Might even, someday, sweep him into the presidency.
Somewhat regretfully, Jackson shook his head. “Duty calls, Sam. Always duty. I’ll see the Dons driven from our soil before I turn my ambition to anything else. If I took state office, I’d have to resign from the army. Active duty, at least. And it’ll be the army—you watch and see—that deals the Dons as they deserve. No blasted politicians in Washington, much less Nashville.”
“I understand, sir.”
Jackson eyed him from beneath lowered brows. “Come on, Sam, you’re not that innocent. If I can’t run for office in Tennessee, there’s no reason you can’t. Young as you are, after the Capitol and New Orleans, you’d win in a landslide. The militia would support you just as readily as they would me.”
Jackson laid down the letter and picked up another. “This is from—well, never mind. Just take it from me that I can get you an appointment as a brigadier general in the Tennessee militia.”
He held up yet another. “And this letter’s from another old friend, in response to a query I sent up there some weeks back. One of our state’s finest judges. He tells me he can see to the completion of your education and making you an attorney-at-law. It’ll take a few years, but you’re still too young to run for a lot of offices, anyway. Thereafter, between that and the brigadier generalship—”
He flashed Houston a grin. “I won’t even talk about your own natural gifts for orating and such. Sam, you are pretty much guaranteed a splendid public career. I’ll back you every step of the way, too. We frontiersmen need people of our own in Washington.”
Jackson could grin very well, when he was of a mind to do so. “You’ll need to get married fairly soon, of course. But a man should get married anyway, and—ha!—you’ll certainly have no lack of choices. I’d recommend a Tennessee belle, myself, but who’s to say? One of those girls from the East Coast would do as well. For that matter, as good as your reputation is, you could probably get away with marrying one of these New Orleans Creole beauties, if you found one that caught your fancy.”
Sam stiffened a little, at the mention of “Creole beauties.” He’d gotten himself into something of a jam, on that subject. Especially with—well, and also—
His intentions were good, damnation! Still, it was very difficult when—especially after drinking too much—perhaps he should start listening to Patrick’s nattering on the subject of whiskey and rum—
But his scattered and nervous thoughts were dispelled, the moment he spotted the thick, official-looking envelope that was also there on Jackson’s desk. He hadn’t noticed it earlier, because it was lying at the bottom of the pile.
“Yes, sir. I’ll give it some thought, sir. But . . .”
Jackson spared him the awkwardness of asking. As if surprised, he looked down and spotted the envelope himself.
“Oh. This?” His fingers rummaged through the stack, for a moment. “Yes, I suppose I should raise it with you, also, even though I’m sure you’ll decline.”
He held up the envelope with two fingers, as if afraid it might be unclean. “This is a letter from Secretary of War Monroe. He’s apparently decided to create a new post for handling Indian affairs—special commissioner to the secretary, or some such silliness—and wants to know if you’d be willing to accept the position. Your duties would start immediately. The salary’s pretty wretched, I can tell you.”
Jackson let the envelope fall to the desk. “You’ll decline, of course.”
Houston stared at the letter.
Jackson’s eyes widened, as if in disbelief. “Sam, be serious. You know what a miserable job it is, being an Indian agent. Unless you’re a crook, which you aren’t. You’ll always be caught betwixt and between. Satisfying nobody and making nothing but enemies on all sides. I can’t think of a surer way for a young man to wreck a promising career before it’s even gotten started.”
That was all true enough. It was also—
Probably beside the point.
Not thinking of the discourtesy that might be involved, Sam rose abruptly from his chair and went over to the window. From that vantage point, he could look down onto the city’s main square.
Patrick Driscol was down there in the Plaza de Armas, sitting at a table with Tiana and General Ross. That had become something of a midday ritual, so Sam wasn’t surprised to see them.
James Rogers was there, too. That was a sad sight, because his brother John was absent. The two of them had been well-nigh inseparable since they were little boys.
Sam felt a little guilty about that. He and the Rogers brothers had spent a lot of time together, in the years he’d lived on John Jolly’s island. If Sam had never showed up there, John Rogers might still be alive today.
John Ross also was sitting at the table, however, which wasn’t usual. Still, Sam wasn’t surprised to see him either.
Why should he be? He’d told John that Jackson had summoned him. Ross had probably made the same guess Sam had made—that, whatever it was about, it would most likely have some bearing on their mutual fate.
The young Cherokee glanced up, spotted him in the window, and nodded.
Sam would never know why that simple nod triggered it off. But, suddenly, standing at a window in the Cabildo, he finally understood why he so loved the Iliad. It had always puzzled him, a bit. The hero, Achilles, was a repellent fellow in so many ways.
But that didn’t matter, he now realized. Homer had used such a hero to make a point. A short glorious life is preferable to a long and meaningless one, certainly. But how do you measure glory in the first place?
“It occurs to me, General,” he said to Jackson, turning his head to face him squarely, “that glory is a thing properly measured by duty. Not the acclaim of others.”
