Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/30



1813, while the war was progressing between the United States and Great Britain, he enlisted at Marysville, Tennessee, in the United States Army. Friends remonstrated against his becoming a common soldier, and when his resolution was carried into effect, considered him disgraced and unworthy of future notice. But he told them, "You don't know me now, but you shall hear of me." His mother consented, and stimulated him by encouraging words to aim at success by an honorable effort. It was not long before he became a sergeant; then the best drill officer in the regiment. He was first stationed at Fort Hampton, at the head of the Muscle Shoals, on the Tennessee River in Alabama. Here he was promoted to be an ensign, and afterward at Knoxville, aided in drilling and organizing the Eastern battalion of the 39th Regiment of Infantry. For some time he was encamped with his comrades at Ten Islands. Soon after, he took up the line of march to Fort William, where his regiment by the way of the Coosa River, proceeded to Tohopeka, or the horseshoe. For a long time an unsuccessful contest had been waged with the Creek Indians. Open warfare they avoided. They hoped to weary out their foes by "forest ambuscades and stealthy eruptions." In Gen. Andrew Jackson and his army, the enemy had to contend with foemen who excelled in military artifices, and who, with the daring courage of their natures nurtured in forest homes, were eager to enter the strife even at the cost of annihilating their Indian opponents. Encamped at Fort Williams, Gen. Jackson's army contained more than two thousand men; and through the forests, in every direction, his spies and scouts were scattered. Guided by their prophets, the Creek Indians had retreated from village to village and gathered the whole of their available force, the chosen warriors of the nation, one thousand strong, on a bend of the Tallapoosa River, well described by its name Tohopeka, or the horseshoe. Here they resolved to stand and risk their destiny on a single contest. The horseshoe bend is a peninsula, comprising about one hundred acres of land,