1824: The Arkansas War (44 page)

Sam didn’t know what to say. As always—it hadn’t lessened a bit, not even after almost three months—the thought of his wife dying just took his breath away. A man with a silver tongue, struck speechless.

When he was able to talk, he grasped at it. “You think so? About Maria Hester, I mean.”

“Oh, aye.” Driscol seemed to swallow. Hard to tell, of course, with a neck like his. “I—ah—should perhaps give fair warning. You know—ah—that rich black fellow in New York? The one from Haiti who’s been sending so much money here.”

“Pierre Toussaint.”

“Yes, him. He’s a devout Catholic, so most of the money he sends goes to support the Church here.” For just a moment, the Scots-Irish Presbyterian surfaced. Patrick had been raised in that creed, even if he himself had long since become a freethinking deist. “Heathen lot, even if—well, I’ll grant they do a lot of good work. Charitable stuff. But the point is, they’re given to saints and icons and graven images and such.”

Sam coughed. “Oh, come on, Patrick! Not even the Catholics—”

“Not on their own, probably. But Marie Laveau decided she was a Catholic two years ago, and she’s been busy ever since importing as much of her voudou as she can into the Church.” Again, the Presbyterian surfaced: “Which isn’t hard, of course, being as the papists half-think like voudou anyway.”

Sam couldn’t help but chuckle. Which, thankfully, leached away some of the grief-surge.

Driscol chuckled with him. “Marie’s got quite the following, too. Except for Tiana, she’s probably the most influential woman in Arkansas. So…Well, look, here’s the point. Don’t get all worked up if you come to find out Maria Hester’s…well, actually, they’ve already declared her a martyr of the Church.”

“She wasn’t Catholic!”

“Don’t argue with
me
about it. Marie Laveau can explain it to you, if you can manage to follow the logic. Which I couldn’t, after she got to the part about consulting—ah, never mind. The point is, they’ll probably be making her a saint by next spring. They already have an image of her—a veritable icon—up on the wall of the big church in New Antrim. The priest squawked, but they made it stick.”

“I thought only the pope—”

“Marie Laveau can explain that to you, also. It seems—this is
her
version, mind you, I doubt me the pope in Rome would agree with her—that since it’s obvious the Virgin Mary is equal to the Christ, it follows as night from day that saints can also be declared by the Women’s Council.”

“
What
‘Women’s Council’?”

Patrick cleared his throat again. “Well, the one that she and Tiana set up. Tiana being a Cherokee, of course, the notion came naturally to her. Especially since Nancy Ward urged it on her, just before the ancient
ghighua
finally died last year. Marie Laveau thought it made perfect sense, too. Which isn’t really that surprising, when you think about it. Slavery being what it is, black people mostly have a matrilineal society, too, in practice if not in theory.”

That was true enough. But—

“The chiefdom of Arkansas now has a
Women’s Council?
Run by Tiana and Marie Laveau? Good God in Heaven!”

“Yes, that’s exactly what Major General Robert Ross said. When his wife Eliza got invited to join. Then he repeated the exclamation—twice; I heard him; I was there—when she accepted.”

“Good God in Heaven!”

Driscol shrugged. “It’s the nature of the soil in Arkansas. Very contagious terrain.”

CHAPTER 29

Arkansas Post

F
EBRUARY 9, 1825

“Thank God you’re here!” John Ross said when he spotted Sam entering the fort’s big mess hall, which had been set aside as an impromptu conference room.

The Cherokee leader pointed an accusing finger at Pushmataha. The principal chief of the Choctaws was ensconced on a chair in a corner, for all the world as if he were seated on a throne. “Explain to this madman that if he doesn’t get his people moved across the Poteau into New Kitu—ah, blast it, Oklahoma—that they’ll starve. As it is, it’s going to be touch and go.”

Sam studied Pushmataha. The old chief was famous all over the frontier for his canny ways, but all it took was one glance to know that he wasn’t going to budge.

