Rifles for Watie

Summer comes to an end, and the weather grows cooler as the Missouri leaves change color. Jeff is always hungry as the food rations he receives are never enough. One day, while he is walking Dixie, Jeff follows the smell of a cider press to a small house surrounded by apple trees. He knocks on the door and asks the woman who answers if he can have some apples. She asserts that he’ll only return with his friends and her family can barely feed themselves. Before she can close the door, Jeff tells the woman that he was raised on a farm and offers to do work for her around the place. She relents, telling him to go ahead and take some apples, noting that he looks more like a schoolboy than a soldier, adding: “Ye orter be home with yer mother” (102). Smiling, Jeff agrees, and she invites him in, offering bread with apple butter and feeding Dixie as well.

The woman introduces herself as McComas, telling Jeff: “We’re lucky to hev any food at all these days. One army or t’other’s on us all the time” (103). She notices that Jeff speaks differently, and he tells her about his family in Kansas. When he talks about the bushwhackers, Mrs. McComas’s expression darkens, and she tells him about her sister on the Kansas border who has been raided twice. She calls bushwhackers “the lowest critters on God’s green earth” (104). Jeff agrees, offering again to do chores. Mrs. McComas takes him to the woodpile and he chops wood. She tells Jeff that her husband is in the army, which has made it difficult to keep the household running. Before Jeff and Dixie leave, she gives him a sack of apples that have fallen on the ground to bring back to camp. One fellow soldier tells Jeff that he is “the best rustler in the whole outfit” (105) as he devours an apple, since Jeff is “so small and boyish, the farm wives all take pity on [him]” (105).

The next day, Captain Clardy asks the company for ten volunteers for an “important duty” (105). Babbitt tries to stop him, but Jeff, eager to see action, steps forward. Their job is to go to the homes of rebel POWs who had been released on the oath that they would not return to the army for the duration of the war but had returned to the Confederate army anyway. Sergeant Baird, who is leading the volunteers, tells them, “We’re ordered to punish their families” (105), which means taking away their livestock and property. Disturbed, Jeff asks, “But, sir, if the men are gone away to the war, won’t the women and children need all the worse what we’re going to take away from them?” (106). Sergeant Baird agrees, but “orders is orders” (106), and he says, “I don’t like ‘em no better than you. But I don’t make ‘em. All I do is enforce ‘em” (106). It is a difficult day, but Jeff is horrified to discover that the last homestead they need to visit is the McComas house.

Baird serves the order, and Mrs. McComas, seeing Jeff with the soldiers, spits, “This is what a body gits for goin’ soft an’ feedin’ a Yankee swine” (107). To Baird, she shouts, “Sure he broke his parole! He couldn’t bear standin’ round doin’ nothin’ when his state was bein’ invaded by a passel of furriners” (107). Unhappily, Jeff takes the family’s only livestock, a cow. He pleads with Mrs. McComas, “Mam, please believe me. I didn’t have nothin’ to do with brinin’ ‘em here. […] Ask ‘em, mam. None of us likes this kind of duty” (108). Unmoved, Mrs. McComas calls Jeff a “Yankee liar” (108). They return to camp, and Babbitt asks Jeff about his day. Jeff says, “I feel low down as a snake” (108). Babbitt warns Jeff never to volunteer for anything. Jeff shakes his head, telling Babbitt about taking the only livestock from the woman who had been kind to him. Bill Earle, another bunkmate, states, “War’s hard. […] I wish they was something we could do about it. But they ain’t nothin’ we can do” (109).

Jeff considers Earle’s assertion, and suddenly asks who is on duty at the camp’s corral. Babbitt tells him and, catching Jeff’s meaningful look, adds, “Careful, youngster. […] It’s after a retreat, you know” (110). But Jeff, having decided what to do, feels better. He approaches Oscar Earnshaw, who is guarding the corral. Jeff appeals to Oscar, reminding him of the apples that he shared the day before. He offers to return with a slice of bread with apple butter if Oscar will turn a blind eye while Jeff frees the McComas’s cow. Oscar replies, “I’ll help you cut her out myself. The corral’s full o’ cows. They’ll never miss one” (111). Jeff retrieves the cow and leads her to the McComas farm. He milks her and then knocks on the door. Mrs. McComas opens the door, looking “frightened and sleepy” (111). She is astonished as Jeff offers her the cow and the pail of milk. Jeff returns to camp with apple butter sandwiches for Oscar and one for himself.

