Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  But the vision! Weshemoneto had shown him what to do; had even Weshemoneto tricked him?

  Why? he cried in his heart. Is our cause not right?

  I have tried to be the best of all holy men!

  I have been sober and have sacrificed myself for six years for my People and kept them out of conflict and given them hope and happiness! Have I not been worthy?

  Now the American army was changing shape to the sound of drums and shouted orders from the distance, forming into ranks and marching straight toward the holy town with flags and bayonets, stepping in unison, coming closer and closer. The people in the town were weeping and rushing about, gathering their children, seeking their loved ones, bundling things up. Star Watcher stood near her brother, watching him.

  “Father,” cried a warrior beside Open Door, “what will you have us do? Tell us!”

  The Prophet hid his hands beneath his robe and wrung them to stop them from shaking. He must think of something now. He had never meant for war to come right into his town! He had always believed that Harrison would stop and talk.…

  Charcoal Burner came riding up from the river, shouting for the people to get out of the way of his excited horse. He reined in, staring at Open Door, eyes wild, his whole being demanding some answer, some guidance at last, and finally he said, “They mean to attack now. They must be delayed, Father, they must be delayed until we can move the people to safety!”

  Delayed. Yes. Suddenly Open Door braced himself. Had not the Great Good Spirit shown him that Harrison would die in his bed? Therefore it could not end here this way!

  Quickly Open Door pointed out six chieftains and one who could speak English. “Go and show your hand for parley. Tell the Long Knives we are surprised to find them here, and our feelings are hurt. Tell them they must come no farther because they put our women and children in danger. That we would like to know what they want. That we invite them to camp near us in peace, and will parley with them tomorrow and find out what they wish us to do.…”

  “Now! Parley now, not tomorrow!” Star Watcher urged.

  “I have a reason,” Open Door replied, then said to the messengers, “Tell them I sent Miamis many days ago to ask them this, but they came up the wrong side of the river. Charcoal Burner, what say you to doing this to halt them where they are?”

  “Yes,” said Charcoal Burner. “There is hope in this. Perhaps it is not too late even now to get the people away. If Harrison can make his soldiers stop. If he will!”

  TECUMSEH WAS PAINTED BLACK; HIS WAR CLUB WAS PAINTED red. He wore only his crane feather headdress, loincloth, sheathed knife, and a pouch. He walked, very erect, toward the pole in the center of the council ground, before which a small fire burned, and his warriors, decorated in the same way, followed him in a single file.

  Smoke from the fire rose toward the stars. In the sky stood the long-tailed star, now grown so long and big that it cast light like that of a full moon.

  Thousands of warriors of the upper Creek nation stood on the edges of the field and watched, lit by bigger bonfires around the perimeter of the field.

  From one side of the field now entered their principal chief Big Warrior, to meet Tecumseh by the fire. He carried a pipe, and a warrior behind him carried a bowl of coals. Tecumseh remembered when he had first seen Big Warrior, many years ago when he had come to Tuckabatchee Town to find his mother. Tecumseh here found another dream manifest. Something, maybe a disease in the years since Tecumseh had seen him, had caused his skin to fade in spots, as Tecumseh had seen. His nose was broad and flat, his jaw wide and square as a box.

  They lit the pipe from the fire carrier’s bowl and smoked to the Four Winds. In the silence of this ceremony, Tecumseh could feel the power and even the mood of Big Warrior beside him. Big Warrior was not very pleased with Tecumseh, who had come here more than a week ago to address the full autumn council of the Creeks, then had postponed his speech day after day because two white men had been present. At last one of the white men, the Indian agent Colonel Hawkins, had grown tired of waiting and left. But the other, a frontiersman named Samuel Dale, seemed to have nothing else to do but wait around, and at last Tecumseh had decided that he must go ahead with his plea anyway, even if a white man did hear it Dale sat among the chiefs on the other side of the field now, and Tecumseh could feel his presence waiting. But white man or no, Tecumseh was going to talk war. He could not dally any longer; there were still hundreds of miles to go.

  These Creeks were his mother’s people. Tecumseh had fame among them, and they were not so bound to the whites as the Chickasaws and Choctaws were. In the Revolutionary War they had fought against the Americans. Big Warrior was on good terms with the Indian agent Hawkins but only pretended to like him. The danger of holding his war council while Hawkins was here would have been extreme, for the agent was a friend of President Madison; Tecumseh had learned that Madison and Hawkins had been something called classmates at someplace called Princeton. Whatever that was, it surely meant that Hawkins would tell the president if he heard Shawnee war talk in the great fall council of the peaceful Creek nation. Tecumseh expected to talk to Madison himself after the confederation was complete; he did not want him to know anything yet. This man Dale would probably report to Hawkins and Hawkins to the president, but there was nothing Tecumseh could do about it now.

