How Few Remain (32 page)

His son, Lewis, embraced him. “Don’t just
be
a witness, Father. Bear witness for the world.”

“I’ll do that. I’ll do exactly that.” A shouted
All aboard!
from the conductor punctuated Douglass’ promise. He climbed up onto the train and took his seat. If the white man next to him was dismayed to have a Negro traveling companion, he was polite enough not to show it, more than which Douglass could not ask.

Going from Rochester to Louisville (or rather, to the Indiana towns across the Ohio from Louisville) took two days. The polite white man left the train at Fort Wayne, to be replaced by a fellow who stared at Douglass in a marked manner and kept sniffing, as if to say the Negro had not bathed as recently as he might have done. Since no one in the car was fresh by then, and since several people apparently had not bathed since the start of the year, Douglass felt he was being unduly singled out. But, as the man from Fort Wayne took things no further than that, Douglass ignored him. He’d known worse.

New Albany, Clarksville, and Jeffersonville, Indiana, had been trading partners with Louisville. They’d sent U.S. manufactured goods into the Confederate States in exchange for tobacco and whiskey and fine Kentucky horseflesh. With the Ohio closed to shipping, with bridges blown up, with cannon barking at one another, they could have had the look of western mining towns after the veins that spawned them had run dry.

Instead, they boomed as never before. The reason was easy to understand: tent cities bigger than any of them filled the countryside beyond the reach of Confederate guns. The U.S. Army was there in numbers not seen since the War of Secession, and bought everything the Rebels would have and more besides.

A driver was supposed to be waiting for Douglass when he got off the train. He stood on the platform, looking around. No driver was in evidence, and it wasn’t likely that the man had gone off with some other elderly colored gentleman by mistake. Douglass sighed. Brigadier General Willcox or one of his officers had managed to make a hash of things.

That meant hiring a cab. The first driver Douglass approached shifted a wad of tobacco deep into his cheek so he could growl, “I don’t take niggers.” Southern Indiana had never been territory friendly to the cause of abolition, and till the war began the locals had probably associated more with the Confederates across the river than with their more enlightened countrymen from other regions of the USA. The second cab driver Douglass approached dismissed him as curtly as had the first.

He finally found a man willing to take him—for a ten-dollar fare. “That’s robbery!” he burst out.

“That’s business,” the fellow returned. “Uncle, ain’t many folks round here who’d drive you for any money.”

Douglass had already seen as much.
Uncle
was one of the less malicious things whites called blacks: not a compliment, certainly, but an improvement over a lot of choices the driver might have made. “Ten dollars it is,” the Negro said, and hoped the man wouldn’t try to hold him up for twenty when they got to Willcox’s headquarters.

The cab had to pick its way down little paths that had never been meant to take much traffic but were now choked with wagon trains bringing the army the munitions it would need to fight and the food it needed till such time as it did go into battle. The dust was overpowering. Above the rattle of wagon wheels, the driver said, “By the time we get there, pal, we’ll be the same color.”

If he was exaggerating, he wasn’t exaggerating by much. Was that the solution to the problem of white and black in the USA—and, for that matter, in the CSA? Put everybody behind a dozen wagons on a dusty road on a dry summer’s day? Douglass wished things could have been so simple.

He soon discovered he could tell which regiments were Regular Army and which volunteers before he saw the banners identifying them. The regulars knew what they were doing. Everything was neat, everything just so. Even the dust around regular
regiments seemed less, as if it were afraid to come up lest some officer give it fatigue duty for untidiness.

Volunteer encampments straggled more. The men themselves straggled more, too, and slouched more, as if some of the iron in the regulars’ backbones had been omitted from theirs. They looked like what they were: men unsure how to be soldiers but called upon to play the role. A lot of them had been called upon; their regiments far outnumbered those of the long-service professionals who filled the ranks in time of peace. A large part of the volunteer strength of the Army was concentrated here for the blow against Louisville.

“All right, Uncle.” The driver halted the cab. “Ten dollars, like I said.” Douglass paid without a murmur, relieved he’d kept to the price he’d set at the station. The driver hauled his trunk down from the roof of the cab, nodded in a friendly enough way, and headed back to town. Douglass guessed he would have gouged a white man almost as badly. That made the orator and writer feel a little better.

