Book One: The Olive Branch Part Five: The Peace of Boston Characters
Chapter Thirty-seven
The Orchards
Joseph Brant. Newtown, on the Chemung River, in the country of the Six Nations. Sunday, 29 August 1779.
In 1779, in the same year as the Peace of Boston, a Continental expedition under General Sullivan advanced through Iroquois territory, destroying towns, crops, and orchards in a campaign intended to end the military capacity of the Crown's Native allies. The Boston settlement addressed the constitutional position of the colonists and made no provision for the Native nations, whose lands were subsequently taken by the Realm the settlement created.
The breastwork had been finished in the night, and in the morning the young men cut green boughs and laid them along the front of it, and stood back on the road to look, and were pleased; and Joseph Brant, walking the length of it in the first light with his gun on his shoulder, thought that it was the best-made thing he had seen in that country in a year, and that it was in the wrong place.
It ran for half a mile along the foot of a long rise above the river road, a mile or so below the town the Delawares called Newtown, on the Chemung: a wall of logs laid lengthwise and banked with earth to the height of a man’s chest, with little bastions run out in front of it here and there so that men inside them could fire along its face, and a cabin at one end that had been somebody’s house in the spring and was a blockhouse now. The river was on the right of it. On the left the ground went up steeply into a wooded hill. In front of it the road came up from the south between the hill and the river, crossed a creek, and ran along the whole face of the wall at a hundred paces; so that an army marching up that road would march across the front of every loaded gun the King’s people had in the Seneca country before it knew there was a gun there at all. With the boughs laid on you could not see the wall from the road. You could hardly see it from the creek. The Delawares had chosen the place and the Senecas had agreed to it in council, and they had worked on it for three days, and it was very good.
He had argued against it for an afternoon.
He had argued, and Colonel Butler with him, for doing what they had done all summer: falling back in front of the Congress’s army as it came up the river, a little every day, and leaving small parties in the hills on each side of it to shoot into it on the march, at its packhorses and its cattle and its stragglers and the men who went down to the river for water; never standing, never letting it find anything to fight, until it had eaten its flour and its cattle in a country with no road through it, and had to go home. It was what that country was for. It was how a few men fought a great many in the woods, and every man at the fire had known it since he was a boy. But it was not his country. It was the Senecas’ country and the Cayugas’, and the Delawares lived in it by their leave; and the Delawares had pointed to this place, where the road ran between the hill and the river like water down a gutter, and the Senecas had looked at the hill and the river and agreed, and Old Smoke had not said no. A man from the Mohawk River did not tell the Senecas how to keep their own towns. Brant had said it once, as well as he could, and then he had gone and dug with the others.
They were hungry. That was the other thing he thought about, walking the line in the grey light with the river smoking beside him. Butler’s rangers had been living for a fortnight on seven ears of green corn a day, a man, and the warriors on less, and on what they could shoot, which with an army of four thousand coming up the valley was nothing, because the game had gone where game goes when an army comes. There were not six hundred of them behind the wall, all told. There were fewer than three hundred rangers in their green coats, and fourteen men of the 8th in red from the garrison at Niagara, and something under three hundred warriors, Senecas and Cayugas mostly, and the Delawares, who had promised two hundred and sent thirty. Butler had expected a thousand. He had said so at the fire, in the evening, looking at the boughs. He had a way of saying a number as if it were somebody else’s fault, and it generally was.
The Congress’s army was more than four thousand. The scouts had counted it at Tioga, where the two halves of it had joined a week ago with a salute of thirteen guns that the scouts had heard from the hills: the half that had come up the Susquehanna from Wyoming in boats and on foot, with a train of cattle driven along behind it and more horses than Brant had ever seen in one place; and the half that had come down the river from the north, from Otsego Lake, in two hundred boats.
He had understood the boats before anybody else at the fire, because he had lived on that river for twenty years. Runners had come down to the Chemung in the second week of August to say that the Susquehanna was rising, in a dry month, with no rain anywhere; that it had come up three feet in a night and was running brown and high past the burned houses at Oquaga, and that the old people said it was a sign. Brant had not needed a sign. A river does not rise in a dry August unless somebody has let it out of something; and the general who was coming down from the north, who was a Clinton, though not the King’s one, had sat at the foot of Otsego Lake all July with his army and his boats and built a dam across the outlet, as any farmer builds a dam for his mill, and then broken it, and come down the river on his own flood. Brant had thought, hearing it, that it was a very good thing to have done, and that the Congress had learned a great deal about this country in four years. Nobody had ever needed to learn it before.
