Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  But Tecumseh did not read it. He did not even look at it. He flipped it contemptuously onto the fire. All watched in silence as it flared up. Ruddell stood blinking, astounded.

  “Listen!” Tecumseh cried, pointing at the ashes. “If Governor Harrison were here, I would serve him in the same way!” And then, with a scornful glance at Stephen Ruddell, who had once been his good friend Big Fish, Tecumseh turned and walked away.

  And when he was ready to return to the Tippecanoe, many of Black Hoof’s young warriors were ready to go with him.

  OPEN DOOR WAS CALLED FROM HIS MEDICINE LODGE ON A hot, dry day by an excited runner. The Wyandots were coming!

  Although he was already swollen with pride and confidence about the thousand warriors in his town, the Prophet was thrilled by this message, and he hurried out to greet them.

  Roundhead was at the head of their column, which was so long and wide that it made a dust cloud on the dry prairie road. Roundhead was one of Open Door’s favorite disciples; he had already proven himself as a witch-hunter, and he was a respected war chief, too, one of Tecumseh’s best aides. He held high in one hand a long spear decorated with a fan of hawk feathers, and in his other hand he held up the Great War Belt.

  Open Door’s chest heaved at the sight of the Great Belt. It had been the symbol of Indian unity in the old days of the defense of O-hi-o. Now these Wyandots had brought it with them, which meant that they were here as their nation, not as a dissident fragment of their nation! The Wyandots were venerated by the western tribes for their strength and wisdom, being called uncles by all the tribes, and it was to them that the Great Belt had been given for safekeeping after Wayne’s conquest of O-hi-o. The arrival of the Wyandots nearly doubled the size of the warrior contingent, and the Great War Belt carried enough medicine to equal still another thousand. Roundhead dismounted and handed the Great Belt to Open Door, and the people cheered.

  They called a council. Here Roundhead explained why the Wyandots had come.

  “For a long time,” he said, “under the power of the Crane and old Leatherlips, the Wyandots stood apart from the Prophet’s movement. Only I and a few others believed. But the rest of my people finally saw that the whites were ignoring their own boundaries from the Greenville Treaty and creeping ever deeper into our tribal lands. Then last year many were shaken out of their sleep by the Fort Wayne Treaty. Then early this year, Harrison made threats that all Indians had better behave, and this angered us. And, finally, this spring, the disciples of your prophet came with this challenge: ‘How can the mighty Wyandots, keepers of the Great War Belt, sit idle on that great token while the white men keep stealing land from all the red men?’ All this at once cleared our heads. Now these of us have denounced the Crane and Leatherlips, and mounted up to ride here.”

  Furthermore, he recounted, as his procession had moved past the Mississinewa with the Great Belt, they had paused for a conference among the Miamis there and had shamed Little Turtle for allying with the whites against his own race. At this, still more Miami warriors had spurned Little Turtle and left him and were now following the Wyandots to this place!

  Open Door stood beaming and praised Roundhead for all this. He reminded the whole council of the prediction that Tecumseh had made last year after the Fort Wayne treaty: that the old traitorous chiefs would lose their hold upon the warriors, that hundreds would see the truth and come swarming to Prophet’s Town. “And now!” Open Door cried. “See us! We swarm like an anthill, just as he said! We have been favored at last with good crops! We have new hunting guns and provisions from the British, who help us because they believe our cause is right! The Great Good Spirit favors our People!”

  STAR WATCHER WAS WORRIED BECAUSE THERE WAS HARDLY any salt. With the fall hunts beginning, there was not enough salt in Prophet’s Town to preserve meat for winter.

  Of course, she thought, with so many people here, the meat might not last long enough to need to be preserved. Nevertheless, salt had become precious since the arrival of the white men in Kain-tuck-ee and O-hi-o; they had not only killed off the game and cut down the woods, they had also taken over the salt licks. They had barred the red men from those places where, since the Beginning, they had made the salt they needed. There were few salt licks in what remained of the Land of the Indians. So now if the Indians wanted salt, they had to buy it from the white traders, whose price was high. But some of the tribes whose leaders had signed land treaties now got part of their annuity payments in salt. Because the Shawnee leaders Tecumseh and Open Door had signed no treaties, salt was always scarce in their village.

