Killing Crazy Horse Read online

  Andrew Jackson has no such problem.

  The general smoothly draws his gun and presses the barrel against Benton’s heart. Jackson pushes him backward into the tavern, toward the back door. Tennessee is still a lawless frontier state in many ways, but should Jackson opt to shoot the young plantation owner there can be no witnesses. Behind him, Colonel Coffee stands at the front door, blocking anyone from following Jackson out the back.

  In all the commotion, Jesse Benton has been forgotten. Now, he slips from the tavern into a back hallway, where he takes up position behind Andrew Jackson and his older brother. Jesse fires his pistol. The first shot hits Jackson in his left arm, lodging in the humerus bone. The second shatters the general’s shoulder blade. A third shot goes wild, stuck in the hotel wall.

  Andrew Jackson pitches forward, firing as he falls. The powder burns Thomas Benton’s coat. Though not hit, Benton tumbles backward down a flight of stairs. Colonel Coffee rushes to General Jackson’s rescue and finds him facedown in a pool of blood. Bystanders follow Coffee, wrestling Jesse Benton to the ground and threatening to kill him. An irate John Coffee turns away from the prone Andrew Jackson and steps forward to pummel the younger Benton, but the crowd separates them. Thomas Hart Benton remains unhurt on the floor in the basement.

  Now all eyes focus on Jackson. Colonel Coffee instructs the group of bystanders to help him carry Jackson back to his room across the square at the Nashville Inn. The general is losing so much blood that he soaks through a thin cotton mattress. When that cushioning becomes too saturated, it is replaced by another. Jackson’s blood does not stop pouring from his wounds, and soon the second mattress is also a dark red.

  Clearly, Andrew Jackson is dying.

  The best doctors in Nashville arrive, called to care for the general. His left arm must be amputated; that much is clear. They hover over him, preparing the saw needed to cut away the shattered limb.

  Suddenly, Jackson barks from the bed: “I’ll keep my arm.”

  The doctors would ignore any other patient, but this is the great Andrew Jackson. It is determined that the ball lodged against the bone in his arm cannot be removed, meaning that the general now has two pieces of lead taking up permanent residence inside his body. A poultice made of slippery elm is applied to the wounds in Jackson’s arm and chest, followed by a splint. There is nothing more to be done but let him rest.

  Thus, Andrew Jackson remains bedridden for eight days, fading in and out of consciousness. His face turns a yellow gray. The Benton brothers have publicly denounced Jackson as a failed assassin, yet there is no way he can fight back. Jackson grows weaker with every passing day.

  Then on Sunday, September 12, almost two weeks after setting out from southern Alabama, nineteen-year-old Samuel Edmondson gallops into Nashville with news about the massacre at Fort Mims. He bears a letter demanding that no less than General Andrew Jackson come to the immediate rescue of the beleaguered American settlers and fight the Creek Indians.

  Jackson is strong enough to read the missive. It is an outrageous request, appealing to a lone man from Tennessee rather than the U.S. government to somehow bring the full force of military might to bear on the Creek aggressors.

  Yet the general does not find it audacious. Rather, the letter is a tonic to his wounds. The general rises in bed and dictates a response. The call to battle appears in the September 14 edition of the Nashville Whig. In a letter addressed to “Fellow Soldiers,” Jackson makes a call for the men of Tennessee to volunteer and follow him into battle.2

  Enoch Parsons, a member of the Tennessee senate, proposes a bill authorizing the state to fund a war with the Creeks. He visits Jackson as a courtesy, informing the general that the bill will soon become law.

  “I mentioned,” Parsons would later write, “that I regretted very much that the general entitled to command, and who all would desire should command the forces of the state, was not in a condition to take the field.”

  “The devil in hell he is not,” Jackson replies through gritted teeth.

  The Benton brothers are forgotten for now. Andrew Jackson will deal with them later.

  A second letter from Jackson is published on September 24. As panic about another Creek uprising spreads through the south, Andrew Jackson makes it clear that he is ready for war. “The health of your general is restored,” he informs the people of Nashville, speaking in the third person. “He will command in person.”

