Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Now, Father,” Tecumseh said, the wind from the lake buffeting the feather in his turban and whipping his cloak around his legs, “I thank you for what you can do for us. I want you to believe that when the Long Knives try to come to Canada, my warriors will never quit their father or let go his hand.”

  My God, Elliott was thinking as he watched James Girty write all this down. What a stir this is going to cause up the line! These Shawnee brothers are like sparks around a powder keg!

  32

  INDIANA TERRITORY

  April 1811

  THE SHAWNEE HUNTERS IN THE WET WOODS HEARD THE sound coming down from the north like a windstorm and saw the treetops and underbrush beginning to shake, but wind never had sounded like this, and they cringed down, looking up in terror toward the high branches.

  The wind sound was full of chattering and squeaking, so loud it was painful in the ears, and dark things could be seen moving, coming from that northerly direction, as if it were a wind full of crazy birds. It came on, and the dark things were so numerous, they darkened the woods with shadow, and the treetops shuddered with the agitation of their coming, and the shrieking grew louder. Suddenly one of the hunters, his eyes wide with disbelief, cried out:

  “A-ne-quoi!”

  Squirrels!

  This was not a wind rushing through the treetops or a cloud of birds, but a horde of squirrels, hundreds of hundreds of squirrels, leaping from branch to branch or bounding along the ground, chattering and squeaking as they fled southward.

  It was a sign. Squirrels lived in small families, not herds or packs. But under some direction of the Great Good Spirit—or perhaps of the Evil Spirit—they were fleeing in hordes, countless squirrels moving with one common will.

  Now as the cloud of squirrels passed over, leaf debris and insects, even some squirrels, rained from the treetops onto the warriors below. For a long time they knelt with their heads bent down and prayed as the squeaking multitudes went over and around them and rushed shrilly onward toward the O-hi-o-se-pe.

  When their din had finally faded to silence, there were injured squirrels squirming on the ground and dead squirrels by dozens, all for the gathering. These men had been hunting in the woods for many days, for food for Prophet’s Town, and had found hardly any game. It was as if all the animals had left the place, frightened off by the strangeness of the season, and the hunters were hungry. But they would not touch the squirrels that had fallen at their feet. These animals, acting in this frightening and desperate way, must be full of bad medicine and should not be eaten.

  TECUMSEH NODDED WHEN HUNTERS CAME IN AND TOLD HIM of the great flights of the a-ne-quoi. Bands of hunters in several places had seen such flights. It was happening all over. Most of the squirrels drowned when they reached the flooding O-hi-o-se-pe and tried to cross it. Tecumseh remembered one other time when this strangeness had swept through the squirrels. It was when he was a very young boy. It had been followed by the troubles with the Long Knives, by the war between the British and the Americans, and by other strange signs. Tecumseh sat and thought of the signs. Since the melting of the deep snows this spring, all of the world had been troubled and full of omens.

  Rains had come early, days and days of rains heavier than anyone could remember. With the melting snows these rains had fed the rivers until they were yellow-gray and swift and high, and then they had flowed over their banks and covered the bottomlands. These floods, to Tecumseh, were like the flood of white men coming ever into the country, as he had told Harrison. Tribes along the Wabash-se-pe and its tributaries had moved their camps up onto the hillsides and prairies, and the rains had kept falling, and the days were dark, the nights cloudy and moonless. Waters of the turbid Wabash came up within inches of the House of the Stranger at Prophet’s Town, and only by praying and using his greatest medicine was Open Door able to stop the river from rising far up into his town.

  This stopping of the flood had been Open Door’s first demonstration of power for many years—since the Black Sun, in fact—but he had little time to bask in the glory of what he had achieved before a greater evil fell upon the People, one against which he seemed to have almost no power at all. It was a terrible new disease. Children and adults grew feverish and could not swallow and declined into states of weakness. Something like dirty gray skin grew in their throats, bloody mucus poured from their noses, their necks swelled, their hearts skipped and fluttered, and dozens quickly died. Many who did not die could not move their hands or feet for weeks, and some were left with uncontrollably trembling hands, others with an overpowering weakness. Open Door with all his chants and remedies had been able to cure only a few, and some of those had suddenly died after they thought they were well, so his powers as a healer came under doubt.