  One day while Tecumseh was still away in Ohio, a large voyageur canoe came up the river from Vincennes, its crew made up of French paddlers. They stopped on the shore and said they had some barrels of annuity salt on board that were for the Kickapoos, due them under the terms of the treaty their old chiefs had signed before the Kickapoos had moved here. The Kickapoos refused to accept it. To take it would imply that they supported the treaty, which they did not. The Frenchmen in the canoe, however, had been told to leave it here. They had more salt for other bands up the Wabash and did not want to paddle all this Kickapoo salt upstream just to take it back down to Vincennes. Open Door was called down to the riverbank to deal with the problem. The salt was very valuable. But what would Tecumseh say if it were accepted? Open Door had a head full of big matters and small details already, being the spiritual leader of a town of hundreds and hundreds of people, and he did not know what to decide. Finally he told the Frenchmen to leave it on the bank. If it was still there when they came back down the river, they could load it and take it back to Vincennes. “No one will touch it,” he said. “My people do not steal.” He would let Tecumseh and the Kickapoos decide the matter when his brother returned. After all, it was not a spiritual concern.

  So the Frenchmen shrugged, left the salt barrels on the riverbank, and resumed their journey against the current.

  The women, desperate for salt, looked at the barrels every day, but none took any, which made Star Watcher proud of them.

  When Tecumseh returned from the Auglaize with his new Shawnee followers and found Roundhead there with his huge party of Wyandots and the Great Belt, there was much celebrating and talking to be done.

  Then one day the big canoe returned down the river and slid to the bank. The crew had delivered salt annuities to Miamis and Delawares upstream and were back, and they were surprised to see the salt barrels still there, untouched. Indians gathered on the bank, and soon there was a hubbub.

  Tecumseh emerged from the crowd, saw the salt and the white men, and looked angry. Open Door explained what had happened.

  To Tecumseh, the salt annuity was one of the American government’s great insults to the red man. It symbolized the hated dependency into which the Indians had been forced, as well as the theft of the salt that Weshemoneto had given the People.

  He strode down the riverbank toward the head boatman, who was an arrogant-looking, deep-chested, black-bearded man wearing a scarlet voyageur’s cap, its floppy crown hanging jauntily down over his left ear.

  Tecumseh stopped in front of the startled man, snatched off his red hat, and threw it in the river. As the man opened his mouth to bellow a protest, Tecumseh grabbed his thick hair above his ears with both fists.

  “Are you an American dog?” he yelled into the man’s grimacing face. Then with all the force of his sinewy arms, he shook the man by his hair until he was screaming for mercy through his clashing teeth. When Tecumseh released him, the man was cross-eyed and staggering to stay on his feet. Tecumseh turned to the others, who cringed and backed away. He pointed at the kegs and the canoe. “Take it back to Harrison. Tell him Tecumseh says we will have nothing from him.”

  Star Watcher did not want to criticize what Tecumseh had done about the salt. She understood why pride was more important than salt. But she did tell him how little salt there was and asked him what might be done.

  “There are small salt springs i
n the lands of that treaty,” he said. “No whites will keep us from going there to make what little salt the springs will yield, my sister, because as I have said, that treaty means nothing to me or our People.”

  “Then,” she said, “I will get some women and go to those springs, and we will work hard to make salt. You must give me some warriors to protect them. And now, come home with me and eat. My husband and your son have not seen you for a long time.”

  He looked at her for a moment, at this sturdy, good-faced, graying woman who had seen half a hundred years of strife and hunger and had given the People everything she had but was stronger than ever and had more than ever to give, and his tension and anger about the treaty and the annuity salt just melted away. And he thought:

  How much of our strength comes from such as she!

  WHEN THE BOATMEN RETURNED TO VINCENNES WITH THE rejected salt and told of their rough treatment at Tecumseh’s hands, the governor expressed his regrets absentmindedly. Then he went back into his office and sat down. He picked up a quill pen and gazed out a window, his face pale, grim.