The general in command of the whole of it was a New Hampshire lawyer named Sullivan, a heavy, quarrelsome man with a red face. Brant had seen him once, on Long Island, in seventy-six, on the morning he was brought into the King’s lines a prisoner in a wet coat, swearing. The King had exchanged him. He had come back.
They saw the army a little before noon.
It came up the road from the south the way the Delawares had said it would, between the hill and the river: first a few riflemen in hunting shirts, spread out and walking slowly, as men walk who have been told to look at everything; then a long way behind them the head of a column. Brant lay behind the wall at the right of the line, near the river, with Captain McDonell’s sixty rangers on one side of him and his own people on the other, thirty of them, Mohawks and white men from the Susquehanna farms, the remnant of the Volunteers who had followed him all summer and the summer before; and he watched the riflemen come on along the road until they reached the creek, and stopped.
One of them went up a tree.
Brant saw him do it, a hundred and fifty yards off, a long thin man in a fringed shirt, going up a big oak by the creek as easily as a boy goes up a ladder, and sitting in the fork of it, and looking. Then another went up a tree further along. Brant knew, before the man in the oak had been up there a minute, that the thing was over; that the man could see over the boughs, from where he sat, into the space behind the wall, where the young men were lying in their paint, which they had put on that morning very carefully, in vermilion, as men should for a battle; and that the man in the tree was looking straight down at a great deal of vermilion.
The riflemen did not come on. They lay down along the creek, and began to fire at the wall, at long range, slowly, to keep the heads down behind it; and behind them the column stopped on the road, and did not come up the road at all, and did not go away either. It stood there. After a while it began to come apart into pieces, and the pieces began to go off towards the hill on the left, one after another, very slowly, through the woods at the hill’s foot, where nobody behind the wall could see where they were going.
Brant lay with his cheek on the earth of the bank and listened to the rifles, and to the young men behind him beginning to talk, and he thought about the Delawares’ gutter, and about the water that was meant to come down it and was not coming.
The cannon began in the afternoon.
He had heard cannon before, a great deal of it. He had been at Long Island and at the siege of the fort on the Mohawk, where St Leger’s little guns had knocked at Fort Stanwix for three weeks like a man knocking at a door he knows nobody will open. He had never heard it in the woods, coming at him. He did not think anybody behind that wall had, except Butler and the rangers, and the fourteen of the 8th.
They had brought the guns up the road on their carriages, and run them out on a little rise across the creek about three hundred yards off, six of them, small ones; and they fired at the wall, and the round shot struck the logs and the earth, and the logs held. That was not what did it. What did it was the other thing they had, two pieces with short fat barrels that threw their shot high, so that it went up over the boughs and over the wall and came down somewhere behind it in the woods, and burst there, with a noise like the end of the world, and threw iron about among the trees; and then another, further back. The young men had never seen a shell. Brant had, at Stanwix. He watched them hear the first one burst behind them and turn their heads, all along the line, to look at the woods at their backs, where there was nobody, where there should have been nobody, where something was killing men; and he saw them understand it in the only way it could be understood by a man who had never seen a shell, which was that the enemy was behind them.
He got up and ran along the line towards the centre to find Butler, and a Cayuga chief whom he knew got up and ran with him, for the same reason; and they found Butler in the middle of the wall, standing, with a glass, looking at the hill on the left.
“They are going round,” Brant said.
“I know they are going round.” Butler did not lower the glass. “They have been going round for two hours, Captain Brant. There is a brigade on that hill, and some officious fellows have moved our left up the hill to meet it without asking me, and now there is a hole in the middle of my line that you could drive a wagon through.” He lowered the glass at last. “We must go. Now, while there is a road behind us to go by.”
“Yes,” said Brant, and the Cayuga said the same.
But the warriors had decided already. Brant saw it happen as he turned round. The shells burst again in the woods behind the wall, two of them together, and the line on the left broke from the far end, all at once, the way a flock goes off a field; the men did not run in a crowd, they were never so foolish, they simply were not there any longer, they had gone into the trees in ones and twos and fives in every direction that was not towards the guns, as they had been taught to go since they could walk; and when he looked along the wall there was a quarter of a mile of it with nobody behind it but the dead.
