Killing Crazy Horse Page 2
From somewhere inside the fort, Weatherford hears a fiddle playing. But that is not the signal to attack. The Red Stick must wait for the lunch bell. With the east gate propped open and the noon meal drawing near, William Weatherford and his warriors grasp their war clubs tighter, eager to swing the blows that will cave in the skulls of their enemy.
* * *
Major Beasley and the Mississippi Militia arrive at Fort Mims on August 2. Beasley’s men immediately go to work, fortifying the simple wall built by the settlers. A stockade of inner defensive walls is added, as well as a new addition to the fort built specifically to house the military. Gun ports are cut into the perimeter fencing, allowing Beasley’s men to shoot without exposing themselves to danger. Within weeks, what was once a collection of homes and stables is completely fenced in by logs placed in the ground vertically, the tops sharpened to a point. In the event of an attack, a blockhouse allows a stout enclosure into which the defenders can retreat and open fire.
The fort was built in a hurry, with an undercurrent of fear permeating every moment of construction. But now that the walls are complete, a calm settles over Fort Mims. Where once there was just open space, there is now protection. The walls and the substantial military presence make the fort’s inhabitants feel safe for the first time in months.
To keep his men happy, Major Beasley recently sent a letter by courier, requesting that his militia superiors send whiskey with which to reward them—the very whiskey that many of them drank to excess last night.
Beasley also requested a drum.
To Major Beasley’s delight, Martin Rigdon, a seventeen-year-old who has served in the army since he was nine, turns out to be an excellent drummer. Beasley himself is a lawyer by trade. He only became a professional soldier to advance his standing in society and has no formal military training. But the major believes that the regular beating of a drum will bring a stronger military bearing to Fort Mims.
Like the whiskey, the drum arrived yesterday.
Now, Martin Rigdon and his drum stand just a few feet from Beasley, who will not commence the whipping without a proper drumbeat. The major clutches the lash in his fist. The slave tenses. The circle of witnesses presses in closer. The soldiers standing guard are playing cards and telling stories.
The east gate remains wide open.
Beasley nods.
The rat-a-tat drumroll echoes through the thick morning air, carrying across the fort’s manicured grounds and far beyond the brand-new walls smelling of fresh pine.
Into the woods.
* * *
The Creek decide to wait no longer. The drumroll now marks their signal to attack. The Red Stick rise from their hiding places without a war cry, sprinting toward the fort’s two entrances in complete silence.
By the hundreds, they race across open ground from the south, east, and west. Now it is time to kill.
Two hundred warriors led by William Weatherford focus their attack on the east gate. It is vital that they get there before being spotted, before the gate can be closed.
Suddenly, a sentry cries: “Indians!” He immediately fires a warning, then runs for his life, making no attempt to shut the east gate.
Major Beasley drops his whip. Drawing his sword, he rushes for the outer walls, hoping to beat the Indians to the open eastern gateway. But just as he reaches the gate, Beasley is shot dead. The Indians swarm, beating his head repeatedly with clubs—leaving the major’s corpse bloody and unrecognizable. The Creek pour through the open eastern entrance. One woman will remember seeing “Billy Weatherford as he came in the gate at a full run, at the head of his warriors.”
To this she would add: “As he sprang over the logs he saw Dixon Bailey, who was a bitter enemy, to who he shouted, ‘Dixon Bailey, today one or both of us must die.’”3
At the same time, a second body of warriors race toward the western entrance of the fort. “With few exceptions, they were naked,” one survivor of the attack will remember. “Around the waist was drawn a girdle with a cow tail running down the back and almost dragging on the ground. It is impossible to imagine people so horribly painted.”
Settlers are scalped, dead or alive. But many blacks are not killed—instead, they are captured, soon to become Indian slaves. The man tied to the whipping post is not so lucky.
The massacre is intense and unrelenting. In an act of desperation, a young scout named Cornet Rankin marches toward the Indians carrying a white flag of surrender.
He is shot dead.