“They murdered and raped and robbed—Crittenden and his devils—all up and down the great river,” the chief growled. His English was fluent, if heavily accented. “Then their militias did it again when they came at us afterward. We will not move from this place until we have our revenge. We will certainly not go to hide across the Poteau, leaving—”

Pushmataha choked off a term that was the Choctaw equivalent of “nigger.” He took a slow, shaky, old man’s breath. “Leaving the blacks to do all the fighting.”

Sam decided to shift the matter into Choctaw—in which he was by now just as fluent, and had considerably less of an accent. “Well, of course not. But your women and children can’t fight, Pushmataha. Not many of the old men, either. So it only makes sense…”

By evening, he’d managed to work out a compromise. Most of the Choctaws would winter over in New Antrim. That would require hastily erecting enough shelter for an additional fifteen thousand people, in a city that was already bursting with more than thirty thousand. But Driscol announced he’d exercise his full powers as principal chief of Arkansas and institute the measure he’d been considering for some time now.

Conscription.
Pure and simple—no blasted inefficient, haphazard Sassenach press gangs, either. Arkansas would do it the proper way. The Napoleonic way.

However, exemptions would be given to able-bodied men engaged in necessary labor.

Building housing on short notice for the newly arrived Choctaws was decreed necessary labor.

The principal chief of Arkansas foresaw no great problem.

“Can Patrick actually manage it?” Sam whispered to John Ridge, with whom he’d been quietly consulting on the side while Driscol and John Ross and Major Ridge and Pushmataha continued their wrangling over the details. “Conscription, I mean.”

Major Ridge’s son was extremely astute, had been residing in New Antrim for some time now, and, along with his cousin, Buck Watie, who was standing alongside him, owned New Antrim’s biggest and most influential newspaper. Sam figured his assessment would be as good as any. And whatever he missed, Buck wouldn’t.

“There’ll be a ruckus, of course. But…yes, he can.”

“Of course he can,” Buck chimed in, speaking as softly as his cousin even if the words came out like a snort. “Don’t let all the similarities fool you, Sam. There are some ways—and not just obvious ones involving race—that Arkansas is about as different from the United States as both of them are from, I don’t know, someplace in Mongolia. One of them is the attitude people have toward the army here. Even a lot of the whites and Indians. The truth is, the way things are now, if Chief Driscol called for a massive number of volunteers, he’d get them. There’ll be a ruckus over conscription, like John says, but it’ll be mostly for show.”

Sam looked back and forth from one to the other. Neither of the young Cherokees looked at all happy.

“And the problem is?”

John, as usual, took some time to think about his answer. Buck, as usual, gave it right away.

“Isn’t it obvious, Sam? What happens if we
win
the war? And come out of it at the end—”

John finished the thought: “—with what amounts to an all-black army, in a confederacy that’s supposed to be mostly for Indians? That’s a recipe for another war. A civil war, this time. In fact, we’re already getting closer to it than I like. If you go out and talk to some of the Cherokees in New Kit—ah, Oklahoma—you’ll hear some nasty predictions and even calls for action. Especially from some of the richer mixed-bloods who own a lot of slaves. Some Creeks are talking the same way, too.”

Sam studied the leaders in the corner of the mess hall. In deference to Pushmataha’s age and infirmities, all of them had gathered around the Choctaw chief ’s chair.

All the races of the continent were represented there. Mostly Indians, with two white men in the form of Patrick Driscol and Robert Ross. Only one black man. That was Charles Ball, the general in the chiefdom of Arkansas’ little army.

But it didn’t matter. All Sam had to do was step outside and walk about the fort for a few minutes. Everywhere he went—manning the twelve-pounders, not just holding muskets—he’d see almost nothing but black men. With a sprinkling of whites, constituting less than ten percent of the whole. One or two Indians, at most—if there were any at all.

