Drums Along the Mohawk (23 page)

It was the first time Gil had ever seen the man whose name since winter had come to be on everybody’s tongue. He was under six feet, but he walked like a taller man. His clothes were made in the Indian fashion, but, except for the deerskin moccasins, they were made of English cloth, and instead of the traditional headdress he wore a cocked black hat bedizened with gold lace. His blanket was a vivid blue, turned back from the shoulders to show the scarlet lining.

Behind him his companions were dressed like shabby replicas. There were five of them, in front of the warriors. A white man in deerskins, whom Brant introduced as Captain Bull, and who smirked a little as he bowed; a half-breed Indian who turned out to be Sir William Johnson’s bastard son by Brant’s sister, a dark-skinned fellow with an Irish face; a Mohawk chief whose name Gil didn’t catch; and a half-breed, negro-Indian, whom Brant didn’t bother about.

Brant smiled a little as he looked down at Herkimer and shook him by the hand. His features were straight, well shaped, and full of animation. He kept looking round on the militia as if to see what their reactions were. But their reactions to himself, not to the situation. It took but one look at him to see that he was vain.

Though he was pure-bred Mohawk, Joseph Brant could easily have been mistaken for a white man, and he talked more educated English than old Herkimer could have mastered had he been thrice reborn and three times sent to college. He had a great dignity of behavior, too, that made the militia look like simple men; but it was not the natural dignity of a plain Indian. It had the manners of a white man who has been to a royal court. It was filled with pride, which even so meaching-minded a man as Christian Reall could see was an unnatural thing.

Joe Boleo, watching his back, grunted to George Weaver, “Brant used to be a nice lad, too. But now he wants the world to know he’s a nice man.”

Joe Boleo had put his finger on Brant’s weakness. He wanted to be admired, by both Indians and whites, gentlemen and farmers. He wanted to be a great man, by both standards, with whatever person he was at the moment engaged. It was an attitude that later would account for his irrational kindnesses and friendships, as well as his cruelties and hates. The mistake he always made was his utter inability to understand that forthright people like Boleo or Herkimer or Gil could see straight through him. Vainer people, he enraged.

Brant’s complaints had been that the Mohawks who had stayed at the Indian town in friendliness to the colonies were held as virtual prisoners, together with their minister, Mr. Stuart; that Butler’s wife and children were kept as hostages; and that forts were being erected on Indian property.

Herkimer had asked if the Indians would remain neutral if these complaints were met, to which Brant replied that the Six Nations had always been allied with the King of England, that they still were. Beyond that he could not go. Herkimer then asked him whether he would talk again to-morrow, and Brant agreed. But as he turned to go, he said quietly, “I’ve got five hundred men. If you start trouble, they’ll be ready.”

That night Herkimer talked with Joe Boleo and another man named Wagner, and George and Abraham Herkimer. “It’s no use at all,” he said. “Brant’s made his mind up. And there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. He’s got five hundred men, and if he wants he can wipe us out.”

“I could draw a bead on him,” Joe Boleo suggested.

Herkimer shook his head.

“Shucks,” said Joe. “We can lick them Indians. If we get Brant, the rest of them will run like rabbits.”

“I can’t take the chance. I’ve got to get these men back to the Mohawk. We’re going to need them all.”

His nephew George said, “What if he starts trouble to-morrow?”

“That’s what I want to see you about. If he does you’re to shoot him. You can lay behind the top of the hill. They won’t see you if you go before sunrise. Lay in those ferns. But don’t you start anything.”

Nothing happened on the next day. Brant greeted Herkimer blandly with the announcement that the Indians under no circumstances would break their allegiance to the King. Herkimer shrugged.

“All right, Joseph,” he said. “There’s no sense in talking any more.”

That was all there was to it. Three hundred men had marched southward ninety miles; they would march ninety miles back.

“No sense,” Brant agreed. “It was nice to have the visit.” The sarcasm was barely veiled. “Seeing you’re old neighbors, all of you, we’ll let you go home. And we won’t bother this country now. As a matter of fact, I’ve got to go to Oswego to meet Colonel Butler.”

Herkimer nodded, stood up, shook hands, and watched Brant calmly walking down the knoll towards the woods with his fifty men behind him. As if he had half a mind to signal to Joe Boleo and Wagner, he kept his hands clenched in his trousers’ pockets. He did not move until the last Indian had stepped into the underbrush.

