gears from good, strong hardwood, beech or oak carved into a dasher for the red cedar butter churn—although every good farmer knew that beech always seemed to decay far before its time—maybe even a wooden door hasp, complete with turning key. Seemed that a man never stopped whittling—even as he sat up with a sick relation taken to bed with a fever, waiting for the ague to loosen its grip on a loved one. All time was precious in and of itself on the frontier, and so best used in keeping one’s hands busy.
While panes of glass could be had inexpensively, iron wasn’t cheap in this country. What there was of it found its way down the Ohio, thence up to St. Louis, where the price of the long iron bars just the right thickness for making tenpenny nails easily quadrupled with the cost of its transportation. Like most settlers, Able Guthrie was a fair enough hand at the hot and sooty work over a forge and bellows, although most men on the frontier generally used the cabin fireplace for their forge and a block of wood topped with a thick plate of iron for their anvil. There they could repair a broken grubbing hoe or fashion a badly needed log chain—for pulling up stubborn stumps—from strips of iron cut with a cold chisel, even reshape and sharpen a worn plowshare, and always, always repair their most vital tool on the frontier: firearms.
True enough that, for most things, repairs with wood and rawhide proved to be far cheaper than repairs with expensive and hard-to-come-by strap iron. Not to mention that most settlers preferred to weld all their wood construction together with pegs hammered into hand-drilled holes lathered with a generous dollop of oakum, which would swell each peg and seat it with no possibility of give, instead of investing in the cost and time to forge-cut and hammer out all the iron nails the same job would require.
“Over in the Illinois I’ve heard tell a time or two of them Chickasaws,” Able said. “That bunch you told us jumped you, then killed your flatboat pilot. They sound just like the sort the redcoats could talk into making war down on the lower Mississip.”
“Just as long as we got warning,” Lottie said as she settled back onto her stool beside the spinning wheel, shifting her skirts up to lay a moccasin on the treadle. “We can get ourselves out of here afore they come tearing through.”
Indeed. Such worry had always been a fact of life on the borderlands.
For more than a year now there had been growing unrest along the western frontier, an uneasiness wrought of rumor and speculation, to be sure, but more so born of a genuine fear that a real threat of Indian invasion once again existed. Like Able Guthrie and Titus Bass, frontier folk were people with family who had fought in the French and Indian War, and a short generation later battled against the British—this time in bloody rebellion against the crown.
Word carried up and down the river in the last year or so that every Indian nation between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains had come under British influence, summoned to revolt against the Americans by none other than Tecumseh, whose very name struck fear into the hearts of many white settlers strung out along the borderlands. Robert Dickson, the sinister British Indian agent upriver at Prairie du Chien, had himself been fomenting all the unrest and insurrection he could—sparking serious fears that thousands of wild-eyed, painted warriors were about to descend the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in a grand assault to wipe the frontier clear of Americans.
Despite the fact that they had launched an invasion of the Illinois in 1813, and a year later Clark himself had led a campaign against the British at Prairie du Chien, they had been less than successful in choking off the possibility that Tecumseh’s federation might just thunder across the sparsely settled frontier. Rumors continued to ignite American passions as those hardy souls waited in the darkness of their lonely cabins, watching and listening, keeping their guns primed and always within reach, whether by the door, or in the fields as harvest neared. These were not a people easily frightened, nor given to hobgoblins of their own making. Folks who had cleared land and settled in that fertile band of country extending from the lower Missouri to the mouth of the Arkansas all had very legitimate fears when reports came north of redcoats down the Mississippi.
Now with all this talk of the British bringing in their huge men-of-war to New Orleans, there to off-load lobster-backed regulars in preparation of launching a pincers invasion on the entire Mississippi valley … why, it only gave the faint of heart another reason to dwell long and hard on heading back east somewhere, anywhere the British weren’t coming ashore and the Indians weren’t skulking.
