Now they saw the figure coming, flitting through the sunbeams in the deep green woods, naked except for breechcloth and moccasins, muscular and graceful. Chiksika raised his arm and shouted:
“Stands Firm! Pe-eh-wah, this way!” The youth veered toward them and trotted up, his silver ear ornamentation jouncing heavily. His usual smile of greeting was not on his face.
“Here you are! Quick! Come to the council lodge. Your father calls for everyone. Great trouble with the Long Knives! They have burned the Wapatomica towns of our people!”
“Burned the towns?”
“Yes! With an army they went up the Muskingum, and burned the towns at the Forks! Hurry!” He turned and sprinted back toward the town, summoning them to follow. Chiksika and Tecumseh plunged into the woods and caught up with him. Chiksika’s blood felt as if it were boiling through his veins; his soul was full of the silent scream of outrage. Could this really be true, that the whitefaces had dared do such a thing?
TECUMSEH LISTENED FROM THE EDGE OF THE CROWD AND felt the anger and excitement of the warriors growing as they were told of the events. As he heard the chiefs of the Wapatomica towns tell of it, he tried to see it in his mind.
It had started when some of the worst sort of Long Knives had tricked some of the followers of Tah-ga-ju-te, a great Mingo chief, and murdered them. The Mingo was a peaceful chief, a friend of both white men and red men. His wife had been a Shawnee woman.
Among the murdered Mingos had been all the members of the chief’s family. The white men had butchered them into pieces. The chief had sworn revenge. He had sworn to take ten scalps for each murdered member of his own family. He had told the white leaders at Fort Pitt that he was not going to wage a general war, and that he would put down the hatchet when he had had retribution. A few of his Shawnee relatives had helped him carry out his vow, and then they had put down their weapons. But the white leaders, in their fear and anger, had then raised an army and attacked six Shawnee towns, burning them and their crops. Their governor chief in Virginia was now raising a bigger army to come farther into the Shawnee country and burn more Shawnee towns. The army was gathering at Fort Pitt, and there were so many soldiers that the smoke of their cookfires hid the hills and the stink of their dung on the ground could be smelled for a mile. They would probably come next to these towns here on the Peckuwe Plains, including Cornstalk’s Town and Kispoko Town.
And now with this invasion threatening, Cornstalk, main chief of all the Shawnees, was calling for his people to remain at peace with the white men, to appease them, to avoid war against so large an army.
But many of the Shawnees were in a rage about the murders and about the burned towns. They felt that the Long Knives must be stopped now and punished, or they would grow more bold and aggressive.
After the council had gone on for hours, and all had had their say, Hard Striker rose to speak. Tecumseh, proud and excited by the sight of his father standing before the hushed crowd, breathed fast and listened. He was determined to remember his father’s words as he always remembered stories and lessons.
“My brothers, my people,” the chief said, his deep voice rolling over the council ground. “Do you remember that only a few moons ago I went to the Mingo chief and spoke to him about the dangers the white men bring? This I did. But he said he had always been a friend to the white men as well as the red, and that he would not guard himself against them.
“I warned him, but he would not listen, and now he has paid the price. All his family was butchered, and now he sits in bitterness. And the trouble that started in his camp now sweeps toward our own homes.
“Listen! Do you think we will stop this trouble by sitting still and smiling at the whitefaces, as he did? Do the whitefaces build their army of thirty hundred just to come and sit and smile at us and talk friendly talk? Listen! The Mingo was not crushed because he was weak or afraid. He is a strong and brave man. No! He was crushed because he believed in the friendship and the word of the Long Knives.
“You know me. I am a war chief. Long have I warned you that we must stand firm against the whitefaces, and never let them reach onto our land even with the toes of their boots. Many of you have echoed my belief.
“It is bad what the Long Knives have done to the Mingos, and to the Wapatomica towns. But if these evil acts have blown the mist of foolish trust from our eyes, then this was good. Now with clear sight we see that the whitefaces want to come here and burn our towns and our crops, so our children will be cold and hungry in the coming winter. The Mingo’s trouble was their excuse to come to our side of the river and try to walk on us. Now surely our eyes are clear!
