1824: The Arkansas War

CHAPTER 13

The Mississippi River, south of Hopefield, Arkansas

Taylor never saw any bodies in the river, coming down from Memphis, since the current would have taken them away. But he didn't much doubt there had been some. The news of Crittenden's expedition had spread throughout the area. While the main body of freebooters might be coming into Arkansas from the south, there were plenty of adventurers-border ruffians, to call them by their right name-from Missouri and Tennessee and Kentucky who were eager to throw themselves into the fray. Give it a week, and they'd be coming from Mississippi; two weeks, Alabama; a month, if it kept up, from Georgia and the Carolinas; two months, from all over the country, especially the South.

From what he could see from the deck of the steamboat he'd hired-well, commandeered in all but name-some hundreds of freebooters had already passed through the area. And they were being just as rough on anybody they ran into as you'd expect from such men.

When Taylor's steamboat reached Hopefield just after dawn, he discovered the settlement had been deserted, with most of its cabins burnt. And Hopefield had been a white settlement. Taylor had seen two burned-out woodcutters' cabins in the miles they had gone since, and their owners would have also been white people. Some of them, at any rate. They might have been mixed families, whites and Indians, which was a lot more common on the frontier than many people liked to admit.

It didn't matter. By now, over four years after the treaty, it was the firm opinion of white Southerners of the type who'd be attracted to this adventure that any white man who voluntarily settled in Arkansas-anywhere in the Confederacy-was a damned nigger-lover. No better than an abolitionist or one of those detestable New England missionaries who were always prattling nonsense about the "rights of Indians."

And there was some truth to the charge, at least if you removed the loaded terms. White opinion on the subject of race, especially when it came to Indians, had never been uniform. In some ways, because contact was so much closer, even less so in the South than the North. True, there were very few white Southerners who'd admit to having any African ancestry, and none of them willingly, since the legal repercussions were so harsh. However absurd it might be, they'd try their best to use a subterfuge term like "Portuguese." But there were plenty who'd admit to having some Cherokees or Creeks or Choctaws perched in the family tree. Brag about it, in fact-even though everybody in the South knew perfectly well that the southern tribes didn't maintain the same sharp and everlasting barriers to the absorption of negroes that whites officially did. A "full-blood Cherokee" might very well be someone whom Southerners would have labeled a "quadroon" or "mulatto" if he'd been white instead of Indian.

Such white folks would be willing to move to Arkansas readily enough. There were advantages, after all. Just for starters, the treaty had among other things finally removed the legal headaches left over from settling disputed Spanish land grants and insurance claims from the great earthquakes of 1811 and 1812. The Confederacy-or the chiefdom of Arkansas-could issue legal land titles, now. For another thing, within a short time the danger of Indian attacks had receded sharply. The Cherokees were pretty well disciplined, Driscol's people even more so-and they proved soon enough that they could handle any Osage raiding parties.

The land in the Arkansas Delta was rich, once you got past the swamps along the rivers. Good land for livestock and good land for cotton. Slavery was a handy way to organize cotton agriculture, but it was by no means essential. And if Driscol's regime forbade slavery, the Bank of Arkansas was a lot easier to deal with than the Second Bank of the United States, at least if you were a poor white man. Especially since everybody knew that in a pinch, a man could always satisfy a bank debt by serving a term in the Arkansas Army-something that positively infuriated the likes of Crittenden.

Julia came out on deck, interrupting Taylor's musings. Her two daughters were following right behind her.

"How does it look, Zack?"

The question-even more so, the sight of Imogene and Adaline-made up the colonel's mind. The twins were twelve years old, nearing thirteen. Still girls, yes, but already very pretty and entering womanhood. They'd be particularly attractive to slave hunters.

"It's too chancy," he announced. "By now, from all reports I've gotten, the freebooters will have dozens of craft moving up into the Arkansas. Steamboats, keelboats, rowboats, sailboats, canoes, even flatboats-hell, you name it." He gave their own steamboat a quick survey. "No way to fend them off from this thing, not if we get trapped in the river. Not with as few men as I've got. We'll need to disembark at the nearest suitable spot and ride cross-country to Arkansas Post. That should still be safe enough."

"Whatever you say."

The confluence of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers