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WHITE RIVER MOUNDS, INDIANA TERRITORY
Spring 1805
SOMETHING DREADFUL WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. LOUD NOISE knew it.
He was sober for once. He never liked the feeling of being sober, for his stomach would quiver and his hands would shake and his mind would scream silently. And when he was sober, the world was a stark, harsh place, and he could not hide from himself the truth that he was a fraud and a failure.
But now on this evening as he filled the stone bowl of his long pipe, as his trembling fingers spilled shreds of tobacco on his lap, as his fat wife sat sullen beyond the fire with still another squirming baby at her breast, Loud Noise felt something worse than his usual profound misery, worse than his usual desperate craving for whiskey.
Something monstrous was trying to get into his soul. He could sense it hovering outside and above him; he could almost hear something, though not with his ears, some woeful moaning or wailing. His heart quaked and fluttered. The fear was worse than the awful fear he had felt before the Battle of the Fallen Timbers, for he had been able to see what threatened him then: soldiers. Now he could see nothing to explain this fear. Perhaps a witch was working against him.
Yes, very likely it was a witch. Anybody might take up his personal medicine bag and invoke its powers against someone he did not like, and Loud Noise knew he was disliked by more people than anyone else in the tribe. Many suspected what he secretly knew: that he was no real master of medicine, though he worked with the herbs and incantations and sometimes just by chance his patients recovered, that their bodies healed their own sicknesses. One of the white men’s diseases just weeks ago had run its course in the village and had taken away many of the people during the winter and had left many others too weak to hunt or to plant or to repair the damage the winter had done to their wigewas. Change-of-Feathers had died among the first, leaving Loud Noise as the only healer in the village, and though Change-of-Feathers had taught him many of the remedies and rituals, never had Loud Noise truly felt the power, never had he had so much as a vision. The appalling fact was that Lalawethika, He-Makes-a-Loud-Noise, who claimed to be Change-of-Feathers’ successor as the tribal shaman and prophet, did not even have a pa-waw-ka or a Spirit Helper. He was in truth more poorly equipped to be even a minor medicine man than just about anyone in the tribe, and he was addicted to whiskey as well, and though he boasted and made claims about his powers, many people knew what a great lump of nothingness he really was, and they had good reason to do witchcraft against him. Often lately he had kept a wary watch on the doings of animals, for he knew that witches sometimes assumed animal shapes to disguise their evil deeds. Once Loud Noise had seen a dog, a dog he had never seen in the village before, looking steadily at him with its yellowish eyes from behind a tree. Once a kingbird had flown down and struck at his head. And once, as Loud Noise had staggered drunkenly out to the sugar maple grove where Tecumseh and a group of people were making sugar, an owl, one of the chief omen birds, had silently flown three times across his path.
Yes, he feared, it could be someone working witchcraft against him.
He sat gazing with a blank eye into the fire, unable to think. He had forgotten even that he was loading his pipe. In his mind he saw the dog’s eyes, the kingbird, the owl floating swiftly through the forest. A witch usually assumed the disguise of only one kind of animal. Could this mean that several people were trying to bewitch him at the same time? That was a frightening thought, and his dread grew almost unbearable.
He would have liked to get some whiskey right now. But now was when he needed it, and now none was at hand. Tecumseh had made it hard to obtain whiskey in his town, by putting all the whiskey sellers in fear of their lives. Only when Tecumseh went away, on one of his trips to talk to the chiefs and young warriors of other tribes, was it easy for Loud Noise to make deals to get whiskey.
Loud Noise knew what his brother was doing on those frequent and far-ranging trips. He had told Loud Noise about a dream, a dream of the white soldier Harrison and a bundle of sticks. Tecumseh believed that the dead sticks meant old chiefs and the green sticks meant young warriors. He believed that the dream was a message that while the old brittle sticks could be broken, or any single green stick could be broken, all the green sticks in the bundle were the young warriors of all the tribes united together.
