Book One: The Olive Branch Part Four: Two Offers Characters
Chapter Thirty
Wild Geese
Joseph Brant. Cherry Valley, in the Province of New York. Wednesday, 11 November 1778.
The war was fought across the province. Philadelphia was occupied and evacuated; the army wintered in the hills west of it and lost a quarter of its strength to cold and disease without a battle; the frontier burned in a war between settlers and the Iroquois nations that the Congress answered with a campaign of destruction against Iroquois towns.
It had snowed in the night and then rained on the snow, and Joseph Brant lay in the wet at the edge of the woods above Cherry Valley with his blanket over his head and his gun under it, and looked down at a place he had known for twenty years.
He could have walked it blind. The road came in from the north along the creek, past the mill, and the houses stood along it at their distances, each with its barn and its orchard and its stone wall: the Campbells’, and the Clydes’, and the Mitchells’, and the minister’s, and up on its rise above the rest, four hundred yards from the meeting house, the big frame house of Mr Robert Wells, with smoke coming out of both its chimneys into the rain. He had eaten at that house. Mr Wells had been a friend of Sir William’s and of Colonel Butler’s for thirty years, a magistrate and a gentleman and a careful, kindly man who had kept out of the troubles as long as a man could keep out of them in Tryon County, and who had his eldest boy at school in Schenectady, out of the way. Brant had eaten at his table in Sir William’s time, and Mr Wells had asked him about the Gospel of St Mark, which Brant was helping to put into Mohawk then, and had listened to the answer.
The meeting house had a stockade round it now. The Congress’s men had built it in the summer, a line of pointed logs round the meeting house, and called it Fort Alden after their colonel, who was a Massachusetts man and had brought a regiment of Massachusetts men to hold a valley in New York; and the colonel, the scouts said, did not sleep in his fort. He slept at Mr Wells’s, with his officers, where the beds were better.
The scouts knew because they had been taken prisoner the night before. A party of them, sent out from the fort to watch the road, had lit a fire in the snow, and gone to sleep beside it, and woken up with Senecas sitting round it warming their hands. They had told everything. Walter Butler had sat with them half the night with a lantern, very patiently, writing it all down.
Butler had the command. That was the first thing wrong with it, and Brant had been carrying it about with him for three weeks like a stone in his moccasin.
Walter Butler was the Colonel’s son. He was twenty-five or six, thin and handsome and very cold, with a face like a blade, and he had been taken by the Congress’s people in the Mohawk valley the summer before and tried at Albany as a spy and condemned to hang; and he had been reprieved, and lain in the jail at Albany all winter, and got out in the spring with the help of friends in the town, and come to Niagara with his mind made up about a great many things. His mother and his brothers and sisters were still at Albany. The Congress was keeping them there, as hostages for the Colonel’s good behaviour, and Walter Butler had come down the Susquehanna with two hundred of his father’s rangers and the Colonel’s leave to call on Captain Brant’s people as he needed them, and Captain Brant was to go where he was told.
Brant had not wanted to come. He had told Butler so, at Tioga, in front of the other captains, more plainly than he usually told anybody anything. He had said that he had fought all summer on his own account, with his own people, and had not needed a Butler to show him the road; and that if Mr Butler wished to go to Cherry Valley, which was a valley full of farmers, he might go; and that Brant would think about it. Then he had thought about it, and come, because the Senecas were coming, three hundred of them, and somebody had to be with them who could speak to them in their own language and be listened to; and because he had a thing to do in Cherry Valley that he had not told anybody about.
He meant to keep the women and children out of it. He had done it before. At Springfield in the spring he had burned every house but one, and put the women and children into that one, and left them unharmed, and the Congress’s newspapers had not printed that. They had printed Wyoming instead.
He had not been at Wyoming. He had been a hundred miles away, at Oquaga, on the day it happened, in July. It had been Colonel Butler and the Senecas and the rangers, down the Susquehanna into the Pennsylvania settlements; and there had been a battle, of a kind, in which the Wyoming militia came out of their fort and were beaten in the open and ran, and the Senecas ran after them, and very few of them got away. Brant did not know what had happened after that. He had heard twelve accounts of it and believed perhaps two. What he knew was that by August every newspaper in the Congress’s country said that Brant had led it, and that Brant had killed women and children in their beds, and that it was the Senecas who were mentioned least, and the white men of the rangers not at all.
The Senecas said the printed accounts turned a battle they had won into the murder of helpless people. Brant heard them at Tioga. Some asked why, having been given the name, they should not do the deed. He had listened without an answer that quieted them.
And then in October the Congress’s soldiers had come over from Schoharie to the Susquehanna, while Brant was away to the east with a hundred men burning barns at the Peenpack, and burned Oquaga.
He had come home to it in the second week of October.