The rangers held a little longer. The rangers and his own thirty, at the right by the river, because they were white men most of them and soldiers, and a soldier had to be told; and when Butler told them, they went back out of the wall towards the hill in good enough order, and found the hill in front of them full of the Congress’s riflemen, who had got there first. There was a running fight then for nearly a mile, through the woods and over the shoulder of the hill and down towards the river again, tree to tree, the kind of fight Brant understood. He killed a man in it. He saw the man’s face. He thought, as he had thought in the ravine at Oriskany, that he had his ring on, and that if he went down here among the oak roots the men who found him would know whose hand it was; and then he did not think about anything at all until they were through.
Butler very nearly did not get through. A party of the riflemen got between him and the river, and he went past them through a thicket on his hands and knees, a man of fifty in a green coat, with the rangers firing over his head; and came out of the thicket on the far side without his hat, and stood up, and looked at Brant, and said, quite calmly, that it had not been the place he would have chosen.
Brant had had canoes put in the river the night before, below the town, eight of them, hidden in the willows. He had not told anybody why. He had not quite told himself. He put the wounded into them at dusk, the ones who could be got to the river, and took them up the Chemung in the dark, away from the army, with his own people paddling; and some of the Congress’s men on the bank saw them go, and fired a few shots after them, and let them go.
The losses were not great. He was ashamed afterwards of how glad he had been of that, as if it had been something he had done. Five of the rangers were killed or missing, and five of the warriors killed, and a few more of each hurt; it had been the shells and not the shooting, and the shells had killed hardly anybody. But they had left most of their dead on the ground by the wall, because there had been no time; and when some of the Senecas went back two days afterwards, behind the army, to bring them away, they found what had been done to them. Brant did not go back with them. He heard about it at the fire. He did not repeat it, then or later, and nobody who heard it repeated it either. The Congress’s newspapers did not print it. He had not expected that they would.
The army sat at Newtown for a day and a night, and burned the corn.
There was a great deal of corn at Newtown. There were fields of it along the river, on the flats above and below the town, a hundred and fifty acres, a man said who had counted, and more beans and squashes in among the corn as the women always planted them, the three together, and it was nearly ripe; it stood higher than a man. The army cut it down. It pulled up the beans, and broke the squashes, and threw the corn into the river, and when that was too slow it piled it in the houses and set fire to the houses. Brant watched from the hill above the town on the second evening. He could see the smoke going straight up into the still air, a dozen columns of it, and then the glow under the smoke as the dark came on. He could smell it. It smelled like the end of harvest, which it was.
Then the army went on.
It went on up the valley, north and west, towards the lakes and the heart of the Seneca country, slowly, with its cattle and its horses, cutting its road as it went; and the King’s people went ahead of it. There was nothing else to do. Butler took the rangers back towards the Genesee, and the warriors went back to their own towns, each to his own, to bring the women and the children out of them before the army came; and Brant went with the Senecas, because they would listen to him now, as they had not at the wall, and because somebody had to tell the towns.
They went ahead of the army along the trail like men going ahead of a fire.
He had known those towns all his life.
He had known them as a Mohawk knows the towns of the Senecas, which is to say as a man knows the houses of his brothers, who keep the western door of the Longhouse as the Mohawks keep the eastern, and who have always been more numerous and more particular and quicker to take offence than the Mohawks, and better farmers. They were good towns. That was the thing the Congress’s soldiers kept saying afterwards, in their letters home and in the newspapers, as if it surprised them: that they were good. At Kendaia there were twenty houses of hewn logs, very neatly built and finished, and painted, some of them, and the graves of the chiefs under painted boxes; and behind the houses an orchard of apple trees so old that nobody in the town could say who had planted them, with trunks a man could not put his arms round. At Kanadesaga, where Old Smoke lived, there were fifty houses and more, some of hewn timber and some of round logs and some of bark, with apple trees and peach trees round them, and a young orchard behind the town that the old man had been watching grow for ten years. At Canandaigua there were twenty-three houses, large and very well finished, better than the houses in a good many German villages on the Mohawk, and Brant had eaten in one of them. And on the Genesee, at the end of it all, there was Little Beard’s town, the great town, a hundred and twenty houses and more, standing in the middle of the widest flat of good bottom land that Brant had ever seen, miles of it, running away up and down the river between the hills, and all of it corn.
