Nobody's Hero. Frank Laumer
this forgotten battle had initiated the equally forgotten Florida War. During this seven-year struggle the army cleared three thousand miles of road through a mosquito- and snake-infested wilderness, sent over forty thousand men into jungle warfare against Seminole Indians, and built some four hundred forts. Hundreds of miles of those roads are now U.S. highways and many of the forts have become cities. Hundreds of towns and several counties in Florida carry the names, both white and Seminole, of the leaders of this long, painful struggle, while descendants of the few hundred Indian survivors who escaped death or deportation form the present Seminole Nation.
More personally, I came to realize that Ransom Clark was a remarkable man. Through the years I have gathered much information about him, exhumed his remains, held his bones in my hands. It became apparent to me that this man needed to have his story completed, the “entire account of his life and adventures” told. I have taken the bones of fact and put upon them the flesh of fiction.
1
Ransom Clark looked toward the sun struggling up through the tall longleaf yellow pines on his right, burning away the showers of the night. Coming on eight o’clock, he figured, temperature about fifty degrees. It was the 28th of December, 1835. Six months to go, then I’m goin’ back. He held the thought. Six months. Lucy. His mouth widened slightly, his eyelids compressed in a small tight smile, the tips of perfect teeth a quick white streak on his grizzled, swarthy face. The overcast sky was silver-gray but clearing. The pine bark, flaking like rust, was rose colored in the early light; the green needles glittered.
He was second man from the lead in the right file of the column of eighty-six enlisted men with fourteen non-coms and eight officers commanded by Brevet Major Francis Langhorne Dade. Born in Virginia, now forty-three years old, Dade had boasted that he could march through the Seminole Nation with a sergeant’s guard. He was married and had a daughter, Fannie Langhorne, who would be five years old next month. Amanda and Fannie would be waiting for him back in their comfortable frame home on Palafox Street in Pensacola. The detachment was in march from Fort Brooke at Tampa Bay north one hundred miles to Fort King. They were in double file, column of route, four feet between the files and between each man and the man that followed. Clark caught glimpses of the advance guard a hundred feet ahead, a shield to blunt attack, a sergeant and five men on foot led by 2nd Lt. Robert Richard Mudge, twenty-five, West Point class of 1833, the oldest of eleven children of Benjamin and Abigail Mudge of Lynn, Massachusetts. Nearer, between the main column and the advance, Captain Upton Sinclair Fraser was on horseback. In New York in June 1814, twenty years old, he had been appointed an ensign in the 15th Regiment of Infantry. Now he was forty-one, in command of Company C, Third Artillery. Fraser was known as “the soldier’s friend,” not a common trait among officers. In addition, he had openly remonstrated with the major several times on behalf of the interpreter, Luis Pacheco, a slave, who walked now beside Fraser’s horse, his left hand on the stirrup.
The long blue column—from the advance guard back to the main body, followed by the horse-drawn cannon, three oxen hitched to the wagon, and finally the rear guard—was some five hundred feet long. They had been up before dawn, on the road nearly two hours. A good fifty miles out of Fort Brooke, a little less than fifty miles to go. They had been slowed by four river crossings and it had taken five days to make it this far, but there were no more rivers, only high ground and open country ahead. Ought to make it in to Fort King, safety, in two, three more days.
A cool west breeze rustled the high palmetto fronds on both sides of the twenty-foot-wide Fort King Road with a click and a rattle. The road had been cleared by the army ten years before through the wilderness of pine barrens, swamps, and forests that made up the Florida Territory, the slash of a sword through the heart of the Seminole Nation. This is more than a sergeant’s guard, Clark comforted himself, this is a small army: two full companies of regulars under the command of eight officers, five of them West Pointers. The men were armed with muskets, a few swords and pistols, and backed up by the cannon.
Finally out of the swamps, the land was rising, opening out from the heavy underbrush of the river valleys to a pine barren, fallen needles blanketing the ground, smothering all growth except palmetto and thin, brown winter grass. It was common knowledge that Indians were like cutpurses, catching you in the dark and ugly places, taking you by surprise. Damn fools if they didn’t, Clark thought. He’d heard that of the five thousand Seminoles in the whole territory, no more than fifteen hundred were warriors. They didn’t have organization, command, a cannon, neither the time nor the weapons to make real war. They relied on stealth.
It had begun the second night, the Big Hillsborough, Saunders store, burnt to the ground, flames still playing across the water from the remains of the bridge built just last year. The major had taken every precaution, the command drawn together every night within a barricade three or four logs high thrown up to slow an attack, half a dozen sentinels posted on a relief one hundred yards and more outside and around. They had heard movement, shouts, screams like a cut pig, a few shots fired, a reminder that the Seminoles had good Deringer rifles with better range and more accuracy than the army’s muskets. Men had been tense, jumping at every sound. They had stared at one another around their fires, checked and rechecked their weapons. “What’re they sayin’, Clark? Are they gonna ’tack?” He shook off the questions. “Nah. Just threats, braggin’.” What use to translate the messages—rage, hate, “We’ll kill you all.”
The babble of voices around him reminded him that only half of the enlisted men of the command were American born. They had come from ten of the twenty-four states, most of them along the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to North Carolina, with a dozen men from Pennsylvania, four from Vermont. And while most of the slave hunters—and settlers—pushing into Florida, clashing with the Seminoles, stirring up trouble, were from Georgia and Alabama, Clark had noticed that no volunteer from either state was in the ranks. He’d heard that recruiters didn’t spend much time in the slave states; wasn’t worth the effort. The greatest source for recruits was laborers and immigrants—where slaves provided most of the labor, there were few white laborers and immigrants were not welcome. He knew that some recruiters preferred native-born Americans; others had found they were more difficult to discipline than foreigners, were not accustomed to military subordination, were less patient and plodding.
Of the foreign-born around him a third were Irish, the rest from Scotland, England, Prussia, Germany, Canada, and God knew where else. Their voices were a medley, a babble of dialects and languages. He recognized other Yankees with their “I reckon so”; Southern Crackers with their nasal twang; Germans spluttering in high and low Dutch; lots of Irish, swearing by the Holy Spoon and all the patron saints; Scotch who praised the land o’ cakes; with here and there a John Bull. And while the army refused to accept branded deserters from its own ranks, it was well known that of the two thousand enlisted men of the British army stationed in Canada who had deserted last year, fully a third were serving again, this time in the American army. For foreigners, Clark figured, it was a chance to learn the language and get food, clothing, shelter, and six dollars a month while they did it. For Americans it was probably the handiest way to escape troubles, romantic, financial, or legal. ’Course, some of the younger ones were just looking for adventure.
Short and tall, young and old, domestic and foreign, it seemed like most of the fellows he’d got to know had come into the army as common laborers with no claim to any special skill, trade, or profession. He had heard such men referred to as typical of the “rag-tag-and-bobtail herd found in the ranks of the regular army; either the scum of the older states or of the worthless German, English, and Irish immigrants.” But he had also found among the men of Dade’s command tailors, clerks, printers, farmers, hatters, barbers, spinners, plasterers, blacksmiths, musicians, glaziers, painters, papermakers, shoemakers, watermen, a lampmaker, a couple of sailors, a weaver, tanner, carpenter, baker, hairdresser, even a teacher.
Still, it was true that most of them were simply laborers, illiterate, ignorant of their own ignorance—boys who had left the farm or small town and joined up in a confusion of boredom and patriotism, or older men who had failed at everything else and had settled for three squares a day and a flop. Clark’s own recruiting officer, more honest than most, had tried to discourage him with the warning “If you take this step you will regret it only once, and that will be from the time