Killdeer mountain, p.2
Killdeer Mountain, page 2
“Are they aboard the Roanoke?” I peered at the tables across from us.
“A few. But the main party is on the Deer Lodge. They left three days ahead of us. I’m told that Senator Rawley and his entourage occupy half the staterooms aboard the Deer Lodge.”
I shook my head. “Being past due in Saint Louis, I was planning to take the next boat downriver. But if President Andrew Johnson—and everyone else—surely you’re not bound for Fort Standish, or Fort Rawley, are you, Mrs. Hardesty?”
“I am indeed.” Her face grew serious for the first time since I’d met her.
“Don’t tell me you were sent for. By the Rawleys?”
“No, but I expect to meet them.” Something hard had crossed the surfaces of her green eyes, limiting their depth. I caught a faint odor of peppermint as she continued firmly: “No, Mr. Morrison, I am journeying to Fort Rawley to recover the bones of my late husband and return them to Kentucky.”
Before we finished dinner I learned that Kathleen Hardesty’s husband had been killed in an encounter with Sioux Indians somewhere near old Fort Standish. I also learned to my surprise that she was not one of the Saint Louis passengers. She had come aboard the Roanoke at Fort Rice only three days ago. What she was doing at that rude and windy post of cottonwood-log huts, she did not say. I suppose no one had asked her, neither Lieutenant Colonel Harris nor Captain Adams nor Dr. Lieber. They were all enchanted by her, content to leave some mystery around her, and so I must confess, was I. Emilie Lieber was not enchanted; it was easy to determine from her eyes and her manner that she was quite wary of Mrs. Peppermint.
After dinner I went to my cabin for a cigar, and noticing that the rain was no longer beating on the hurricane deck I opened the door to the narrow promenade between the cabins and the deck railing. The air was fresh and electric, but utterly windless. Swift-dancing lightning filled the southwestern sky, outlining a boiling mass of approaching clouds. The storm was giving us only a respite. I lit my cigar and started on a brisk turn around the saloon deck, trying to work the kinks out of my wagon-cramped leg muscles. When I reached the companion way to the main deck, I continued aimlessly down the steps. The deckhand on guard at the gangplank was still lounging on the packing case, a lantern burning beside him. He was half upright, his shoulders against a burlapped bundle. He was looking intently at something on the riverbank.
Under a bright play of lightning, I made out the shape of a man standing just beyond the loading dock. Drops of moisture on his black India-rubber poncho winked like shiny beads.
“He must be drunk,” the deckhand commented.
“How long has he been there?”
“Ever since the rain stopped. Maybe half an hour. I halloaed him a time or two, but he never even moved a muscle. He just stands there looking at the Roanoke.”
He was that hollow-voiced hollow-eyed man who’d told me that the boat was at the landing, that Miss Nettie and her both were going upriver to that new fort. They were sent for, he had said with emphasis. I had forgotten about that. So they too had been summoned to Fort Rawley for the commemoration. I wondered who Miss Nettie and her were.
The first thunder of the squall line rumbled along the river, and the trees along the bank caught a sudden sweep of wind. When the lantern’s wick began sputtering, the deckhand lifted the square-sided light and extinguished the flame. Almost continuous lightning now flooded everything with a phosphorescent glow. The man in the poncho stood motionless like a black statue. He could see me as plainly as I could see him, and I was certain that his sunken eyes were fixed on me. For a few seconds then, as the storm roared down upon us, the world turned to solid darkness. I kept my gaze upon the riverbank, but at the next flash of lightning, the black shadow had vanished.
“He’s gone,” the deckhand said. “I was beginning to think he was not human.”
Rain was swirling in on the wind. I turned and ran up the steps to the saloon deck, shivering, and clamping my jaws tight to keep my teeth from chattering.