  But Jackson is still frail. He returns to the Hermitage, his plantation ten miles outside Nashville, where he remains bedridden until the first week of October. The general wills himself to heal. The pain in his left shoulder is so great that he cannot wear his full military uniform, the weight of his epaulets causing extreme pain. His arm is still in a sling, making it impossible to mount a horse without help. Yet by the first week of October, just three weeks after being shot, Jackson is riding south to meet up with his new army. Colonel John Coffee has already led the force to the town of Fayetteville, Alabama, to await further orders.

  “He was still suffering pain and was looking pale and emaciated from the wound received in the famous duel with Benton,” one young lieutenant from Florida will later write of Jackson’s appearance. “He was mounted on Duke, the brave old war horse that afterwards bore his gallant master so proudly on many glorious battlefields. His graceful, manly form, usually erect, was now bent with pain.”

  “His pallid cheek gave evidence of his suffering. Yet there was something in the lineaments of his face, a slumbering fire in his pale blue eye,” twenty-one-year-old Richard K. Call will add, “that made me and everyone, recognize the presence of a great man.”

  Despite his misery, Jackson rides into Fayetteville on horseback. His army awaits. No longer an invalid, the wounded warrior is determined to once again lead men onto the field of battle.

  But as he dismounts to greet his troops, even Andrew Jackson has no idea just how bloody that field will be.

  Chapter Two

  MARCH 27, 1814

  HORSESHOE BEND, ALABAMA

  6:30 A.M.

  General Andrew Jackson prepares to “exterminate the hostiles.”

  After spending five months conducting raids against the Creek Indians in central Alabama, Jackson is glad spring has arrived. He stands atop a small rise on this chilly Sunday morning, peering out at the enemy encampment through his collapsible brass spyglass. Finally, after a winter of war with the United States, the Creek nation appears to be trapped. As the sun rises, Jackson discerns smoke from cooking fires in the makeshift village. Houses large enough for twenty to thirty Indians back up to a line of trees. It is hard to count the number of Creek warriors milling about, but it looks to be close to one thousand. Jackson can also see hundreds of women and young children on the premises.

  The one individual Jackson cannot see is William Weatherford. Since Fort Mims, the Creek leader has become notorious among Americans as the most feared and elusive chief in the South. Capturing or killing Red Eagle, as Weatherford is called by his warriors, would be devastating to the Indian cause. But this will not be easy. Just a few months ago, when U.S. forces thought they had Weatherford trapped, he boldly escaped by jumping his gray stallion off a tall cliff, falling into the Alabama River below.

  Andrew Jackson is determined there will be no such flight today. William Weatherford must be captured.

  The general wears full uniform, complete with epaulets and knee-high black riding boots. His jacket is slightly oversize, per Jackson’s preference. His left arm still throbs painfully, but despite the musket ball lodged near his shoulder, the danger of amputation has passed.

  All around him on this small hillside, Jackson’s army stands at the ready, two regiments of Tennessee volunteers and another of U.S. Army regulars. Combined with the mounted cavalry led by John Coffee, now a general, and the renegade Cherokee warriors who have chosen to help Jackson annihilate the Creek nation, the general commands almost four thousand men—heavily outnumbering the Creeks.
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  But the Indians have chosen their defensive position wisely, opting to make their stand on a peninsula with a horseshoe shape. Their village is nestled within, bordered on three sides by the Tallapoosa River, a raging torrent whose ice-cold waters run to twenty feet deep.

  Yet the river is not the most formidable obstacle protecting the Creek.

  Rather than stealth and concealment, the Indians have chosen to wage war like the white man. In an act of ingenious military engineering, they have constructed perhaps the greatest fortress Jackson or his men have ever seen. As the general now observes, a thick and powerful wall reaches from one side of the peninsula to the other, directly across the open mouth of the horseshoe. This is not a feeble and hastily constructed barricade, like the doomed white settlers built at Fort Mims. A zigzag row of thick, rough-hewn pine logs stacked eight feet high stretches 350 yards across the valley, from the Tallapoosa River on the west side to the Tallapoosa on the east. Mud has been packed into the spaces between each log to hold them fast. Wooden firing platforms allow the Creek to take steady aim, then drop below the wall to reload, while narrow portholes allow the defenders to fire without putting themselves in danger.