  And then when at last, in the Green Moon, the rains stopped and the sky cleared, another awesome sign redoubled the People’s fear:

  There was something in the sky!

  It was bright like a star but was not a point of light like a star; it was long, a streak. It was in the northern sky, in a place where usually no major star was. It reappeared on every clear night, just perceptibly higher, as if it were moving slowly across the sky toward the south. All the red people watched it and wondered at it and turned to their shamans for answers, but in virtually every Indian town it was thought to be connected with the Shawnee prophet, who, five years ago, had made the sun go dark. Nobody could look at the bright streak in the distant sky without thinking of the Shawnee prophet or of the great sign predicted by his brother, the sign that would come when the alliance was ready and the red men would turn back the white men. To Tecumseh, who had been born under a shooting star, it had to be a part of his pattern of signs. One thing he knew: he must go to the southern tribes. This year the oneness would have to be completed.

  Thus for those who were committed to the Shawnee brothers, the bright thing in the sky was a speck of hope; for the others it was a troubling omen of a conflict they did not want.

  Being one on the other, it unsettled everyone, and people began doing strange things. All over the frontier, things began happening that should not have happened. The world was unsettled this year, and the People began behaving from the darker side of their souls.

  THE SPANIARD BAZADONE, INNKEEPER AND TRADER IN VINCENNES, a man known to have a penchant for trouble, was in one of his dark moods when the knock came at his door. It was very late at night, and he had been poring over a huge portfolio of papers that always put him in a bad mood.

  A quarter of a century ago, when General George Rogers Clark had been to Vincennes on his campaign against Little Turtle’s confederation, Clark had seized a boatload of Bazadone’s goods to help provision his troops. Bazadone had begun a lawsuit against Clark, a lawsuit that had by now moved into its second generation of lawyers and still was not settled, even though it had helped substantially to bring the old general to financial ruin and transform him into a bitter old drunkard. The litigation had taken its toll on Bazadone’s soul, too. Now at the knock on the door, he slapped down the papers and went to open it, holding up a lantern.

  There in the night stood an Indian, a Muskogee far, far from home, to whom Bazadone had sold some rum earlier in the day. The Indian was now quite drunk, grinning crookedly, swaying, and asking for more rum. Bazadone knew the Indian had nothing left with which to pay for any more rum, so he told him to go away.

  The Muskogee, weaving this way and that like a tree about to fall over, began to plead, and Bazadone slammed the door in his face with a curse. When the Indian began knocking on the door again, Bazadone grabbed down his flintlock, which was loaded with bird shot. He flung open the door and discharged the gun point-blank into the Indian’s abdomen, spewing blood and innards all over the yard.

  WITHERED HAND THE POTAWATOMI WAS ALWAYS VERY SENSITIVE to signs, and when he was unsettled by those this spring, he interpreted them to mean that he must do something to stop the white men who were spreading out from Kaskaskia into his hunti
ng grounds in the Illinois country. Withered Hand considered himself the most important ally of Tecumseh and Open Door, but he also considered himself their equal in judgment and ability, and he did not feel bound to sit and wait for their signal to resist the white men. In the spring, as soon as there was sufficient grass to feed horses, he rode out with a band of warriors and began raiding isolated farms. Settlers began deserting their homesteads and fleeing to Kentucky and Kaskaskia.

  A PARTY OF GOVERNMENT SURVEYORS UP FROM CINCINNATI, in black hats and greatcoats, with their supplies and instruments on packhorses, moved up the Wabash, past the mouth of Raccoon Creek to a meadow surrounded by budding hardwoods. They unloaded their equipment, made a camp, built a fire, and marked the point that was to be the western end of the Ten o’Clock Treaty line according to Governor Harrison’s treaty of 1809. They were cold and hungry. They would rest now and begin their survey the next morning.

