Book One: The Olive Branch Part Three: Saratoga Characters
Chapter Nineteen
Friends and Neighbours
Joseph Brant. Fort Stanwix, in the Province of New York. Tuesday, 5 August 1777.
On the frontier it was not easy at all. The Confederacy split, nation against nation, and was invaded and burned out by an expedition sent for that purpose. It never recovered as a power.
The flag had gone up over the fort on the Sunday, the morning after they came, and Joseph Brant had been looking at it on and off ever since.
It was not much of a flag. Anybody could see from the edge of the woods that it had been made in a hurry by men who were not sailmakers: the stripes were not all the same width and did not quite run straight, and in the mornings, before the wind got up, it hung from its staff like a wet shirt. But it was the Congress’s flag, the one their army had carried since the siege of Boston, thirteen stripes of red and white with the King’s Union in the corner; and every morning when the garrison ran it up, the drums were beating in St Leger’s camp across the clearing under the King’s Union on its own. It had taken Brant some time to decide what that looked like, and on the second day he had decided. It looked like two families in a lawsuit over the same farm.
The Congress’s people called the place Fort Schuyler now, after their general at Albany. Nobody else did. It had been Fort Stanwix since the last war, when the King’s engineers built it to hold the Carrying Place, where the Mohawk River gave out and a man going west took his boat out of one water and carried it on his shoulders over the height of land to the next. The Oneidas had carried their canoes over that ground since before there were Englishmen to build forts on it. Brant had carried his own over it at sixteen, on the way to Niagara with Sir William, and he remembered the mosquitoes better than the fighting.
The runners came in from the east in the middle of the afternoon of the fifth: two young men from Canajoharie, grey with dust to the knee, who had been sent by his sister.
Molly Brant had kept Sir William Johnson’s house for fifteen years and borne him eight children, and since he died she had lived at Canajoharie among her own people, in a good house on the river road with glass in the windows, and nothing moved on the Mohawk River that she did not hear about by nightfall. What she had heard this time was that the militia of Tryon County were out. They had been gathering all week at Fort Dayton, and now they were marching for the fort to raise the siege, with wagons, and with Oneidas among them; and they would be within ten or twelve miles of the camp that night.
Brant took the young men to St Leger himself, and stood by while they told it again, and watched St Leger’s face, which was a sensible soldier’s face and showed nothing. Then he took them away and fed them, and asked after his sister and her children, and was told they were well, and that she had said to tell him one thing more. Herkimer was coming himself.
He had known that already. There was nobody else they would follow.
They went out before dawn, along the road east, towards the Oneida town of Oriska and the men coming up from it.
Sir John Johnson had the command, because he was Sir William’s son and a baronet and the colonel of a regiment, and the regiment was his: his loyal New Yorkers in their green coats, men of the Mohawk valley who had gone to Canada with him the year before rather than sign the Committee’s papers. John Butler had the rangers of the Indian department. Brant had his Volunteers, the Mohawks and the white men together, who had come with him from the Susquehanna and drew no pay but what he could find for them. And the rest of the Six Nations’ warriors came with them, Senecas mostly, several hundred of them, under Sayenqueraghta, whom the English called Old Smoke, which was near enough what his name meant, and who was old, nobody knew quite how old, and over six feet tall, and walked like a man of forty; and under the young war chief they called Cornplanter.
The Senecas had not meant to come to a battle. Brant knew that, though he had not been at their council. Butler had met them at Irondequoit in July, with presents, a suit of clothes and a brass kettle and a gun and a hatchet for every man, and had told them, so they said, that they were wanted only to come and see the King’s soldiers beat the rebels: to sit down and smoke their pipes and look on. Brant had heard Sayenqueraghta repeat it on the march from Oswego, mildly, as a man repeats a thing he has been told and is not sure he believes. Brant had said nothing. He had not been at the council, and it was not his to correct.
The place Sir John had chosen was a ravine about six miles from the fort, where the road went down off the higher ground into a marshy bottom and crossed it on a causeway of logs laid side by side, and climbed out again through the trees on the other side. A column on that road would have to come down into the bottom and over the logs in single file, or near it, with its wagons behind it. The plan, as Sir John explained it by the fire and the chiefs agreed, was simple. The troops would lie across the road at the western end and begin the attack in front. The Indians would lie in the woods along both sides of the ravine and close in on the flanks. Brant’s people would go round to the eastern end and shut the door behind the column once it was in, so that none of it could get out.