  The land in front of the wall has been denuded, offering no place for an attacking force to hide. Nothing but pine stumps and open ground lies between Jackson’s army and the fortress. In the event that Jackson’s army makes it across this perfect killing zone, sharpened branches jut outward from the wall to impale those who would attempt to climb over.

  A Creek village

  Andrew Jackson is deeply impressed.

  “It is difficult to conceive a situation more eligible for defense than the one they had chosen,” Jackson will later write of the Creek fortress.

  Making matters worse for Jackson is his army’s morale. There is deep division within the fighting force: the men from Tennessee are loyal to the general, but they are undisciplined and prone to rebellion.1 On the other hand, the men from the U.S. Thirty-Ninth Infantry Regiment despise Jackson because he is not one of them. Aware of this, the general places the Thirty-Ninth at the center of his column, to spearhead the first wave of assault on the wall. These regulars are the general’s best soldiers, and, as Jackson well knows, they just as surely will be the first to die.2

  With the Creek finally trapped right before his eyes, the general must find a way to win. He believes the answer lies in his artillery. Jackson has two cannon at his disposal, a six-pounder and a three-pounder. They are aimed at the right side of the Creek barricade and will open fire from a distance of just eighty yards. This is point-blank range for cannon. Surely these artillery pieces can blast a hole in the stout Creek fortress.

  The Tennessean uses the butt of his left hand to collapse his looking glass. There is nothing more to see. The artillery will not open fire for four more hours.

  General Andrew Jackson’s ingenious battle plan, however, is already in motion. The shape of the peninsula on which the Creek now make their stand resembles more than just a horseshoe. As shown on Jackson’s maps, it also looks very much like a noose.

  General Andrew Jackson is about to pull the knot.

  * * *

  Per Jackson’s orders, General John Coffee is two miles away, moving his mounted cavalry into position. They are on the south shore of the Tallapoosa, strung out in a long line that will soon encircle Horseshoe Bend. When General Jackson orders his frontal assault on the Creek wall, the only avenue for the Creek to escape will be the river. But as they turn to flee, they will be met by the full force of the U.S. Cavalry.

  Since answering the summons to war almost half a year ago, Coffee and Jackson have developed a very simple strategy for destroying the Creek: surround a village with cavalry, then send infantry forward to kill as many Indians as possible. There is little imagination to this sort of envelopment. The Tennesseans have succeeded through sheer ruthlessness.

  On November 3, 1813, Jackson ordered Coffee, newly promoted to brigadier general, to lead a group of nine hundred Tennessee mounted volunteers. This was the first act of vengeance for the massacre at Fort Mims. The engagement took place in central Alabama, in the heavily forested region between the Coosa River and the Georgia border. Coffee’s mounted force marched through the night in complete silence, prepared to launch a dawn attack against a Creek settlement known to contain a few hundred warriors and their families.

  “The surprise was complete,” First Lieutenant Richard K. Call will write in his journal. As personal aide to General Jackson, Call was not actually present at the fight, basing his version of events on the recollections of his fellow soldiers. “The town was entirely surrounded early in the morning. So soon as our men were seen on one flank, the Indian drum sounded the alarm, which was answered by the wild war whoop of 180 warriors, who sprang to their arms.”

  The Indian counterattack was quickly suppressed. In what would become known as the Battle of Tallushatchee, Coffee’s dragoons then surrounded the warriors and their families in their homes, killing 186 Creeks.3

  “Shot them like dogs,” is how Tennessee militia volunteer Davy Crockett will describe the battle.

  When bullets were not enough, the houses were set ablaze. In one instance during the fighting, forty-six Red Sticks became trapped inside a house. Each was burned alive.