Jackson’s face went blank. “Yes,” he replied.
Sam nodded. “That’s what I just figured out. So I’ll be accepting the secretary’s offer, I think.”
“Well, it’s your decision.” Jackson twisted his head, in a little gesture Sam couldn’t interpret. Then he held up the letter. “You’ll want to read it, and make your own reply. But I’ll inform the secretary of your decision.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Jackson escorted him personally out of the office, gracious all the way. The general did that extremely well, too, when he was of a mind.
“Please give my regards to Mrs. Jackson.”
“Oh, certainly. And come visit us at the Hermitage, Sam, whenever you can manage it. Rachel was quite taken by you.”
In the corridor, after the door was closed, Sam paused for a moment. Jackson’s last words, he realized, were the general’s way of making clear that no bridges had been burned.
Good. Sam had a feeling he’d need to cross that bridge—many times—over the next few years.
Outside, he took a seat at the table.
“Well?” John Ross asked.
Sam held up the envelope. “It’s done. Step one, at any rate.”
Driscol said nothing. Tiana smiled. General Ross shook his head.
“Cousins,” he murmured, blowing on his cup of tea. “Why is it that all families have mad cousins?”
“The English,” Driscol stated. “Trace it all back, and you’ll find a Sassenach to blame.”
“Probably,” Ross allowed. “Though I do think the Scots have some sins of their own to answer for.”
“Oh, aye, to be sure. But we learned all the great crazed ones from the English. Our own native sins were too humble to scatter mad cousins across half the world, like so much gunpowder.”
When Coffee came into the general’s office, he found Jackson at the window, gazing down into the square below. The general had an odd, crooked little smile on his face.
Coffee came to join him. “Huh! Don’t they look like a cozy lot of plotters.”
“Don’t they just? I told you he’d refuse the rose.”
Coffee shook his head. “Andy, there are times I think you’d rather lose a fight—rather die, come
down to it—than admit you were wrong to start it in the first place.”
Jackson’s face went blank. “Of course.”
AFTERWORD
When it came time to design the jacket of this book, my editor Steve Saffel asked me how I would describe The Rivers of War and the story which it launches. It’s an alternate history, obviously. But of what?
Well . . .
That’s a harder question to answer than it seems.
On the simplest level, it’s an alternate history of the Cherokees. In fact, the story originated when Steve asked me some time ago if I could write an alternate history wherein the Trail of Tears could be prevented.
I told him I could do it, but not precisely. “Prevented” was simply impossible. Given the political, social, demographic, and economic forces at work in North America by the early nineteenth century, I couldn’t think of any plausible mechanism by which the southern tribes could avoid being driven off their land by the expanding United States. Not, at least, without positing some sort of time travel or science-fiction element—and that’s not what we were looking for.
Nor was that a story I would have wanted to write. Even if I could have figured out a way for the Cherokees to make a valiant and successful stand, retaining possession of their traditional lands, where would that lead? None of the answers to that question genuinely interested me as a writer.
That sort of valiant effort by an embattled minority has its precedent in world history, of course. For one example, many of the shattered Bantu tribes of southern Africa were rallied by Moshoeshoe in the early nineteenth century. The result was the country known today as Lesotho, which is completely surrounded by South Africa.
But I wasn’t attracted by the idea of writing a North American equivalent of the Lesotho story. I don’t mean to take anything away from the accomplishments of the founders of that nation. However, the fact remains that for the two centuries since, Lesotho has been entirely overshadowed by the much more compelling story of South Africa as a whole.
The more I thought about it, though, the more intrigued I became at the idea of an alternate history in which the relocation of the southern tribes happened, but did so in a very different way. A way which, over time, would have a tremendous impact on the unfolding developments in North America as a whole.
What if, in short, an “Indian nation” emerged in the heartland of America—something more than a place where the broken pieces of the tribes were herded like cattle into a pen? This “Indian nation” would of necessity wind up becoming something of a hybrid, and would be powerful enough to withstand the blasts of later historical developments.
That was . . . plausible.
Not likely, perhaps. But “likely” isn’t the business of alternate history. What matters is that the story be reasonably possible, and that it results in a story which will be entertaining in its own right.
In the end, Steve proposed that we call it an alternate history of the American frontier. I agreed, since that seemed as good a description as any. True, it would probably be most accurate to call it an alternate history of the United States and the surrounding territories during the Jacksonian Era and the period leading up to the Civil War. But that’s an impossibly long description to fit onto a book cover.
So, The Rivers of War is an alternate history of the American frontier. That said, you can expect this story as it unfolds to spend plenty of time with many very unfrontierly characters, such as James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Winfield Scott—and, for that matter, a retired British major general named Robert Ross.
The Cherokees, on the other hand, are very frontierly, and they are the prism through which this story will project an alternate history of North America. That’s because—as the character of Patrick Driscol says at one point in the novel—this is a family saga. A tale, if you will, of the new clan emerging on the continent, with its many disputatious nations, races, factions, and creeds.