  “Look,” one whispered, raising his head from a canvas-wrapped transit he had just set down. “Injuns right yonder.”

  The warriors, clad in plain, unadorned deerhide clothing, had appeared in the moist young grass of the meadow without a sound. They were three or four times the number of men in the surveyors’ party, and they carried muskets. They had on no war paint.

  The party’s guide, a hunter from Vincennes, calmed the surveyors with a chuckle.

  “Them’s Weas,” he said. “Friendly little fellers from just up-river, never gave anybody a bit o’ trouble. Heh, heh! Fact, they help keep th’ gov’nor informed o’ what mischief them Shawnee scoundrels is up to. Ready to share with some guests, gents?” And he got up and started walking toward the Weas with his right hand up and a big smile on his stubbly face.

  But the warriors walked past him as if they had not seen him and went into the camp. Without a word they snatched up all the surveyors’ gear, their guns and provisions. They dumped some of the instruments in the fire, threw some in the creek, and broke others by hurling them against rocks. They emptied the priming powder out of the white men’s guns. When one big surveyor tried to shove away an Indian who was reaching for his powder horn, three warriors converged on him and threw him to earth. Then the first yanked off his powder horn, breaking the strap.

  When the whites at last were thoroughly disarmed and stripped of their possessions, one of the Weas pointed southward and said in English:

  “Go that way. Go past Vincennes very fast and not stop. If your faces are in our country again, you will not be happy we see you.”

  GOVERNOR HARRISON COULD SEE THE PATTERN BEGINNING to emerge. Horses were being stolen from farms in the border areas. Potawatomis known to be under the influence of the Shawnee prophet were raising hell in Illinois. Pacane, a Miami chief who had signed the Treaty of Fort Wayne, had now turned around and balked at receiving annuities, protesting that he had been forced to put his mark on the treaty. A party sent out to survey the Fort Wayne Treaty lands had been threatened and chased out, just as Tecumseh had warned him they would be.

  There was no doubt of it in Harrison’s mind: the Indians under the leadership of the Shawnee brothers at Prophet’s Town were commencing their hostilities. The governor had been fretting all winter about the vulnerability of Vincennes, which could be reached in a few days by canoe from Prophet’s Town.

  Indians who were Jealous of the Shawnee brothers’ influence brought rumors of all kinds to the governor: that Tecumseh was plotting to murder him; that British agents were at Prophet’s Town, inciting the brothers; that Tecumseh was going to attack Vincennes in force with British help. Though Harrison understood the motives behind such tales, he could not shake from his head the notion that they might have some basis in fact. He began writing long letters with great frequency to the War Department. He requisitioned five hundred new rifles and asked for better swords, saying that the presently available swords might do to split the bare skull of a savage but not the helmeted head of a British dragoon. In his many personal letters to the secretary of war, he began suggesting that he should perhaps be authorized to march a strong force up the Wabash toward Prophet’s Town and at least intimidate the Shawnee leaders. He requested that the federal authorities build a strong new fort close to Prophet’s Town, to guard the way to Vincennes.

  In the meantime, he was having Indian troubles right in his own town. The innkeeper Bazadone had killed an unarmed Muskogee, and Harrison, in an effort to soothe Indian resentment, had compensated the Muskogee’s friends with goods and had ordered Bazadone put on trial. Two trigger-happy white ruffians had shot and wounded two Weas without provocation near Vincennes, then had been killed in turn by avenging Potawatomis. The entire population was getting very nervous about any and all Indians. Settlers were leaving. Immigration into the territory, which was needed to bring the population up to the minimum for statehood, was slowing because of the scare.

  Harrison began to examine from all angles the idea of marching an army against Prophet’s Town. Of course, as he well knew, he had no legal right to send a force into country still claimed by the Indians. But by broad interpretation of the laws governing territorial defense, he might get away with launching a retaliatory campaign—if he could find something in the Shawnee’s doings big enough to retaliate for.