Then he said, “Call up the men.”

The militia, held under arms, came quickly up the hill and formed companies. At the same moment, a wild yelling burst from the woods; the brush suddenly disgorged a band of Indians. As they came into the open, they brandished their muskets, tossed up their tomahawks, and yelled again.

“Don’t anybody notice them.”

Herkimer’s voice was calm and contained. He had lit his pipe
and now he stood in front of the militia, puffing it and staring up at the sky.

“God damn,” he said. “I didn’t see that storm coming up. But I guess we’ll all get wet anyway. Let’s break camp and go home.”

The Indians were still yelling and prancing at the woods’ edge. But now they too heard the thunder. The clouds suddenly engulfed the sun, a still sultry light came over the rolling valley, and then the rain, in large drops, like a volley from heaven, struck the land. The Indians dove back into the woods and the militia were left alone in the falling rain.

Then they too broke for their own camp. They heard the Indians popping off their rifles through the woods, but the sound was like play in the noise of wind and thunder.

When the last man got into camp, the general’s tent was struck and he was hunched on the back of his miserable old white horse. Joe Boleo said, “They’ve all skedaddled.”

Herkimer grinned. “They’re touchy as women about their paint when they’ve just put it on.”

“It was war paint,” said Cox.

“Yes, I saw it.” He was unruffled. “It’s time we got back home.” He raised his voice above the rain. “This trip ain’t altogether a waste. We’ve learned to march together and get along without scrapping between ourselves.” He grinned and rubbed the rain off his mouth. “Boys, it looks like a bad time was coming. But you’ve seen painted Indians, now, so you’ll know what to shoot at.”

Plenty of the men had been wondering what the expedition had been for. But as they listened to the little German talking to them through the rain, they realized that they had a man who could take them into the woods, and who wasn’t scared of Indians, and they felt that when the time came he could set his teeth in a situation and hang on. “Boys,” he said, “go back and get your haying done as early as you can. Peter,” he called to Colonel
Bellinger, “I’m going back the way we came by. We have food waiting for us at Cherry Valley if the Continentals ain’t ate it all. But I give you enough extra so you can take a short cut. Follow up Butternut Creek. If these Indians ever make a shy at German Flats they’ll come that way. You ought to see the country. Joe Boleo’ll show you how to go.”

So the German Flats company crossed the Susquehanna at the ford above the Unadilla and headed home straight north without more than an Indian trail to follow the course of the Creek.

It was wild land. Gil, floundering through a swamp, found Adam Helmer, whom he had hunted with during the winter, beside him. “It’s great hunting country,” Helmer said. “I’ve hunted it for years. I know it like my fist and I’d like to see the Indian who could catch me in it. Or that I couldn’t catch.”

When they came out at Andrustown Helmer asked permission to leave the ranks. He wanted to visit one of Bower’s girls. When he got permission he dropped back to Gil’s side. “Why don’t you stop off? Polly’s got a sister that can give you fun.”

Gil grinned and said, “I’m a hired man, Adam. I got to get back to work. You heard what Herkimer said about hurrying the crops.”

“You mean you’re married.” Helmer shook his big blond head. “But you’re kind of behind with your sowing, mister.” He laughed, stepped out of line, and entered the woods. All girls were does to Adam, and some had to be still-hunted.

The company tramped through the little cluster of eight farms while the women and children ran to the fences. For the Indian trail turned suddenly into a road that ran straight to Fort Herkimer.

That evening, on the second day of their march, the company disbanded. By dark, Gil had got home. There was no light in his house, so he went to the stone one. Looking through the
door, he saw Lana and Mrs. McKlennar and Daisy, her negress, sitting together.

They all made much of him, and Mrs. McKlennar went down cellar for some sack, which all three white people drank. She snorted a good deal at his description. “It sounds just like rioters trying to get up their nerve. What we need is regular troops.”

“Herkimer has nerve enough,” said Gil.

“I don’t doubt it, when he gets pinched. But you don’t win wars by pinching.” She snorted, sipped, and grinned, showing her teeth. “But we’re glad to have you back, my lad. Ain’t we, Magdelana?”

Lana seemed subdued, and at the question she dropped her eyes to her sewing and flushed.