There was nothing left. They had burned the houses on both sides of the river, the good log houses with their chimneys and their glass, that the people of Oquaga had built over twenty years to show that a Mohawk town could be as good as any German farm; and the corn in the cribs, four thousand bushels of it, the whole winter’s food; and they had gone on along the river and burned Unadilla on both banks, and the grist mill and the saw mill, the only ones in the valley. They had found nobody. The people had gone the day before, in the greatest confusion, leaving their dogs and their cattle and their kettles; and Susanna had taken the children to Niagara, coughing, in a canoe, in the rain, and he had found her there a week later lying on a borrowed bed with her face to the wall.
An officer of theirs had said, the prisoners told him afterwards, that it was the finest Indian town he had ever seen. Then he had burned it.
Brant had walked about in the ashes for a whole afternoon, alone. He had found the place where his own house had stood, and the stones of the chimney, still standing, black, with the hearth between them where he had sat in the evenings with Peggie and then with Susanna and the children, and read to them, in Mohawk, out of the books he had helped to make. He had stood there a long time. Then he had gone and found the Senecas, and Butler, and said that he would come to Cherry Valley.
That was the thing he had not told anybody: that when he said it, he had not altogether known whether he meant to keep the women and children out of it, or not.
They went in at about eleven, in the rain.
The plan had been to go in at dawn, and the rain had stopped it. The rangers’ powder was wet, and the Senecas would not move in rain like that, any more than a sensible man would; so they had all lain in the woods through the end of the night and into the morning, without fires, without blankets, some of them, in the sleet, with the valley below them going about its business in the grey light, cows and smoke and a woman crossing a yard with a bucket. Brant had watched her cross the yard three times. He did not know who she was.
Then the rain eased, and Butler gave the word, and they went down.
The rangers went for the fort. That was the plan: the rangers and the few regulars of the 8th to take the stockade, or keep its garrison inside it, while the Indians went for the houses where the officers were. Brant had his own people, his Mohawks from Oquaga and his volunteers, the white men from the Susquehanna farms who had followed him all summer, not many more than a hundred in all; and he took them down the slope at a run towards the Wells house on its rise, because the colonel was in it, and because the Wells family was in it, and because he had made up his mind in the night, finally, lying in the sleet, which of the two things he had come to do.
There was a ploughed field between him and the house. It was wet. It had been ploughed in the autumn and then snowed on and rained on, and it was a quarter of a mile of mud to the ankle and then to the shin, and he ran across it with his gun held up and his men behind him, falling, getting up, as a man runs in a dream with his feet held to the ground, and the Senecas came down the other slope on to the dry road at the same time and reached the house first.
He heard it before he got there. Then he got there.
He would not afterwards tell anybody what he had seen at the Wells house, and very few people asked him, and he did not answer the ones who did.
He came round the corner of the barn as the colonel came out of the side door, running, without his hat, with a pistol in his hand, for the fort, four hundred yards off across the open ground; and the colonel got perhaps forty yards, and turned once and pointed the pistol at the man behind him, and it did not fire, the rain had been at it, and the man behind him threw his hatchet. Brant saw the colonel go down in the snow. He did not go towards him. There was no use.
The house was full of Senecas. He knew some of them. He knew the young war chief they called Little Beard, who was in the doorway, and who looked at Brant when he came up, a long, steady look, and did not move out of the way. Brant went past him anyway, into the house. He was inside it for less than a minute. In that minute he saw everything there was to see, and understood that he had been crossing the ploughed field while it happened, and that there was nobody in the house now who needed him to keep anything off them. Mr Wells was there, in the room where they had talked about St Mark, and his mother, and his wife, and his brother, and three of the children, and the little girl. His sister Jane had got out of the back of the house, somebody told him afterwards, and run to the woodpile, and a ranger who had been a servant in the house had caught hold of her and called out that she was his sister, to save her, and a Seneca had killed her at the woodpile anyway.
He came out of the house and stood in the rain.
Little Beard said something to him in Seneca. Brant understood it perfectly. It was about Oquaga, and about Wyoming, and about men who called other men murderers. Brant did not answer it. He found that he had nothing to answer it with that would have been true.
The rest of the day was a long one, and he spent it doing what he had come to do, in the places where it was still possible to do it.
He went from house to house down the valley, with his own people round him, as fast as he could go, ahead of the Senecas where he could get ahead of them and behind them where he could not. At the minister’s house old Mr Dunlop was standing in his own doorway, with his daughter behind him, and his wife was already dead; and one of Brant’s own Mohawks from Oquaga, the chief they called Little Aaron, was standing beside Mr Dunlop with his hand on the minister’s shoulder, not saying anything, only standing there, and the Senecas who came to that door looked at Little Aaron and went away. At another house he found a woman he did not know, with her children, all of them in the kitchen, the woman holding the poker; and he stood in her doorway with his gun and told her who he was.