“Listen! The Master of Life would not look upon us as worthy men if we bent to beg at the white man’s feet, for the white man is wrong and we are right. Now the Master of Life calls upon us to do with strength and courage what is our duty to do: to put these white intruders back out of our country! This country was given to our People.
“I ask you, warriors of the Kispoko Shawnees, and all men of other septs who sit among us today, to be brave and righteous! I press for war to resist the Long Knives. When we sit in council with our great chief Cornstalk, I will tell him this, and I hope that I may tell him that all my warriors are with me! Neweh-canateh-pah Weshemoneto!”
The hundreds of voices of the Kispoko men responded in a roar: “Ho! The Great Good Spirit favors our People!”
Tecumseh had quailed, listening to his father’s words. Now a fearful excitement crowded up in his breast, for though he knew little of war, he was old enough to understand that there would soon be a great disruption of all things he knew.
HARD STRIKER WAS SURE THAT HE HAD SWAYED MOST OF HIS warriors to back him for war in the great council with Cornstalk. But that night his wife was looking at him with narrowed and cunning eyes, and he suddenly realized that his hardest battle of persuasion might still be ahead of him. As his wife, Turtle Mother was the Kispoko women’s chief, and the women’s chief was the peace chief. If the women of the sept decided against war, they had many ways of influencing the men, both in open council and by private persuasion. If Turtle Mother wanted no war against the white men, she could set the women in motion to change the men’s minds. So Hard Striker decided to watch her closely and see which way she was leaning.
When she put the pot of succotash before him and knelt across from him, he shut his eyes and thanked Weshemoneto for the good world he had given them to live in, then prayed to Kokomthena with thanks for the corn and beans she had created. Then he smiled at his wife across the fire and reached with his horn spoon into the pot. She smiled sweetly back at him and filled her spoon also.
He nibbled some of the corn from the edge of his spoon, saying, “Mmmmm. Mmmm!” Chiksika and Star Watcher and Tecumseh filled their spoons and began eating, watching their parents, aware of some wordless tension between them. The triplets were already asleep under a blanket on the bed at the end of the room. Loud Noise had been a good, quiet child for a change that evening, and the household of the chief was calm and pleasant.
“How good this food is,” he said to his wife.
“How good it is to be all together here and in good health, all our family safe,” said Turtle Mother. “May nothing ever harm this family or take any of us from the others.”
Hard Striker stopped chewing for a moment, then resumed. He knew what she meant by that. He swallowed and said:
“May no bad people ever drive us from this bountiful and sacred land.”
Turtle Mother stopped chewing for a moment, then resumed. She knew what he meant by that. She swallowed and said:
“May we have peace. For, as our great chief Cornstalk has told us, if we anger bad men, they will bring armies into this bountiful and sacred land, and make us suffer.”
Hard Striker’s eyes flashed. But then he smiled at her again and blew on his succotash to cool it. He said, “If a child kicked this pot of food into the fire, and then did excrement in your bed, and you petted him and
asked him to be nicer, do you think he would be nicer, and do that no more?”
“Mat-tah, no,” she said.
“The Long Knives,” he said, “have done that to the Wapatomica towns. If we go to them at a treaty and pet them and ask them to be nicer, they will smile behind their hands to each other and then come into this valley to throw our food in the fire and do excrement on the graves of our ancestors. My wife, they must be punished for what they did, and stopped from coming here. The whitefaces must bleed now in the east, or we will bleed and weep all the way to the sunset.”
Tecumseh shivered at what these quiet words made him see in his mind. He could remember, as in a dream memory, red blood on white skin. He did not realize that his father and mother were arguing. He presumed that they were always of one mind. Chiksika and Star Watcher knew they were arguing and refrained from saying anything.
Turtle Mother’s face was now like a mask. But through her glittering eyes Star Watcher could see anger and fear and doubt and resolve all marching back and forth in her soul.
