Rifles for Watie (36 page)

Jeff soon found out from Hannah, the news-bringer, what it was. They were going to leave the big house and go south to live for the duration of the war. With Blunt's Union army prowling about so closely, it was the safest thing to do.

“An' we ain't goin' as refugees, eithah,” she said proudly.

She explained that Mr. Jackman, an adjutant in one of the Watie regiments, had rented a plantation near Bonham, Texas, just south of Red River, and was sending the family, their slaves, and his herd of cattle there in style.

For days the Jackman women and the slaves packed supplies and personal belongings in several big tar-hubbed wagons for the long trip south. They were even taking Marjorie's grand piano. Already it was lying on its side in one of the wagons, heavily buttressed by hams from the smokehouses to keep it from becoming scratched.

“Yo's goin' wid us too, honey,” the old colored woman told Jeff. “Dey's fixed you a pallet in de back ob one ob de wagons.”

Not if I can help it, thought Jeff, twisting impatiently on the bed. The sooner he could return to the fort and be out of this hospitable rebel family's debt, the easier he would feel. He disliked this sailing under false colors.

Two nights before the Jackmans were due to start south, he decided to make the effort. Fort Gibson couldn't be much more than thirty miles north, and he had been feeling better lately.

He waited until everybody had gone to bed and the big house became quiet. Outside he could hear the whippoorwills whistling in the woods. Bracing himself, he sat up, sliding his legs over the side of the bed. He looked out the window toward the barn. He even had his getaway horse picked out, an old Roman-nose gray that had long since been turned out to pasture because of his age. Jeff knew he would carry him to the fort, riding bareback.

He took a couple of steps toward his clothes, hanging from a peg on the wall. Instantly he became so weak and dizzy that he toppled back onto the bed. For nearly five minutes he lay there, fuming at his accursed feebleness and gathering strength for another try.

It ended even more ingloriously. In the darkness he lost his balance on the stair leading to his bed and fell flat on his face. Shaken and downcast, he lay on the floor, panting.

At this rate he would never get back to the fort. Railing at himself for not having exercised more, he finally crept back to the bed. Looks like I'm going on a long trip to Texas, he told himself.

The Jackmans' final night in their beloved home came all too soon. Everything had been put in readiness for the leave-taking on the morrow. The wagons were loaded, the cattle herded into the family stockade, the small children bathed and put to bed early. Mrs. Jackman and the girls took one last farewell walk about the premises, pausing at the family well to bury their china in the yard. Joel, the aged Negro body servant, dug the hole with a spade, carefully placed the dishes in it, then gently covered them up.

Mrs. Jackman was taking with her half a trunkful of the new Confederate paper money. A stanch rebel patriot, she had earlier gone to Little Rock, Arkansas, and exchanged all her gold and $75,000 worth of State of Georgia bonds for the new Confederate paper specie. It was all the money she had in the world. Hers was no halfway loyalty. Resigned to the trip, Jeff pulled up his sheet for the last time in the big southwest bedroom and closed his eyes.

When he awoke next morning, the sun was two hours high. Blinking uneasily, he realized he had overslept. Everything about the plantation was ominously quiet. He knew Mrs. Jackman had planned to start at daybreak so they could reach the Texas Road by nightfall of the second day.

Alarmed, he sat bolt upright in bed. Swiftly, he looked out the window into the yard and caught his breath with relief. There sat the six tar-hubbed wagons, each packed and ready to go. But there were no teams being hooked into the traces, no jingle of harness from the barn, no bawling of cattle from the stockade. House, barn, corral, stockade—everything was terrifyingly still.

From somewhere within the vast silence of the big house, he heard the faint sound of feminine weeping. Now he knew there was trouble of some kind.

“Hannah. Hannah.” His voice echoed through the silent halls. Soon he heard heavy footsteps approaching. Hannah ambled into the room, despair in her face, a white dish towel clutched in one hand. Her eyes were wet. Sniffing noisily, she kept dabbing at them with the dishcloth.

“The Pins come last night,” she moaned. “Ouah slaves has all left us. Evahthing on de place has been stole. Yankee ahmy sho gonna git us now.”