  The treatment of the Frenchmen ordinarily would have provoked him to take up his pen and issue still another ultimatum to those insolent Shawnees at the Prophet’s town.

  But just that day Harrison had talked with a group of twenty Iowa Indians, who told him that they had recently encountered on the Illinois River a large band of Sauks, Foxes, and Winnebagoes who were on their way to the Prophet’s town on the Wabash. That in itself would have been no unusual matter; warriors were always, it seemed, traveling to and from that damned place. Winnemac’s recent report of two thousand warriors there was, Harrison had thought, probably exaggerated, but still there were too many there. When Harrison had asked the Iowas what numbers they meant when they said a large band, their answer had made him step back with a gasp.

  There were, they said, eleven hundred.

  A CRY CAME DOWN FROM THE PRAIRIE INTO THE TOWN: Many people were coming! They were in the dress of western tribes.

  Tecumseh rode out to greet them, and as he rode toward the drifting dust of their coming, he was astonished at their numbers. Then their head rider separated from them and came galloping with a spear held high, and a smile of joy spread on Tecumseh’s face. There was no mistaking those massive shoulders, that wide, happy face. It was Shabbona—the Charcoal Burner—Black Hawk’s second chief and a man Tecumseh had grown to love like a brother already. And here he came, as he had promised, face aglow with happy triumph.

  They halted their horses together and clasped each other’s hands, grinning as if their cheeks would split. “So many!” Tecumseh exclaimed, waving toward them.

  “Yes! When we heard of the treaty of that white governor, many said, ‘Unless we unite and go with Tecumseh, they will overrun us!’ We see their Fort Madison there in our own land, and we grow harder inside. And so I bring more than you expected. Two hundred and forty strong young men. And their families, with some older men who can fight if they are needed. And these are only the ones who come to stay. Black Hawk’s warriors will be ready when your great sign comes and you call them.”

  Two weeks later, when their lodges were standing on the prairie near the upper end of Prophet’s Town and the families of all of Charcoal Burner’s warriors were deep in the ceremonies and teachings of Open Door, Tecumseh sent the two hundred and forty warriors up to visit Matthew Elliott at Fort Malden in Canada. “He is our friend. He has many new British guns and much powder that he is eager to give you,” Tecumseh said. “Get them and come back, and may the Great Good Spirit smile along your way.”

  OPEN DOOR WAS ALONE FOR A CHANGE, SITTING IN HIS MEDICINE lodge, just himself and his effigy, which stood against a pole opposite him beyond the fire-ring, as if it were the Prophet’s guest—or as if the Prophet were its guest. Perhaps the Prophet was the guest, he was thinking, idly pulling a string of his sacred beans through his fist; the hollow reed man lived here in the medicine lodge almost all the time, while Open Door was forever busy among his multitudes, seldom alone, seldom with a moment for meditation.

  Of course it was good to be so important to so many people, to give them spiritual food where they had been empty and hopeless for so long, and when Open Door was preaching to their upturned, rapturous faces, all was well, and he was joyful that Weshemoneto had made him the messenger for this great upsurge of love and power in this critical time.

  But the people had so many nonspiritual needs and problems, too, and were always entreating him for some little thing or other. They had their little disputes and jealousies, being from so many different tribes; they had their particular rituals and manners, and he and his wife and Tecumseh were constantly called upon to make judgments and decisions. The followers always had to be supplied with food, which sometimes had been an unfulfillable task, but for the present anyway was being met. Kokomthena at last had helped the women bring in bountiful crops, and the British had been generous, and the hunters, by traveling far south toward the White River country, had been able to bring in adequate meat. Open Door’s wife had turned out to be the best sort of a village queen, able to administer and oversee the women’s part in ceremonies and food preparation even on this enormous scale. She was, he had admitted to himself at last, a great blessing to him after all. Before he had gone to Heaven and acquired this importance, she had been a scornful, nagging woman, a curse and a burden upon his life. But she had grown with the rise of responsibility, as had he, and now she was a helpmeet of immeasurable value, as well as a good mother who kept their children from becoming tyrants as the children of important chiefs sometimes become. In her own spirit she had become great and powerful, and her hatred and distrust of the whites was as keen as his. She felt a holy duty to keep the women and children safe. Yes, all was most favorable, in general. Open Door felt that he himself was a miracle of the Great Good Spirit’s wisdom and power. From a drunkard and an object of ridicule esteemed by no one, he had been transformed into the most revered red man of his time, perhaps of all times. He was a miracle, and he carried the race of red men upon his shoulders.

