1824: The Arkansas War (23 page)

But Ball was already turning away, and Robert closed his mouth. There was really no need to give Ball advice on the rest.

“Anthony!” Ball hollered. “You and Corporals McParland and Parker. Take enough men to man the oars on the keelboat and head upriver.” He pointed to the west, his finger indicating the Arkansas. “I want information, mind. Don’t be gettin’ in no pointless scrapes.”

Robert hesitated. But before it was necessary to intervene, Ball corrected his own error.

“Ah, never mind that. I don’t need the information so much as Patrick does. You do whatever you gotta to do to find him. Let him know where things stand down here.”

Captain McParland nodded and began giving orders. Robert relaxed and went back to watching Bryant at his work.

It was quite a bright day, he realized. Even now, so close to sundown.

Just after sunset, many miles downriver, another keelboat finally drifted ashore. The sole survivor of the three men in the boat clambered painfully onto the east bank of the Mississippi.

As exhausted as he was—the wound in his leg had kept him from sleeping—he was still shaking from the whole experience. Seeing most of his friends ripped to shreds by that incredible steamboat—
since when did steamboats have cannons?
he was still wondering—and then watching two of them slowly bleed to death, was never anything he’d expected when he joined up with Crittenden. He was only twenty-two years old.

He’d barely gotten ashore when he half sensed a threat. Turning his head, he got a glimpse of a war club coming at him before he lost consciousness altogether.

When he woke up, his head ached and there was dried blood caked on the side of his face. He tried to wipe it off but discovered his hands were tied.

What—?

Everything was flickering. It took him a while to realize that night had fallen and that he was seeing everything by the light of a fire in a small clearing. A while longer, to realize that he’d been tied spread-eagled between two trees in the clearing. And a bit longer still, to discover that he was naked.

Not long at all, then, to realize the rest. The dozen or so men also in the clearing were all Choctaws, from their outfits. He was pretty sure they were, anyway. Indians all looked alike to him, but since he’d moved to Mississippi from South Carolina he’d gotten to know a little of the differences in the way the various southern tribes dressed.

Knives, however—Indian, white, or Creole, it really didn’t matter—all looked very much the same. And he was looking at an awful lot of them.

“Oh, shit,” was all he could think to say.

CHAPTER 15

Arkansas Post

O
CTOBER 5, 1824

It took a day longer to reach Arkansas Post than Zachary Taylor had expected. He’d assumed that, this being the autumn, the White River would be fairly low, and fording it would be easy enough.

And so, in fact, it had proved—once they
got
to the river. What he hadn’t realized was how difficult the terrain between the Mississippi and the White rivers would be in the first place. No settlers had moved into this part of the Delta yet, and the natural landscape was essentially unmodified. Swamps, bayous, oxbow lakes, a profusion of creeks—everything that cavalrymen detested.

Crossing the White itself hadn’t been a big problem, although they’d had to travel upriver a ways to find a ford. But, finally, a day late, they’d arrived at Arkansas Post.

More precisely,
would
have arrived—except by now, the fort was under siege.

“A day late and a dollar short,” Taylor muttered to himself. “For want of a nail. Hell and damnation.”

He didn’t even have the advantage of high terrain, from which he might have been able to spot the gaps in the siege lines. There wasn’t any high terrain worth talking about, in the area. The only reason he was able to observe the Post at all, from a reasonably close range, was simply because most of the area north of the river hadn’t been cleared yet, and the terrain was still heavily wooded.

That there
were
gaps in the siege lines was certain, for the good and simple reason that the terms “siege” and “lines,” applied to Crittenden’s army, were laughable to begin with. That wasn’t really an army out there; it was just a very big lynch mob. Or bandit raid—take your pick. Given the nature of Crittenden’s forces, the distinction was pretty much meaningless.

Unfortunately for Crittenden—this much was also obvious, even from Taylor’s limited vantage point—the lynchees who were the target of the mob’s attention were hardly the sort they’d have found in a local county jail. First, because they were armed. Second, because the authorities in Arkansas had apparently taken the time since the founding of the Confederacy four years earlier to turn a ramshackle French trading post into a fort.

A frontier fort, granted, with wooden palisades instead of stone walls. But Taylor could see that they’d even dug a moat around the fortified town, on all three sides that weren’t already sheltered by the Arkansas, and kept it filled with water diverted from the river. No dinky little ditch, either. This was full-scale military construction, with a twenty-foot moat, glacis, scarp, counterscarp, the whole works. There were even berms protecting the four-pounders positioned just outside the walls of the fort—with gates right behind them through which the guns could be hauled if it appeared an enemy was making a successful assault on the outer fortifications.

Not that there was much chance of that, with an enemy like Crittenden’s mob. The Arkansans had kept the glacis meticulously clear of any growth and had cleared the area well beyond it. Any assaulting force would have to cross at least five hundred yards in the open, the last thirty yards while climbing up a glacis; then, have to cross the moat, whose waters were undoubtedly at least eight feet deep; and then have to clamber up a scarp before they could finally reach the fort’s guns. Which, by then, would have been withdrawn into the palisade anyway. All the while, being swept by canister fired from four-pounders manned—Taylor was sure of this, too—by some of the same veterans of the Iron Battalion who had broken British elite regiments at the Mississippi in 1815 and routed the Louisiana militia at Algiers five years later.

Even the U.S. Army would suffer major casualties in any such assault against defenders like these. Taylor himself wouldn’t be willing to try it without a minimum of three regiments in the attacking force—and only if those were regular units, not state militias. In his estimate, the likelihood that Crittenden’s yahoos would be able to storm the fort was about that of the proverbial snowball’s chance in Hell.

