The King's Salt

By David More

Its 1778, and the American Revolutionary War is three years old. In this fourth book of the award-winning Smithyman Saga, Sir Thomas Smithyman and his friends still consider themselves honor-bound to remain loyal. They continue their bitter civil war against former friends, neighbours and family for four more years, trying to regain their homes and land in what has become New York State. But Thomas and friends, his wife Nancy and their children, along with his stepmother, the fierce Mohawk Princess Laura Silverbirch and her war chief brother, Matthew, lose everything to the triumphant Patriots. Now refugees, they must fight betrayal by a thankless government, despair, hunger and isolation to reconstruct their lives and create a new place for themselves and their children in the northern wilderness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jan 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781490787039

David More

David was educated at University of Waterloo (BA History) and Queens University (MPA and MA History). He is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers, and an award-winning historical novelist. A sailor since the age of 13, he has always loved fooling around with boats, and constructed a 32-foot yacht from scratch. David is married and has a daughter, and lives with his wife, Donna, near the waterfront in Kingston, Ontario, in an 1850s limestone house that they are continuously improving. David is proud to have logged several weeks as a volunteer, deckhand, cook and occasional helmsman for the square-rigger St. Lawrence II, the platform for Kingstons highly successful traditional youth sail-training program.

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THE

KING’S SALT

DAVID MORE

©

Copyright 2018 David More.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-8698-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-8699-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-8703-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931348

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… I have eaten of the King’s salt, and, therefore, I conceive it to be my duty to serve with unhesitating zeal and cheerfulness, when and wherever the King or his Government may think to employ me.

– Sir Arthur Wellesley (later, Duke of Wellington)

ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover Photograph: courtesy Brigantine, Inc

Map One:   Some Locations described in The King’s Salt

Map Two:   Approximate routes of General Sullivan’s 1779 Campaign and Sir Thomas Smithyman’s 1780 Campaign

FOREWORD

A note to my readers about usurping Major Ross’s accomplishments in the name of McDonnell, and other departures from the strict script of history that will be obvious to some.

I simply must bow my head in humble and sincere acknowledgement of the amazing feats of all real men and women my stories are based on. Some people will be more recognizable than others in these pages. I was more torn than usual while writing this book between the actual, astonishing history – most of it virtually unknown to me when I started – and the need to maintain a story line that captures the historical essence, while necessarily synthesizing some people and places to make it into a story. Many historians, of course, are humbling and inspirational masters of the writing craft.

The result, in The King’s Salt, stays within the boundaries of my own rather arbitrary personal standards of real and not-real history. I can only hope that as a result of my endeavors, some people are impelled to go and learn about the real people behind my books. That they will instantly recognize them, I have no doubt whatsoever.

I must also confess to a certain amount of geographic fudging regarding the exact location of Snarlington. Locals will know that the view of the Adirondacks from New Johnstown (Cornwall), the infighting over naming the town (Brockville), the river suitable for milling (Gananoque) and Sir John Johnson’s house on the hill (Williamstown) are not all in the same, mythical place. At least folks in those towns will all find something of themselves in the story!

To a great extent, and unlike the rather uncritical appreciation shown by Americans to founders of the United States, Canadians today stand on the shoulders of unappreciated, often maligned, and forgotten giants, whatever their origins: Molly and her brother Joseph Brant, Sir William and Sir John Johnson, John Butler, and countless others, notably including René-Hippolyte Laforce and Jean-Baptiste Bouchette along with thousands of nameless Canadien bateau men and voyageurs. They are all heroes and deserve better, although statues of a select few of those Valiants recently erected in a prominent place in Canada’s capital city have gone some distance towards mitigating this rather typical Canadian self-abnegation.

At the time of writing, Canadian historian Gavin Watt is a modern-day giant in the field of meticulous reconstruction of forgotten daily events during the Revolution. I had the priviledge of meeting Gavin at the 1812 Escape of the Royal George Commemoration in Bath, Ontario, in 2012. I have appropriated considerable detail from his Loyalist histories. I hope he finds this tolerable, for his various accounts truly inspired me. The story of the British-American, French-Canadian and Aboriginal Loyalists who fought for King and Parliament, some making enormous, indeed, the ultimate sacrifices, fighting to get back lands they considered were stolen from them during the American Revolution, seems not particularly highly valued in Canada, generally speaking, and is of course largely uninteresting to folks in the United States. Without the bitter struggle of those loyal folks to resist repeated attempts to ‘liberate’ them by their cousins south of the border, Canada would most likely not exist at all, at least not west of the Ottawa River.