The people went out of them ahead of the army, as the people of Oquaga had gone out of Oquaga. They went with what they could carry. They could not carry the corn. It was not ripe enough to take in, most of it, and there was too much of it, and no time; so they left it standing in the fields, acres and acres of it, higher than a horse, and took the children and the old people and the kettles and went west along the trails towards Niagara, two thousand people, then three, then more, with the warriors going back and forth behind them to watch the army, and the army coming on behind the warriors, every day, a few miles a day, burning.
He watched it take Kanadesaga, in the second week of September, from the woods on the hill above the lake.
The army came round the town at sundown, very carefully, in three columns through the woods, as though the town were full of men waiting for it, and found it empty. Old Smoke’s people had gone the day before. There was a white child in one of the houses, a little boy of three or four whom somebody had taken from the settlements and nobody had remembered in the going, and the soldiers found him and took him up and made a great deal of him; Brant could see them doing it from the hill, in the last of the light, a ring of men round something on the ground, and one of them lifting it. Then they went through the houses one by one, taking what was in them, and lay in the town all the next day eating its beans and its squashes; and on the second morning, before they burned the houses, they turned out the pioneers into the young orchard behind the town, with their axes, and went through it from end to end.
They did not cut the trees down. That was what Brant could not at first make out, from the hill. He saw them go in among the trees in a line, as men go into a field to reap, and stop at each tree, and bend to it, and go on; and the trees were still standing after they had gone through, every one, with their leaves on and the fruit on them, and he thought for a little while that perhaps the officers had stopped it. Then he understood what they had done, and sat down on the hill, and did not watch the rest.
He knew what it was. He had seen it done all his life, on the Mohawk River, by the Germans and the Dutch, on every new farm in Tryon County. It was how a man cleared woodland for planting when he had not the time or the hands to fell the trees and grub the stumps. He went round each tree with his axe and cut a ring through the bark all the way round, a hand’s breadth deep, into the white wood; and then he went away and left it. The tree did not fall. It stood there all summer in its leaves, and very often the next spring it leafed again, and flowered, and set fruit, because a tree does not know at once that it is dead; and then it died, standing, and the farmer planted his corn among the grey trunks, and in a few years the trunks came down in the wind, and he had his field.
The settlers called it a deadening. Brant had walked through a hundred of them in his life. He had never thought about the word before.
It went on for another week.
They burned Canandaigua on the tenth, and Honeoye on the eleventh, and the little towns in between; and on the thirteenth Butler, who had been lying in the hills with four hundred men waiting for a chance at the army on the march, fell instead on a scouting party of the Congress’s riflemen, two dozen of them under a young lieutenant who had gone out ahead to look for Little Beard’s town and lost his way. They killed most of them in a single volley. They took the lieutenant alive, and a sergeant with him, and Butler questioned the lieutenant himself, as he questioned every prisoner, very patiently, and wrote down what he said; and then he gave them both to the Senecas, because the Senecas asked for them and the army was close and there was nothing else to do with them; and the Senecas took them to Little Beard’s town, where Little Beard was, and did there what the Senecas had done to prisoners in that war, and the war before it, and the war before that.
Brant was not there. He was twenty miles off, on the trail west with the women, when it happened, and he heard of it the next day. He knew, hearing it, that it would be his; that it would be in the Congress’s newspapers before the winter that Brant had done it, as he had done Wyoming, where he had not been, and Cherry Valley, where he had; and that there was nothing at all to be done about that, and never would be, because the men who write things down were not on his side of the fire.
The army found the two of them the next day, when it came into Little Beard’s town. Then it burned the town, all the houses, a hundred and twenty-eight of them, the soldiers said, who counted everything. Then it began on the corn.
It took them two days. There was too much of it to throw into the river. They pulled it, and piled it in the houses before they burned the houses, and in the kilns, and in great heaps in the fields, and set fire to the heaps; and the flats of the Genesee burned from one end to the other, for miles, with a smoke that went up over the hills and could be seen, the people said who were going west along the trail, from a day’s walk off. Some of the stalks were seventeen feet high. A soldier had measured one. He had never seen corn like it, he told his friends; and he had not, because there was no corn like it anywhere else. The Senecas had been growing it on those flats for longer than anybody could remember, and now they were not.