The Pin Indians were Cherokee full-bloods sympathetic to the Union, who got their name from the fact they wore crossed pins on their coats or hunting shirts as a badge of their order. They had encouraged the Jackman slaves to steal all the stock and run it off toward Fort Scott, Kansas. The stables had been swept clean. Gone were the mule teams that were to pull the heavy wagons to Texas. Gone from the stockade were the cattle. The thieves had even stolen the pet saddle horses the girls were planning to ride to Texas. There sat the six loaded wagons all ready to roll, and not a hoof on the place to turn a wheel. And all the men were off at war!

Dry-eyed, Mrs. Jackman wasn't giving up.

“There's no use of our fretting about it, Mr. Bussey,” she said practically. “The milk is on the floor. But I've got to think of some way to get our wagons and our family to Texas.” She looked at him expectantly.

Behind her stood Miss Pat, red-eyed and inconsolable. The thieves had taken Barney. She had raised him from a colt. No other hand besides hers had ever fed him.

“Mam, haven't you got some old worn-out stock somewhere on the place that you could use to pull the wagons?” Forgetting the war, Jeff wanted desperately to help them. “If you went slowly, you might get through. With so much stealing going on, the families with the sorriest teams might have the best chance to make it. Nobody would want to steal any broken-down stock.”

Mrs. Jackman decided to try it. She and Miss Pat walked out on the range and found several old horses, two sick oxen, and a lame mule the deserting slaves had considered too worthless to steal. Old Joel helped Jeff put on his clothing and assisted him to the rear wagon. He felt faint after all the exercise and lay down on a pallet that had been fixed for him, his head aching dully. At this rate he would never get to Fort Gibson. It was hot in the wagon despite its canvas top, much hotter than in the house.

With a final look at her beloved home, Mrs. Jackman, in the front wagon, shook out her lines and clucked to her team. The caravan began slowly to move.

The long trip was pure torture to Jeff. Mile after mile he lay helpless, eating the thick dust and listening to the creak and groan of the wheels. The wheels lurched, jostling him cruelly. When Mrs. Jackman bought some oxen from a settler living along the trail, replacing their worn-out stock, their progress became faster.

Swinging around the San Bois Mountains, they came out on the Texas Road. The big thoroughfare was crowded that summer with wagons of Cherokee families going south to Red River to live near their menfolk for the war's duration. Jeff's malaria returned. His weight shrank. The Jackmans dosed him with everything, from a tonic they made of wild cherry and dogwood bark to a vial of quinine they secured from the apothecary at Boggy Depot. When the long trip finally stopped deep in the Choctaw country, he felt he never wanted to ride in a wagon again.

The journey ended unexpectedly one night at a deserted log house a quarter mile off the road, where they stopped to rest. They found a large garden, neatly weeded, and an orchard heavily laden with late peaches and early apples. There were a barn and several outbuildings, even a cool spring and a cellar close by.

“Why don't you move in?” a neighbor family advised. “You'll like it here. The Choctaws and Texas people are wonderful. They opened their corn cribs to us and helped us with our crops. The winters here aren't severe. Spring comes much earlier than at home. And it's safe. General Cooper's army usually winters at Fort Washita, close by.”

Despite her husband's earlier arrangements for them to live in Texas, Mrs. Jackman sent word to him they had decided to stay here for the present. With all their slaves and cattle gone, they wouldn't need a large place anyhow. With the help of their neighbors, the wagons were unloaded and the family moved in. Jeff was installed in a small shed room south of the house, overlooking the Texas Road.

It was a much different life from the one they had led in their luxurious two-story manor back near Briartown. Still too weak to help with the farm work, Jeff could only give directions. The women borrowed a small walking plow and, hitching one of the oxen to it, planted late corn and black-eyed peas. They worked all day in the field. The cinch bugs devoured nearly everybody else's corn, but not the Jackmans'.

“Everybody says our rows are so crooked, the bugs can't find our corn,” Jill laughed one night when she brought Jeff his supper.

Talk was always about the war. Stand Watie's name was on everybody's lips. The whole rebel country seemed to lean on him. Jeff was surprised to learn that he had been elected principal chief of the southern segment of the Cherokees and it was his responsibility to feed the destitute refugee families camped in the Choctaw country. Under his direction, the Confederate government furnished the refugees corn, wheat, molasses, and sugar when they were available from the rebel supply center at Boggy Depot. The Jackman women went there quite often for their supplies.