Finally, one hopes that the Orendas of Molly Brant and her brother Joseph and the Johnson clan, upon whose lives I have loosely based those of Laura and Matthew Silverbirch and the Smithymans, are resting in peace, somewhere on the broad, sunny back of the Great Turtle, perhaps distantly amused by the fact that their Mohawk descendants and many other indigenous peoples are still arguing about whether it is better to vest land ownership in individuals, as the white folks do, or in the clan and nation, as traditional aboriginal culture holds. In any case, it is largely because of their courage, endurance and patience that there remains any discussion at all in the present day about these great moral issues.

I hope the small volumes of this Smithyman Saga assist in bringing people’s terrible, personal struggles before, during and after the real first American Civil War back to the consciousness of all thoughtful citizens.

David More, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, January 2018

DEDICATION

T his novel is dedicated to history teachers everywhere, at every level, but to a few in particular who encouraged and inspired me. Professor Jane Errington, Ph.D., Queen’s University, author of The Lion, The Eagle and Upper Canada , among many other titles, has been profoundly supportive, encouraging my research interests and reminding me frequently that there is always something new to learn about high-quality writing. Professor Errington supervised my History M.A. and continues to guide my doctoral studies. I took an undergraduate course at University of Waterloo from Professor Royce MacGillivray, Ph.D., Harvard, now retired, author of the Dictionary of Glengarry Biography . He made me realize I could actually be a decent scholar - and that I could write reasonably well about history. They were simply the best history teachers I ever had, but Honorable Mention should also go to my Grade 10 teacher at Frontenac Secondary School, Bill Hunt ( Booze, Boats and Billions ) and to my Grade 11 history teacher at St. Andrew’s College, Jamie Mainprize. I have been very fortunate.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

F irst, to my readers, thanks for taking the time to contact me – you make the creative effort worthwhile! To all my editors – behind every successful writer is a great editor is an aphorism that truly applies in my case. Your careful attention to detail and to tone are invaluable and irreplaceable support for this author in creating great stories. To the librarians at Queen’s University’s Stauffer Library and W.D. Jordan Special Collections, and to archivists at Queen’s University, Library and Archives Canada and the Archives Nationales du Québec at Université Laval , who have all been unfailingly helpful in my often-obscure inquiries. To Oscar Milan, who owns the Novel Idea independent bookstore in Kingston. To my supportive friends and, last but not, of course, least, to my wife and daughter. Thank you .

I would also like to acknowledge that

the land under our home in Kingston is known to be traditional territory

of the Anishinabe and Haudenosaunee peoples.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1     A Preview of Disaster; The Last Battle, August 1782

Chapter 2     Liverpool, Nova Scotia, 1777

Chapter 3     Mohawk Encampment, Fort Niagara, Spring 1778

Chapter 4     Butler’s Rangers Encampment, Fort Niagara, Spring 1778

Chapter 5     Death and Lies Along the Mohawk, Spring 1778

Chapter 6     The War Comes to Wyoming Valley, 1778

Chapter 7     Sullivan’s Campaign of Terror, Iroquoia, 1779

Chapter 8     Rendezvous on Carleton Island November 1779

Chapter 9     To Salty Sint Eustatius, November/December 1779

Chapter 10   Diadem A-Hunting, December 1779

Chapter 11   Burning the Valleys May-November 1780

Chapter 12   The Burgeoning of Carleton Island December 1781

Chapter 13   The Grand Tour Comes to Detroit, Autumn 1782

Chapter 14   A Dreadful Peace, 1783

Chapter 15   The Beaver Club, Montreal, Winter 1783

Chapter 16   Starting Over, 1784

Chapter 17   Adieu to Lake Ontario, November 1784

Chapter 18   Planting Hate at Smithyman Hall Mohawk River Valley, August 1785

Chapter 19   Rotten Fruit from the King

July 1786

Chapter 20   The Starving Time, 1788

Chapter 21   The Ruskin Patent, March 1788

Chapter 22   Snarlington A-building, 1789

Chapter 23   Cruel Fortune, 1790-91

Chapter 24   ‘We Claim by Conquest’ – Wabash River, Ohio Territory November 1791

Chapter 25   Brotherly Warnings, Grand River December 1792

Chapter 26   Port and Cigars, Chateau St-Louis, Quebec City, 1793

Chapter 27   Rumors, Lies, New Rules – Kingston, Upper Canada 1794-5

Chapter 28   The White Sickness

Kingston, 1795

Chapter 29   Where is Home? Decision Made, 1796

Chapter 30   The Western Tour – Promises and Serpents 1797

Chapter 31   Revenge Moves North New Corinth, New York, 1797-8

Chapter 32   The Captive and the Truth Snarlington, 1798

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CHAPTER 1

A Preview of Disaster; The Last Battle, August 1782

The men who fought in the Battle of Blue Licks were as well qualified from experience to face the Indians as any body of men that were ever collected.