Loud Noise still loved and admired his brother, but sometimes he was unsettled by his zeal. Loud Noise could remember all too clearly the burned towns and the devastated crops that the People had suffered almost every year while the war hatchet was up. And he could remember all too vividly the sight of Wayne’s Blue-Coat soldiers rushing toward him in the Fallen Timbers with their terrible spikes and their roaring war cry. Loud Noise had decided that one can accomplish more alive than dead, so it was a major inclination of his spirit to remain alive. He dreaded war as much as he dreaded witchcraft and failure, and, as all those hovered near him, his burdens were terrible.
And sometimes the most shameful thought of all would get into his head and bother him so much that his heart would hurt. Sometimes, when he saw or tasted honey, he would remember his brother Cat Follower dying of beestings while he gorged himself on that honey. Sometimes he feared that Cat Follower’s ghost was near and was waiting to take revenge. This night he had thought of his dead brother that way. Loud Noise, pondering all this now, found his pipe in his hand with tobacco in its bowl, and he searched the fire-ring for a twig with which to light it.
Sometimes Loud Noise thought that Tecumseh made too much of the white man’s evil, that he was too rigid. Loud Noise himself could tolerate white men when he was among them. The ones who sold whiskey were a smiling, friendly sort of people; certainly they treated him more respectfully than most of his own people did. They made him feel he had some importance. Tecumseh hated and feared whiskey, so he deemed whiskey sellers evil men of the worst sort and would not even talk to them, except to threaten them. But they were really not that bad—at least not if you needed whiskey sometimes.
And then there were the Shakers.
These people recently had made a profound impression upon Loud Noise. Though they called their God by a different name, they had, like the Shawnees, a moral code of behavior that pervaded all the hours of their lives. Like the Shawnees, they believed that the divine spirit was released in people by dance. Loud Noise had witnessed some of their agitations in O-hi-o, where they recently had settled; he had seen them seized by such ecstasy that their bodies convulsed and twitched in a strange, frantic dance, and he had felt that he was seeing true holiness. Like the Shawnees, the Shakers believed that God is not only man but woman as well. The Creator of their sect, like Kokomthena of the Shawnees, had been a woman. And their moral code itself, calling for truth and trustworthiness, generosity and kindness and gentleness, was like an echo of what the Shawnee code had been, back in the happy days before corruption. Though Loud Noise himself was one of the most corrupt, he had become poignantly aware of the code when he recognized it in the Shaker teachings. If all white men were like the Shakers, Loud Noise suspected, there never would have been trouble with them. Loud Noise thought very often about the Shakers, in a wistful sort of way.
But of course he personally could never have been much like a Shaker; they were against liquor and copulation, which were to him about the only things that made life worth living—until afterward when the hurting head and the crying babies came.
Loud Noise sighed and picked up a twig with his trembling hand and held one end of it in the fire until it was burning, and he looked at its flame as he lifted it to the tobacco bowl and put the stem of the pipe in his mouth. All these things continually flowed through his head, like a muddy river, but they came to nothing and only added to the misery and foreboding that pressed down on him. His heart was huge in his chest and twisted with anxiety, and he could hardly breathe. It felt as if the spells of witches were crushing him from all sides.
The fire on the end of the twi
g burned bright over the pipe bowl. It grew brighter. It grew blindingly bright like the sun.
Then a terrific roaring scream exploded in his head.
Loud Noise’s wife heard him grunt. She looked up at him.
His eye had rolled back till only the white showed. The pipe and burning twig fell from his hands. A great sucking noise sounded from his throat.
And slowly he toppled to his side and lay curled up like a stillborn.
THICK WATER WITH A RACING HEART WATCHED TECUMSEH begin to weave his spell again through the semicircle of warriors and chiefs seated before him in the Delaware council house. Thick Water had traveled to villages throughout the Middle Ground with Tecumseh in the last three years and had heard him say these truths over and over, and they seemed more powerful each time.
“The white man’s trap closes upon us!” Tecumseh cried. “Already you know that the white men’s chief Jefferson has bought from the French father those sunset lands that lie beyond the Missi-se-pe to the Shining Mountains. Already you have seen two Long Knife captains lead soldiers out into those lands. Do you believe just because they go far away that their going will not bother us? Listen! I will tell you what they are doing!” Tecumseh stretched his arm to point to the west. His listeners were taut with attention. He had been talking to them for an hour, and his voice was like thunder, his reason like lightning.