“Hup, hup,” said Mrs. McKlennar. “Leave that and go to bed. That’s where he ought to have found you, anyway. Go on.”

Gil hardly felt Lana’s light touch on his arm. She was looking up with tenderness in her eyes. “I’m glad you’re back, Gil.” And then, “Gil, are you glad? Because I’m real glad.”

“Yes,” he said. “But I’m hungry as sin, too.”

The summer was like any other summer in the upper Mohawk Valley, except for the heat. No one remembered such heat as came in that July. Day after day of it, that even dried the woods so that ranging cattle returned early to their barns. The air was sultry, and there was a dusty smell in it, as if a spark dropped anywhere could set the whole world blazing.

Men swinging their scythes through standing grass could feel the brittle dryness of it through the snathe from blade edge to palm; and the women, at work with the rakes, found the hay cured almost as fast as they could handle it.

In German Flats, people, starting the haying, found it hard to believe that war was going on in other places. The plain farmer, thinking of his hay and wheat, had no real idea of what the war was about. In the evenings, reverting to the subject listlessly, all he recalled was the early days of 1775, when the Butlers and the Johnsons and their sheriff, Alexander White, had ridden the length of the valley to chop down the liberty pole in front of Herkimer Church, as they had done at Caughnawaga. But now they were all skyhooted off to Canada for these two years.

It seemed they couldn’t take account of the messengers riding horseback up and down the Kingsroad. Men who went at a gallop and didn’t stop to drink. All they thought of it was that you couldn’t find day labor any more for love or money. Congress was paying men to work up in the woods around Fort Stanwix, a crazy notion for a crazy place—as crazy as the heat.

Up at Fort Stanwix two men had taken charge. One was an apple-faced young Dutchman with a chin as sullen as a growing boy’s and very bright blue eyes. His name was Peter Gansevoort, he wore a colonel’s epaulets, and was so gentrified about his linen that one soldier, whose wife (by courtesy) had come along, was doubling the family pay. The other was the second in command, Lieutenant Colonel Marinus Willett, a man who looked like a farmer, with a lantern-like face of rusty red all over, and a nose like a grubbing hoe. When he first appeared the settlers said the very smell of him was Yankee;
but he came from New York, and he was able to laugh and enjoy himself.

The five hundred men in the garrison considered that their commanding officers were slave drivers. Not only did they start rebuilding the entire cheval-de-frise, they burnt John Roof’s place to the ground, they cleared the scrub laurel from the clearing, and worse than that they sent two squads out every day to fell trees across Wood Creek. To the local labor, that didn’t make sense. What was the use of repairing the fort if, at the same time, you made it impossible for the British to get there?

Then like a thunderclap, on the seventh of July, word came up the valley that Fort Ticonderoga had been taken by Burgoyne. Though half the people did not know where Ticonderoga lay, the very sound of the sentence had the ominous ring of calamity.

All at once, George Herkimer’s company of militia was mustered and turned into squads of rangers. They blocked the roads to the four points of the compass—west at Schuyler, east at Frank’s tavern beside Little Falls, south at Andrustown, and north at Snydersbush. Rumor said that the Butlers and the Johnsons were returning to the valley, bringing their Indians and the wild Highlanders of whom the Germans were as fearful as they were of the Senecas themselves.

Reports came in of men in the woods at Schoharie, and at Jerseyfield. Overnight the little town of Fairfield was deserted. A man named Suffrenes Casselman had led the Tory villagers westward. The word was brought down by a settler on Black Creek, who described them: twenty men, women and children with them, carrying what they could.

As they finished the haying, the people of German Flats were aware of the rebirth of their old racial fears. The Committee
of Safety began enforcing their new laws. A negro was shot for being out after dark without permission. Communities began repairing the old stockades. The hammering at Eldridge Blockhouse came up the valley on those still days, so that Gil Martin, struggling with Lana to get the last of the hay under the barrack roof, heard it plainly.

That evening Jacob Small rode down from Eldridge. He said, “We’ve got a cannon set up in the tower,” as proudly as though Betsey Small had borne another son. “If you hear it go off, it’s Injuns. If she shoots twice, don’t try to fetch anything, but run like sixty. If she shoots three times, try to get across the river. It means they’ve got so close you couldn’t get inside the fort.”