Not far away, looking at Arkansas Post from the opposite side of the river, two other men reached the same conclusion.

“Well, shit,” said Ray Thompson.

“We are well and truly fucked,” agreed Scott Powers. Sighing, he squatted on the ground, propping himself with his musket. “God damn Robert Crittenden. God damn all Crittendens. God damn every Kentuckian who ever lived. Louisianans, too.”

Thompson squatted next to him. “So what do we do now?”

Powers gave him a sideways glance. “Meaning no offense, Ray, but what’s ‘we’ got to do with it? You got hard-nosed creditors. I don’t.” He inclined the musket forward, pointing toward Arkansas Post. “You want to get your head blown off trying to take that place, you go right ahead. Me, this was just supposed to be a stepping-stone to Texas. I’ll take Mexican regulars over these crazy Arkansas niggers any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.”

Thompson scowled but didn’t make any response. He and Scott were pretty good friends, all things considered. But “friendship” in their circles had some clear and definite limits. That Powers would abandon him in an instant if he thought it necessary was a given.

The opposite was also true, of course. And now, somewhere in the back of his mind, Thompson was starting to gauge that possibility.

“Non,”
Charles Lallemand said forcefully to Robert Crittenden.
“Absolument pas!”
He pointed stiffly at the fort across the river and shifted to heavily accented English. “We have no more chance of storming it than we do of swimming back to Alexandria.”

“Less,” his brother Henri-Dominique added with a sneer. His eyes ranged over the mass of men clustered on the south bank of the Arkansas. Most of them were shouting curses and jeers at their opponents across the river, brandishing their muskets in what they apparently thought were warlike gestures. A fair number of them were even firing at Arkansas Post. At a range of perhaps four hundred yards, and getting low on powder.

It might be possible to plumb the depths of American stupidity, but Henri-Dominique suspected the line necessary would be so long that only a team of oxen could hold it up. Why had he and his brother ever agreed to this madness in the first place?

The answer, alas, was obvious. Money. Their enterprises in Alabama had turned out poorly, and they’d not been able to resist Crittenden’s blandishments concerning the wealth of new plantations in the Delta. So perhaps their own stupidity was not much shallower.

Glumly, while his brother Charles and Robert Crittenden continued their argument, Henri-Dominique studied the Arkansas fortifications across the river. About the only consolation he could find was that at least they’d been designed by a man who’d also once served in the emperor’s colors.

Poor consolation, though. The empire was gone, vanished, and there was today to be dealt with. Henri-Dominique and his brother had both known, of course, that Driscol was a veteran of the French army. But they’d never expected anything like
this.
And, unfortunately—he took a moment to curse himself and Charles along with Crittenden and his men—they hadn’t taken seriously the few reports they’d gotten about the nature of the fortifications at Arkansas Post. In their experience, an American “moat” was a poor excuse for a ditch, a “walled fort” was a glorified log cabin, and such terms as “glacis” and “counterscarp” were quite literally foreign.

He was still surprised, though, at the quality of the design. He wouldn’t have thought a sergeant, on his own, would have been able to come up with it. Especially a sergeant whose service, by all accounts, had been entirely in units of the line.

“Absolument pas!”
his brother repeated.

“Merde, alors,”
Henri-Dominique added for good measure.

A few hundred yards to the west, and on the Post side of the river, Captain Anthony McParland had come to the same conclusions arrived at by Taylor and Lallemand.

“No chance they’re going to take the Post,” he told the two corporals. “Not without a siege, anyway—and the Laird’ll be here long before that.”

His grin was on the wicked side. “I’ll add that the stupid bastards got themselves penned up, on top of everything else.” He pointed backward toward the river, which was now hidden by the woods. “The Arkansas makes a loop, right there, just opposite the Post. General Ball told me that’s why the Laird shifted the fort from the original French location. Any enemy who camps opposite the Post can be trapped against the river real easy, since they’re in a sort of little peninsula. And I’ll bet you a month’s pay—mine against yours—that’s exactly what the Laird’s planning to do.”

“What’s a peninsula?” his cousin asked.

The captain glared at him. “You’re supposed to know that already!”

Sheffield Parker gave his fellow corporal a quick glance. “Cal was sick that day when they covered it in the sergeants’ school.” To Cal, he explained: “It’s what they call a piece of land stickin’ out into the middle of the water. Like Florida. The whole state’s basically a big peninsula.”

“Oh. Yeah. I was sick that day.”

“You was malingering that day, you mean,” his older cousin growled. But there wasn’t much heat in it. In truth, he was more surprised that Parker remembered than that Callender didn’t know. The “sergeants’ school” that the Laird had instituted in the army of Arkansas was a compressed sort of affair. Worse, even, than the officers’ training Anthony himself had gone through—and he well remembered how many once-mentioned items he’d forgotten. Mostly thanks to being promptly dressed down by his superiors soon afterward.

“What do you want to do, sir?” Parker asked.

The young black corporal was meticulous about military protocol in the field, unlike most of the white noncoms. So were most of the other black ones, now that Anthony thought about it. On some level, very deep, quiet, and still, he’d come to realize that the black soldiers in the army—the noncoms and officers, even more so—took the whole business more seriously than white ones usually did. All the white people of Arkansas, leaving aside the foreign missionaries, were still Americans in every sense of the term except formal citizenship. So they shared the generally casual attitude toward military matters that characterized most Americans.