From the constant and bewildering movements of the white men, only Tecumseh seemed able to deduce just what they were really doing at any time, and why, and Thick Water was convinced that this was the truth and that it was the most important truth the red men could learn.
Tecumseh went on:
“I have traveled far. I have talked with the Sioux, and their neighbors who live beyond the Great River, who were called to council with those two captains. They told me what those captains said to them. Those captains told them that American traders would soon follow them up the Missouri-se-pe, bringing them goods that will make them happier and make their days easier, and that the Sioux should trade with them, not with the British traders. Those captains put their flag up on a pole and said the Sioux must now live under it. They said that if they would be good red children of the white father Jefferson, and would be friendly to the whites who followed, then the white father would smile on them and send them many desirable things. In council they gave the chiefs a taste of whiskey. Maybe that is one of the ‘desirable things’ the white men will take to the Sioux. Ha!
“But they said if the Sioux would not give their hand to the white men, the white father Jefferson would send into their country more white soldiers than they could count, to make them behave!”
Tecumseh paused and looked in the faces of his listeners and saw many of them clench their jaws, saw their eyelids harden. They had heard just such warnings themselves in the past, and the white armies had come, and come again, and again. It was the familiar story, and now it was happening to People far in the west, the Sioux and others beyond the Sioux. The Sioux were not especially liked by the Indians in this council lodge, for they were arrogant and pushy and perhaps deserved to be pushed themselves. But it was not good to hear of this being done to any red men, even remote and alien nations like the Sioux, if it was the white men doing it.
“Now hear what I say,” Tecumseh went on. “I have learned the names of those captains. One is named Clark.” He paused, and they murmured that familiar name. “Yes. ‘Clark.’ Is that name an echo in your ears? This Captain Clark is a young brother of the great old enemy General Clark. I tell you this is so!
“Do you remember what happened to us after General Clark appeared in our country? Were we not scattered and driven out of our homelands? Did we not lose everything when the old Clark came into our country? Remember. Remember!
“And now if this young Clark does the same to all the land in the west, where will we withdraw ourselves when they grow too thick here? I remind you that we are surrounded by white men, and they tighten their trap around us even now. There is no place to go, except Canada. And the Long Knives covet Canada, too.
“And do you think the Long Knife government means to let us keep these lands we now inhabit, between O-hi-o, which we have lost, and the Wabash-se-pe, which we are losing? Oh, we sit here now, yes. But in the west, we no longer have a path to the Missi-se-pe. In the south, we have only a narrow path to the O-hi-o-se-pe. And in the east, white men have been coming across the lines of Wayne’s treaty for all the ten years since that treaty was made, and they kill much game in our lands, so that our women and children are hungry. They bring whiskey across the line and sell it. And they have murdered many of our people, and the treaty forbids us to punish them for those murders. Do you remember the murder of our brother Waw-wil-a-weh, who was killed even though he had embraced the white man’s ways? And so many others? The white men say there has been peace ever since Wayne’s treaty, because we are forbidden to kill white men. But they shoot our hunters as if we were the hunted!
“Listen! I warn you of something very close to us:
“Here where we now live, the whites now call this the Indiana Territory. This word means ‘Land of the Indians.’ But what is a territory? Just before they drove the Shawnees from O-hi-o, they named O-hi-o a territory, and put a governor over it. St. Clair. You remember St. Clair. And thus two years ago O-hi-o was changed from a territory to what they call a state. It is now the Seventeenth Fire of their nation. Even a young man remembers when that nation was the Thirteen Fires!
“Now, my brothers, heed this: This Indiana Territory where we live, it now has a governor. Yes! The white chief Jefferson has put a governor in Vincennes, in the heart of ‘the Land of the Indians,’ a governor who can decide on land treaties. Does this not warn you of what the white chief intends? If they truly believed it is the ‘Land of the Indians,’ why would they put a white governor here?”
