Chapter 1

1866: defiance, Ohio

After mustering out of the Forty-fourth Colored Infantry Regiment at Chattanooga in April, I spent the rest of the spring and early summer of eighteen sixty-six in northwestern Ohio, on the family farm near Defiance. Technically, I was on an extended leave while the U.S. War Department decided how and where it was going to organize new regiments of colored troops, for which I had volunteered, despite the fact that I was white. At least I was generally thought of as white; the fact that my father’s mother had been Seneca was not generally known. For that matter, one’s heritage of some portion of Indian blood was not uncommon in what had so recently been the country’s northwest frontier. More remarkable, though, was my volunteering to serve with a colored regiment. However, even that was due to a series of events in the recent War, events over which I’d had but trifling influence.

Now that War was over and the country was returning to its primary occupation: westward expansion.

Contrary to most expectations, after The War the U.S. Congress authorized an expansion of the regular Army, to ten regiments of cavalry and forty-five regiments of infantry. Those regiments were to include six colored regiments: two regiments of cavalry and four regiments of infantry.

During The War, the Union had depended heavily on state militias and purpose-recruited volunteer regiments to supplement the limited size of the regular Army. Afterwards, the actual number of men under arms was largely reduced overall because of the disbanding of those expressly-organized volunteer regiments and state militia units. In contrast, under the new Congressional directives, the official United States Army would grow nearly fourfold.

Since I had been assigned to a colored regiment during The War, that assignment the result of the racist notions of our Army’s then commanding general, William Tecumseh Sherman, I had lately been recruited to train colored scouts in the newly expanded standing army. This was essentially the same assignment I’d had during The War, so I gladly volunteered. I had found working with colored troops the same as working with the white troop, with whom I’d begun my wartime enlistment. I was able to identify but two exceptional differences between the white and colored troops I’d known.

The first was that the federal Army afforded the colored troops poorer rations and equipment than it did their white counterparts. We learned to make do.

The second difference was more telling. I took note of a more ardent dedication to duty among those colored volunteer soldiers who -- as most had been born and raised as slaves -- were experiencing freedom for the first time. They did not take that experience for granted. For such men, being a soldier in the Army of the United States of America fulfilled a fervid longing ingrained of years under bondage. And their attitude made me appreciate the ideals of America in a more profound way, and this new mindfulness required that I see myself in a new light.

This was much in my thoughts as I assisted Pa with the springtime routines of the farm.

While my older brother, Amos, was helping our brother-in-law, Steffen Hildebrand and his wife -- our sister, Miriam -- to drain and plant a new farm near Ridgeville Corners, Ohio, a hamlet northeast of Defiance, I had assigned myself to the duty of temporarily taking his place on the family farm, which Amos would eventually inherit. And so I helped Pa with the equipment and tack repair, and the planting, thinning, and weeding chores that were part and parcel of spring and early summer on a farm.

I’d written Pa, even before mustering out, that I had signed on for a posting to the new colored regiments that were being formed for duty in the far west. When I got home, he told me that he hadn’t really been surprised by my news, as he realized, just from my time with our Uncle Sammie, that my true interests lay in a direction other than farming. He even went so far as to speculate that his Onodowa’ga -- Seneca -- blood may have proofed-up in me. Him saying that gave me a peculiar feeling, as if a different world had just opened before me.

It’s not that I resented farm work; I actually enjoyed it. While physically demanding, it was also relaxing in the many routine and repetitive chores necessary for purposes of raising crops and food animals. It was especially comforting after the prior two-and-a-half years of wartime and post-war garrison duty in northwest Georgia. Being able to plan for work that didn’t involve the possibility of your friends being killed was a blessing in itself.

Despite the post-war drop in food commodity prices, Pa still had a market for the excess corn he was planting, corn that was not all needed to feed our own livestock. He and several other local farmers had contracted with a distillery in Louisville, Kentucky to plant a certain variety of corn suited to the distillery’s needs, a variety that thrived in the rich black soil of the reclaimed sections of the Great Black Swamp of northwest Ohio. But it was the availability of the Miami and Erie Canal, with it’s mule- and oxen-drawn freight barges, that made shipping the bulk corn reasonably inexpensive, especially compared to steam-driven alternatives, such as railroads and riverboats. Even the hundred-mile portion of the journey on the Ohio River was downstream and the loaded barges could easily be floated with only minimal steamboat assistance.

As to more personal matters, after I arrived home, I did visit one of the girls I’d been sweet on from the year before I joined the Army. However, her interests had become firmly rooted in domestic concerns, anticipating the needs of a farm family. While we did share some moments of intense physical re-connection, we both soon realized we no longer shared a common vision of our future. Plus, my sisters told me she’d been keeping company with another young man in recent months.

