Beyond Fort Mims Read online

  BEYOND

  FORT MIMS

  BEYOND

  FORT MIMS

  A western story

  Lauran Paine

  Copyright © 2011 by Mona Paine

  E-book published in 2017 by Blackstone Publishing

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6122-3

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6121-6

  Fiction/Westerns

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  Chapter One

  Fort Mims And Beyond

  The fort was a large, palisaded compound, its inhabitants, including eighty militiamen under Major Daniel Beasley, included five hundred and thirteen people among whom were one hundred and eighty women and children. Normally the gates were left open during the day. The surrounding cleared land was deep and rich and because of high humidity and frequent rains crops were bountiful, cattle were grazed, and harvested produce was stored.

  The late summer of 1813 was one of the hottest on record for Alabama. Rains were infrequent but humidity remained high. Fort Mims was roughly thirty miles from Mobile Bay where the Mobile River flowed into Mobile Bay, which was about thirty miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. The entire area over many miles, with or without rain, had high humidity.

  On a serene Sunday church services were in progress for those who attended. For those who didn’t there were wrestling matches, drinking, loafing, and whatever form of relaxation people sought in fiercely hot and humid weather.

  A slave named Hosiah was foraging outside the fort when he saw Indians. Hastening back to the fort, he told his owner, John Randon, what he had seen. Randon went immediately to Major Beasley, who had just finished a wrestling match with a captain of militia named Dixon Bailey.

  The major, who had been drinking, listened to what Randon had to say, and because Randon seemed sincerely worried Beasley agreed to send out scouts. He also promised that if Hosiah was lying, he would be whipped.

  The scouts left the fort, sought shade from the heat, and eventually returned to report no sign of Indians.

  The anxiety caused by Hosiah’s tale diminished as time passed and the major’s assurance that there were no Indians in the vicinity was supported by the general knowledge that there had been no Indian trouble, except isolated, mostly distant incidents in a long time.

  Sunday passed comfortably for the fort’s inhabitants. It would be the last for many of them. Hosiah had not lied. An Indian called Red Eagle, whose given name was William Weatherford, the son of an Indian woman and a Scotsman named Lachlan McGillivray, and who the Creeks called Hoponika Fitshia, Truth Maker, had Fort Mims completely surrounded.

  Monday morning Red Eagle had made his final disposition for the attack. The signal would be when the soldiers inside the fort were summoned to their midday meal by a drum roll.

  At the time of the drummer’s call to mess, Major Beasley was playing cards with some officers. At the sound of the drum Red Eagle and his one thousand yelling Indians broke from cover and raced toward the fort.

  There was a rush to close the gates—too late. Hundreds of Indians firing muskets, arrows, and holding aloft tomahawks and clubs streamed inside.

  As Major Beasley ran toward the blockhouse, he was overtaken by an Indian with a stone tomahawk who killed him with a blow that split his skull.

  Captain Dixon Bailey tried to rally the soldiers as Indians were pouring through the gates. Some inhabitants, mostly women and children, made it into the blockhouse. The children were put in the loft; on the ground floor women reloaded guns.

  Outside was pure chaos. Indians clubbed, shot, and knifed indiscriminately children, women, old people, men, even small animals. Captives were put to death by torture. Their screams could be heard above the bedlam inside the blockhouse.

  Repulsed by gunfire from the blockhouse, the Indians turned to clubbing the dying. At this juncture the Indians found the liquor stores. Afterward, they went on a particularly gruesome rampage of killing, scalping, and even killing again those already dead. Several heads were cut off and the Indians used the heads for a kind of soccer game.

  When the fighting dwindled until only those in the blockhouse still offered resistance and fired their weapons selectively, probably because their powder and shot was diminishing, Red Eagle and most of his warriors left. The remaining Creeks, with no reason for haste, spent what remained of the day plundering, torturing and killing captives, drinking, and celebrating their victory.

  For them the final tragedy was inevitable and there was no reason to hasten it. Inside the blockhouse were people unable to escape, unlikely to be saved, and for those reasons plus one other—fire—there was no need for the Indians to take risks.

  The number of escapees was about half a dozen. One black woman named Hester, although wounded, got past the fighters, reached a nearby watercourse, found a canoe, and paddled to a settlement called Fort Stoddard. She was shown into the presence of General Claiborne and told her story of the massacre.

  At Fort Mims the final tragedy occurred. When smoke in the loft drove the terrified children to the lower floor, additional flames from fires set in different places outside made life inside unbearable. The choice for the last defenders was to leave the blockhouse, face hundreds of Indians, or stay inside and be burned to death. Adding to the horror of those moments were the howls, taunts, and screams of waiting Indians who danced and waved weapons on this dark night. For the defenders surely it was a scene from hell.

  Some ran outside. They were immediately lost in a mêlée of screaming Indians who shot, clubbed, and knifed them to death. Others died in walls of fire as the blockhouse was consumed, screaming, crying, struggling until burning wood fell upon them.

