The men were in good spirits, stepping right out. Until this morning they had had flankers eighty yards out, pacing the column on each side, men whose job was to flush an enemy if he was there. There had been no path for the flankers; they had had to push their way through whatever underbrush they encountered. It was slow, exhausting, and dangerous work. Men had been rotated every hour but they, as much as the oxen at the rear, had been a drag on the column. With the last river crossed, the opening out of the country, visibility good, attack growing less likely with every hour, Dade had pulled them in today, counting on the watchfulness of the several officers on horseback, the front and rear guard, to warn of danger.
This was their sixth day on the road. The crossings had been their weakest moments. Little Hillsborough wasn’t much more than a creek and the bridge still stood but they’d had to ford the Big Hillsborough. Two days later they’d patched the half-burnt Big Withlacoochee bridge and crossed with dry feet and the next day most had crossed the Little Withlacoochee on a log while horses, oxen, gun, and wagon had forded. Clark wasted little time in worrying, pretty much took things as they came, but aware that if the Seminoles had had the sense to hit them at the rivers, some men on the north bank, some in the water, the rest bunched up like sheep on the south bank waiting to cross, they could have been destroyed, shot down where they stood. He raised his head, looked out across the palmetto, through the pines. It would take organization Indians didn’t have, he told himself, to pull enough warriors together at any one time to make an attack that could overwhelm a command like this, armed and ready. If training and experience could keep them safe, they had enough and more.
Captain Gardiner, Lieutenants Basinger, Mudge, Henderson, and Keais were West Point trained. Maybe Henderson and Keais were only six months out of the academy but Basinger had five years of service, Dade, Gardiner, and Fraser over twenty years each, starting with the War of 1812. Clark felt wrapped in armor with more than one hundred well-armed men and experienced officers. Every soldier knew that organization and discipline won battles. Seminoles could run around like evil children, half naked, screaming, shooting, but they had no organization, no real authority over one another. Each warrior was independent, could join a fight or go fishing. Against a cannon, against men who could give and take orders, fire on command, stand shoulder to shoulder, an Indian wouldn’t have a chance. No matter that they only had fifty rounds for the six-pounder, half of that solid shot, designed for use against structures, not men. The deafening crash of its firing would terrify an Indian; the iron balls could smash a tree and scatter limbs like clubs among them.
He looked around. The underbrush was thin. Instead of the dense growth of the river valleys that could screen any number of Seminoles, palmetto had taken over, choked out the bushes. Stunted trees of the lowland were giving way to tall, high-limbed pine. ’Course, enough Seminoles wouldn’t need much organization, but now they’d lost their chance to come in close, ambush the column.
He looked over at DeCourcy marching on his left, caught his eye. Edwin DeCourcy was English, from Maidstone, five years older than Clark, his hair blond, his eyes blue. His father was an officer in the English army stationed in Canada. “Things are lookin’ good, ’igh ground from ’ere on in,” he said. Clark smiled, nodded his head. He took a deep breath. A few more months, then back to Greigsville. And Lucy.
The men around him were trudging steadily, most staring at the heels of the man in front, bored, thinking of food, girls, rest. We must look like a giant blue caterpillar rippling along he thought, light glinting off a buckle, button, musket barrel. He was conscious of DeCourcy at his side, the long loping swing of his legs. Why is he here? Why are any of us here? A hundred men marching through a jungle, a thousand miles from home?
He looked up, ahead, caught glimpses of Fraser, Pacheco, Mudge, the advance guard. He turned, looked over the men following, black hats bobbing against the green. He shook his head, stared at the sand of the road past his boot tips swinging, left, right, left. Nothing to do but march and think.
The pay, sure, food, clothing, and shelter, but what was behind it all? Why did the president, Congress, send us here? Clark couldn’t remember a single man he’d run into that wanted to be here, who had thought of coming back after his service, settling. This was no land for farming, he knew that. The thin, sandy soil would never bring a crop. The water was brackish, often tainted with iron, stinking of sulfur. The few settlers around the fort had pigs and cattle, but they were poor stock, gaunt, underfed. Mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, cockroaches, scorpions, other insects that he had never known in the north made life miserable day and night while rattlesnakes on land and moccasins in the water made travel dangerous. And men who had served through the seasons said that only for a month or two in the winter was the weather bearable, the rest steaming hot. It was no place for white men, never would be.
“It’s slavery, Mr. Clark,” Lucy’s father, Judge French, had said. Clark had told him of a poster he had seen in Geneseo, a poster that said the army wanted volunteers to go to Florida, protect the settlers. “It’s not the settlers they want to protect, Mr. Clark, it’s slavery,” the judge had said. He and Clark had been brushing down one of the judge’s prize horses, sweeping opposite sides down and back with curry combs. He paused and straightened, laid both arms across the animal’s back. “That land has been home to Seminole Indians for a hundred years, Mr. Clark. All along slaves have been escaping into the territory, been welcomed by the Indians. There are a few of those in Congress—powerful men, decent men, ex-president Adams in the Senate for one, Giddings in the House—who despise the institution of slavery, want to abolish it. But the majority, also powerful, represent the South. Slave owners, most of them. Seminole Indians harbor the slaves. To get their slaves back they’ve got to get rid of the Seminoles.”
Captain Gardiner was moving stolidly alongside the column on his horse, seeming almost to be pacing the men. Clark watched as he frowned down heavily at the men off his stirrup, then up toward the advance, back toward the rear, the column rippling like a blue wave against the green. With no flankers out, he and the other mounted officers were the eyes and ears of the command, watching, listening for trouble. As he came up alongside, Clark thought he looked uneasy, his grim face turning left, right, cigar in one corner of his mouth, smoke coming from the other. He had heard more than one man compare the little captain to a pot-bellied stove, an impression made stronger by his perpetual cigar, smoke bursting forth as though from a stove-pipe. He stood barely five feet, was almost as wide as he was tall.
Of the older, experienced officers, Gardiner and Fraser had seen plenty of fighting but Dade was the only one who had actually fought Indians and he seemed optimistic, but it was hard to ignore the captain’s obvious concern. It was clear that he had not agreed with Dade’s decision on the flankers, but there was no man to doubt his courage or his strength. Story was that as a cadet at West Point he had had a serious disagreement with another cadet over a girl and had wrapped a poker around the fellow’s neck with his bare hands. He had come away with the nickname “God of War.” If he was worried, maybe Clark should be too.
He looked out across the dark green saw-tooth palmetto again, the tall grass that crowded up along the road on both sides. This was Seminole country all right, but the risk of attack should be about past. The road had been cut ten years ago by eighty stout axmen through scrub oaks, palmetto, and grapevines near the rivers, leaving a virtual wall of nearly impenetrable undergrowth on each side where Seminoles could crawl and wriggle through to rise and strike with total surprise. Compared to that, this pine barren of the higher ground was like a release from prison. Across the palmetto, through the pine trunks straight as flag poles, sky brighter by the minute, a man felt like he could see forever. Reassured, Clark shook his head. If the Seminoles hadn’t struck by now they weren’t likely to try it here.
Good thing, too. Judge French had taught him to use musket and rifle, how to load, aim, fire, and the care of a weapon, had given him time and ammunition for target practice. With the help of a Seneca Indian he had learned to handle a knife. But he knew from his own lack of military training in the use of arms,