General Willcox was supposed to know he was coming. When he strode up to the tent with the general’s one-star flag flying in front of it, he discovered the sentries had not been informed. “You want to see the
general?”
one of them said, gray eyes widening. He turned to his companion. “Eb, this here dusty old nigger wants to see the general.”

Both soldiers guffawed. Eb said, “Yeah, but does the general want to see this here dusty old nigger?” They thought that was funny, too.

“I am Frederick Douglass,” Douglass ground out in icy fury. “I was asked to come here to write the story of this army and its assault on Louisville. The story I have in mind to write at the moment will not cast the two of you in the best of light, of that you have my assurance.”

His tone worked the wonder his appearance had failed to effect: the sentries began to treat him like a man, not like a Negro. The one who wasn’t Eb disappeared into the tent, to return with a spruce young captain. “Mr. Douglass!” the officer said with a broad smile. “So good to meet you. I’m Oliver Richardson, General Willcox’s adjutant.” He shook hands with Douglass with every sign of pleasure. “I trust you had no difficulty finding the headquarters?”

“Finding them—no,” Douglass said. Whatever else he might
have added, he kept to himself. For all he knew, his difficulties might lie at Richardson’s feet. He’d met plenty of white men who were friendly to his face and called him a nigger the minute he turned his back.

“Let me take you in to see the general, Mr. Douglass,” Richardson said. “I’m sure the men will carry your trunk there to the tent where you are to be quartered.”

“Sir, there ain’t no such tent,” the sentry who wasn’t Eb said, “on account of we didn’t know this here … fellow was a-comin’.”

“Set one up, then,” Richardson snapped. An instant later, he was all affability again. “Come with me, Mr. Douglass.”

Douglass came. He found Brigadier General Orlando Willcox slogging down a mountain of papers, a scene he remembered from visiting headquarters during the War of Secession. He wondered how generals ever got to fight; they seemed too busy filling out forms and writing reports to have the time for it.

Willcox was a roly-poly man six or eight years younger than Douglass, with a high forehead that looked higher because his hair had retreated from so much of it. “Mr. Douglass!” he exclaimed, putting down his pen with every sign of delight. “God be praised that you have been able to join us before the commencement of the great struggle.”

“I had worried about that, yes,” Douglass said, “knowing how celerity is so vital a constituent of the military art.”

“We are less hasty than we might have been under other circumstances, there being so many volunteers to weave into the fabric of the Regular Army,” Willcox said. “But the mingling of warp and weft proceeds well, and I still have every confidence that the good Lord will grant our arms and our righteous cause the victory they deserve.”

“May it be so,” Douglass agreed. “If, however, you will forgive my speaking on a matter where I am the rankest amateur and you learned in every aspect, much the same sort of talk was heard in General McClellan’s headquarters during the War of Secession. The Lord is, as the saying has it, in the habit of helping them that help themselves.”

Captain Richardson sent Douglass a venomous glance that made him suddenly surer than he had been where his difficulties in making arrangements had arisen. General Willcox did not see that glance; he was answering, “I forgive you readily, as it is my
Christian duty to do. But if you knew how many hours I have spent on my knees in prayer, beseeching God to grant me the answers to the riddles of this campaign, you would be more certain I am acting rightly.”

Douglass had nothing against the power of prayer: on the contrary. He did wish, though, that General Willcox also spoke of how many hours he’d spent studying maps, examining the enemy’s positions on the far side of the Ohio, and sending over spies to examine them close up.

“The event will prove my strategy,” Willcox declared.

“Very well, sir,” Douglass replied. As he’d said, he was no soldier himself. And Orlando Willcox was certain to be right … one way or the other.

    Philander Snow leaned out to spit over the side of the Handbasket. “Six days on the road!” he said. “Reckon my backside’s as petrified as some of the bones them perfessers dig out of the ground.”

“If my hindquarters were that petrified,” Theodore Roosevelt said, “I wouldn’t be able to feel them, and I most assuredly can. But six days of hard riding would have left us just as worn, and we can carry more supplies in the wagon. Besides, Fort Benton can’t be much farther, not when we passed through Great Falls day before yesterday.”