  The previous year, 1812, the United States and Great Britain had gone to war for the second time within living memory. But the War of 1812 was for the most part being conducted in the northern and easterly parts of the nation, and while it raged and the White House was burned by the British, hundreds of miles southward, with poor roads and even poorer means of communication, the Fort Mims disaster, while actually a war within a war, had repercussions that resulted in fights that had no bearing on the national war.

  What happened at Fort Mims was in the minds of frontiersmen the cause of a war that they would pursue to its bloody finale and that, to them, was known as the Creek War, after the name of the preponderance of fighting Indians, the Creeks, who got their name from the British who said their entire area was crisscrossed with creeks, which was an accurate description.

  In a huge territory of the southern part of the nation at that time, settlers and settlements were poorly defended, if at all, something which years of more or less peace between red men and white had encouraged. Intermarriage was common. Indians farmed as did whites; both races supported an economy that was adequate for the times. What caused the Creeks to take up the hatchet was an Eastern Indian named Tecumseh who advocated a great confederation of tribesmen to drive out the whites who had taken lands the Indians claimed. The Creeks did not join Tecumseh’s confederation, but his mission among the Creeks and other southern tribes sewed seeds of resentment against all whites that inevitably led to the Fort Mims massacre and the Creek War.

  Subsequent to the Fort Mims massacre, with the settlements aroused and hastening to muster militia,
tales of atrocities spread. Friendly Indians were no long welcome in the settlements, and people on isolated farms lived in constant fear.

  About ten miles from the Tennessee village of Winchester, in a log house surrounded by tillable land close to the banks of Bean Creek, a locally renowned hunter named David Crockett lived with his redheaded wife. She was called Polly, although her real name was Mary. They lived comfortably, if not extravagantly, with their three children: Margaret, William, and John Wesley.

  Crockett was in his twenties, slightly over six feet tall, with brown hair and eyes. He was imbued with an insatiable wanderlust that would never leave him. When he heard there was to be a muster of volunteers to fight Indians, he rode to Winchester and volunteered. Afterward he rode home and told Polly what he had done and that the volunteer contingent was to leave that night.

  She dutifully prepared a pack for him, and stood in the cabin doorway, watching her man riding to war. He had said in parting he would come back now and then, which probably did little for Polly Crockett’s heartache. Now she had full responsibility for their children and their livelihood. His enlistment was for sixty days, not too long a period of time, unless, of course, he never came home, or did so in a canvas bag in the bed of a wagon.

  Commanding officer for the area was General Andrew Jackson, an impatient, fiery-tempered man ten years older than David Crockett. He early displayed something just short of contempt for the militia. He commanded the regular army, of which there were not enough men to conduct a full-scale war over interminable miles of rivers, forests, mountains, and the hordes of fighting tribesmen. By the time he undertook the army’s advance toward Indian country, the Winchester volunteers, who had been joined by other volunteers, had a combined strength of about two thousand men of which the Winchester volunteers accounted for slightly more than half.

  They moved into hostile country, crossed out of Tennessee into Alabama at a place call Muscle Shoals, made camp on a ridge that commanded a view of the area, and put scouts out in all directions. This was hostile Indian country and no frontiersman would believe Indian scouts did not know they had crossed the river and how strong they were.

  During their wait for the regulars under Jackson, an advance unit rode into camp under Major John H. Gibson, who served under one of Jackson’s favorites, Colonel John Coffee.

  When Gibson said he wanted some of the best-qualified frontiersmen to scout ahead, he was told the best man was Davy Crockett. The major chose Crockett and asked him to recommend the man to go with him.

  Crockett looked the part in his buckskin clothing, moccasins, in his prime at twenty-seven, bearded and muscular. He called up George Russell with whom Crockett had made many scouts.

  Major Gibson said Russell was too young; he hadn’t even begun to shave, to which an irritated Crockett said that, if whiskers made the man, then billy goats should lead and govern.

  The major accepted George Russell. Another ten men were also selected. The following morning, early, the men left camp, well mounted and heavily armed, under the orders of Major Gibson. Later they met, and took with them an Indian trader who volunteered to guide them through a countryside he knew very well.

  They were moving through territory even their trader guide was uneasy about when Major Gibson decided to divide the party. He would take half, and Crockett would take the other half. They would make a wide sweep and meet at a crossroads fifteen miles ahead.

  From here on the possibility of an ambush was very real. Both parties progressed carefully with outriders on all sides, using every experienced frontiersman’s trick of deception not to be discovered.

  It was a long, harrowing ride. By dividing the command, the major had assured that if either party had to fight, they could not possibly prevail against the hundreds of Indians who used this territory as a hunting ground. It was to their advantage that they rode at night. That in fact may have been their only advantage before they reached the point of rendezvous the following morning.

