1812: The Rivers of War Read Free Page B

faction of the Creeks, the southern allies of Tecumseh, came mainly from the Confederacy’s Upper Towns. By and large, the Lower Town Creeks had either remained neutral or were allied with the United States.
    American newspapers tended to portray the Red Stick war as an attack on white settlers. It was that, certainly, but it was more in the way of a civil war among the Creeks themselves. The people massacred at Fort Mims by the Red Sticks a few months earlier, on August 30, had mainly been Creeks, not whites. Mixed-bloods, true, most of them—but the same could be said of the Red Sticks, especially their leaders. Tecumseh and his brother The Prophet had sought to unite all Indians against thewhites. But, like most Indians, they viewed the distinction between “red men” and “white men” more along cultural lines than strictly racial ones. Many of Tecumseh’s followers, especially the Creek warriors of the Red Stick faction, had some white ancestors themselves.
    Tecumseh himself was dead now, killed in Canada in October, when U.S. forces under the command of General William Henry Harrison had defeated the British and their Indian allies at the battle of the Thames. It was reported that Colonel Richard Johnson, who’d led the final cavalry charge and had been badly wounded in the affray, had shot Tecumseh personally. But the fires Tecumseh and his brother The Prophet had lit among the many Indian tribes were still burning in the southern territories of the United States.
    Coffee rubbed his chin. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait for the Georgians to regroup, General?” His finger traced the lines of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers. “We’re not going to move easily through this terrain. It’s pretty much pure wilderness, by all accounts I’ve received.”
    Jackson shook his head impatiently. “We haven’t time for a slow campaign, John. The real enemy is the British, don’t ever forget it. We’ve got to crush this uprising as soon as possible or we’ll still be tied up when the British arrive.”
    “You may be jumping to conclusions, General. Napoleon might beat them, you know, even after his defeat at Leipzig. If he does, the British won’t be in any position to send more troops all the way across the Atlantic.”
    Sam was a little surprised that Coffee didn’t hesitate to argue the matter. After witnessing the Homeric temper tantrum Jackson had just thrown, Sam himself would have been a little hesitant to disagree with him under any circumstances.
    But the general didn’t seem to mind. “All my hopes are with Napoleon, to be sure. But…” He sighed. “The bastards are already into France itself. Marching on Paris, according to the latest news. I just can’t assume that he’ll win. And if he loses, which at this point I’d have to say he probably will, then the British Empire is going to bring all its power down on us. With the Spanish holding their coats. Before that happens, we’ve
got
to have the savages under control.”
    Again, he gave Sam that sidelong glance. “Begging your pardon, Ensign.”
    Sam suppressed a sigh of his own. He had a sneaking suspicion the general was going to needle him on the subject for … quite some time.
    Jackson turned back to the map, his own finger tracing a route along the Coosa. “I intend to start our march as soon as possible. We’ll follow the Coosa down to here, at which point we’ll move eastward toward Emuckfaw. From there, we’ll just be a short distance upriver from the horseshoe bend on the Tallapoosa, where Chief Menawa and Weatherford and about a thousand Red Stick warriors have forted up.
    “John, I’ll want you and your cavalry—you’ll be working with the Cherokees, too—”

CHAPTER 2
    When The Ridge and his companion saw the militia officer come scuttling out of General Jackson’s tent, they said nothing, but they did exchange a little smile. Some of the Creeks had already started calling the American general “Sharp