On the fifteenth of September, in the afternoon, the army turned round and went home.
He went to Niagara with the people, because there was nowhere else for anybody to go.
There were five thousand of them under the walls of the fort by the end of the month, and more coming in every day: Senecas and Cayugas and Onondagas and Delawares and Mohawks, the people of every town between the Chemung and the Genesee, lying in the open along the river and the lake shore, in bark shelters and under blankets and under nothing, round fires made of whatever would burn, waiting for the King to feed them. The King’s people at the fort were feeding them. Colonel Guy Johnson, who was the King’s Superintendent for the Six Nations, and Sir William’s nephew, and had taken Brant to London, was feeding them salt pork and flour out of the King’s stores, and writing to Quebec every week that the stores would not last the winter, and that the King’s Indians must be fed by the King or they would starve or go over; and he was right, and they knew it, and they did not thank him. A Seneca whose town was ashes tried to shoot him one morning at the fort gate, for the things he had told them in the spring about the King’s protection, and was knocked down by the sentry, and not punished, because nobody could think what to punish him with.
The women went to the warriors in the evenings, at the fires, and asked them to make peace. They asked very quietly. They asked whether the King’s war was worth the corn; and the warriors did not answer them, because there was no answer to that question that a man could say in front of his mother.
Susanna was not there to ask him. She had died in the spring, at Niagara, in the week the ice went out of the river, coughing, as Peggie had coughed. He had told her, before that, in the winter, sitting on the borrowed bed with his back to the wall, where he had been at Cherry Valley and what he had done there and what he had not been able to do; all of it, in Mohawk, slowly, for most of a night, while she lay with her face to the wall and listened. At the end of it she had turned over and looked at him for a long time, and put out her hand, and he had held it until it was light. She had not said anything. He had not needed her to. He had found, afterwards, that it was the one thing in the whole of that year he would not have had otherwise.
The children were with the women of his family, in a shelter by the lake shore that was better than most. Isaac was twelve, and wanted to go to the war. Christina was ten, and cooked. Brant sat with them in the evenings and did not talk about the towns, and they did not ask him.
At the beginning of October he went back down into the Seneca country, with Old Smoke and a few of the young men, to see what was left.
The army was gone. It had gone back down the valley the way it had come, burning again whatever it had missed on the way up, and the scouts said that it had reached Tioga, and was pulling down its fort there, to go home down the Susquehanna to Wyoming in its boats. Nobody had followed it. There was nothing to follow it with.
They came into Kanadesaga on a cold bright morning with the frost white on the ashes.
It was very quiet. The houses were heaps of black timber and grey ash, with the chimneys of the ones that had had chimneys standing up out of them; and the fields round the town were stubble and char, trodden flat by horses, with here and there a pumpkin that nobody had found, very orange, lying in the black. The old man walked into the middle of the town and stood where his own house had been, and looked at it, as Brant had stood at Oquaga, for a long time. Then he walked on, past it, out to the orchard behind the town, and Brant went after him.
The trees were standing. They were young trees, ten years planted, in rows, and every one of them had its ring cut round it at the height of a man’s knee, through the bark into the white wood, clean and even, very well done; the army had done it in a morning. The leaves were still on them, turning yellow, as leaves did in October. There was fruit on them. Nobody had picked it, and there was a great deal of it, small hard red apples hanging in the bright cold air, and a good many on the ground under the trees; and an old woman of the town who had come back before them was going along the rows with a basket, picking them up.
Old Smoke stood and looked at the trees for a while. Then he said, to nobody, in Seneca, that they would bear next year.
“Yes,” said the old woman, without stopping. “Next year they will bear. They do not know yet.” She bent and picked up an apple and put it in her basket. “The year after, they will know.”
The old woman came along the row to where he was standing, and looked up at him, and held out an apple. He took it. It was cold from the night and very hard, and when he bit into it it was sharp and sweet at once, as the best apples are in October, after the first frost; and he stood in Old Smoke’s orchard in the bright cold morning and ate it slowly, all of it, down to the core, because it was a good apple, and there would be one more year of them, and then there would not.