  Major Gibson was not there, nor did he arrive later in the day, a situation that put Crockett and his companions on a vigilant alert, suspecting as they did that the major and his party may have been ambushed and annihilated.

  The anxiety was too much for some of the scouts who told Crockett they were going back. This would further weaken Crockett’s party and would, as was pointed out to the would-be defectors, make it highly improbable that they could go back the way they had come without being killed by Indians.

  Because Gibson was obviously not going to appear at the rendezvous, Crockett led his small band in the direction of a village of friendly Cherokees some twenty miles distant. On the way they crossed the clearing owned by a white man married to a Creek woman who was clearly worried when the band of heavily armed scouts approached his cabin. He told Crockett that only a short while before ten warriors had visited him, and, if they should return, to find him talking to white scouts, they would all be killed. The man’s advice, while perhaps justified, was not followed by Crockett. The squaw man said, “Go back where you came from.”

  Crockett did the opposite. He continued on the trail to the village of friendly Cherokees.

  They found the village after dark by its many fires. When they were closer, they could hear Indians calling back and forth. Crockett made a sortie on foot, lay in hiding for some time, and decided the Cherokees were still friendly because in hostile villages a pole painted red was prominently displayed. At this village there was no such pole.

  If the Indians were surprised when a party of armed white men rode into their village, they did not show it—for a while anyway.

  They fed the scouts, cared for their horses, treated them as friends, but did not appear altogether happy to have them as guests. These Indians were one of the groups that tried hard to maintain a degree of neutrality between the hostiles and the whites. When the Indians decided they had done for the whites what was expected of peaceful and friendly people, a spokesman asked Crockett to leave, which Crockett agreed to do before dawn.

  Late in the night, when the camp was totally quiet, a Cherokee went to Crockett’s bed ground and whispered the two words guaranteed to awaken Crockett, “Red Sticks.”

  If it had been a ruse to get rid of the white men, it could not have succeeded better than it did. But it wasn’t a ruse. An Indian runner had arrived with news that a great army of hostiles had crossed the Coos River at a place called Ten Islands, moving in the direction of the road the runner said was being used by a large army of regular soldiers marching into Creek territory.

  To Crockett that had to mean the Indians, whose moccasin telegraph was better than the white man’s method of passing information, knew Jackson was coming, knew by what route, his strength, and were amassing to attack him.

  Crockett and his scouts pushed their horses to the very limit to reach Jackson’s column. They rode sixty-five miles in twelve hours on horses that had not been properly cared for during the entire period of their enlistment up to this time.

  They made that ride through territory infested with hostile warriors without incident and found Colonel Coffee’s advance on animals ready to drop. Crockett did this believing the army was in imminent danger of annihilation as it marched against invisible foemen. He had taken great risks, had pushed his men and animals to the verge of exhaustion, but he had found Coffee’s advance force in time.

  Colonel Coffee listened to what Crockett had to say, dismissed him, and did nothing toward increasing the size of his advance scouting parties or taking additional precautions.

  Crockett was stunned, then he was angered. He went directly to General Jackson where his reception was even chillier, but a little later, when Major Gibson arrived with the other half of Crockett’s scouting party, and gave the same report, General Jackson sent eight hundred volunteers under Colonel Coffee to seek the Indians. Crockett’s scouts accompanied this force, which was not only large and
noisy but which permitted Red Eagle’s allies to provide the hostiles with the route of march and the size of Coffee’s column.

  Chapter Two

  To War And Back

  Colonel Coffee’s destination was an Indian town called Black Warrior’s Village. His purpose was to sweep the countryside and engage any Indians he encountered. Black Warrior’s Village was where the city of Tuscaloosa now stands. Crockett and his scouts rode in advance and on both sides of the marching column.

  For an excellent reason they found no Indians. Red Eagle had learned enough from other confrontations with the army to choose his battle grounds.

  Coffee’s column reached Black Warrior’s Village and found it deserted. Because the army was never adequately supplied, the soldiers ransacked the town, found quantities of grain, corn, and cured meat. They rested there, fed their horses well, and, as they prepared to march deeper into hostile territory, Colonel Coffee ordered the town burned, which was done. When the march was resumed, there was nothing left of Black Warrior’s Village but ash and embers.

  From this point forward Colonel Coffee directed the march without offering objectives, which bothered Crockett and others. They had reason to doubt the colonel’s competency at fighting Indians, something they knew about from experience.

  Regardless of Coffee’s strength, the party was now in the heart of hostile country. It could be assumed with thousands of Indians throughout this area that Coffee’s movements would be watched by day and night.

  The anxiety spread to the regular soldiers. The column was riding deep into Creek territory. At any moment it could be attacked by overwhelming numbers of Red Sticks.

  After passing through the Chickasaw and Choctaw territories without incident, it began to appear to Davy Crockett that Coffee was leading his army too deep into a deadly, dangerous countryside where retreat would be impossible if it was attacked from the rear.