They took their places in the dark and lay down in the wet ferns and waited.
He had been home a year, and it did not feel like home yet.
The packet fought off a privateer near Bermuda and brought him to Staten Island in July. He went with the army to Long Island. By November it had no use for one Mohawk and no plan for his river. He and Tice dressed as farmers, crossed the Hudson by night at Kingsbridge and walked two hundred miles through the Congress’s country, lying at each barn where they asked to sleep. The King’s promise stayed in his sea chest until he could bring it home.
Susanna had been at Oquaga with the children. She had coughed when she held him, the cough his first wife Peggie had had before she died, and she was coughing still when he left her; and Isaac and Christina, who were Peggie’s, had looked at him for a day as though he were a stranger who had come to sell them something, and then forgotten that they had. He had gone on to Niagara at Christmas to tell Butler what he had seen in New York, and come back to Oquaga in the spring, and raised the King’s flag there, and men had come to it: Mohawks from both castles, and a good many white men from the farms along the Susquehanna, who had been told by their county committees to sign the Congress’s association or be called enemies of their country, and would not sign it. They were the King’s men, they said. So, said the committees, were they.
It was at Niagara, in the new year, that the word came about the fire.
There had been a sickness at Onondaga in the winter, nobody knew of what, and ninety people had died of it, and among them three of the principal sachems. The Oneida chiefs had written of it to the Congress’s officers at Fort Stanwix, the fort Brant was now besieging, and sent it by runners to every nation, and it came to Niagara in their words. The great council fire of the Confederacy at Onondaga was put out, and could no longer burn.
Without the fire there could be no common council. The nations must choose separately. The Senecas traded with Niagara and were fed there that winter; the Mohawks kept the King’s belts. The Oneidas listened to Kirkland, who had sat beside Brant at Wheelock’s school and now served the Congress.
He had seen Herkimer at the end of June.
Herkimer came to Unadilla with three or four hundred militia. Brant met him with a hundred and thirty. They sat on logs between their parties. He had eaten at Herkimer’s table and sold him furs for twenty years; Herkimer had attended the councils at Sir William’s and smoked without saying much. His brother was a captain with St Leger now. Brant asked after him before they began.
Herkimer had said that the Congress did not mean to leave the King. They had said so in their Grievances, which had been read out in every county: they asked him only to hear them, and to govern them rightly. They were all the King’s men in Tryon County, said Herkimer, the Committee as much as anybody, and he did not see why the Mohawks should take up the hatchet against men who were the King’s as much as they were.
Brant had said that the King’s belts were still lodged with the Mohawks, as they had been with their fathers. He had said that the King’s officers had given those belts, and not the Congress. He had said that he had been to see the King himself, in his own house in London, and that the King had asked him whether the Six Nations were steady, and he had said that they were, and he did not mean to make himself a liar.
Then, because it was what was wanted, and because he had a hundred and thirty men and Herkimer had three times that, he had said, “I have five hundred warriors with me, armed and ready for battle. You are in my power. But as we have been friends and neighbours, I will not take the advantage of you.”
Herkimer looked at him for a long moment, and Brant saw him decide that it was very likely a lie, and decide that he could not be sure, and decide that it did not matter, and it was the last of these that Brant liked him for. They parted without hurt. At Oswego a man said Herkimer had brought three men ordered to shoot Brant if trouble came. Brant thought that likely. He would have taken the same precaution.
The column came along the road at about ten in the morning, in the heat.
Brant heard it before he saw it: wagons, and the creak of harness, and men talking in German and Dutch and English, not much and not loudly, the way men talk on a road early in the day. Then the head of it came past the place where he lay, near enough for him to have touched a horse, and went on down into the bottom towards the logs: a few Oneidas first, walking easily, then the General on his horse with his officers about him, then the first regiment, in their own clothes, every man with a musket and a powder horn and a blanket roll. He knew the shape of half the men in it. He could have named a dozen of them from where he lay. One of their colonels was a Klock, which was a name he had been hearing all his life. They went past him and down into the ravine, company after company, and he lay in the ferns with his face close to the earth and waited for the wagons, and the rear.