Now for the details that will be of interest to many of my readers.
First, I should explain what the break point is in this story. For those of you not familiar with the conventions of alternate history, a “pure” alternate history like this one—one without a science-fictional element that causes the change in history—is based on the notion that a single altered event is what causes the deviation from history as it actually occurred.
There are informal rules governing this, and the most important is that the author is only allowed one such “break point.” Everything that follows has to be logically connected to that one change.
In the case of this story, the break point is simple and surprisingly modest. In the fifth chapter, as Sam Houston scales the Creek barricade at the battle of the Horseshoe Bend, his foot slips. As a result, the arrow which in real history caused a terrible wound to his groin simply produces a minor flesh wound.
And . . . that’s it.
In real history, although Houston finished the battle—even led another charge which resulted in two more wounds—he was so badly injured that he was actually given up for dead. And, although he survived, he needed to spend a year recuperating from his wounds. So he missed the rest of the War of 1812.
In this alternate history, his continued activity after the battle means that he can serve as a catalyst, connecting people who would become critically involved in the basic issues dealt with in the story. And that’s important, because they were all at the Horseshoe: Andrew Jackson, John Ross, Major Ridge, and Sequoyah—the men who would wind up being the central figures in the dispute between the Americans and Cherokees in the years to come.
Moreover, Houston’s own life changes drastically. In real history, he became one of Andrew Jackson’s closest associates. In fact, until his alcoholism and a terrible first marriage wrecked his initial political career, he was widely considered to be Jackson’s most likely successor. And after he regained his stature as a result of the Texas Revolution, he again became one of Jackson’s closest allies.
Here, however, the connection with Jackson happens much sooner, and with many unforeseen consequences. So, in one sense, this story can be viewed as an alternate biography of Sam Houston.
Beyond that, all of the major characters in the story are, with one exception, real historical figures. That one exception is the freedman teamster, Henry Crowell, whom I invented out of whole cloth. Still, even in Crowell’s case, his character is based on real people of the time.
The extent to which the personalities of the novel’s other characters match their personalities in real history varies a great deal from one character to the next. In the case of such characters as Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson, Winfield Scott, James Monroe, and—albeit to a lesser extent—John Ross and Major Ridge, there’s an extensive historical record which enabled me to base their personalities as closely as possible on the real people. Thus, while some modern readers might be skeptical that Sam Houston’s attitudes on race were as depicted in the novel, those were in fact his attitudes, and they’re amply recorded in existing documents.
With other characters, much less is known. The basic facts of the military career of Robert Ross, for instance, are well established. But his personality seems to have largely vanished from the historical record. So I felt at liberty to develop his personality as it best fit the story. First, because nothing I posit stands in contradiction to what is recorded. Ross was, for instance, known for being a “soldier’s general.” And, secondly, because since I saved his life—in a manner of speaking—I figured I was entitled to some dramatic leeway. (In real history, after the successful British attack on Washington, D.C., Ross was killed a few weeks later leading the attack on Baltimore.)
At the far extreme, the characters of Patrick Driscol and Anthony McParland are based on real historical figures. The execution of the deserters depicted in the beginning of Part II of the novel did, in fact, happen as I portrayed it. But so far as I was able to determine, even the names—as well as the personalities—of both the sergeant and the
young private involved have disappeared. So, I developed them as I needed for the purposes of the story.
Tiana Rogers occupies a category of her own. She did exist, and became Sam Houston’s second wife from 1828 to 1833, when he went back to live with the Cherokee after the wreck of his political career in Tennessee. They divorced after he moved to Texas, and Tiana eventually died of pneumonia in 1838.
To the greatest degree possible, the depiction of her in the novel is true to life. Indeed, she was by all accounts very tall and, though slender, very strong. There are stories of her marching into trading posts where her husband Sam had gotten stinking drunk and hauling him out over her shoulder—and Houston was a big man, standing at least 6 feet 2 inches tall and powerfully built.
But there are so many legends surrounding Tiana that separating fact from fiction is simply impossible. Even her name is a matter of dispute. I chose to use the variant of Tiana, although it was probably spelled Diana or Dianna in writing, because the name would most likely have been pronounced that way by Cherokees.
However, the name on her tombstone in the officers’ circle of the cemetery at Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, is spelled “Talihina.” That name was bestowed on her by a journalist in the 1890s, half a century after her death—and is almost certainly wrong, because it is probably Choctaw rather than Cherokee in its origins.
But that’s to be expected, since it is also a matter of dispute whether the body buried in that grave is hers in the first place. Most scholars think that it probably is, but there are a number who dispute the claim.
I made my own decision as to how I would portray Tiana during the hour or so I spent at the cemetery in Fort Gibson, contemplating her tombstone. (Which it is, after all, whether or not the body that’s buried there is really hers.)