2
IN KEEPING WITH the after-dinner custom on passenger boats in those days, the males retreated to the gentlemen’s cabin for cigars and brandy, while the females gathered in the ladies’ cabin to do whatever it is that females do when they are together. I found Captain Adams and Dr. Lieber at a table in the gentlemen’s cabin with the Roanoke’s pilot, Henry Allford. Captain Adams and Allford had been together on the Effie Deans during most of the war, and although I had never warmed toward that acerbic pilot, I respected his remarkable ability to get a steamboat past sandbars, snags, and sawyers in flood or shallow waters. Allford was bald except for fringes of reddish hair above his ears; his facial expression at all times portended doom just ahead.
After we’d exchanged greetings I remarked to Allford that the refurbished Roanoke was quite an improvement over the wartime dilapidation of the old Effie Deans.
“The owners spent several thousands re-outfitting this boat, I’m told,” he replied gloomily. “A crystal chandelier over there in the ladies’ cabin, those red plush divans out there in the central lounge, carved woods in here and elsewhere, as you must have noticed. I suppose you know they were restoring the Effie this spring at a Saint Louis dock when she caught fire and burned beyond redemption. Were you ever aboard her before the war, Morrison? Splendor, pure splendor.”
“No, only during the war. But I can attest to her sturdiness during that run we made in the Gulf of Mexico.”
The pilot clucked his tongue deprecatingly. “Only a bit over a hundred miles from the mouth of the Mississippi to Mobile Bay,” he said. “But sheer foolishness, utter foolishness. Except for the Sound, we had no charts of any kind. By the time we reached Montgomery, the Rebels had given up the ‘cradle of the Confederacy’ to Wilson’s cavalry.”
“And the war was over,” Captain Adams added. “All the same, I believe we set a record with the Effie Deans from the spring of ’64 to spring of ’65. Above eight thousand miles, was it not, Henry?”
“Eight thousand, two hundred and seventy-six miles,” Allford answered gravely.
“The Effie Deans,” Dr. Lieber said softly as he poured a few more drops of brandy into his glass. “Named I believe for one of Sir Walter Scott’s heroines. My God, was not that the boat Major Rawley came up on?”
“She was indeed,” the captain said, turning to face me. “Sam, you should have been along with us on that trip. When we left Saint Louis we had near on to three hundred men packed aboard. Galvanized Yankees, they were.”
“Galvanized Yankees?”
“Yes, they’d been Confederate soldiers. The lot we had aboard came from prisons in the East and Illinois, I believe. Mostly farm boys from Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas. From what I gathered, they had been crowded for months into Union prison camps in the most uncongenial places. No trees, no shade of any kind, nothing to look at but high board fences and the sky. Sleeping on the ground without even a handful of straw between them and hard-packed sand. You can understand why, when offered, they’d take an oath of allegiance to the Union and join our army to fight Indians out here in the West. God knows, each man may have had a different reason—a determination to survive by any means, disillusionment with the war, a secret avowal to desert at first opportunity.”
“Plenty had that last scheme in mind,” Allford said. He pulled a plug of Daniel Webster chewing tobacco from the pocket of his jacket, opened a long-bladed knife, and trimmed a thin shaving into his lower lip. He stared mournfully up at a brass cabin lamp affixed to the paneling. “Gen’l Ulysses Grant figured some would skedaddle at first opportunity. He was against the whole design, but President Lincoln was for it, and so Grant went along, providing they were shipped out here in the West.”
Captain Adams’s corroborating nod was almost imperceptible. Moisture in the air had brought his graying hair to a wild curl so that it splayed over his ears from the sides of his cap. ”Six men escaped before we left the Saint Louie wharf,” he said. “Major Rawley was so furious he made me hold the boat another day so that he and his young officers could comb the city in search of the deserters. He confiscated every set of irons he could find in the Saint Louie jail and shackled men at random—right out on the main deck in full view of the riverfront. I told him it was useless to search for the runaways. You know, Sam, how uncontrolled that river town was in sixty-four.”
“So Rawley was in command of the converted Rebels,” I said. “Were his officers all good Union men?”
“Decidedly. You can imagine what would have happened if—But he and his officers were all so damned young! Green as grass in June.”
“Unfledged,” the pilot agreed, and aimed an accurate jet of brown tobacco juice into a brass cuspidor that rested quite close to my left boot.