  Big Warrior laid the pipe across his arm, nodded once to Tecumseh, and then turned and went off the field.

  Now Tecumseh and his warriors went to one quadrant of the field, and there they took crumbled tobacco and sumac leaves from their pouches and sprinkled it on the ground. They went on around the circle, doing this at each quadrant to sanctify the ground and keep bad spirits out of the council. Then, as the hushed crowd looked on, they returned to the pole in the center, went around it, and then shook the rest of the tobacco from the pouches into the fire. When they had done this, they were standing in a small circle around the pole, with the small fire smoking in their midst, large bonfires around them, the dense circle of Creek warriors around the council ground, the sprawling town of Tuckabatchee nearby, and the Tallapoosa River flowing deep and quiet nearby with the long star reflecting off its misty surface.

  Suddenly this hush was rent by a pulsating shriek. Tecumseh’s war cry then was magnified by the tremolo voices of his two dozen warriors, a chorus more fierce and primal than that of a wolf pack at twilight. The drumbeats began pounding like a great heartbeat, and the warriors leaped into the stalking posture. They moved in unison, following Tecumseh: a toe pointed and placed delicately upon the earth, then the heel set down, while the muscular bodies moved slowly in exaggerated postures of stealth, eyes darting left and right. Then the other foot, toe down, then heel down, arms slowly moving as if parting the foliage of a place of ambush, and the only sound the heartbeat pulse of the drum. In the circle they stalked their enemy, and the Creeks were with them in their hearts, feeling the tension build, hearing the tempo of the drumbeat gradually quicken.

  Then the tremolo cry again, and at once the drum was pounding rapidly, taking the people’s heartbeats up with it, and the dancing warriors were springing, crouching, whirling, swinging their clubs, and stabbing with their flashing knives. No warrior who had ever surprised and attacked an enemy, no youth who had ever dreamed of doing it, could fail to respond to the sight of those postures, those gestures, to imagine themselves this swift, this powerful, this fearless in the attack. The dancers yipped with every sudden move; they sprang shoulder high from the ground and landed crouched, grimacing, their eyes mad and mouths wolfish; they bounded forward, grappling with imaginary foes, stabbing them, then spun about to kill enemies behind them. So swift and hard were their strokes that the dance had had to be rehearsed and coordinated and practiced over and over, or these dancers with their flashing, naked blades might have hurt or killed each other in performance.

  Firelight gleamed on their sweating muscles; they turned and leaped upon their own shadows. The Creek warriors looking on we
re wild-eyed now as they watched, and their own limbs twitched, their own hands clutched spasmodically, as their souls moved in battle with the dancers’ souls. Ai! That is how I would spring upon my enemy! Ai! So strong is my own arm! Ai! Now I stoop to take your scalp, you who were a great warrior but not so great as I! The dancers now were in a crouch, and their knives flashed this way and that, and finally with an ululating cry of triumph they all leaped far off the ground and landed on the balls of their feet at the last thump of the drum, and stood with weapons in their right hands, their left hands thrust upward, and though their upraised hands were empty, the spectators for a moment saw scalps in them, blood dripping.

  Then Tecumseh stood alone in the firelight, his chest heaving from the intense exertions of the dance. All his warriors had filed out from the circle. Of them only Seekabo remained on the council ground. He stood between Tecumseh and the chiefs, to translate. Here he would be at his best, the Muskhogean being his native tongue, the Creeks his own people. Seekabo waited, looking at Tecumseh.

  Alone, a black-painted figure on the ceremonial ground of Tuckabatchee in the homeland of his mother, his shadow thrown in all directions by the bonfires around him, Tecumseh waited for his silent immobility to affect the thousands. His heart was fire, honey, and salt because of what he had learned here.

  On arriving at Tuckabatchee he had inquired about Turtle Mother.

  Ah, they had told him. Your mother has gone. Great in age and wisdom, she should have lain down in peace to sleep with a serene face. But some whites were here, and when they left, many people died of a disease which was like drowning out of water. She like many of the old and weak was among them. Come, we will show you where she is buried.

  Now he stood alone in the middle of the council ground just as he had stood at her grave and remembered her face as he had seen it so long ago, beautiful but bitter with hatred for white men, and he remembered the warmth and comfort of her arms. The white men had killed his father, Hard Striker. They had killed his foster father, Black Fish. They had killed his beloved brother Chiksika in Tennessee and his brother Stands-Between at Fallen Timbers. They had driven his mother out from the Shawnee land into a lonely exile among the Creeks from whom she had grown so different, and at last, thirty years later, they had killed her with a disease instead of a bullet. All this was in Tecumseh’s heart now as he began to speak:

  “O Muskogee, my kin! People of my mother’s blood!

  “You have seen how the Shawnee strikes his enemy! You have seen his quickness, his strength! My warriors have shown you.

