may write to me if . . . if you like.” She didn’t drop her eyes. She held out one hand. He had never touched her. Now he took her hand in his fingers. It felt as fragile as the cup in which she had sometimes served him tea. At the touch he felt his own lips open, tried to swallow down what seemed to be a peach pit in his throat. “Yes.” A moment longer they stood, then her hand slid from his, she turned, opened the door, went inside. The door closed.
•
While it was true that the army provided food, clothing and shelter, the beef and pork were often rancid, the bread or “ship’s biscuit” moldy, the coffee weak, and all were to be prepared by the soldier himself if he was serving in the field. Clothing was of cheap and coarse material, too large or too small, with boots that sometimes fell apart within weeks. Shelter at the frontier posts where Clark had served were either drafty log structures with wooden bedsteads that slept two to four men, their only mattress being forty-four pounds of straw issued monthly for each pair of men, quickly infested with fleas and bedbugs, or in the field, tents with straw mattresses. It was common knowledge that the food and bread ration, the rough ill-fitting clothing and the housing had changed little in half a century, but some thought it a great advantage that just this year regulations had ruled that each man be issued eighteen ounces of baked bread rather than flour, though in reality it made the post bakery into a money-making machine, since it took less than eighteen ounces of flour to make an equal weight of bread. To augment the regular ration of raw or boiled meat and bread, men were encouraged to garden, fish, and hunt.
And it hadn’t been as easy to save money as he had thought, what with a sutler’s temptations. The army had authorized the establishment of a business at every fort to offer for sale to soldiers as well as civilians “necessaries,” which might include cheese, fruit, nuts, and tea, as well as needles and thread, books, paper and pencils, and, of course, whisky, beer, and wine. Clark had never indulged in liquor, only rarely had a glass of beer, but the fruit, nuts, writing paper for a labored letter to Lucy, and sometimes a book, broke the monotony of garrison life. The paymaster made his rounds every two months, and Clark had known men who spent their entire pay and more on luxuries and liquor. Meanwhile, the sutler had the right to sit at the pay table and take up to half a soldier’s pay to satisfy his debts. Still, he had traveled a thousand miles and more, had gained some understanding of the world and its peoples that only travel could provide, had managed to put at least a little money aside. He would keep saving, take it back to Lucy. In spite of Benjamin, he had begun to believe that he was worthy, that he was a man. He knew hope. He had dreams.
From Rochester he had been sent to join his regiment at Fort Mitchell on the west bank of the Chattahoochee River in Alabama. The fort had been built in 1813 along the Federal Road that connected Washington City with New Orleans. The road was created by the linking together of the various post riders’ paths, cleared sixteen feet wide through almost unbroken pine forest, the center eight feet cut close to the ground, sufficient for moving supply wagons, cannon, and men on horseback or on foot. Swamps and streams had been causewayed and bridged. It ran through the territory of the Muscogees, known as Creeks by white men. The fort had been named for the then-governor of Georgia, David Mitchell, and was located a mile west of the Chattahoochee River. It was the first stockade in a series built about a day’s travel apart west of the Chattahoochee and served as a supply base.
It was now a base for troops sent to protect friendly Creeks from the whites. Settlers crowded and tumbled along the road past the fort in battered wagons and on foot. Along with their worldly goods they carried psalm books, whisky stills, and flintlock rifles. Here and there along the road they dropped out, took up land, built one- and two-room cabins, and settled down to raise cotton and children.
Clark had not known an officer, and few enlisted men, who did not feel more sympathy for the Indians than for the white settlers. The treaty forced upon the Creeks by Andrew Jackson in 1814 had driven many of them into unity with the Seminoles of Florida. The taking of Indian land, the ill-famed removal of the southern tribes to Indian Territory in the west, was not only disagreeable to most soldiers but shameful. General Winfield Scott had issued an order that “every possible kindness, compatible with the necessity of removal, must be shown by the troops.” His aide, Erasmus Keyes, had admitted that he “felt like a trespasser, one of a gang of robbers.”
Though a large part of the tribe had already been moved west, the Creeks remaining in the vicinity of Fort Mitchell had thought to placate the whites, to deal fairly and be dealt with fairly. Then gold had been discovered some fifteen miles south of the Fort Mitchell. Whites of the surrounding country had, without permission of the Creeks, entered their land, opened mines, were digging and washing the ore. They had built villages of log houses and set up trade with one another. There had been skirmishes between the Creeks and the gold-diggers, murders committed, and preparations on the part of the affronted Indians that seemed to threaten a general war with their nation.
A federal marshal sent to evict the intruders had to call for help. Colonel Twiggs, commanding the regiment, ordered out a detachment of Fort Mitchell troops. Clark’s Company B, 2nd Artillery, under command of Capt. Francis S. Belton, was given the task of protecting the Creeks and their gold from the white intruders. Belton, a forty-one-year-old career officer who preferred the security of an office to the risks of the field, delegated the job to Lt. Walter Scott Chandler, West Point, 1830. Chandler, with Clark and twenty-five others, had gone to village after village, burning the log houses, driving the white inhabitants off Creek land.
At one such settlement called Yamacraw along the Augusta River, they found the white inhabitants, a mob of fifty or sixty in number, armed with clubs, axes, hoes, brickbats, and broomsticks, ready to fight. Clark wrote to Lucy of the excitement. “We had been ordered to load our muskets with blank cartridges, but on seeing this, orders were given to draw the blanks and load with balls. No sooner did we do this than the foe dropped their weapons, and scampered for the woods, as fast as fleet heels could carry them.”
But there were more squatters than soldiers and, when push came to shove, the Southern-led government backed the whites. Perhaps Indians were considered a step above Negroes, but a short step. The Creeks of Alabama and Georgia, in spite of the treaties that guaranteed their reservation “forever,” would finally, in handcuffs and chains, be set upon the road to far Oklahoma, the “Trail of Tears.”
In February of 1834 Clark’s company and another under Capt. Upton Sinclair Fraser were ordered to Fort Morgan on Mobile Point, the single tooth in the mouth of Mobile Bay. They marched across the state to Mobile, boarded the steamboat Sangumon for the thirty-five-mile trip down and across the bay and, on March 7, were the first troops to garrison the vast new fortress, completed after fifteen years of labor by thousands of slaves laying eight million bricks.
A year passed. Nothing threatened except the weather. Men fought only among themselves. They ate, slept, hunted, stared out at the occasional boat passing in the distant channel. In January of 1835, Belton assigned Lieutenant Chandler, Acting Quartermaster, the task of taking a crew up the bay to Mobile for pay and supplies. He had been on detached service for almost a year, first on recruiting, followed by service at Fort Gibson in Indian Territory. He had only returned to Fort Morgan in November. He chose Sgt. W. Grant for his crew along with Privates Leavenwise, Finn, and Clark.
Mobile Bay was known for its capricious winds, called “northers,” and suddenly rough water. Five men in a small sailing boat could have their hands full, but the trip to Mobile, five miles west across the bay, thirty miles north, was uneventful. It was a cold day and clear once the morning fog had lifted. Heavy winter coats, wool jackets and trousers, and Jefferson boots kept the men warm, though a dash of sixty-degree spray felt like ice water on exposed fingers that held the tiller or worked the sail. They kept well out of the channel, far from the risk of collision. Clark was glad for the change; a boat trip and a night in Mobile a rare treat, an adventure for men who were garrisoned in the most isolated post in the country where fatigue duty was the order of the day.
They