Captain Robert Patterson, Fayette County Militia

… burn’t 3 Houses which was part of the Fort but the Wind being contrary prevented it having the desired effect, kill’d upwards of 300 Hogs, 150 head of Cattle, and a number of Sheep, took a number of Horses, pull’d up and destroyed their Potatoes, cut down a great deal of their Corn, burn’t their Hemp and did other considerable damage …

Report by Captain William Caldwell, Butler’s Rangers,

Commander of British and Allied forces at the Battle of Blue Licks

B rigadier-General Sir Thomas Smithyman knew that the relentless, candle-melting Montreal summer was the very least of his worries – his soldiers were not going to freeze to death from lack of firewood, for instance – and there was almost nothing he could do about it, in any case. But the accumulating weight of it, day after endless day, was making him incapable of rational thought – as shatterbrain’d as any village idiot! Salty sweat irritated him, running down his face to sting his eyes and into the corners of his mouth. If he didn’t mop it off regularly, the drops threatened to splotch and ruin his correspondence to the Governor. The invasive heat had besieged the town in a dome so hot that he now half-expected to see people dying from the yellow fever in the streets, as if it were Cartagena or Jamaica. It had bullied its way to occupy the front of his mind and now sometimes seemed to be the only thing that mattered. Even the damp, bone-penetrating cold of London during the previous winter had not affected him as badly as this.

Alone in his office, he hated to admit that he was feeling sorry for himself. It felt too much like admitting failure. 1782 was the seventh year of the American war. It had not gone well, especially for those who had remained loyal American subjects of His Britannic Majesty, George III.

Holy old bald-headed monkeys! he blasphemed out loud. Sighing in exasperation, for the third time this morning he tossed aside a badly cut quill for his orderly to remove.

Apparently the Army cannot even find me a clerk competent enough to cut a decent pen! Johannes knew how to do this properly. Why in God’s Holy Name did I ever let him go off to bloody, damned Fort Niagara?

He did not pick up a fourth pen, but sat, lost in thought and sweating.

In spite of his best efforts, Sir Thomas could not keep his mind from wandering into daydreams about his childhood, growing up half-wild in the freewheeling atmosphere of his father’s vast estate on the northwest frontier of British New York. Forced reluctantly into exile to avoid arrest and imprisonment as a Tory, at the age of thirty-four he was now feeling careworn, and often found his thoughts straying back to better days. Some of his fondest memories, apart from a couple of long-lost loves, included racing his imported horses at father’s always-riotous games days or in the annual Albany fairs. The tormenting thought often intruded that some ignorant Continental Army officer, perhaps even Appelbaum himself, was now abusing his beloved chestnut, Scimitar. Those had been wonderful days – a vanished Eden – even if it was just the thrill of poring over newly arrived copies of the Racing Calendar. It never mattered that they were outdated by as much as a year before reaching Smithyman Hall. This Monday morning, August 19, Sir Thomas continued to make feeble and largely unsuccessful attempts to push such sweet memories aside. He wondered for the thousandth time if his present existence was a comeuppance for his previous happiness.

The repetitive mental cruelty of British Army paperwork certainly constituted a form of Sisyphean punishment. But Sir Thomas’s suffering was compounded, on this and most recent mornings, by a variety of additional burdens, including the heat. Montreal often saw late summer heat waves, but this one had been unbroken even by a long-hoped-for thunderstorm. They had just sweltered through another airless and, for Thomas and many others, sleepless Sunday night, followed by the third cloudless Monday morning in a row. The sky remained stubbornly veiled in a thick, watery, grey haze.

More abstract than the weather, but even more oppressive for American Loyalists like Sir Thomas and his wife, Nancy, the Revolutionary War was winding down to its dismal, final curtain. They both easily endured simple physical hardship and deprivation, having done so many times since the outbreak of fighting so long ago. That was inconsequential. Forced inactivity, though – especially in the face of impending catastrophe – felt like the creeping paralysis of a living death. It made them both frantic. Sir Thomas was commander of the volunteer regiment he had financed on credit since ’76 – two battalions raised from his former tenants and friends – and he yearned with all his heart to get back into some kind of action to help him forget the terrible course of history. But, blow coming upon major blow, recent news had pitilessly lashed the Smithymans.