Then, early in June, I received a letter from Doc Fraser, one of the former scout-sharpshooters from the Forty-fourth colored regiment. He and Royal Higgins, another colored scout-sharpshooter from our old platoon, had been assigned to an as-yet undesignated colored cavalry unit to be organized at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. I knew that both he and Royal, following some of our mounted patrols, had expressed an interest in the cavalry regiments. For my part, I still wasn’t sold on horses as the primary means of troop movement, not in small-unit scouting, at least. A soldier’s ability to leg it to a military objective still seemed to me the more effective method.

While horses were generally useful in getting a unit to the scene of trouble, at that point the animals often became a burden which the unit had to carry. Their feeding, care, and protection, especially in the face of battle, not only reduced the effective fighting force by one in four, the horses added what amounted to a secondary battle objective that had to be defended to remain effective. Granted, a cavalry charge was an especially potent tactic for overcoming a massed enemy force, but that type of infantry formation was falling out of favor.

Moreover, horses were a larger, more vulnerable target than a soldier. They were unable to take cover or otherwise protect themselves, save in headlong flight. The loss of even a limited number of mounts would leave a detached unit crippled in its operational capability. Horses certainly had their uses, even in pitched battles, but those uses were limited. At best, horses were a mixed blessing.

But Doc and Royal had displayed a special affinity for the horses when we had operated as a mounted infantry unit, and I knew they would make the best of that mode of military service. Doc, who’d been a school-teacher before The War, wrote that he was being promoted to sergeant, while Royal was being made a corporal. They were to report to Fort Leavenworth by July fifteenth. He asked if I’d received an assignment, yet.

That evening, I wrote to him, recounting my springtime activities and telling him that Amos, whom he’d met during The War, was helping our brother-in-law set up his new farm. I also let him know that I had not yet received orders.

That changed two days later, when Pa came back from town with a load of seed for a new type of hay called luzerne alfalfa, which had become a popular feed crop in California and Oregon. Pa had also brought a thick envelope addressed to Sergeant Judah Becker. I reckoned my rank must be official, then, as my mustering-out papers had designated me a corporal.

Inside the envelope, in typical War Department officialese, were my orders to report to Baton Rouge, Louisiana no later than the eighth of July, eighteen sixty-six. Included were several Army chits for transport and meals en-route. One line on the orders made formal note that I had been promoted to sergeant.

Pa had stood and watched as I went through the contents of the envelope. When I looked up at him, I saw the tears over-brimming his eyes. I just went to him and hugged him to me in a fierce embrace. Life was becoming entirely too bitter-sweet.

The next event, a total surprise, was the arrival of Great-Uncle Sammie, Pa’s Seneca Uncle, Samuel Cayuga. He had canoed all the way from Oneida Lake in New York, mostly along the shores of Lake Erie.

His presence was cause for a gathering which brought our youngest sister, Rachel, and her husband, Marcus Rappaport, to visit from Toledo, where Marcus was a shipping agent. Their eight-month old son, Amos, was named for our father. It was Marcus who had learned of the need for a particular corn variety at the Kentucky distillery and had helped organize the local farmers to bid on a contract. That’s also when he had met Rachel.

Of course, Miriam, Steffen and their two children, both little girls, attended the reunion, as did Amos and the young woman he was courting.

The next surprise was when our Pa also invited a lady friend to the gathering. Helen Mitchell was a widow whose husband had died at Shiloh. She lived with her brother and his wife. The brother operated a seed supply warehouse in Defiance and Mrs. Mitchell helped out by writing down orders for her brother to assemble and bring to the loading platform. That’s where Pa had met her. She seemed like a very nice lady.

I’d written Uncle Sammie from Chattanooga, before mustering out, telling him that I had signed on to an extension of my enlistment and likely would be fighting Indians in the far west. He was quite inured to the idea of fighting Indians, as that’s what most Indians had done, other than hunting, and some farming, for hundreds and hundreds of years. As far back as anyone could account, Indian tribes were almost continuously in a state of conflict with other Indian tribes.

That was the remarkable thing about the old Iroquois Confederacy: five populous and powerful tribes occupying a large region around the lower Great Lakes -- Lake Erie and Lake Ontario -- had settled into a centuries-long period of peaceful relations, at least with one another. The Seneca had been one of those tribes.

After the reunion festivities and the return of the visitors to their homes, Uncle Sammie had proposed that he and I canoe up the Maumee River and cross over to the headwaters of the Wabash River, and thence into the Limberlost, a large swampy wilderness on the Indiana-Ohio border.

The Maumee River basin, which included much of the northwest corner of Ohio, a section of south-central Michigan, and the northeastern corner of Indiana, comprised a region that was known as the Great Black Swamp. In fact, what Amos and Steffen were doing to prepare Miriam and Steffen’s land for crops was to dig drainage ditches. It was the same thing Pa had done when he and Ma first moved to the region. The rich soil that remained after the land was drained was the fertile black color that gave the swamp its name.

