Nobody's Hero. Frank Laumer
was now a base for troops sent to protect friendly Creeks from the whites. Settlers crowded and tumbled along the road past the fort in battered wagons and on foot. Along with their worldly goods they carried psalm books, whisky stills, and flintlock rifles. Here and there along the road they dropped out, took up land, built one- and two-room cabins, and settled down to raise cotton and children.
Clark had not known an officer, and few enlisted men, who did not feel more sympathy for the Indians than for the white settlers. The treaty forced upon the Creeks by Andrew Jackson in 1814 had driven many of them into unity with the Seminoles of Florida. The taking of Indian land, the ill-famed removal of the southern tribes to Indian Territory in the west, was not only disagreeable to most soldiers but shameful. General Winfield Scott had issued an order that “every possible kindness, compatible with the necessity of removal, must be shown by the troops.” His aide, Erasmus Keyes, had admitted that he “felt like a trespasser, one of a gang of robbers.”
Though a large part of the tribe had already been moved west, the Creeks remaining in the vicinity of Fort Mitchell had thought to placate the whites, to deal fairly and be dealt with fairly. Then gold had been discovered some fifteen miles south of the Fort Mitchell. Whites of the surrounding country had, without permission of the Creeks, entered their land, opened mines, were digging and washing the ore. They had built villages of log houses and set up trade with one another. There had been skirmishes between the Creeks and the gold-diggers, murders committed, and preparations on the part of the affronted Indians that seemed to threaten a general war with their nation.
A federal marshal sent to evict the intruders had to call for help. Colonel Twiggs, commanding the regiment, ordered out a detachment of Fort Mitchell troops. Clark’s Company B, 2nd Artillery, under command of Capt. Francis S. Belton, was given the task of protecting the Creeks and their gold from the white intruders. Belton, a forty-one-year-old career officer who preferred the security of an office to the risks of the field, delegated the job to Lt. Walter Scott Chandler, West Point, 1830. Chandler, with Clark and twenty-five others, had gone to village after village, burning the log houses, driving the white inhabitants off Creek land.
At one such settlement called Yamacraw along the Augusta River, they found the white inhabitants, a mob of fifty or sixty in number, armed with clubs, axes, hoes, brickbats, and broomsticks, ready to fight. Clark wrote to Lucy of the excitement. “We had been ordered to load our muskets with blank cartridges, but on seeing this, orders were given to draw the blanks and load with balls. No sooner did we do this than the foe dropped their weapons, and scampered for the woods, as fast as fleet heels could carry them.”
But there were more squatters than soldiers and, when push came to shove, the Southern-led government backed the whites. Perhaps Indians were considered a step above Negroes, but a short step. The Creeks of Alabama and Georgia, in spite of the treaties that guaranteed their reservation “forever,” would finally, in handcuffs and chains, be set upon the road to far Oklahoma, the “Trail of Tears.”
In February of 1834 Clark’s company and another under Capt. Upton Sinclair Fraser were ordered to Fort Morgan on Mobile Point, the single tooth in the mouth of Mobile Bay. They marched across the state to Mobile, boarded the steamboat Sangumon for the thirty-five-mile trip down and across the bay and, on March 7, were the first troops to garrison the vast new fortress, completed after fifteen years of labor by thousands of slaves laying eight million bricks.
A year passed. Nothing threatened except the weather. Men fought only among themselves. They ate, slept, hunted, stared out at the occasional boat passing in the distant channel. In January of 1835, Belton assigned Lieutenant Chandler, Acting Quartermaster, the task of taking a crew up the bay to Mobile for pay and supplies. He had been on detached service for almost a year, first on recruiting, followed by service at Fort Gibson in Indian Territory. He had only returned to Fort Morgan in November. He chose Sgt. W. Grant for his crew along with Privates Leavenwise, Finn, and Clark.