“I’ll tell you this for a fact,” Able declared, dusting shavings off his lap onto the porch and standing to stretch backward, working the kinks out of his spine. “The Injuns don’t need no British to help ’em make trouble in this country. Forests thick as they are hereabouts, the Injuns got millions and millions of friends.”
“Friends?” Titus asked, nicking a finger with his knife.
“The trees,” Guthrie answered, jabbing his knife into the dark. “Trees what can hide them savages as they come sneaking up on a settler’s place. Hide ’em again after they’ve done their devil’s work and are skulking away into the forest, getting off with scalps and prisoners and everything else the durn blooders can carry away.”
“There simply ain’t no way of figuring what goes on in an Injun’s mind,” Lottie added as her foot rocked the treadle, the hackle spinning in rhythm with the giant wheel as the wool fibers wrapped themselves around one another in a long, continuous strand she was carefully taking up on another spindle.
Marissa sat nearby atop a three-legged stool as the air cooled and the twilight deepened, carding more of last spring’s wool sheared from the family’s sheep. He looked at her a long moment, watching her hands at work, remembering his mother at work on her own linsey-woolsey, the cane splints clacking as she moved them back and forth in the weaving sleigh, making her coarse cloth for those loved ones needing new shirts and britches, dresses and stockings.
“The missus is right, Titus,” Able agreed. “No way of knowing when Injuns will break loose. That’s why my folks kept the doors barred tight, and come summer they plugged the chimneys too.”
Bass looked up at Able. “Injuns come in down the chimneys?”
“They sure as … they sure do,” Guthrie said, barely catching himself. “They’ll come to get you anyways they can. Mingoes, Wyandots, them Shawnee what your grandpa fought in his day. Any and all of ’em. They’re the devil’s seed, that’s the gospel. Their kind’s the red offspring of ol’ Be-Hell-Zee-Bub himself!”
“Didn’t you and Titus tell me word has it Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio are all clamoring for war the loudest?” Lottie asked.
“It’s the God’s truth there,” Able replied. “Folks what settled in country the farthest from the fight with the redcoats appear the most eager to stir things up now.”
Bothersome gnats had gone with the fall of the sun, as had the buzz of the hummingbirds, but still Titus could hear the reassuring chirp of the cicadas clinging to the trees, thinking about how Able had said every one of those big trees was a friend to the Indians coming to wipe the valley clear of Americans. A threat so real that it took on shape and body as he remembered his footrace from the Chickasaw hunting party, the smell of them strong in his nostrils as they boarded the flatboat, grappled hand to hand with the crew, leaving Ebenezer Zane dead.
“While’st it’s the rest of us out here—we’re the ones who’ll fight their war when it comes,” Guthrie eventually added.
“If’n them Injuns was coming,” Titus said in that tone of his when he wanted most to prove he knew whereof he spoke, “they’d long come by now, Mr. Guthrie.”
The settler’s knife stopped in the middle of a long peg, a tiny curl still wrapped over the blade and Guthrie’s finger. After a moment’s contemplation he said, “Maybeso you’re right, Titus.”
“They was coming, they’d come in the first full moon of spring,” Bass explained. “Even first full moon of early summer.”
Guthrie’s brow crinkled. “How you figure it by the seasons like that?”
“I don’t,” Titus replied. “Just recollect what my grandpap allays said. The Injuns, they come right after winter breaks up. Now, well—it’s getting too late in the raiding season.”
With a great harump the settler turned to look at his wife. “See there, Lottie. This young man’s got him some good sense ’bout such things, don’t he, now?” He looked back at Titus. “Let’s just pray your grandpap was right.”
“’Nother thing too,” Bass said as he selected another oak limb to whittle on from the pile at his feet. “Injuns fight for what they figure to be their land.”
“Your grandpappy teach you that too?”
“Yes, sir. Them Injuns folks say are far up the Missouri—’bout them coming down here to raid? No, sir: they won’t get all that fired up ’bout coming down here to fight when this ain’t the land where the bones of their grandfathers are buried.”