Hour after hour, Jeff lay on his stomach watching the traffic go by on the Texas Road. It increased so greatly in August of '63 that he knew another battle was looming. Company after company of marching rebel infantry and dusty rebel cavalry, accompanied by supply trains, ammunition wagons and large droves of sheep and longhorn cattle and small Mexican mules, came up from Texas, bound for the north. The Southern refugee women living all along the road saw the grim preparations, too, and with mounting dread thought of their fathers, brothers, and sweethearts.

When news came in late August of the defeat of the rebel General Steele at Perryville, fifty miles north of Boggy Depot, the women waited in fear for the mounted runner Watie always sent south with the casualty reports. When Jeff heard the battle tidings, he found his emotions queerly divided. He was secretly elated at the Union success and yet he didn't want the Jackmans hurt by it.

He was the one who first saw the rebel cavalryman turn into the Jackman driveway four days after the battle. It was an hour before dusk. The lone rider came trotting in from the north. He was gaunt and dirty; the buckskin horse he rode looked sweaty and hot.

The Jackman women had just come in from working in the garden. Janice saw the rider as she was bathing her face at the spring.

“Look, Mama,” she gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. They stood in a little cluster at the well, watching him ride up, a strange fascination in their faces, an odd paralysis in their legs. His horse shied nervously at the chickens, and, growling something unintelligible, the rider pulled rein about twenty feet away.

“Is this the Jackman home?” His brown, whiskery face looked like a weed-grown field.

Mutely the women nodded.

“Does a Mrs. Sophie Chavis live here?”

With a little cry of anguish, Sophie shrank back against the clapboard shed. Mrs. Jackman and Marjorie moved quickly to her side.

“I've bad news, mam. Your husband, Thomas Chavis, was killed in the Battle of Perryville. We didn't recover his body, mam. We was retreatin' too fast. The Feds will probably bury it, mam.”

Thus did the war serve the women on both sides.

There were happier times, too. One afternoon in early September, Mr. Jackman rode into the yard for his first visit since the family had arrived in the Choctaw country. Deliriously happy, his daughters hurled themselves upon him, hugging him joyfully.

“Stir around, Hannah, and help get something to eat, but only the Lord knows what it will be,” Mrs. Jackman called to black Hannah. Then turning to her husband, she embraced him, saying, “Why didn't you ring a bell, or blow a horn and let us know you were coming?”

After dinner was over and the girls had related all the exciting details of their flight by wagon from Briartown to the Choctaw country, they brought their father to see Jeff. He was a small, ragged, black-haired man with a drooping mustache. Soberly he told of the Confederate defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in the East and at Perryville and Fort Smith in their own theater of the war, about the terrific rate of desertion among Cabell's Arkansas troops and of the rebels' appalling lack of arms, clothing, medicine, and shoes. With the Mississippi River patrolled by Union gunboats, the hard-pressed Confederate government at Richmond could not supply their westernmost forces in the Indian country.

And then he told them something that made Jeff's heart jump like a quail exploding from a grass clump.

“I think we'll do much better in the spring,” Jackman added hopefully. “We've been getting a few new repeating rifles smuggled in from the North. Stand thinks he was worked out a way to get hundreds more. This rifle shoots seven times without reloading. It's lighter and more than a foot shorter than our muzzle-loaders. After you shoot, you crank a lever under the trigger. It opens the breach, kicks out the empty cartridge, pumps in a new cartridge, and you're ready to shoot again, all in the flash of a second.”

A panic came over Jeff as he heard Orff's new Spencer repeater described in such exact detail. Any rebel cavalry force equipped with a rifle like that would have a tremendous advantage, might lengthen the war five years or even bring the Union to its knees in this far-off Western sphere.

He knew he must stay longer in the rebel country. If the rebels were getting repeating rifles from some place in the North, it was his job to find out where they were coming from and stop it, if he could. But how was he going to, lying flat on his back in the Choctaw country, nearly a hundred miles below Fort Gibson?