Through the screaming of terrified women and children, and the hail of bullets, the Mississippi Volunteers somehow manage to regroup. The Red Stick attack stalls just inside the east gate, the newly built inner wall preventing them from penetrating into the center of the fort. On the south wall, soldiers fire through specially designed portholes with deadly accuracy, causing the Indian attack to fall back. On the north wall, Captain Dixon Bailey’s men turn back the Creek advance, firing their single-shot muskets with deadly accuracy.
During construction of the fort, brush and trees were cleared for a hundred yards in every direction, allowing an unbroken field of fire for the Americans. Indian bodies now lie across the plain, including those of several shamans who chose to wear “bulletproof” deerskin. Many Creeks, however, survive this barrage and reach the fort’s walls. With Indians on one side of the portholes and militia on the other, the two sides literally take turns firing at one another through the same openings from just inches away.
Slowly, however, the Americans fall back into the center of the fort. Panicked women and children are ordered to find a building and go inside, away from the fight. Many women refuse, preferring to remain with their men, loading guns, drawing water from the well to put out fires, and bandaging the wounded.
“Help or hope there was none,” one account written shortly after the battle will read. “Soldiers, women, children, Spaniards, friendly Indians fell together in heaps, the dying and the dead, scalped, mutilated, wounded, bloody, to be consumed [here] long by fire or to become food for hungry dogs and buzzards.”
So it is that the dead and dying cover the ground inside and outside Fort Mims.
As the second hour of fighting comes to an end, many small buildings within the fort are ablaze. But the fight remains at a standstill. The Creek cannot penetrate the fort’s inner walls and thus content themselves with looting the outer buildings, even as the defenders hunker down inside the blockhouse and small homes at the center of the fort.
The battle appears to be a stalemate.
For two hours, the Creek tend to their wounded, unsure of whether to leave with their captured slaves or to once more risk their lives in battle.
But there is one act that must be avenged: Dixon Bailey’s betrayal against his people at the Battle of Burnt Corn. Until Bailey is dead, the fight cannot end.
William Weatherford longs to see Dixon Bailey killed for his treachery, but he is also friends with many whites still trapped inside and cannot bear to witness what will come next. So he departs the battlefield. He will later tell his sister-in-law “he rode off, for he had not the heart to witness what he knew would follow, to wit, the indiscriminate slaughter of the inmates of the fort.”
* * *
The final confrontation begins with the launching of a single flaming arrow. The heartwood of the longleaf pine, from which every building is constructed, is known to burn at a tremendously high heat. First to blaze is the kitchen, a stand-alone structure. The fire quickly spreads to the compound of stables and workshops surrounding the Mims home. More fire arrows follow, and soon the Indians are penetrating the fort’s inner defenses and setting every structure ablaze.
Frantic settlers seek to chop holes in the outer fences, hoping to escape the deadly chaos. Those trapped inside the burning structures face the agonizing decision between being burned alive or being scalped. Captain Dixon Bailey and his men still control the north wall, even as his brother James and sister Elizabeth have made the fatal d
ecision to retreat to the Mims house. There, the root cellar is packed with children. As Indians enter the blazing home, James Bailey is shot dead while Elizabeth looks on. She could save her own life by feigning loyalty to the Creek, but instead Elizabeth points to her brother’s corpse and proclaims, “I am sister to that man you have murdered there.”
Benjamin Hawkins, a black slave who witnessed the incident before being led away as a Creek hostage, recounts what happens next: “Upon which they knocked her down, cut her open, strewed her entrails around. They threw several dead bodies into the fire and some that were wounded.”
Settlers fleeing the flames are clubbed, shot, stabbed, sliced open with tomahawks, and scalped with special long knives carried for that specific purpose. This includes not just the men and women fighting so desperately to save Fort Mims but their infants and young children as well.