Turtle Mother finished the meal in this tense silence and said nothing while cleaning up afterward. Without a word she scoured the cookpot with sand. And then in the feeble light of the fire she worked for a long time with awl and sinew to repair a moccasin. She was thinking hard. Most of the times when Hard Striker glanced through his pipe smoke at her, her face looked so defiant that he was sure she was preparing her peace speech for the women. He worried and grew irritated by turns but did not try to talk with her again about it, because he thought it would work out better if she thought than if she stiffened in argument.
It was not until the next morning that he knew. Before full daylight he opened his eyes and saw that she was up on her elbow looking at his face in the gloom. Her naked body was warm against his side, and her musk was strong in his nostrils.
She said softly, “You tell me that you will punish the Long Knives. You do not say that they might win. If they were to win, killing many of our young men, then they would surely come on here to punish our People. And that would be even worse than asking them for peace.”
He thought. Then he said, “Yes, but they will not win. Because we are better, and we are right. I have told you how we slaughtered the British soldiers in the woods at the head of the Beautiful River in the Long War. They do not know how to fight in the forest.” He talked low, not wanting the children to awaken to this kind of talk.
She said, “I do not want my son Chiksika harmed or killed. Nor do I want that for you.…”
“Then do not speak the words of it. That is bad medicine to speak of it.”
“But you must know how much I do not want that.”
“So this is what you will tell the women to say? That we should cringe before the Long Knives and let them infest our sacred lands?”
She stared at him. Her breast was on his arm, and he did not want to die. But he wanted to do right.
Finally she said:
“Because I honor you, wahsiu, I will not speak out against what you want to do. But listen. If my son dies, if the Long Knives win and then come here to harm my children or molest my daughter, perhaps I will be bitter with you forever.”
A PULSATING SCREAM PIERCED THE STILLNESS OF THE NIGHT. It was taken up by hundreds of other voices, which swelled to such a shriek that Tecumseh felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. A hide-covered drum beat like a huge, fast heart, and the flames of a bonfire soared higher than the roof of the council lodge. All the people of Kispoko Town were gathered around the council ground. In the center were the bonfire and a war post.
The post was a peeled log as thick and tall as a man. It had been painted red, and it stood there, as yet untouched but nonetheless the focus of everyone’s attention.
The drumbeats went on like a pulse after the scream had died down. Then the line of warriors shuffled out into the center. The chatter of deer-hoof rattles tied to their feet and ankles joined the rhythm of the drum; then the ululating war cry rose again, pouring from their throats.
The line of dancers was long. There were several hundred of them, their faces and naked bodies painted in colors, shining in the firelight with oil and sweat. They stepped high, touched their toes to the earth, and then thumped their heels down, their sinewy bodies arching, then crouching, their knives and tomahawks glinting in the light of the blaze. Their eyes were bulging, crazed. At first the dance was a pantomime of stealth, as they stalked their enemy. Then it built in passion and noise. They leaped, swung, and twisted their bodies in the motions of combat, chopping and stabbing the air with their weapons, repeating and repeating the war cry.
Chiksika had told Tecumseh that when one reached this stage of the dance, one could see his enemies before his eyes, and thus one was striking and slicing not the empty air, but the vision of the enemy. One can sometimes feel the blade hit flesh, he had said. And if one feels the blow like that, it is a sign that when the real battle is fought, the blow will actually cleave enemy flesh. Therefore one must dance with the utmost exertion, even to the point of exhaustion, with the heart full of fire, in order to make the enemy’s vision appear. To do the war dance with half a heart, Chiksika had said, was to go half-prepared into battle.
Chiksika now was second in the line of dancers. Before him was Blue Jacket, formerly the white youth who had been whipped in the gauntlet. He was a promising warrior now, as much a Shawnee at heart as Chiksika. They were transported. The war post had become a whiteface soldier in a scarlet coat. Blue Jacket and Chiksika circled close around the war post, war cries tearing their throats; they dodged and spun as they closed upon it. Blue Jacket leaped high, and with a lashing blow as quick as the strike of a snake he struck the blade of his tomahawk into the very crown of the red post. Then Chiksika’s blade stuck beside it.
Outside the circle of firelight, Tecumseh yelped. He had seen blood spurt from the post.