Cornwallis had surrendered his army at Yorktown the previous October. Then, Lord North’s wartime Government in London had fallen in March. Peace negotiations with the rebel Americans were underway in Paris. And this steamy morning’s garrison routine remained as tedious and soul-destroying as ever. Sir Thomas willed himself to stare at the army clerk’s fair copy of his 300th or so weekly regimental report, which he had scribbled out last Saturday. His own handwriting had always been execrable, albeit mostly legible. As a youth, he had been a poor, easily-distracted student with an indulgent (up to a point) and powerful father, but in this life he had to ensure that Spencer had copied it letter-perfect, for it would shortly come to the exacting attention of Sir Thomas’s superior officer, Swiss-born General Frederick Haldimand, Military Governor of Quebec.

How has my life come down to meticulously executing such boring, useless work?

Even the miserable frustrations of having to handle covert, delicate, discussions with self-important, hotheaded popinjays like the Vermont Allens, on the vanishingly faint hope they would bring their territories back to the King, was more interesting. Or directing the intricate American spy network Haldimand had asked him to set up in 1778. Sir Thomas was also the Crown’s Superintendent and Inspector General of the Six Nations Indians and those in the Province of Quebec. Like his father, he very much enjoyed their company, not least because his loving, fierce stepmother Laura Silverbirch and her warrior brother Matthew were themselves Mohawk. A council with their people would be stimulating, at least, complaints and all! Instead of such things, he bent his head to his duty, and read his report back from his clerk’s neatly scripted version.

Your Excellency, I beg to inform you that the local units of the Queen’s Royal Regiment of New York which I have the honor to command have been fully employed this past week in ...

Some days were much worse than others. Today, he could hardly stand it. He set the page down on a stack of others, rose and strode heavily to the open windows of his office, the heels of his polished high boots resonating on the maple plank floor. He leaned outward against the sill, attempting to find some scrap of breeze, and closed his eyes against the heat. Six years of war had passed since he had last seen the luxurious interior of Smithyman Hall, his beloved Mohawk Valley inheritance, every room of it marked by the luxury, grace and style that had been his father’s hallmarks, even on the frontier. His own beautiful horses were gone, stolen by his enemies. His former racing stables now sheltered pigs and chickens, and the lopsided, spavined, sickly, underfed nags owned by the dregs of the so-called officers of Washington’s so-called Continental Army. His ancient oaks and beeches felled for firewood. Reports said the elegant, gleaming, curving central staircase balustrade had been spitefully hacked and gouged, disfigured by patriot officers’ swords and blamed, with their usual sly dishonesty, on the Mohawks. Sir Thomas had snorted in derision when he heard that – the liars blamed everything they could on the Indians. As if the native people would deliberately scar the treasured home of their most trusted friends and family. It was ludicrous! Smithyman Hall was a place where Indians had always been respected and gifted, housed and fed. There they had gathered around Sir William’s Council Fire – the only one outside their homeland in Iroquoia – by the hundreds, even thousands, for a quarter of a century. Until the rebel vandals came. Smithyman Hall’s peacocks, that his wife and sister and Mohawk stepmother cherished, slaughtered with bayonets to befeather Yankee Doodle Dandy’s hats! It made him want to spit. As he often did since his father’s death, Sir Thomas spoke in his mind to Sir William, who had also known the hardships of battle and the challenges of diplomacy, who had arrived on the frontier from Ireland with almost nothing and who had worked his way to a fortune.

I was a disappointing son, I know it, Father. But I have paid. Believe me, I have paid. My little boy is dead. Nancy had to flee Albany in winter with him and so he never got a chance. And how can I rid myself of the blame for letting her leave the children behind and to come with me through those filthy battlefield camps the next year, when we all were so foolish as to think we would be going home victorious? I cannot even mourn him without driving her into fresh anguish. I fear she’ll never get over it. Nancy’s brother Samuel lost his leg and nearly his life at bloody Oriskany. What will he do now? How can I help him, when everything I own has been confiscated? My half-brother, Adam, killed there, too, under my command. Having to tell mother of his loss was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. So many of our friends dead, at the hands of neighbors turned rabid, or exiled from all they held dear, as Nancy’s father was from New York.

Thomas had been staring southward through the window, towards the invisible, far-away Adirondack Mountains, that had once been home. His eyes dropped to the stone-hard, dusty streets below, where a few drooping horses clopped heavily along, driven by equally oppressed-looking wagoners. He turned and dropped heavily back into his chair. Six years of the most dreadful blood and suffering. All of it wasted in a futile attempt simply to get his country and his lovely manor home back. And it had all come down to this. He added some purely mental editorial content to his report to Haldimand.