The Limberlost, known to the former native Indian inhabitants as the Loblolly Swamp, was of a similar nature to the Black Swamp, and it was only separated from it by a few miles of slightly higher ground. That barely-discernible divide caused the Limberlost to drain into the Wabash River, which, in turn, was a major tributary of the Ohio River. The Maumee, a major tributary river of the Great Lakes, drained into Lake Erie, which, with the other Great Lakes -- Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Ontario -- emptied into the St. Lawrence River and thence into the North Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, the Limberlost, but a few miles away, drained eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. I marveled at how such minor deviations could cause such major differences in outcome.

I readily agreed to the trip with Uncle Sammie. I expected that he wanted to renew my scouting skills and the related knowledge, hence the trip into the wilderness. But it turned out that wasn’t his purpose.

The Maumee River follows a relatively direct course, not given to the considerable meandering one might expect of a river flowing through a swampland. In contrast to most rivers of that type, the Maumee was cut through rock, much of it broken layers of shale, which caused the many shallow rapids that had made barge canals -- both the Miami and Erie Canal and the Wabash and Erie Canal -- necessary as alternatives to the river itself. As we paddled upriver, Uncle Sammie and I sometimes took advantage of the Wabash and Erie canal, rather than make long portages past shallow rapids. Besides, the current in the canal was much slower, making our upstream course even easier.

It took us three days to paddle the roughly sixty river miles to our portage. For the overland section we suspended the canoe by straps from our shoulders to carry beside and between us. We brought it and our equipment and supplies on the all-but-level, nine mile, half-day trek. At the end of the portage, we put in to one of the streams that fed the Limberlost and the Wabash.

Uncle Sammie was largely quiet those first few days. While he’d sometimes point out interesting sights -- a beaver lodge, a family of ducks swimming along the shore, a doe and her fawn, a bear foraging in the early season grass -- our conversation was mostly limited to the necessities of travel and setting up our overnight camps. By the third day, I realized that the silence was drawing a curtain around us, a separation from the busier world. It was reminiscent of the quiet times we’d shared in the coldest weeks of winter when we would den-up in his small cabin on the Mohawk.

By the time we reached the long portage from the St. Mary’s River, which, with the St. Joseph River converged to form the Maumee near Fort Wayne, Indiana, we had run through most of the food supplies that we had brought and became dependent on hunting and trapping game and foraging wild plants. At Uncle Sammie’s insistence, I had left my firearms at home, so I was pressed to use either my bow or to make snares to acquire our meat. Meanwhile, Uncle Sammie saw to the vegetable side of the meals.

Once in the Limberlost, we located a suitable place on a hummock, an area of high, wooded ground, some distance into the swamp, and we set up a semi-permanent camp. That night, as we sat watching the flickering remnants of our supper fire, Uncle Sammie said, “There is a trap, Judah, one that almost all men fall into without even knowing it happened.”

He glanced at me and said, “We deceive ourselves in believing that all people think alike, as we do ourselves.” He paused. “Even when we realize some people may think differently, we still consider it as thinking differently from the normal way, the right way, the way we think. We believe those people are not just thinking differently, we see them as thinking wrongly.”

He turned back to the glowing embers. “And why is our way the right way? We seldom ask that question, though sometimes men do ask it. Those men are called philosophers. And philosophers can spend their lives describing all the reasons why their way is the right way to think. Never once, in the history of mankind, has a philosopher written that everyone in his culture was wrong. That job is reserved for prophets.”

Uncle Sammie had a collection of books at his cabin. I don’t remember all the titles, but I do remember some of the authors: Marcus Aurelius, Plato, John Locke, Rene Descartes, Confucius, Hypatia, Voltaire. I would whisper the names on the spines as I’d drift off to sleep. Uncle Sammie had urged me to read them and I’d try, but it was hopeless. I did manage to get through a few of the books and essays of Thoreau and some pamphlets by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, but the rest of it seemed like trying to read a foreign language even though they had been translated to English.

But now he continued, “Because, in reality, there is no wrong way and no right way, there are just different ways, and that goes for the prophets, too. The reason we always think our way is right is because that’s the way we were raised, it was the only way we knew, and it was the way our parents were raised, and their parents were raised, and so on forever. But when whole nations of people, or entire continents, are raised more or less the same way, it becomes their presumed right way of thinking simply by being commonplace.”

He stretched out on his side on his bedroll and held his head up by his hand and a crooked elbow. He said, “Except that on these continents that are now called the Americas, before the Europeans came, there were thousands upon thousands of people who were raised in their own right way for many centuries. Then people from the European continent decided to colonize the American continents. They also thought their own way was the right way, but it wasn’t the same right way as the people already living here. Each people knew that the other was wrong and each saw the other as incredibly stupid, stubborn, and belligerent not to admit their error.

“Since both cultures had strong warrior traditions, armed conflict was inevitable. And it was inevitable. Even if, by some extraordinary event, the leaders of each group could have found their way to a middle ground, the vast majority of the peoples would not have accepted it. Each people demanded that the other be converted from their wrong thinking or else be annihilated.”