The last holdout is the north wall, where Dixon Bailey still fights. When they can take it no more, Bailey flees out of a hole hacked into the base of the north wall. His wife and four children escape with him. Bailey’s son Ralph, unable to walk because he is wounded, is carried by a black slave named Tom. Despite a hail of bullets and arrows, the group makes it into the nearby woods before Bailey is shot down. He dies in a small grove of trees and is later buried in a mass grave, along with his wife, his children, and the hundreds of other victims of the Creek massacre.
It seems, however, that at least one of Dixon Bailey’s offspring will survive. The slave Tom attempts to negotiate for the life of fourteen-year-old Ralph Bailey, hoping to offer both of them up as prisoners. But when Tom hands the boy over, the Creek immediately smash in his skull and take his scalp. Tom, meanwhile, is directed to join the group of slaves who have been taken captive.
William Weatherford, who could not even bear to witness the final carnage, has had his revenge—but at a great cost.
* * *
By evening the battle is done. Two hundred and forty-seven bodies are counted when a relief party finally arrives ten days later. One eyewitness put it this way: “At the East Gate of the stockade lay Indians, Negroes, men, women, and children in one promiscuous ruin. Within the gate lay the brave unfortunate Beasley. He was behind the same and was killed, as was said, in attempting to shut it. On the left within the stockade we found forty-five men, women, and children in one heap. They were stripped of their clothes without distinction of age or sex. All were scalped, and the females of every age were most barbarously and savage-like butchered, in a manner in which decency nor language can convey. Women pregnant were cut open and their children’s heads tomahawked.”
The victims are unrecognizable from heat, decomposition, and the ravages of wild dogs, insects, crows, and buzzards. In addition to those bodies littering this plain overlooking the Alabama River, many more dead have been incinerated inside the burning buildings, the flames so hot that nothing more than ashes is left of these men, women, and children. The exact toll is impossible to count, but it is estimated that almost five hundred settlers have been killed by the Creeks at Fort Mims. Adding to the carnage, the Indians continue their rampage in the days and weeks that follow, riding through the countryside to burn homes and slaughter thousands of cattle.
Both sides suffered in the Battle of Fort Mims. More than one hundred Creek also lie dead. But to this day, the fight marks the greatest Indian victory over Americans in U.S. history.4
The night after the massacre, a lone rider gallops away from St. Stephens, a trading post seven miles west of Fort Mims. Nineteen-year-old Samuel Edmondson is bound for the city of Nashville, 450 miles north. He carries news of the slaughter and two letters requesting immediate military assistance. One is addressed to Tennessee governor Willie Blount. The other is destined for a forty-six-year-old major general in the Tennessee militia named Andrew Jackson, a volatile plantation owner whose renown for personal toughness has led his troops to give him the nickname Old Hickory. Edmondson will ride night and day, changing horses as needed, in order to deliver these letters as quickly as possible. The Creeks must be stopped.
Thus begins a new chapter of warfare between Indians and settlers. No longer will hostile tribes face isolated enemies—now, they will be challenging the vast and growing power of the United States of America.
It is a challenge they will soon regret.
Chapter One
SEPTEMBER 3, 1813
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
9:00 A.M.
Andrew Jackson has vengeance on his mind.
The white-haired general with the soft southern accent is armed with a riding whip and a sword, which he carries every day. This morning the six-foot-one former senator is also carrying a loaded pistol in his back pocket. An up-and-coming politician named Thomas Hart Benton, a former friend and confidant, has publicly slandered Jackson, claiming he conspired to make a fool of Benton’s brother in a recent duel.
But the fact is that young Jesse Benton has made a fool of himself. Instead of standing completely still after turning to fire his pistol, per protocol, he squatted down to avoid getting shot—only to end up with a lead musket ball in his ample backside. When Jesse relayed the news to his brother, who was visiting Washington, D.C., at the time, the young man wove a tale of deceit that blamed Andrew Jackson. After that, Thomas Hart Benton began making public assertions that the legendary general is a cheat and a liar.