… ditch-digging, cutting God-damned firewood for the regular army and guarding treasonous American prisoners who so richly deserve to be turned over to the tender mercies of the Mohawks. Making me the chief digger, head woodchopper and senior gaolkeeper.

He had been forced to remove his heavy scarlet uniform coat early that morning, but he continued to drip, and kept the paperwork at arm’s length to avoid blotching the sentences. Grinding his teeth, he carefully finished reading his report and the other letters and scratched his spiky, cramped signature at the bottom of each of them, then recalled his clerk.

Spencer, put my seal on those and get ‘em to His Excellency today, without fail, he growled, or you’ll find yourself living on Prisoners’ Island guarding the stinking Yankees! Inform Major Crowell that I do not wish to be disturbed for an hour. And kindly shut the door behind you, Corporal.

He stood and walked across the floor to stare glumly out once more across the heat-shimmering rooftops of Montreal. He regretted granting Johannes leave to join Butler’s Rangers, even temporarily, in a fit of generosity after he had returned from London with his promotion to Brigadier-General. The man was a brilliant secretary and bookkeeper. Sir Thomas had never had to check the dot of every i and the cross of every t of Johannes’ work like he did this Spencer’s, and neither had his father. He mopped his brow with a sopping linen handkerchief, for all the good it did. He even found himself envying his uncle Johannes for a moment. These were unworthy thoughts, he knew.

Johannes Pfalz was an orphan refugee and former indentured servant from Germany. Billy had married his older sister, Katrina, who became Thomas and his sister Anna Christine’s mother. She had died giving Thomas life. Billy had mourned her deeply, but he was the sort of man who strongly desired the company of women, and he had quickly remarried, to Mohawk princess Laura Silverbirch, who had then raised Katrina’s children and several of her own by Billy, with great love and devotion. At present, Uncle Johannes’ own wife and children were barricaded safely in New York, the last loyal British enclave in the former colonies that now called themselves the United States of America. His stepmother and his Mohawk uncle Matthew were in the west, helping to keep the King’s Iroquois allies on side.

Johannes was also somewhere out west, and probably still killing rebels. Thomas wished he were back in the fighting, too, and to hell with this command! His rank and positions now seemed merely crutches to help him endure the excruciating dénouement of a war that others had lost. Bile rose in his throat every time he thought about the arrogance and ignorance of most British officers, deliberately deaf to the advice of seasoned frontier warriors like himself and flat-out horrified by even little bands of war painted native bogeymen. Thomas shook his head wryly, realizing he was thinking about redcoats much the same way those Boston Tea Partiers did – and he was a redcoat – knighted by the King! In fact, though, like his troops, he’d much preferred the forest green coats General Carleton had first approved for his regiment in 1776, when Sir Thomas and the 200 stalwarts who would become his first Royal Yorkers had staggered out of the forest near Montreal, starving from their three-week wilderness trek across the mountains to join the British. Most of all, he wished he were back with Scimitar, riding and hunting in the peaceful backwoods. Nancy had always been woman enough to push erotic memories of former lovers far into the background, although the war had harmed their relationship too, perhaps irreparably.

But, oh, Father, I remember how proud you were of your own scarlet coat when King George made you a general – how you had it tailored in London, because you could, and trimmed it with as much gold braid as you dared, and how you looked for excuses to wear it and your cocked hat. You said it gave you stature at those big Indian Councils of yours – as if you needed it.

He smiled a bit at that boyhood memory of General Billy Smithyman, but it vanished in the other, newer images of home that flooded in after it. He dreaded returning this evening to Nancy and her – admit it, Thomas – entirely justifiable and highly vocal unhappiness at remaining a refugee. Six, no, it was already seven years ago, she and her family (and his) had basked in near-universal esteem at the pinnacle of New York’s glittering colonial society. The events of those years were not his doing or his fault. She knew that too, but still she ranted, dammit! Yes, he was feeling sorry for himself, and it disgusted him. Elsewhere, he knew, men were still fighting a different war, a seemingly more honorable, if similarly pointless war, in the hot summer of 1782.

* * * * *

More than 700 miles southwest of Montreal, the Licking River murmured and whispered its way around three sides of a pale sandstone hill on the similarly hot and sunny western slope of the Appalachian Mountains. The hill was one of dozens carved out of the Cumberland Plateau by the river’s serpentine descent, adding its fair share to the silt the river carried eighty miles northwest, down to the broad, beautiful Ohio River.