  Once he had got the notion of invading, it began to grow. He wanted the Fort Wayne Treaty lands surveyed and sold and settled as quickly and easily as possible, and the only recourse he could see to clear the way for it was by scattering that nest of red militants and fanatics who dwelt at Prophet’s Town and defied him at every turn.

  Then, in the midst of these ponderings and plottings, he would remember that most vivid of all memories: Tecumseh poised to strike. And he would feel the delicious chill of dread. What an enemy that man would be! Sometimes in his reveries of the invasion he would see himself and Tecumseh, in the great, sprawling chaos of battle, seeing each other arid going straight at each other with naked steel. It was a rather frightening image, and he would have an uncanny feeling that that was just how it would happen: that Tecumseh would find him and attack him face to face.

  But then Harrison would remember the maxim:

  The greater the enemy, the greater the victory!

  BAZADONE WENT TO TRIAL FOR THE MURDER OF THE drunken Indian. Harrison desperately hoped the Spaniard would be sentenced to severe punishment. He was aware, as Tecumseh had pointed out to him in their private talk, that not once in the years since the occupation of the Northwest had any white man been convicted for killing any Indian, though there had been hundreds of murders. If the Indians could see just one white man punished for such a crime, Harrison knew, one of the worst grievances of the red men would be eased, and incalculable benefit surely would come of it. So he brought the prosecutor to his mansion and talked to him for a long time about the importance of this matter. He said:

  “Bazadone is known to be guilty. There is no doubt! You will do the greatest service to this capital and the territory by making the clearest and strongest possible case against the murderer. Do so, sir, I implore you!”

  The prosecutor did so.

  The jury, made up of white men haunted by the specter of warlike Indians, acquitted the Spaniard without deliberation.

  The news traveled swiftly through all Indian towns in the territory.

  Once again it had been proven that by the white man’s law, the life of a red man was of no importance at all.

  BY MIDSUMMER TECUMSEH AND HIS BODYGUARDS AND DANCERS were ready to go to the south. Their canoes were loaded with weapons, ceremonial objects, red sticks, and paints. Now Tecumseh went into Open Door’s medicine lodge and sat with him for the most urgent and serious talk he had ever had with him in all the years of their mission. This time he did not sit on the opposite side of the fire-ring but close beside him, and he put his hand on the back of Open Door’s neck, to speak to him as an older to a younger brother, as he had in their childhood.

  “My brother,” he said, “I am going to explain some very
important things, and I am going to ask for your sacred word of promise. Everything we have done in the past six years, and everything we are about to do to complete our great work, depends upon your attention to what I tell you now. There has never been a time like this, and if you do not give me your word, everything could be undone; as quick as a thunderclap, the fate of our People could be made dark.”

  Open Door, his eye glittering with fervent sincerity, said, “Brother, you know you can depend on me. Our mission is my life!”

  Tecumseh hoped he could. Lately Open Door had shown some of his old foolish, spiteful traits. He had seemed to grow more distant from Tecumseh, more resentful of his suggestions. It was not hard to understand why, of course. For a while he had been adored and respected as the spiritual father of all the People. But then the realities of the white invasion had required more than mere religious leadership, and Tecumseh had had to assume more and more of the command. It was clear that Open Door felt his own stature shrinking, that he resented being second to his brother as he had always been in childhood. But for these next few critical moons, there must be complete concurrence between them.

  Now Tecumseh said:

  “As I leave for the south, I am going to stop at Vincennes and try again to soothe Harrison’s fears. He is like a child needing some more attention, but he is like a dangerous child with many knives in his hands. I understand him. He wants to come up here and scatter us because we will not do as he demands. He looks for any excuse to do so. I will try to put him at ease so that he will sit where he is until I come back from the south. When I return from there, the alliance will be complete. It is not quite, yet, and nothing must happen to shake it down until I have put the top on it. Harrison must be given no excuse to march against us. None! Do you in your heart understand how important this is?”

  “I understand. How could I not understand?”