The plan was that the column should be let all the way in. It was not let in. Brant never found out afterwards who began it. St Leger said later that it was the Indians, who could not wait, and very likely it was; but it might have been a young man of any nation who saw a neighbour on the road who had wronged his family, and could not wait either. A musket went off somewhere along the southern side of the ravine, and then twenty, and then everybody’s; and the warriors on both flanks rose out of the ferns and ran in on the column with their hatchets, while the rear of it was still on the high ground at the eastern end, outside the trap, with the wagons.
The rear saw what was happening ahead of it and turned and ran.
Brant’s people were there to stop it, and some of them did, for a while, at the wagons. But it was a whole regiment, and running, and once it was running the young men went after it, as young men will after anything that runs: back along the road towards Oriska, through the woods, across the creek, and it was a long time before any of them came back, and some of those who came back were carrying what they had taken. Brant let them go. He could not have stopped them. He turned back with what he had kept, perhaps a hundred men, towards the noise in the ravine, which had become a single noise, like a mill.
He had been in battles before. He had been in the last war at sixteen, and at Long Island the summer before. This was not like either.
It was not like a battle at all. It was like a quarrel at a barn-raising, with everybody’s cousins in it, that had been going on for twenty years and had at last come to knives. The column had broken into knots and pieces along the road and in the bottom, and every knot was fighting for itself, behind trees and logs and the bodies of horses, and the Senecas and the Mohawks were among them, and the green coats were coming in from the west; and men were calling out names. That was what Brant would remember. Not the noise, though it was very great, nor the smoke, which lay in the bottom in the wet heat and would not lift; but that men were calling to one another by name. A Mohawk he knew from the Upper Castle stood up out of the fern ten yards from a farmer Brant had sold a horse to, and they knew each other, and stood there for the space of a breath with their weapons in their hands, and then went on with it.
The Oneidas were in the thick of it, with the General’s people. Brant saw Han Yerry of Oriska, whom he had known for years, fighting from behind a fallen tree with his wrist bound up in a rag, firing one-handed while his wife loaded for him; and his son beside them, and they were killing Senecas. He saw a Seneca go down in front of that tree and not get up. He did not go towards it. He had a great deal else to do, and he did not want to, and he was ashamed afterwards of how glad he had been that he had a great deal else to do.
Herkimer’s horse had been killed under him early. Brant saw him later, at a gap in the smoke, on a rise of ground above the bottom where what was left of his people had drawn together: sitting on his saddle on the ground with his back against the trunk of a tree and one leg out in front of him, and the leg was wrong below the knee. He had a pipe in his mouth. He was giving orders round it, and pointing with it, and as Brant watched he took a tinderbox out of his pocket and lit it again, with great care, as a man does at his own fire on a winter evening, and went on giving orders.
Then the rain came.
It came out of a black sky all at once, with thunder on top of the ravine, the kind of summer rain that falls in rods and makes the woods roar, and in a minute nobody’s powder would burn. The fighting stopped. It did not stop because anybody ordered it. It stopped because no man could fire and no man would stand up and go at another with a hatchet in rain like that without seeing him first, and nobody could see anything. They lay where they were, all of them, the King’s men and the Congress’s and the Six Nations of both kinds, in the same mud, within shouting distance, for an hour and more, with the rain coming down on them and the wounded crying out on both sides in the same languages, and waited for it to stop.
Brant lay under a log with the water running down his back and found that he was thinking, of all things, about the Swan with Two Necks in Lad Lane: the ostlers, and the fire the people of the house had lit for him at two in the morning, and the smell of coffee. He did not know why. He supposed it was because it was the last place in which he had been dry.
When the rain stopped it was worse.
Herkimer had used the hour. Brant saw it as soon as the fighting began again. The Congress’s men were behind their trees in twos now, one firing and the other waiting, so that when a warrior ran in after a man had fired, as a warrior did, to reach him while he loaded, there was a second musket ready for him. It was a simple thing. It was the kind of thing a farmer would think of, sitting against a tree in the rain with nothing to do but think, and it killed a great many Senecas.