“I met some of them later at Fort Rice,” Dr. Lieber said. “But I knew none well except Major Rawley. Young, yes, but he impressed me as being earnest and willing to learn.”
“A spoiled swellhead,” Captain Adams retorted. “A windjammer!”
Lieber looked surprised. “I saw none of that in him at all. Quite the opposite in fact.”
“Well, you knew him later on. Perhaps that near brush with the Angel of Death—the surprise Indian attack—losing all his squad and his own life almost—out there on the Malpais. Ordeals can change a man.”
“On the Malpais?” I asked. “I understood that Rawley lost his men at Killdeer Mountain.”
Lieber glanced at the captain, deferring to him, and then when he realized that he was to reply, the doctor said: “Killdeer Mountain came afterward. What happened on the Malpais could have happened to any officer. He was taken completely by surprise, by superior forces, and was overwhelmed.”
“It was pride that did it,” Captain Adams declared. “All young men believe themselves to be immortal, but Rawley had gone beyond that. He thought he was indestructible because of his inborn superiority. He believed that God had gifted him, chosen him. He told me such, more than once. That forced march of his across the Malpais was meaningless, totally unnecessary. The officers at Fort Standish later admitted so in my presence. What do you think, Lieber?”
Dr. Lieber replied slowly, his accent slightly heavier than before. “The relief march was unnecessary, yes, but Major Rawley did not know it was unnecessary when he left the Effie Deans. He expected that his ten men might be needed to save Fort Standish from being overrun. He did not know about our fortifications, how strong they were.”
“I assured him there was no great danger there in the short run,” the captain said. “Others on board, who knew the fort, supported me. We all warned him that on the Malpais there could be more danger for him and his platoon than for the defenders of the fort. He refused even to listen. No, he wanted to make a dashing show, to aggrandize his own image of Major Charles Rawley. He gloried in himself. I had seen it growing in him from the day we left Saint Louie. He came to me that first afternoon and laid down the rules. A pink-cheeked boy, what was he, twenty-two? His battalion staffed with a dozen other pink-cheeked boys. Except for Rawley, from Ohio, not one, I think, had ever ventured far from the Atlantic shore, certainly never crossed the Alleghenies westward. He was in command of the Effie Deans now, he told me with a bold directness. I was to obey his orders, as if I were one of his junior officers.”
A dry humorless chuckle came from Allford. “I heard Enoch’s response through my thin cabin partition. Like a whip cracking, his voice was.”
Captain Adams had got out his large curved-stem pipe and was tamping rough-cut into the bowl. “I let him know the boat was my command, but that I would cooperate with him in all matters which did not endanger the safety of the vessel. He seemed to respect me after that. Actually came to me for advice once or twice, the way a spoiled son will do when he runs up against a hard block. Sometimes he listened, sometimes he didn’t. He did not listen to my advice about the court-martial.”
“How was that?” I asked.
Captain Adams turned to glance up at the fanlight above our heads. “Sounds like hail,” he said. The rattling of ice against the curved window became a counterpoint to the clicking of poker chips at the table behind us. Rain streaked the dirty glass with runners that reflected orange light from the brass cabin lamp. The captain drew deeply from his pipe, and puffed a ring into the blue swirl of smoke suspended from the ceiling. Tobacco pungency mingled with whiskey aroma.
“That court-martial was inevitable, I suppose. In spite of all Rawley’s precautions—doubling the guard, hourly night inspections, threatening harangues—one or two or more of the Galvanized Yankees would be missing almost every morning at reveille. They just slid off the deck into the Missouri waters, risked their lives, but I’d wager most of them made it to shore. Then one night, just after we’d steamed past Independence—with all those former Rebels having their last look at civilization as we passed—houses, people in citizens’ clothing, horses and buggies, women in white dresses, whatever—it was too much for them. That night almost a dozen got away. There was an alarm, they made great splashes when they dived, and Rawley and his young officers fired off their pistols. Their chances of hitting anyone in that black water were about as likely as shooting a catfish in the dark.”