In January, three months later, Jeff’s luck runs out. Clardy orders the company to clean their guns before an inspection at noon. Remembering his arrest before the battle, Jeff goes to Clardy and requests permission to discharge his musket to clean it. Glaring at Jeff, Clardy agrees. Outside, he shoots his musket. Immediately, a sentry appears. Jeff quickly informs him that he had permission from Clardy. The guard attempts to verify this, and Clardy growls, “Of course I didn’t” (113), adding that he had disciplined Jeff for the same offense in close proximity to the rebel army before the Wilson’s Creek battle. Jeff protests angrily, shocking the sentry with his impudence. Clardy orders the guard to arrest Jeff and deposit him in the guarded tent, promising: “This time I’m going to teach him a lesson he’ll never forget” (113-114). After a day in the guardhouse, Jeff receives two weeks of assignments to “the most disagreeable tasks the captain could contrive, marching about the camp carrying a knapsack filled with rocks, digging stumps, burying dead horses, digging latrines” (114), and finally landing in a labor crew that was digging ditches around the camp.

He meets David Gardner again, who is still laboring as punishment for deserting. At night, sleeping amongst the prisoners, Jeff seethes about the injustice of his punishment and is divided between his yearning for battle and “loathing for all the cruelty and tyranny that accompanied war” (114). In May 1862, “two months after he won his emancipation from the road crew” (115), Jeff receives a transfer to “Fort Scott, Kansas, and became a part of a Federal invasion force of six thousand men under Colonel William Weer” (115). In June, Weer’s army leaves Fort Scott for the Cherokee Indian Nation. There, the army will repair homes for “the loyal refugee Indian families who had fled into Southern Kansas early in the war” (115). Thrilled, “Jeff could hardly wait to start. Nearly thirteen months in the army and he still hadn’t fired a shot in combat!” (115).

In June, the company moves across the Kansas state line to the Cherokee Indian nation. The spring has been dry, and water is short. The cooks have resorted to fishing water from muddy ponds and boiling and skimming it until it is clean. Repulsed, Jeff decides to stick with coffee, although it is made from the same water. Jeff and his company are stationed with “two regiments of newly organized Union Indian Home Guards, mostly Creeks and Seminoles armed with antiquated long-barreled Indian rifles” (116). Along the expedition, the army is followed by a caravan of Native American refugees who lost their land in early Confederate attacks but are now returning home. Jeff is happy to have escaped the road crew. They move southwest, and the land is hot and dry. One soldier refers to the area as “Stand Watie’s home stompin’ grounds” (117). Jeff recognizes the name of “Stand Watie, a warlike Cherokee of mixed blood, who owned slaves and commanded a small, hard-riding rebel cavalry unit” (117). Watie’s unit has been brutally attacking and raiding the lands of Native Americans who side with the Union, although the majority of Native Americans have been “fighting actively with the South” (117).

While Jeff was stuck on the road crew, his company had fought the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas, and “it had been the first Federal victory of the war in the far west” (119). One day, the sky becomes cloudy as if it might rain, but a Native American boy named Joe Grayson explains to Jeff the signs that it will not. Grayson marches barefoot, explaining to Jeff that when he gets tired, he remembers that his mother walked 800 miles barefoot on the Trail of Tears only twenty or twenty-five years before. As they march, Grayson points out different Native American housing. The full-blood Cherokees live in cabins, and Grayson looks down on them as “lazy. All they wanta do is live like old-time Indians. […] They jest wanta hunt and eat” (120). The mixed-race Cherokees, however, live in large farmhouses, and Grayson explains, “They know how to live” (120). Later, they pass a home that has been burned to the ground, which Grayson identifies as the former home of Clem Vann, a “Union man” (121) and the father of Grayson’s boyhood friend. Grayson becomes emotional as he tells Jeff that Watie burned down Vann’s homestead.