A small force of armed men lay quietly near the top of the little hill, a couple of hundred feet above the river. They comprised fragments from a variety of fighting units, although none were regular British army troops. Several dozen of them, including the leader of the raiders, Captain William Caldwell, were members of Butler’s Rangers, a regiment composed of refugees loyal to the King who had been driven, on pain of death, from their farms and homes in New York and Pennsylvania. The Rangers wore faded and patched dark green woolen jackets with red facings. They were stained with black powder smoke, sweat, and blood, and adorned with worn, scratched pewter buttons. Grimy white cross-belts, black peaked caps, and woolen breeches that had once been white but were now ragged, greasy and grey-blotched also marked them as seasoned campaign veterans.

A handful of other men belonged to Sir Thomas Smithyman’s regiment. Their worn-out, scarlet coats had mostly weathered to a sort of pale rose color, but they were otherwise similarly dressed. Half a dozen more men were British Indian Department officers, wearing buckskin jackets. They, too, ultimately reported to Sir Thomas. But most of the 240 men in the party were Indigenous warriors from several Indian nations, mostly naked except for a loincloth, war paint and feathers. Everyone, regardless of origin, wore Indian-style moccasins and leggings. The early afternoon summer sun was very hot on their backs. Fully a third of the men had walked several hundred miles to arrive at this place. Some had come twice that far. Nearly all of them were well concealed in two deep, heavily treed ravines running down the side and backside of the hill. None could hear the soft noise of the river, but they were listening intently to the tone of unintelligible muttering voices being borne up to them on the warm wind.

Grouped by themselves a small distance from the others, five of the men on the hilltop at Blue Licks had been comrades for years, bonded tightly during the war by mutual suffering. Refugee Loyalists Johannes Pfalz and James Haye, along with James’ Ojibway son, Raven’s Claw, Mohawk War Chieftain Matthew Silverbirch and his half-Mohawk nephew Luke, Billy Smithyman’s son, had all volunteered for this particular expedition. Sir Thomas had reluctantly seconded Pfalz to the Rangers, and at Fort Niagara Johannes had stepped forward to participate in this raid. For him and the others, the war was not over, although in the east, the main body of Queen’s Yorkers and their officers now had nothing much to do except loathsome garrison duty, maintaining fortifications and socializing, which required the routine consumption of enormous amounts of liquor.

The men on the hill all had very personal reasons to fight the rebels, except for the younger Raven’s Claw, who was getting to know his father and proving himself on the warpath. James Haye had lost his wife and children and farmstead. Pfalz’s New York farm had been confiscated. Matthew and Luke had seen their entire homeland along the Mohawk River stolen by Americans and allied Oneida tribesmen. Three of the men were old friends or family to Sir Thomas, and had been to his father, who had died just before the revolution. Early in the war, the spiteful Patriots had desecrated Sir William’s grave, scattering his bones and hair about the sacred ground of the church that he had built at his own expense in the Mohawk Valley. This news had permanently disgusted and enraged them all.

Over time, the men had developed a certain bloody-minded affection for the challenges of the campaign trail. Pfalz, Haye and Silverbirch had each learned their first warfare lessons more than twenty years before, while serving under General Billy Smithyman against the French in 1755. Luke had been a warrior since his first action under his uncle Matthew’s leadership ten years before. Their group lay bunched a few feet apart, just past the crest of the hill and near the head of the westernmost ravine.

Matthew was remembering his first battle. He was then a boy of fifteen, fighting beside his uncle, Emperor Marten, perhaps the greatest Mohawk warrior chieftain of all time. That was at Lake George, north of Albany, during the war with the French. The Mohawks were allied then, as now, with the British, largely a result of personal diplomacy by transplanted Irish fur trader cum British Army militia General Billy Smithyman. The Mohawks had come to Lake George to fight under Billy’s leadership. In that battle, a veteran French general surprised and cut off Smithyman’s force. Early that day, with their backs to the lake and nowhere to retreat, War Chief Marten had died in battle. The desperate stand of the remaining British and allied forces against the French and their Indian allies had won an unexpected victory, the only British victory for the first three years of the French and Indian war. Billy had been badly wounded during the battle, but after a daylong, bloody fight from behind an improvised abattis barricade of felled trees and overturned wagons, his motley army of militiamen and Indians had not only beaten off the French attack, they had captured General Dietrich. Billy had received his baronetcy for it, and one for his son. Matthew smiled to himself, remembering that he had been so nervous when the cannons first bellowed, that he had held himself up only by grabbing a sapling.