  But lately, in these rare moments of solitude, when there was time to reflect, Open Door had found himself troubled and frightened now and then. Subtle changes were taking place, and even in the midst of the great, humming, throbbing spiritual power of this sprawling village—no, it would be better to call it a city now—Open Door would look at the effigy standing over there beyond the rising smoke and would feel that the big reed doll was substantial while he, Tenskwatawa, its creator, was hollow.

  It had been three years since he had had a vision or even a dream of any significance. Nothing came to him that could be read as a prophecy. Though he might pull his string of beans through his hand like this, or chant prayers, or pass the sacred sticks through the smoke of the sacred tobacco, no ecstasy visited him, no more messages came in the roaring silence of the voice of the Master of Life; even when he looked out the smokehole at the moon where he had once gone, it looked like nothing but the moon, a ball in the sky as the white men believed it to be; Our Grandmother never talked to him or showed her beautiful wrinkled face. She still had never revealed anything special to him about medicine or cures, beyond what he had learned from Change-of-Feathers; the truth was, he was just as mediocre a medicine man as he had always been.

  When Open Door would think of the moon, that was when he would feel most hollow and afraid. His one great triumph of prophecy, the day he had made the moon cover the sun, had been a fake. Though he reminded his followers of that miracle over and over, and his fame rested largely upon the world’s memory of that day, the awful and shameful truth of it was that he had got the information of it from Tecumseh, who had got it from some white man. Sometimes Open Door convinced even himself that the Great Good Spirit had told him of the eclipse; sometimes, carried away by the flights of his own preaching, he even recalled that he had simply commanded the sun to go dark and it had done so. If a whole People believed something, di
d that not make it so? But then he would remember how it really had happened, and he would grow afraid, because he would wonder if he really was the hollow one.

  And there had been other things that had made him feel hollow.

  Some things he had had to do simply because of the way life was on this lower world: despite his preaching against hog meat and cattle meat, there had been many times when nothing but British salt beef or the arrival of a stray pig had kept the People alive. There had been times when he had let his own fire go out, and his life had not ended as he had predicted would happen to anyone who neglected the sacred hearth fire.…

  Or had it? He pulled the beans through his fist—though they were sacred beans, they grew moldy in these humid summer months—he wondered if the visions had stopped because he had failed to keep the fire kindled now and then. Oh, it was frightening to think!

  Sometimes when he was thus troubled he would feel that there were still witches working against him. Only this spring he had learned that Leatherlips, the ancient Wyandot chief in O-hi-o, had been poisoning people’s minds, denouncing the Prophet, and using witchcraft against him. To defend himself against it, Open Door had sent Roundhead and five warriors to find Leatherlips, try him and kill him. They had found the old man in his camp on the Scioto-se-pe, had tried him in council as a witch and a traitor to his people, and had found him guilty. They had made the old white-hair kneel at the edge of his grave, then struck the blade of a tomahawk into his brain. Leatherlips had jerked about and fallen partway into the grave but had not died right away. For a long time his blood had oozed onto his white hair and his body had perspired, which had proved that he was indeed a witch.

  Open Door also believed that Winnemac the Potawatomi was using witchcraft against him, as well as spying for Harrison. Winnemac was without doubt an American dog, who had helped Harrison make the terrible treaty last year, and the only reason Open Door had not openly accused him of witchcraft was that he was related to so many important Potawatomis that to kill him would likely drive some of them from the alliance.