Then Sir John’s people tried something. A body of the green coats came in from the west in good order, towards the rise where Herkimer sat, as though they were a party from the fort come out to help; and they had nearly got there before somebody on the rise saw the colour of the coats and shouted it out. After that it was bayonets and musket butts and knives among men who had been neighbours on the same river, and some of whom were kin; and Brant had seen a good deal of fighting in his life, and he did not want to see that again.
It was well into the afternoon when they heard the guns from the fort.
They came from the west, faint, a field piece and then muskets, a great many of them; and at first nobody understood. Then a runner came in, and then another, and the word went along the ravine from tree to tree. The garrison had come out. While the camp was empty and the warriors were all here, the Congress’s men in the fort had come out with a gun and two hundred men or more and gone through the camps, the King’s camp and the Indians’ camps both, and were in them now.
The Senecas did not wait to hear any more. Somebody among them raised the cry, Oonah, the cry that means it is finished and every man should go, and it went along the woods, and they went. The Mohawks went with them. Sir John’s people drew off towards the road. Nobody followed them. Brant looked back once from the top of the rise at the western end and saw the bottom of the ravine, with the logs of the causeway in it and the wagons beyond, and the dead lying along the road and in the marsh and up the slopes on both sides, more of them than he had ever seen in one place; and on the far rise, under his tree, a thick man sitting on a saddle, smoking.
The camps had been stripped to the ground.
The Congress’s men had taken everything. They had taken the blankets and the kettles, the brass kettles Butler had given out at Irondequoit, fifty of them or more; they had taken the guns that had been left behind, and the powder, and the clothes, and the deerskins; they had taken the packs, with all that was in them, the wampum and the silver work and the presents of the spring, every man’s small store of everything he had. The warriors had gone into the ravine in their shirts, or with nothing on above the breechclout, as men did who meant to fight hard and quickly; and they came back to find that they had nothing to cover themselves with that night, or any night, and nothing to cook in, and that what they owned was in the fort, where the Congress’s flag hung wet from its staff with the King’s Union in the corner.
Colonel Claus said afterwards that the disappointment was greater to them than their loss. He meant it kindly, and he was wrong. Brant had sat with the Senecas that night, and he knew which they had minded more.
Butler’s people said seventeen Senecas killed; the Senecas said more than thirty, and as many hurt. Chiefs’ names would have to be raised again in council. The Mohawks lost fewer, the King’s troops few. Tice came in with a ball in his thigh and said he had seen worse. Of the Congress’s men they heard two hundred dead, then five hundred. Nobody agreed on a count.
The Senecas mourned in the open without blankets. Their voices carried to the fort. After midnight Blacksnake came to Brant’s fire. He had seen more dead men than ever before, he said, and never would again. Brant hoped not. The young man described the blood running into the marsh like rainwater, then left him.
Old Smoke came later. He was very tired. He said that he wanted to take his people down the valley in the morning, to the German Flatts and beyond, and finish it, while the Tryon County men had nobody left to stand with; and St Leger would not let him, and he wanted Brant to know that he had asked. Then he said, mildly, that he had been told he would only have to smoke his pipe and look on.
Brant said that he knew.
“The General smoked his pipe,” said Old Smoke. “I saw him.” And he went away too.
Brant sat by the fire until it was nearly morning.
Herkimer would be carried to the Falls. Han Yerry would go to Oriska, if Brant’s young men left him an Oriska to find. Afterwards the Oneidas could come to Canajoharie, where Molly lived, where his own house stood. There was no council fire at which to wipe the families’ tears and put down the hatchet. The Peacemaker’s weapons lay under the pine roots, buried so that the nations would never use them against one another again. Today the nations had brought them into the ravine, in the rain, for the King, both sides of them. He had brought his own.
The King, he thought, would not know. One day, as Brant had always known he would, he would make it up with his sons; and the Oneidas, who had chosen the sons, and the Mohawks, who had chosen the father, would find that the family had gone home and left them in the ravine together.
The ring was on his hand where it had been for a year. He turned it in the firelight and read his name on it, Joseph Thayendanegea, as large as it would go. He had had it made so that if he died in the woods, the men who found him would know whose hand it was.
He saw now that it had been made for strangers, and there had not been a stranger in the ravine all day.