But today, the odds are on our side, not on theirs.

Matthew had long since been a professing Christian of the Church of England, and had even become a scholar, with a translation of the Gospel of St. Luke into Mohawk to his credit, but today it was purely Mohawk blood singing in his veins, and it was the warm breath of the Great Spirit that he felt, blowing life into the soldiers on the hill. Today, Matthew was Thayendanegea in war paint, not the young religious acolyte, nor the prosperous farmer he had once been along the banks of the faraway Mohawk River.

The men lying nearby heard him speak out loud, in grim-toned Mohawk, "Today will be a day for you, my uncle Theyanoguin, and for you, Brother Billy, Io’tonhwahere, and for your son, Thomas, Onen’ta’onwe, and for my sister, Laura, Konwatsi-Tsiaenni. Today, we will get back a small payment for all that these white savages took from you, as they have stolen everything from the rest of our people." His three companions understood completely that Matthew was speaking to his guiding spirit Orenda, and they displayed no signs of overhearing what they knew to be a private moment.

The previous year, General Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown marked the collapse of the British southern campaign to subdue the rebels. The empire’s earlier Northern Campaign had been defeated at Saratoga in 1777. As the Government in London absorbed the news of this ignominious and shocking defeat and pondered what to do next, senior military commanders in the theatre reduced active hostilities, pending new orders. Haldimand had directed Sir Thomas Smithyman to maintain a defensive posture in the east. In any case, there was really nothing left in that district to attack. Since Oriskany in ‘77, his forces and Indian allies had left little but blackened chimneys standing anywhere in the thousands of square miles of their former New York homelands north and west of Albany.

However, no one had yet received any direct orders for an actual cease-fire. In the west, the Upper Country, Loyalist units at Forts Niagara and Detroit, along with a few regular troops and hundreds of Indians, knew perfectly well that there were still juicy patriot targets left standing on the western frontier. From Lake Erie south to the Ohio River, thousands of Shawnee and Delaware warriors and those from a dozen other western nations also refused to accept that the Ohio River valley now belonged to American settlers. There, ‘Patriots’ notwithstanding, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 still applied. As far as the Indigenous peoples were concerned, it all remained Indian Territory, proclaimed into law by George III. Billy Smithyman, too, had confirmed it as Indian Territory at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in ’68.

In 1774, The Quebec Act for a third time reaffirmed that the entire Indian Territory was under the protection of the King’s representatives. Only appointed King’s officials could legally buy and sell the land from its original owners. On paper, this essentially closed the western settlement door to His Majesty’s white colonists and, not incidentally, diverted most of the Ohio Valley fur trade back towards loyal Montreal and away from increasingly disloyal Albany. All of these measures, of course, simply amounted to theoretical British obstacles placed in the path of the very real torrents of settlers flowing west across the mountains and occupying whatever land they desired. Such paper rules imposed by London simply infuriated half a million Americans. For many, it had been the last straw. Land speculating classes and individual settlers alike, they had rapidly moved beyond restraint or recall. Even before the official proclamation of the Quebec Act, thirteen of Britain’s seventeen North American colonies were at war with the mother country.

Through the early part of the rebellion the western Indians continued, mostly alone, to defend and enforce the settlement line against encroaching settlers and organized American militia forces. Much of the struggle consisted of the very grim business of tiny skirmishes, burning down individual settler cabins, killing, scalping and capturing the inhabitants, and driving survivors back east into, and across, the mountains. These raids were usually followed by American retaliations in kind against the nearest Indian villages. At the request of the tribes, and the Loyalists, British commanders in Detroit and Niagara occasionally were able to bring to bear larger forces in the region, and the men concealed on the hill at Blue Licks constituted one of those.

In the center of the ambush, to the immediate left of Matthew’s party, nearly two hundred Indian warriors waited. They were mostly Wendats, Hurons driven from their homeland more than a century earlier. They had re-established themselves in small communities scattered from Detroit to the Ohio Valley. None were happy to see settlers intrude into their lands without their permission. On the far left of the hidden force, the rest of Captain Caldwell’s company of green-coated Butler’s Rangers, along with the British Indian Department officers, concealed themselves in the brush.