Uncharacteristically, Jackson has held his temper for weeks. But as Benton journeys home to Nashville and is overheard repeating the slander in many a barroom along the way, Tennessee’s “first citizen” can take no more. Andrew Jackson publicly pronounces he will horsewhip the thirty-five-year-old Benton “on sight.”
Andrew Jackson in a painting by Thomas Sully, 1845
That moment has come.
Thomas Hart Benton stands in the doorway of Clayton Talbert’s Tavern. In time, he will become a formidable political figure, instrumental in America’s westward expansion. But at present, he is struggling to find his way. Benton was born into wealth but was expelled from the University of North Carolina for stealing from his fellow students, an embarrassment he still carries.
His brother, the heavyset Jesse, stands a few steps back inside the barroom. He is six years younger than Thomas, with a reputation for being arrogant and impulsive.
Both Benton brothers are armed.
Andrew Jackson has spent the night at the luxurious Nashville Inn, one hundred diagonal yards across the town square. The three-story establishment is the general’s favorite lodging and will remain so for decades. He enjoys gambling on the cockfights in the vacant lot next door. Wine and games of billiards flow freely in the ground-floor tavern, and the general stables his horses around back. The Bentons also normally stay at the Nashville Inn, but this is not a normal day. For their own safety, they selected Talbert’s Tavern—for they know a battle is brewing. Word of the pending confrontation between Jackson and the Benton brothers has spread quickly. Local citizens fill the square at a discreet distance, keeping out of pistol range as they await the action to come.
Jackson ignores the bystanders. His close friend, Colonel John Coffee, walks at his side. Together, the two men follow the wooden sidewalk leading around the square to Talbert’s. They stroll slowly, feigning deep conversation. Jackson is a rail-thin 145 pounds and prefers to wear his overcoats baggy, to give the appearance of being larger. Colonel Coffee is an enormous man, with a booming voice and an even temper that balances out Jackson’s explosive personality. Both are in their forties, although the general’s gray hair contrasts with Coffee’s dark locks. Their friendship is so profound that Colonel Coffee once fought a duel to defend Jackson’s honor, during which the military officer took a ball in the thigh.
“Do you see that fellow?” Coffee asks quietly, glancing at Thomas Hart Benton, who is still standing in the tavern doorway.
“Oh, yes,” Jackson replies. “I have my eye on him.”
Andrew Jackson feels the weight of the whip in his right hand,
his sword in its scabbard, and the heft of the pistol against his back hip. The weapon weighs more than three pounds and features a barrel almost eight inches long. A scar creases Jackson’s left arm, the result of a British sword three decades ago in the Revolutionary War. Inside Jackson’s chest, a musket ball is lodged just inches from his heart, a painful reminder of a duel seven years ago. His opponent shot first and scored a direct hit. Yet despite the hole in his chest and the blood pouring from his wound that would soon fill both his boots, Jackson managed to take a steady aim, then shot and killed his opponent. Doctors say that Jackson himself will die if the bullet is ever removed. Thus, it remains.1
With every step along the sidewalk, General Jackson and Colonel Coffee draw closer to Talbert’s Tavern. Jackson knows there is a barroom on the ground floor, with a side hallway and a door leading to a back porch. A plan takes shape in his mind.
The two men stop directly in front of the hotel. Jackson quickly pivots to face Thomas Hart Benton.
“Now, you damned rascal, I am going to punish you,” snarls Jackson, shifting the whip to his left fist.
Benton reaches for his pistol. At one time the young man idolized Jackson, whose successful career in the House of Representatives and Senate provided a road map to the sort of life Benton hopes to enjoy. Benton’s own father died when he was just eight years old, and at first Jackson seemed to fill that void. In time, however, Benton longed to be more powerful, more famous, and even more beloved than the man nicknamed “Old Hickory.” His respect turned into jealousy as Benton realized that his only chance of surpassing Jackson was to kill him.
But Thomas Hart Benton is nervous as he reaches for his gun. He has never drawn a weapon before. Benton fumbles to pull his eight-inch-long flintlock “pocket” pistol from his coat.