Grayson explains that there is an ongoing feud between Union and Confederate Cherokees. A group of rebel Cherokees, including Watie, signed the treaty that allowed Andrew Jackson to take Cherokee land and force tribe members onto the Trail of Tears. Jeff is shocked to learn that the United States government took away their homes. Grayson remembers his own home, a “two-story brick, prettiest in whole Georgia county” (121), which had been in his family for a 100 years until Jackson’s soldiers showed up and forced his mother and family out. Jeff considers Grayson’s story, amazed that Grayson had decided to be loyal to the Union and horrified that his country had committed such acts. At camp one night, Babbitt asks Bill Earle why they are traveling to “this Godforsaken Indian country” (122). Earle reminds him that they are escorting the refugees home as well as showing the Cherokees how strong the Union army has become. Since many Cherokees “had to join the rebels against their will” (122), Earle suggests that a show of strength might convince them to switch sides.

Earle goes on, wondering if, while they are showing off, a larger faction of the Confederate army could decide to attack and take them out. Babbitt points out that their spies and scouts have likely made sure that there is no such rebel force ahead. Jeff is taken aback to discover that “each side has got plenty of spies in the other’s army” (123) and wonders if he has been traveling beside rebel spies. Babbitt tells Jeff that the punishment for being caught as a spy is death, and Jeff concludes that “it must take an awfully brave man to be a spy” (123). The company approaches a farmer who stops his truck to sell apples to the men. While the farmer tries to transact with the excited mob, Earle jumps onto the wagon and begins to help himself, sharing apples with his fellow soldiers. After the farmer’s cries for a captain go unheeded, he drives his empty truck away. Jeff is “beginning to learn the army’s careless regard for the private property of civilians, especially food” (124). Although stealing within the camp is severely punished, the company treats stealing apples from a farmer “as a great lark” (124). In the camp, food shortages have led to thin rations.

One evening, a soldier approaches the cook fire after the meal. Apprehensively, Jeff hides when he reaches into his pocket. But instead of a weapon, he produces a piece of corn bread and asks to dip it in the leftover grease. The soldier introduces himself as Stuart Mitchell from Council Grove, Kansas, who was a prisoner in Watie’s camp for months. Mitchell tells his fellow soldiers about being captured and used as a “body servant” (125), which meant hard labor on minimal food. When Mitchell was first taken by Watie’s outfit, he believed they were “a pretty good lot” (125). But their teasing and torment stirred hatred in Mitchell, and he promises no mercy if he ever comes across them in battle. A week later, as food rations become even sparser, the soldiers complain to Millholland. Sympathetic, Millholland suggests that they forage and take food from “families that’s got plenty” (126), although this is technically against policy. They begin stealing food and livestock from Cherokee farms and the sentries look the other way.

One day, while Jeff and Earle are foraging with Mike Dempsey—“the old Irish teamster who had befriended Jeff at Fort Leavenworth” (128), they decide to check out an old cabin although their arms are already full. The cabin is empty except for a cat, which Jeff decides to bring back to camp “to keep the enemy from getting him” (127-128). This appalls Earle. Back at camp, the three soldiers are caught returning. Anxiously, Jeff worries that he will face time on the labor crew or worse, since he has been punished before. A lieutenant begins to reprimand them for “stealing from civilians” (129). Jeff replies, “We didn’t steal it. We just took it” (129). The lieutenant recognizes Dempsey, who begins to explain what they were doing. Suddenly, the lieutenant notices the cat and softens, letting them go. Dempsey tells the other two that he was once friends with the lieutenant’s father. Earle praises their luck.

Moving forward, the company arrives too late to participate when Watie’s outfit raids the camp and are defeated. Jeff complains, “Just my luck, […] I’ll never get in a real fight” (131). Babbitt tells him that he would indeed be lucky, but Jeff disagrees. They march on in intense heat through cattle country. Even hungrier than before, the men catch a cow, which Millholland skins and filets. Chadwick suggests that they stop to cook the meat and rejoin the rest of the army when they finish. Millholland agrees. As the steaks cook, Jeff undresses to boil the lice out of his clothes and Mitchell follows suit. Suddenly, a band of Watie’s rebel soldiers appears. They attack, shooting, but Jeff is half-naked naked and unarmed. For a moment, Jeff thinks he has been shot, but discovers that the bullet hit his canteen, spilling red sorghum syrup on his pants. After the attack, the soldiers discover that the rebels stole their steaks and their cow. Jeff realizes that Millholland is missing, and they find his body, shot down. Devastated, Jeff curses Watie and his men. They bury Millholland, and bitterly eat rice for dinner.