To pass the time, while they all patiently waited for the Americans they could see and hear to enter the trap, Matthew had been quietly telling his friends a story about Sir Thomas Smithyman’s journey down the Ohio more than fifteen years before. At the time, Thomas had been a stubborn, love-struck teenager smitten with a runaway disguised as a female stable hand. His outraged father sent him away under the care of veteran scout and Indian trader Henry Chilton, with the object of toughening Thomas up and making him more responsible. Thomas was Sir William’s heir, who must be able to handle his hard-won estate. Johannes had been Thomas’s boyhood tutor and knew the story well, of course, but young Raven’s Claw was wide-eyed, picturing the red-coated, grim-faced, gold-laced Colonel he had seen commanding the Queen’s Royal Yorkers at Oriskany, as a boy adventurer hundreds of miles from home.

… he and Henry Chilton were camped a little farther down the Ohio from here in ’65, when Kickapoos and Mascoutens ambushed them. Both of them nearly lost their scalps …

A nearby warrior interrupted his reverie. A young Miami war chief named Mishikinakwa was one of four observers standing and casually leaning on their muskets, in plain sight but out of rifle shot of the Americans below. He commented in a low, exultant voice, without looking at his companions, I see they are coming, now, Brother. One of the officers has just galloped across the ford and is shouting back at them and waving his sword. The rest are following.

The Indian lookouts on the hilltop closely watched the Kentucky and Virginia militiamen fording the river half a mile away, in impetuous pursuit of the raiding party. They felt growing satisfaction that their simple ruse had worked. Ranger Captain Caldwell had led his party’s initial, provocative raid on the outpost known as Bryan’s Station. They had surrounded it for a day or two, destroying crops and killing livestock, but after marksmen within the fort had shot several over-bold warriors, Caldwell withdrew his little force to where the remainder of the party waited. He had ordered a well marked, and thus well baited, trail left behind them as they pulled back.

Two weeks before, Caldwell’s detachment of Rangers and Indian Department officers had met with many angry warriors in the mood for war during a large council meeting on the north side of the Ohio. Matthew’s party, along with some other Iroquois warriors and some Royal Yorkers, had joined them there from Niagara. The intent had been to meet and organize a major assault on the town of Wheeling, Virginia, on the American side of the Ohio. But the rumored threat of an American preemptive attack under the impressive Colonel Clark had reached them first. Most of the Indians had dispersed, to warn and protect their own villages. Caldwell and the remaining members of his party suspected the actual risk of any American attack was low; the rumors had probably been spread deliberately. In any case, they, at least, had not come this far for nothing. As they watched the Shawnee leave the council to return to their villages, Caldwell muttered to War Chief Silverbirch, Matthew, the British bloody Army may have lost the entire southern campaign at Yorktown last year, and Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne may have done the same in the north back in ’77, but for people like us, there is only one acceptable outcome in this war: to win. The only way we shall regain our homes from those thieves who have stolen them is through victory. He was preaching to the converted.

But Wheeling was too big a place for Caldwell’s now much-smaller force to attack. After some discussion he targeted Bryan’s Station, in what would eventually become the State of Kentucky. He split his forces, and the attack on the little collection of fortified houses linked by a wooden palisade naturally stung the local militia into an angry response, as it was intended to do. Those Virginian and Kentuckian men were now determined to intercept and kill the insolent intruders before they crossed back to the north side of the Ohio, or die trying. It was a prescient thought. The patriot horsemen were forty miles from the main British force when they set out in pursuit.

Their force included famed frontiersman and Lieutenant Colonel of the Fayette County militia, Daniel Boone. Boone, who had cut the first settler trail across the mountains into western Kentucky, was among a small minority arguing for caution during the pursuit. He had a grudging respect for the skillful trickery that Indians could bring to a fight and he had heard that these raiders also had Loyalist Rangers with them. The latter had built an unofficial reputation among their opponents for ferocity and wiliness over the course of the war. Officially, of course, all white Loyalists were all simply banditti – savage Tory vermin, even more evil, if that were possible, than their Indian allies. The militiamen held a council of war at the end of the first day of the pursuit. Late in the increasingly heated discussion, the tall, lanky Kentuckian had interjected, after a chorus of catcalls at the previous speaker.

Boys, Boone said, I think Major McGary is right, an’ if ye’d just think about it a bit, ye’d agree with us. This trail we’re following back to the Ohio seems just a bit too easy and clear. They’ve even blazed the trees! Ye’d have to be blind not to see those tomahawk nicks. And it’s not like the trail is invisible to begin with! Remember, Colonel Logan is only a day behind us, with another three hundred men. We can afford to take some extra care, just in case …

But caution was never a respected frontier virtue, and the usual character insults began to be flung about, including unfortunate comments from the force’s senior officer, Colonel Todd, which Major McGary felt reflected on his courage and honor. McGary absorbed those public slights from his superior officer in