Now his voice took on an edge that made their scalps prickle:
“Beware of this governor! I have seen him in dreams, long before I saw him riding beside General Wayne on the battlefield, learning from old Wayne how to invade lands! That day Weshemoneto pointed to him and told me this will be our greatest enemy, worse for us than the old Clark or Wayne! Listen:
“In only two years, this governor has stolen from the red man by treaties more land than Wayne took from us by war!
“Listen! Two years ago I could ride three days south from here and six days west from here, on our lands. Now I can ride only one day south and three days west. Do you remember as I do? Two years ago at Fort Wayne this governor made a treaty with foolish chiefs, which gave him land reaching two days’ travel all around Vincennes. Two moons later at Vincennes he made another treaty, which took from us ten times that much more land, from the Illinois-se-pe south to the Beautiful River. Last year he took all the land south of the great Bison Trace as far west as the Wabash-se-pe, and then all the land between the Illinois-se-pe and the Great River! Think of this! And at this moment he calls more chiefs to him at Vincennes, for more such treaties! Before this year ends, old fools living on annuity dollars may give him the land upon which you are now seated!
“Unless! Unless we all join our hands and tell him with one voice: ‘No! Red men will not move back anymore, will never sign another treaty! The Great Good Spirit put us here!’ We must show this governor we all have the same heart, that no red man will ever sell another handful of ground to him, ever! We must make our old chiefs see they are killing their own people with their treaty marks, and that if they mark again, we will kill them!
“Brothers, I say: Beware this governor who sits beside the Wabash-se-pe at Vincennes. Refuse him anything he asks! Take nothing he offers! Do not provoke him, for that would give him an excuse to strike us. But refuse him! Any red man who takes that governor by the hand and marks another treaty is a traitor to all our race, and ought to be put to death for killing our life!
“Go warn your old chiefs that they had better not go when he calls them! Warn them that
we are tired of feeling the trap tighten on us! Beware of this governor, whose name is Harrison!”
Their response swept through the council house as one great, breathy voice. And Thick Water was more moved than any of them.
AS HE RODE HOME UP THE RIVER WITH HIS LITTLE GROUP OF chieftains and bodyguards, Tecumseh knew he had as usual stirred his listeners deeply and had given them a look at the truth that they had never seen very clearly before, and that it was a truth that would not easily go to sleep in their minds. Hundreds throughout this territory had heard his warnings and his explanations of what was happening, and they discussed them in their own councils after he left. He carried in his soul the sound of their cries of affirmation, the sight of their glittering eyes.
And yet this seemed a task that would never be finished. There were still important chiefs who resisted Tecumseh’s words and undermined his warnings. Many of those who had signed the Treaty of Greenville thought Tecumseh was a dangerous upstart. They feared he would bring the Long Knives’ might down upon them again. Black Hoof was against him—his own elder chief, the true chief of the Shawnees. If his own chief was against him, how could other tribes follow him? Black Hoof, Little Turtle, and Tarhe of the Wyandots were three of the greatest chiefs the Algonquian nations had ever had, and in their age and wisdom they had chosen to take the white man’s path. They honored the treaty despite the white man’s violations of it, and they lived on the annuity the white man’s government gave them. They had grown to need the white man’s tools and goods and were bogged down in the white man’s credit, as in quicksand. They had to agree with what the white chiefs wanted. They were not themselves anymore. It was too late for them to go back to the old ways and to walk the old warpaths again. They had been tamed and put in invisible harness. And so these old, tamed men feared Tecumseh, because he was not tamed. He was a great warrior with a mighty voice, who somehow understood what the white men were doing and how they did it, who excited the young men and made them proud and defiant, and who traveled tirelessly to towns everywhere with his message of resistance. But being a Kispoko, he could never rightfully be the chief of all the Shawnees. And if he was not the true chief of his own tribe, how could he imagine himself the chief of all the Indians? Who had ever even heard of a chief of all the Indians? The Indians were not all one people. Why did he keep talking to them as if they were?
Panther in the Sky Page 47