Patriotic Fire by Winston Groom Page B

fights throughout the hundred-acre peninsula; with rifles, bayonets, swords, knives, spears, clubs, bows and arrows, tomahawks, rocks, fists, and teeth the Indians and soldiers went at it. About three p.m. it began to rain, and Jackson sent an offer urging the Red Sticks to surrender. Instead, they shot the messenger, and the battle continued with renewed fury. Houston was carried from the field, shot twice through the shoulder and with “a ghastly wound in his thigh” from a barbed arrow. He was not expected to live. Some of the Indians tried to escape by plunging into the river, but rifle fire from both banks soon turned the Tallapoosa red with blood.
    Late in the afternoon the fighting became desultory as the soldiers came together against isolated pockets of resistance. “Not an Indian asked for quarter, nor would accept it if offered.” Finally, when it became too dark to see, the fighting ceased, and next morning’s sun rose over a frightful tableau. Five hundred and fifty-seven Indian bodies were strewn over the little bend in the river; at least another 200 had “found a grave at the bottom of the river,” while it was estimated that another 100 or so died of their wounds in the forest.
    The back of the Red Stick confederacy was broken.
    After weighting down his own 49 dead and sinking them into the river to keep them from being scalped by any returning Indians, Jackson by midday on March 28 had his army—including 157 wounded—on the five-day northward march back to their encampment. His only regret was that William Weatherford was not found among the Indian dead and would have to be hunted down—or so he thought.
    Jackson had established his base at Fort Toulouse, ironically the original French outpost at the fork of the Coosa and Tallapoosa that Weatherford’s great-great-great-grandfather had built a hunded years earlier. It was rehabilitated and renamed Fort Jackson, and there the remaining Creek chiefs began coming to Jackson to surrender—fourteen of them in all. After securing promises of their good behavior, he pardoned them and set them free.
    Then one day a tall, light-skinned Indian with a newly killed deer slung over his saddle rode into the American camp and asked directions to Jackson’s tent. When it was pointed out, the Indian spurred his horse in that direction, where, at the flap of the tent, he encountered Chief Big Warrior, one of the friendly Indians who had been fighting at Jackson’s side.
    “Ah!” Big Warrior exclaimed. “Bill Weatherford, have we got you at last?”
    Weatherford began damning his antagonist as a traitor, and threatening to shoot him, when Jackson suddenly burst out of the tent.
    “How dare you ride up to my tent after having murdered the women and children at Fort Mims!” the general shouted.
    According to witnesses, Weatherford replied with the following soliloquy, as if from some staged modern-day Indian pageant:
    “General Jackson, I am not afraid of you. I fear no man, for I am a Creek warrior. I have nothing to request on behalf of myself. You can kill me if you desire. But I come to beg you to send for the women and children of the war party, who are now starving in the woods. Their fields and [corn] cribs have been destroyed by your people, who have driven them into the woods without an ear of corn. I am now done fighting. The Red Sticks are nearly all killed. If I could fight you any longer, I would most heartily do so. Send for the women and children. They never did you any harm. But kill me, if the white people want it done.”
    The great crowd of officers and men who by now had gathered around the tent began to shout in chorus: “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” But Jackson hushed them up, declaring, “Any man who would kill as brave a man as this would rob the dead.”
    The general invited Weatherford to dismount and come into his tent for an interview, which he did, dragging the deer along as a gift. It is said that Jackson talked of forming