi. All were in flood, swelled by the winter rains, and the Mississippi, also, rose with their tribute and overlapped its low banks. Sometimes in the swampy country it spread away to the right and left for miles, until on either side we could see no shore; then it flowed between the soft mud hills again and at night in the darkness we could hear the chunk, chunk of tons of earth falling into deep water as the hills, eaten away at their base, tumbled into the river; then the day would come again and the sun would shine over a yellow, muddy sea, sometimes half covered with bush and trees and roots and other debris, brought often from the mountains thousands of miles away. But the current always carried us on toward New Orleans, and we spent part of the days now drilling on the barges and flatboats, forming in little companies and learning how to present our rifles and fire at the word of command.
As we swept Southward the air grew warmer, though the winter was advancing and I perceived now that we were approaching a semitropical region. The vegetation, the colour of everything changed. It was no longer the stern north of a Kentucky winter, which is southern only by comparison with the States farther north, and we were fast approaching the sunny lands of the Gulf country. Some scrubby trees on the banks of the river were pointed out to us as orange groves, and we saw, too, the live oaks, the clinging moss, and the slimy cypress, proofs of a warm South.
But still there was no news; the world had closed behind us and was unknown before us. We could only guess, until far down in Louisiana we saw a man in a boat fishing near the shore. He was not disturbed by our approach, and did not rouse himself from his half sleep as one of our arks was turned toward him.
“Hallo, there!” shouted the biggest of our Tennesseeans.
“Hallo yourself! What do you want?”
“Are the British at New Orleans?”
“Yes.”
A chill, a deadly paralysis, fell upon us all. We had come nearly two thousand miles, only to be too late, to find the British already in New Orleans.
“Keep on!” suddenly said the fisherman, dropping his line back into the water. “The British are at New Orleans—before it, but not in it. Go on. Andrew Jackson is waiting for you!”
Again the thundering cheer of two thousand men rose as it had risen when we overtook the boatload of arms, and without another word we turned once more toward New Orleans and pushed on, oar and sweep aiding current.