“I am Joseph Brant,” he said. “I have not the command, and I do not know that I can save you. But I will do what I can. Get into bed. Quick. Say you are sick.”
She stared at him. Then she did it, children and all, in her clothes, under the quilt, and he called in two of his men and they took paint out of their pouches and put his mark on the woman’s face and on each of the children’s, his own sign, quickly, with their fingers, as a man marks his cattle in the spring; and the next party of Senecas that came to the door saw the mark, and saw who was standing in the doorway, and went on. He did not know her name. He never learned it.
He and Captain Jacobs of Oquaga hid twelve people in the end, mostly the King’s people, the families who had kept quiet in the valley and signed nothing, in a cellar under a barn and in the woods behind it, and sat on the cellar door with their guns across their knees until it was dark. He did not know whether it was twelve people saved or twelve people who would have been saved anyway. He thought he would very likely never know, and he found that he wanted very much to know, and that it did not help.
The fort was never taken. The rangers lay round it all afternoon in the rain and fired at it, and it fired back, and at about half past three Butler gave it up and drew them off. The garrison stayed behind its logs. It had a good deal to look at from there.
There were thirty-two of them dead in the valley by the evening who had not been soldiers, most of them women and children, and sixteen soldiers besides. There were seventy prisoners, sitting in the snow in a field behind the barns under the rangers’ guard, with no fires and their children in their laps.
He found Butler at the edge of the field, with a lantern, writing.
“You had the command,” Brant said.
Butler looked up at him. He had a face that the lantern did nothing for: thin, white, very composed. “I had the rangers,” he said. “I had two hundred rangers and a few of the 8th, and three hundred Senecas who will do exactly what they please, as you know better than I do, Captain Brant, since you are the one who can talk to them. I did everything in my power to restrain them. I shall say so.”
“To whom?”
“To General Schuyler. I am writing to him now.” Butler looked at the paper. “I shall tell him that I look upon it as beneath the character of a soldier to wage war on women and children. I shall tell him that the Indians were much incensed by the burning of their town at Oquaga by his people, which is true, as you know, since it was your town. And I shall tell him that if he goes on keeping my mother and my brothers in Albany, we shall not take the same pains in future.” He dipped his pen. “You will forgive me. I have a great deal to write, and the light is bad.”
Brant stood there for some time. He thought of a good many things to say, and said none of them, because Butler was writing it all down, and a man did well to say nothing to someone who was writing it down. Then he went back to his own fire. He did not sleep.
In the morning Butler let forty of the prisoners go, the women and the children most of them, to walk back down the valley to the fort through the snow. The rest the Senecas would not give up. Brant was glad of the forty. It was the one thing that had been done right, and he did not know whose idea it had been, and did not ask.
Then he burned the valley.
With McDonell, sixty rangers and fifty of his own people he burned the valley. Barns, houses, grain, fences: whatever would take a flame in the rain. Without food the fort must go. He knew what the Congress’s men had done at Oquaga. At Wells’s barn he carried the torch in himself. He stood until the dry timber beneath the roof caught, then went to the next building.
They went back the way they had come, up the valley towards the Susquehanna and Niagara, with the Senecas’ thirty prisoners walking among them: Mrs Campbell and her four children, and Mrs Moore and hers, and old Mrs Cannon, who was Mrs Campbell’s mother and could not keep up. On the second day she sat down in the snow on the trail and would not get up, and a Seneca whose brother had died at Oriskany stood over her for a moment and then did what was done to prisoners who could not keep up. Mrs Campbell was ahead, with the children. Brant was behind. He came up the trail and found the old woman lying there, and the Seneca walking on, wiping his hatchet on the snow, and he stood over her for a while, as he had stood in the ashes at Oquaga, and did not do anything, because there was nothing left to do.
On the fourth day the weather cleared, very cold, and in the afternoon the geese went over.
He heard them before he saw them, the way one always did, a long way off and high up, like hounds a valley away: then the skein itself, a great ragged line of them against the pale sky, going south, calling to each other, over the column and the woods and the burned valley behind it, where the smoke still stood up in two or three places in the still air.
He stopped on the trail and watched them go over.
In the summer, a captain of the Cherry Valley militia, a man called McKean, had left a letter for him, saying that if Brant ever came to Cherry Valley they would change him from a Brant into a goose. Brant had laughed at it. He had written a postscript about it to a friend on the Susquehanna, in his own English, which was good enough for a postscript: that the Cherry Valley people were very bold and meant to make nothing of him, and called his people wild geese, but that he knew the contrary.
He had been pleased with that postscript. He had thought it rather good.
He walked after the column. The light was going and Niagara was still far off. Susanna lay there with her face to the wall. He would have to sit beside her and tell her where he had been.