6
ON THE OHIO RIVER
October 10, 1774
THERE WAS NO MOON, BUT IN THE STARLIGHT HARD STRIKER could see the other war canoes and the rafts moving alongside through the mist on the surface of the great river, every vessel loaded with as many warriors as it could carry without sinking.
They were now in the middle of the river. Hard Striker was in the prow of a large canoe. The whole sky was brilliant with stars. The water of the Beautiful River gurgled under the bark hull of the canoe.
As he always did the night before going into battle, Hard Striker looked up to try to see his warrior’s star. Long ago when he was a young man courting Turtle Mother in her Creek village, he had learned from the Creeks their belief that the soul of every warrior was guarded by a particular star. She had pointed out to him which star was his own, and since then, as war chief of the Shawnees, he had lived and fought under one of the two stars that lined up with the Guide Star of the North. Now he had to turn in the canoe and look back over his shoulder to see the star. He looked at it for a moment and then returned his gaze to the river. His hand on the prow of the canoe felt the rub and flow of the water against the hull, as if the canoe were a living thing swimming on the living water. He could feel too the living strength of the eight paddlers whose strokes drove the vessel toward the east shore, closer and closer to the enemy’s camp. Hard Striker now was thinking of the plan of the battle.
It was to be a battle plan unlike any he had ever followed. It was Cornstalk’s plan, for Cornstalk at last had agreed to lead the tribes against the Long Knife army. So many of his people wanted to fight the white men that Cornstalk had agreed, but with reluctance. Since it was Cornstalk’s war plan and Cornstalk was a brave and intelligent chief, it probably was a good plan, though it was not the red man’s usual way of fighting.
Usually a war party would make a surprise raid upon a force or a town it could surround and then, if resistance became too great, would withdraw and await a more favorable chance. This time, though, there would be no better chance. The whiteface army camped at the mouth of the
Kanawha-se-pe was now about the same size as Cornstalk’s force, ten hundred men. But in a few days it would be three times larger, because the white chief Governor Dunmore was coming down the great river from Fort Pitt with a much bigger army. And so Cornstalk had decided to engage this smaller part of the army before the two parts of the white force could unite. If the attack succeeded, there would be many captured guns and powder horns with which to arm more warriors for war against the other part of the army, which was still far up the river.
The enemy camp was on a wedge of land where the Kanawha-se-pe flowed into the O-hi-o, a mile downstream. From here in the middle of the great river Hard Striker could sometimes see the glimmer of a far-off bonfire, a tiny light like a spark that would then vanish in the blackness of the shoreline forest. Above the wedge of land there was a faint glow of firelit smoke from the campfires.
Cornstalk’s plan was to place a line of warriors across that wedge of land, from the O-hi-o to the Kanawha-se-pe, before daylight. This would trap the soldiers on the point of land so they could not retreat. Cornstalk had learned in the Seven Years’ War between the British and French that if white soldiers were crowded into tight places, they could be annihilated by warriors shooting from cover around them. If Cornstalk’s ten hundred warriors could advance down the wedge undetected before daybreak, they could crowd the white soldiers into just such a tight place.
It did seem like a good battle plan. With Cornstalk’s Shawnees were some Mingos, Delawares, and Wyandots. If these allies could do to this army what the red men had done to the British army of Braddock nearly twenty years before, then there was a chance to stop the other part of the army and save the Indian towns. If this battle failed, the Shawnee nation would be left with two unbearable choices: surrender to the Virginia governor, on the white man’s terms, or destruction of the villages and crops in the face of winter.
And so this day would be a great and important day. This would be as important as any battle the Shawnee men had ever fought in all their history since the Beginning. Hard Striker prayed as the vessel moved through the starlit mist of the river. He prayed that the Long Knives would be caught by surprise, that in their confusion they would get in the way of each other’s guns, that they might even be overrun while still in their blankets. They had no suspicion that Cornstalk was crossing the river. The rafts and pirogues and canoes were silent. Some of the chiefs were so sure it would happen this way that they were already exulting.
Panther in the Sky Page 7