right. It was like walking on a brown carpet through a cathedral of pines. Clark, staring through the trees, frowned. In a moment something had changed. He looked around, left, right, up in the tall pines, across the sawgrass around a pond, then down, along the column, front, back.
The pond, maybe three, four hundred feet across, bordered with green reeds, was in clear view now on his right, maybe sixty yards away. He looked, then stared, suddenly frowned. No waterbirds, no sound. None. Only the soft brush of men’s boots against the pine straw, the rustle of palmetto. The trees were silent, no quarreling of jays, no scolding of gray squirrels. The world was holding its breath. He wondered if the major, if anyone else, had noticed the silence. His scalp tightened, he felt an instant chill. He clamped his teeth, gripped his slung musket with his left hand, swallowed hard, jerked his head from right to left, pond to forest. Something was terribly wrong.
2
Ransom Clark was twenty-three years old; he was born in March 1812, the second son of five sons and five daughters of Benjamin and Catherine Clark of Greigsville, New York. He had swarthy skin, hazel eyes, black hair, taller than most at five feet nine. He dreamed of home, not that he had ever had one. He had gone to Rochester, New York, from Livingston County in the summer of 1833, on the 9th of August had enlisted in the 2nd Regiment of Artillery for three years under 2nd Lt. Abner Riviere Hetzel.
In Hetzel’s presence he was examined by a doctor to determine that he was sober, neither a habitual drunkard nor subject to convulsions. The doctor then verified that his sight, hearing, and intelligence were adequate. Next he was told to strip in order to ensure that, as regulations specified, he had no tumors, ulcerated legs, or ruptures, nor chronic cutaneous affliction, and that he had “perfect use of all his limbs.” The doctor looked at his hips and under his arms for the D that would have branded him for life as a deserter. Young and strong, he passed the physical without any trouble and then, as Hetzel scratched the information on the enlistment form, he gave his age, twenty-one, born in the town of York, Livingston County, New York. Hetzel added his height, complexion, the color of his eyes and hair. Clearly Clark had the required command of English. He could read, write, had even picked up more than a few words in French. Hetzel read to him the Articles for the government of the armies of the United States. Finally, he was taken before a justice of the peace and took the oath of affirmation, repeating after him; “I, Ransom Clark, . . . do solemnly swear . . . that I will bear true allegiance to the United States of America, . . . and that I will serve them honestly and faithfully . . . against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever; . . and observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States, . . . and the orders of the officers appointed over me.”
Clark had heard tell that there had been a twelve-dollar bounty given every man who enlisted, but Hetzel told him that it was no longer offered. On the other hand, a private’s pay had recently been raised to seven dollars per month, eighty-four a year. A common laborer might make a hundred dollars, but in addition to his pay, a soldier was provided with food, clothing, and shelter as well as medical care. He could travel, learn, put some money aside. And he was a soldier now, a man.
Benjamin Clark, Ransom’s father, had a house, barns, two hundred and fifty acres where he kept cows, raised hay, peas, corn, beans, potatoes, and hell. He was considered well to do. He was a hard man, hard as the rocks in his fields. His own attorney, Henry Chamberlin, stated that he was more coarse and brutal to his own family, his wife Catherine and their ten children, than any man he had ever known.
The nearest neighbor was half a mile away but Benjamin thought him too close. He knew only those he had to know and disliked most of them. Strangers, even neighbors, were sometimes stoned and dogged away. He had come to the area twenty years before but resented as intruders the Irish who were settling in the area and scorned the few remaining Seneca Indians as savages. He kept liquor by him constantly and, though rarely sober, was still considered to be a sharp, hard bargainer by men who had known him for twenty years and more.
Benjamin had trouble getting workmen and couldn’t keep them when he did, often losing his hay crop for lack of help. The haying season was a long five or six weeks from late June through early August, the hardest labor on a farm. He would scour the neighborhood for haying help but only the desperate would work for him. He paid little and grudged that. Haying was hard steady work through fourteen- to sixteen-hour days, but most young men accepted it as a physical challenge and competition, swinging the long-handled scythes from dawn to noon, stopping only to whet their blades on grindstones brought into the field. They took their noon meal where they stood and worked till last light, raking, spreading, and turning the cut grass to cure into hay. A threat of rain added desperation to the work, every hand rushing to get the hay under cover or rolled into cocks to keep it from rotting.
Men had learned that old Benjamin worked them harder than other farmers, paid them less, and never provided the tot of rum or brandy during brief rests that others did. By law and custom he could claim the labor of his children until maturity and he worked his sons, Ransom, Henry, even crippled William, harder than hired hands would tolerate. He grudged them food and shelter, paid them nothing. He had been heard to remark, when speaking of Ransom, “I never liked the boy.” Even Chamberlin had more than once taken a damning from him even while representing him in court with one controversy or lawsuit after another. When he wasn’t being sued he was suing others, including even the boys, Henry and William. When he was too drunk to leave his bed he demanded that the smaller children bring him whisky in a cup, neighbors half a mile away sometimes hearing him rip out. He was not alone in this indulgence. By 1830 liquor consumption in the United States had reached the equivalent of ten gallons per year for every man, woman, and child. This in turn was giving rise to the temperance movement.
In May 1830, Ransom had had all the hard labor and harder treatment he wanted. He hated to leave his mother and his younger sisters and brothers to take the constant abuse old Benjamin handed out. He had begged his mother to get out, take the children, but she had nowhere to go, no way to support them all. “Come with me,” he had said. “Leave the old bastard! I can get work, Ma. We can make it. Ain’t no call for you and the little ones to take it no more.” She had hugged him, her stocky little body clinging, then pushed him away. “You go, Ransom. We’ll hang on a little more. It ain’t so bad, he won’t really hurt us.” She looked at the floor. “He ain’t a bad man, son. Just he can’t leave off the drink. Life ain’t been easy for him, all the children. . . . ” Her voice trailed off.
She had met and married Benjamin more than twenty years ago. He was tall, strong, a man with a head for business, but hard even then. Through the years, through ten births, she had cooked, fed, endured. She jerked her head up. “But you, you got all your life yet to go, you got to live.” She took his arms in a fierce grip, squeezed. “You’re a good boy Ransom, a good man. You go on. Me and the little ones’ll make it. He’s partial to William. He stands up for us, like you and Henry. You don’t worry now, son. You go, you live.”
Two younger sisters, Lydia and Betsey, had already escaped through marriage and immediately been disinherited. And sure enough, on the 12th of May Benjamin advertised in the Livingston Register, “My son, Ransom Clark, left me on the 10th inst., without my consent or approbation. Said boy is 18 yrs old, rather large for his age, and of a dark complexion. All persons are hereby forbid harboring, employing, or trusting him on my account.”
Benjamin had never given Ransom much more than homespun trousers and shirt, cast-off shoes, a knife in a slim leather sleeve, had taught him only to work and to curse. He had found work in the area, hiring out in Greigsville, Wadsworth, Leicester, a few miles north in York and five miles east in the county seat, the village of Geneseo. Brutal work, but not half as brutal as working for old Benjamin. Farmers would give him board, room in their barns. And he foraged. He would take an ear of corn here or there while working, shuck it, eat it raw. As he moved from farm to farm, job to job, he learned to recognize the thorny vines and bushes, the frail flower of the wild rose. In season its blossoms developed a reddish-orange berrylike fruit with a taste like apple. He found