“The solution’s obvious,” he said harshly, not caring now if his voice carried. “Pick up the load yourselves, damnation.”

Both young Cherokees flushed. “We’ll fight, Sam, and you know—”

“That’s not what I meant, and
you
know it. Sure, you’ll fight. Nobody ever accused Cherokees—or Creeks, or Choctaws, and sure as Sam Hill not Chickasaws and Seminoles—of being cowards. And so fucking
what?
”

He jerked his head in the direction of Major Ridge. “You’ll fight the way your father—and your uncle, Buck—fights. A great warrior; nobody denies it. Not me, that’s for sure, having fought next to him at the Horseshoe Bend and the Mississippi. And it doesn’t matter, because the only role he and his men could play at the Horseshoe and the Mississippi was that of auxiliary troops. There’s no way—not on their own—they can stand against what’s coming.”

Now he jerked his head in the direction of Driscol and Ball. “They
can,
on the other hand. Because whether you like it or not—whether it rubs your Cherokee customs and traditions the wrong way or not—they’ll fight the white man’s sort of war. And that’s what kind of war this is going to be. And you know it. So cut out the tomfoolery. I ask you again. You know the solution. Are you willing to accept it?”

John and Buck looked at each other. “Yeah, all right,” said Buck almost immediately.

“My wife can handle the newspaper,” John chimed in. “Truth is, she manages it pretty much already, on the business end.”

“Well, good.”

The Chickasaws wouldn’t budge at all. So, finally, Patrick cut the Gordian knot.

“Fine, then. I’ll be pulling out of Arkansas Post come spring. Because there’s no way to hold it, against the size army the United States will send. So you can winter over in this area, and you can have the Post thereafter, if you think you can hold it. I give it to you. You’d still be smarter to send your women and children—them, at least—over into Oklahoma.”

Sam translated. The Chickasaw chiefs swelled.

“We’ll hold it! Watch and see if Chickasaws can’t!”

Ten minutes later, most of the mess hall was cleared of people. The only ones who remained behind were Driscol, Robert Ross, Sam himself, and the four Cherokee leaders: John Ross and Major Ridge, and Ridge’s son and nephew.

“Idiots,” Robert Ross stated. “The American army will overrun the Post, and they’ll all die. Most of them, anyway. A few might escape at the end.”

Driscol shrugged. Every ounce of him the ice-blooded troll, now. “So let ’em die. They’re Chickasaws; they won’t die easily. They’ll bleed the bastards, be sure of that. And once it’s over”—the troll’s grin, as pure as you could ask for—“it’ll be us instead of Henry Clay hollering ‘vengeance for Arkansas Post!’ ”

Driscol turned to Sam, glowering at him. “I’ve half a mind to forbid you from enlisting in the army altogether. I’ve got the legal authority to do it, too, at least here in Arkansas.”

“Damn you, Patrick, I didn’t come all the way—”

“Damn
you,
Sam Houston! Look, sooner or later wars have to be
ended,
too. And…” For a moment, the troll almost looked embarrassed. Impossible, of course. “Well, the truth is, I’m a poor one to try to make a settlement. You, on the other hand, are a natural diplomat and could probably manage the trick—
provided
you weren’t actually involved in the fighting and killing.”

Before Sam could continue the argument, Robert Ross intervened.

“Patrick, you’re being foolish. First, you have to win the war in the first place. Which, as it stands now, you mostly likely won’t.”

Driscol glared at him. The British major general didn’t seem to care in the least.

“Be as stubborn as you want. Here’s the truth, Patrick. You’ve got probably the best army anywhere in the world that could have been created by sergeants. The world’s best sergeants, I’ll add that into the bargain. But sergeants can’t win wars. They can rarely even win battles. What you need is what you don’t have. A real officer corps. You don’t have real cavalry, either, but you can probably survive that lack. You won’t survive without officers. Real ones, and enough of them.”