The captain stopped for a minute to relight his pipe. Hail still tapped capriciously against the fanlight. “Next morning he came to see me—d’you remember, Sam, we’d built a large compartment of heavy planking on the rear of the main deck to store war supplies—gunpowder, ammunition, and such—when we were operating below Memphis?”
“With cotton bales around the outer walls,” I recalled.
“Yes, we’d got rid of the cotton bales, but the compartment still served as a hold. Well, Rawley wanted to know if I would open it so that he could lock some of his men in there each night to discipline them. I took him down and showed him how full-packed it was with his battalion’s supplies—tents, blankets, uniforms, dry rations, arms, ammunition. I told him he’d do well to get twenty men in there. ‘I’ll double that number,’ he snapped back. I pointed out that the weather had been exceedingly warm, and that if he locked the compartment hatch the men would suffer not only from the heat but also from bad air. His only reply was a shrug.”
After a long pause, Captain Adams recounted how Rawley had had all the ammunition moved up into the staterooms where his officers were quartered, and that night had crowded forty men into that musty place below. Long before daybreak they were yelling and pounding and pleading to be let out for air. Rawley and Adams had a row over that, and Adams finally persuaded him to open the hatch and post night guards.
“It was during all the racket, I suppose, that one more man went over the side. He was reported missing at reveille.”
Rawley was surprisingly calm when he visited Adams’s cabin to inform him of this. “I must set an example,” was how he put it. “I must shoot one of my men for desertion.” Seeing the consternation on Adams’s face, he went on hurriedly, trying to explain that surely Adams must understand the necessity for this. Unless the desertions were stopped, he would have no command left aboard the boat by the time they reached Fort Standish. Adams reminded him that “to prove desertion he must seize a man in the act,” and he had had no luck at that.
“He informed me that a few of them talked of nothing else. His officers had overheard them, and the talkers were a bad influence on the others. He could make good soldiers of most of these Rebels if he could put such a fear of desertion in their minds that they would no longer think of it. I asked him why he was telling me all this. When he was unsure of himself he had a manner of twisting an ear with his thumb and forefinger. He did so then, scuffing his boots on the floor of my cabin the way a young boy will do in the presence of an overbearing elder. ‘So you will understand what I am doing,’ he replied slowly.
“He pointed out that I was not a military man, and might misunderstand the action he planned to take. He was telling me this so that I would be prepared for it.
“I did not know what to say, so I said nothing, and he excused himself hastily, blundering against the corner of my bunk as he turned to leave. That night we had a heavy rain, not windy like the storm we’re having now, but a steady downpour. The poor devils who slept on the exposed decks had to crowd under what shelter they could find. I’m not a light sleeper, but several times I awoke to hear them cursing and moving about. An ideal time for going over the side, I thought to myself, and at dawn I dressed and went up to the pilothouse to watch morning roll call. Henry was there, his head poked out the window, curious as I to see how many would be reported missing.”
“I was certain,” Allford said, “some names would not be answering.”
“But not a man was absent,” Captain Adams declared with an emphatic slap of his hand against the tabletop. “I was looking right down at Major Rawley, a big solid youngster he was, always dressed in his best uniform for reveille—fancying a wide-brimmed black hat instead of the cap he wore at other times. I expected to see a smile of satisfaction on his face when the last report of ‘All present’ sounded, but instead his expression was quite grim. He shouted something to one of his lieutenants. I could not follow the immediate proceedings, but after a moment or so a tall man stepped forward from one of the squads and stood stiffly at attention facing the major.”
Adams had taken notice of this man before, a muscular towheaded fellow, hair fine as cotton. He always seemed to be in company with another man half his size, who Adams described as “rat-faced, with a long twitchy nose and his crooked teeth squeezed in to the front of his narrow mouth, popeyes set too close together, and small pointed ears curved in to his skull.” When they were together, and that was most times, their relationship appeared to be one of prince and commoner, the towheaded soldier tall and proud in the foreground, the rat-faced runt obsequious and deferential in the background, regarding the prince in an almost worshipful way.