Mobile Bay was known for its capricious winds, called “northers,” and suddenly rough water. Five men in a small sailing boat could have their hands full, but the trip to Mobile, five miles west across the bay, thirty miles north, was uneventful. It was a cold day and clear once the morning fog had lifted. Heavy winter coats, wool jackets and trousers, and Jefferson boots kept the men warm, though a dash of sixty-degree spray felt like ice water on exposed fingers that held the tiller or worked the sail. They kept well out of the channel, far from the risk of collision. Clark was glad for the change; a boat trip and a night in Mobile a rare treat, an adventure for men who were garrisoned in the most isolated post in the country where fatigue duty was the order of the day.
They started back the morning of the twenty-fifth. The sky was overcast. A civilian messenger had joined them. They carried all the provisions the skiff would hold. With the cargo plus an extra man, there was little room to move about and the six men moved carefully, taking their positions with their feet among the bags and barrels. Clark found a place to sit on a bag of flour, his feet on the gunnel, enjoying the rare chance to travel by boat. They had little freeboard but the bay was calm, fog shrouding them like a winding sheet. By nine o’clock the fog was thinning, the sky bright, a breeze pushing them down the west side of the bay, the water a little choppy now, slapping against the hull. The wind freshened and they were under easy canvas. They passed the mouth of the Mobile River and were coming up on Dog River, six miles out of Mobile, two miles south of Choctaw Point.
Without warning a freak of wind was on them, slamming against the sail, throwing the boat over, sail flat on the water, catapulting the men into the bay along with the provisions and sacks of coin. Clark, gasping with the shock, struggled back to the capsized boat. In an instant the water had penetrated his heavy clothing, seeming to squeeze the air out of his lungs. The others floundered, shouted. The boat, unable to complete its roll because of mast and sail, unable to right itself with half a load of water, lay on its side, a low half-moon of gunnel that offered a place to hold but nothing more.
Chandler, hat gone, wet hair plastered to his face, gasping for breath, regained the boat, shouted at the others to swim, get to the boat. He grabbed out at one man who was shouting in terror, choking, unable to swim, flailing helplessly. He brought him in. Another man was trapped under the sail, his hands punching up at it, unable to free himself, Chandler went to him, reached under the heavy cloth, grabbed him by the collar. Clark had followed Chandler. They dragged the man out, got him to the boat. Gasping from the struggle, the leaden weight of water-logged clothing, boots, dragging at them, Chandler told them to hang on, get out of their coats and boots. Shirts and trousers would hold any body heat a little, keep the cold water from direct contact.
Only the men’s hands and heads were above the water. They were hardly able to speak for the chattering of their teeth, splashed and choking on the waves that broke against the hull. Under Chandler’s direction they tried to right the boat but their efforts only tended to settle it further, risking the loss of equilibrium, sending it to the bottom. Spontaneously, desperately, they shouted for help, singly, then together. The fog swallowed the sound, there was no reply.
Silent then, the men looked to the lieutenant, at each other. They were far from shore, out of the channel. Who would see them, hear their shouts? Should the strongest swimmer strip and head for shore? But in the confusion, the fog, they had lost all sense of direction. If their strength held until the fog burned away, if land was not too far . . . But the cold was taking hold, bodies shuddering, hands and feet, arms and legs, going numb.
A long time passed, or seemed to. The fog had lifted, the shore was visible, impossibly far away. Even if a ship should pass in the distant channel they would never be seen. Talk dwindled to oaths, prayer. Suddenly a man was gone, vanished. Terror joined fear, cold. Clark was aware of Chandler’s voice, others, then silence. He held. Then a shout. Chandler was struggling with a man, trying to hold him to the boat. Clark’s numb hands gripped the gunnel, face resting on his hands. He was unable to move, only to endure.
More time, and then the sky was darkening, night was coming. Clark looked down the boat’s side, not sure where he was, what he was doing. He was alone. Night, and he knew only that he must hold on, must not let go. He tried to hold to the image of Lucy, a future, but his mind was growing as numb as his body, feeling nothing, knowing nothing, except that