  “The battle had ended in the village, the warriors fighting in their board houses, which gave little protection against the rifle bullets or musket ball,” First Lieutenant Call will write of the battle’s final outcome. Call traveled through the night to enter the village the following morning so that he might report back to Jackson.4

  “They fought in the midst of their wives and children, who frequently shared their bloody fate. They fought bravely to the last, none asking or receiving quarter, nor did resistance cease until the last warrior had fallen. Humanity might well have wept over the gory scene before us. We found as many as eight or ten dead bodies in a single cabin, sometimes the dead mother clasped the dead child to her breast, and to add another appalling horror to the bloody catalogue—some of the cabins had taken fire, and half consumed human bodies were seen amidst the smoking ruins. In other instances dogs had torn and feasted on the mangled bodies of their masters,” Call will report.

  That same morning, as Coffee’s men loot the village in search of food, they discover a potato cellar. “We were all as hungry as wolves,” Davy Crockett will write to his wife. “We found a fine chance of potatoes in it, and hunger compelled us to eat them, though I had a little rather not, for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on the day before had run down on them, and they looked like they had been stewed with fat meat.”

  Women had fought alongside their husbands, many times inflicting death with a bow and arrow. Inevitably, many were killed. One such woman lay dead, clutching her two-year-old son in her arms.

  The boy, however, has survived the slaughter. Along with the small group of prisoners captured at Tallushatchee, he was brought before Andrew Jackson at his headquarters along the Coosa. Impulsively, Jackson decides to adopt the child, named Lyncoya, as his own. “I send on a little Indian boy,” Jackson writes to his wife, Rachel, at home in Nashville. “All his family is destroyed.”

  Andrew and the former Rachel Jackson Robards have no children of their own. Theirs is a complex but deeply committed relationship. Rachel began publicly referring to herself as “Mrs. Jackson” long before their first wedding, in 1791. She did this while married to the violent and jealous Captain Richard Robards. Even after taking their vows, Andrew and Rachel were accused of bigamy because Rachel had failed to finalize her divorce from Robards. The two were legally married a second time in 1794. However, the charges of bigamy would be used to slander Andrew and Rachel Jackson for decades—with the ironic result of strengthening their bond. Upon Rachel’s death from heart failure in 1828, at age fifty-one, Jackson will write to John Coffee: “My mind is so disturbed … my heart is nearly broke.”

  Between 1794 and 1809, as the Jac
ksons entered their forties without offspring, they made the choice to pursue adopting a family. The first of three boys who would take on the Jackson name entered their lives in 1809. Andrew Jackson Jr. was a twin, and the son of Rachel’s brother, whom they adopted as a child. The reasons for splitting him from his twin are still uncertain, but it is believed that their mother was mentally ill. The young Creek child named Lyncoya will be the second son adopted by the Jacksons.5

  This is a seemingly odd turn of events, for the general is currently in the midst of destroying every last vestige of the Creek nation. The bulk of his fortune and property holdings have come through successful land grabs from the Cherokee and Chickasaw tribes in North Carolina and Tennessee. Jackson considers Indians inferior and easily exploited, similar to the one hundred Negro slaves who work his plantation home outside Nashville. And just as Jackson zealously offers rewards for runaway slaves and uses the lash to inflict punishment, he also sees nothing wrong with his men trapping Creek warriors inside their homes and slaughtering every last one. The massacre at Fort Mims made it quite clear that men like Andrew Jackson are honor bound to protect the American way of life and the nation’s westward expansion from tribes like the Creek.

  Rachel Jackson, wife of Andrew Jackson, in a painting by Louisa Catherine Stroebel

  However, in one very specific way, Andrew Jackson is just like the adopted boy named Lyncoya. The general’s father died in a logging accident three weeks before his son’s birth in 1767, his brother Robert died of smallpox, then his mother died of cholera while nursing American soldiers being held on board British prison ships during the Revolutionary War. Andrew Jackson was left orphaned and alone in the world at the age of fourteen. Thus, this hardscrabble frontiersman famous for his ruthlessness in business and war, fondness for settling disputes with fists and duels, and unrelenting determination to triumph in any situation, at all costs, has a singular sentimental weakness: family.