“If it
was
much further, I expect I’d be too crippled-up to walk a-tall by the time we got there,” Snow said.

“If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed has to go to the mountain,” Roosevelt said. He saw at once that his traveling companion had not the slightest idea what he was talking about. Suppressing a sigh, he made himself what he thought was remorselessly clear: “If forts are the only places in Montana Territory where volunteers may be enrolled into the U.S. Army, then I needs must go to a fort to remove the unfortunate adjective from Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment.”

“Yeah, and all your toy soldiers’ll be a real part of the Army then, too,” Snow said, which made Roosevelt swallow another sigh. The ranch hands were good men, honest men, true men: he’d seen as much many times. Just as many times, though, he’d tried to hold any sort of intelligent conversation with one of them, and just as many times he’d failed.

With or without intelligent conversation, he and Phil Snow
rattled northeast close by the north bank of the Missouri River, on toward Fort Benton. They’d followed the river all the way from the farm; except for enormously overdeveloping the buttocks and every single circumadjacent nerve, the trip was easy.

Snow pointed ahead. “Smoke on the horizon, boss. If that don’t mean we’re about there, I’ll swallow my chaw.”

“What would happen if you did?” Roosevelt asked, as usual curious about everything.

“I’d sick my guts up, and pretty damn quick, too,” Snow said, expectorating for emphasis. “I done it once, when I got throwed off a horse.” His tone turned mournful: “It ain’t somethin’ you want to do twice.”

As he must have known, he didn’t have to make good on his promise. Inside of half an hour, the Handbasket rolled into Fort Benton. A considerable town had grown up around the fort, which lay as far west along the Missouri as even the shallowest-draft steamboat could reach.
The same thing happened around the legionary camps in the days of the Roman Empire
, Roosevelt thought. He glanced over to Philander Snow and shook his head. Snow’s many admirable qualities did not include an interest in ancient history. Roosevelt kept the thought to himself.

Snow was glancing around, too, into the back of the wagon. “You gonna put on your fancy uniform, boss?” he asked. “Hope it ain’t got too wrinkled from sittin’ there bundled up this past week.”

“I think I’ll be smarter leaving it bundled up,” Roosevelt answered. “By what I heard in Great Falls, this Henry Welton in command of the Seventh Infantry is only a lieutenant colonel himself. I don’t want to go in there looking as if I’m claiming to be his superior officer.”

“That’s clever. That’s right clever.” Philander Snow shifted the reins to his left hand so he could slap the other down on his thigh. “You don’t mind my sayin’ so, you’re wasting your time runnin’ a ranch. You ought to be in politics.”

“The thought has crossed my mind,” Roosevelt admitted. “If I hadn’t decided to come out here, I might have run for the Assembly back in New York. I’ll tell you this much—we need to see some changes made, and that’s a fact. If the people who are running things now won’t make ’em, we need to throw the rascals out and put in some people who will.”

Snow brought the wagon to a stop across the street from the
timber gate and adobe walls of Fort Benton. Perhaps not coincidentally, he brought it to a stop directly in front of a saloon. “You won’t need me to go in and talk with this lieutenant colonel, whatever his name was, will you, boss?”

“No, I don’t suppose I will.” Roosevelt stuck out his lower jaw and looked fierce. “But I will need you in some sort of state to travel when I come out again. Have a few drinks. Enjoy yourself. But if I have to pour you into the wagon, you will regret it, and not only on account of your hangover.”

“I’ll be good,” Snow said. “Don’t really fancy the notion of heading back toward the ranch with my head poundin’ like a stamping mill.” Next to that prospect, nothing Roosevelt threatened could put fear in him.

But he hurried into the saloon with such alacrity that Roosevelt clicked his tongue between his teeth. Then he shrugged. He’d see when he came out of Fort Benton.

“Mornin’ to you,” the sentry at the gate said when he approached. “State your business, if you please.” The soldier did not stand aside.

“I wish to speak with Lieutenant Colonel Welton,” Roosevelt answered. “I have assembled a body of volunteer troops to offer to the U.S. Army.”