  “Thus in the years of my youth I roamed through the south, and struck at white men who were doing wrong things. I made my knife taste their blood because they had taken the Sacred Hunting Grounds.”

  He spoke with nearly as much motion as he danced. His arms swept and arced as if with weapons. He coiled tight like a snake and then sprang forward to hurl challenges and taunts from his mouth. He reached for the sky and shook his arms as if creating the thunder in his own voice. The Creek warriors strained forward to watch and listen when he lowered his voice to hisses and whispers; they yipped when he shouted in passion.

  “Once our people were many. On all the land from the sunset to the sunrise our campfires shone like stars rained out of the sky.

  “Then the whites came. Our fires have dwindled; everywhere our people have passed away, as the snow in the mountains melts in the spring. We no longer rule the forest. Yes, brothers, our campfires are few. Those that still burn we must combine into a great fire!”

  It was nearly daybreak when Tecumseh had finished. The Creek warriors were nearly in a frenzy; their hearts were twisted with sorrow and anger for what had been done on the land of the Great Good Spirit by the invaders from the slime of the Eastern Sea. Never had their souls been blown so high and low by words, so thrown about by gestures. The white man Samuel Dale had made himself as inconspicuous as he could, and his own head was spinning with the comprehension of what he had seen happen here. He had remembered everything so that he might report it to Hawkins and show what a danger was being created here, but he wondered if he would get out alive to report it. Such a passion these people were in!

  And he knew he would never forget one particular sight: Big Warrior’s own hand clenching his knife handle. Big Warrior himself!

  BUT BY THE TIME OF THE COUNCIL NEXT DAY, SOMETHING had turned inside Big Warrior. It was as if he thought he had been moved further than he should have been. He knew now that Tecumseh’s night of oratory had made the Creek warriors eager to follow him into a war whose consequences he had not allowed them to think of. Big Warrior himself, who had to think of consequences for his people, had nearly leaped up in accord with the emotions Tecumseh had aroused in every man. But Big Warrior had thought much since then, and he had grown indignant about the influence this visitor had exerted upon his warriors, and he had talked in secret with Dale and with cautious old chiefs. And now Big Warrior faced Tecumseh before the gathering and said:

  “You are a bad man. I will not encourage my people to follow you to ruin.”

  Tecumseh drew his head back. His lips and eyes narrowed. For a long time he said nothing. Then he pointed his hand at Big Warrior’s mottled face and cried for all the council to hear:

  “Your blood is white! Even your skin is growing white, to show it! You have taken my talk, and the sticks, and the wampum, but you do not mean to help the red people! I know why. You do not believe that the Great Good Spirit wants this done. You do not believe that he has sent me on this holy mission!

  “You shall know! When I return to the north I will stamp my foot on the ground, and here in Tuckabatchee you will feel the earth shake!”

  Now Big Warrior once again felt himself being jarred, almost intimidated, by the boldness of Tecumseh’s words and startled by the fire in Tecumseh’s eyes, which looked as intense as if Weshemoneto’s own eyes were drilling into him with contempt. The council had become a hum of awed voices at those last words.

  Tecumseh knew that whether Big Warrior finally condoned or condemned him in the council, many of the Creek warriors had perceived the truth and importance of his plea and were eager to join in resisting the white men. When the earth trembled and the dust rose and the river ran backward, it would shake them loose from all fear and doubt, and they would take up arms against the Americans!

  34

  TIPPECANOE

  November 6, 1811

  “I EXPECT NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO COME OF THIS PARLEY,”

  General Harrison said to the officers standing around his little field table. “That humbug is only stalling.”

  The officers nodded, their elegant bicorn and beaver hats bobbing up and down. They all wore capes and cloaks against the raw, misty cold. Nearby, mauls thudded on tent stakes, soldiers yelled and grumbled, axes thudded, and saws rasped as the army set up officers’ tents and gathered dead wood for bonfires. The aroma of beef boiling in kettles for the evening mess was already spreading in the dank air. There was a rustle of heavy canvas as a team of privates grunted and raised Harrison’s white marquee tent a few yards away. The general went on:

  “Here is what I mean to do, gentlemen. We will meet with this Shawnee prophet tomorrow as he has requested. We will restate our demand that he disperse his warriors now and forever. I do not expect him to comply. He will probably plead for more time, more councils.

  “But he won’t get them. If he doesn’t yield to our demands tomorrow, we’ll wait till they’ve gone to their huts, then fall upon the town and destroy it. Burn it down, and burn their harvest.”

  Colonel Boyd, commander of the regulars, cleared his throat. “Governor, sir, I’ve been thinking we’d do better to strike them now.”

  “Aye!”

  “Aye! My thinking, too!”

  “Now! Yes!”

  “Why let them ready themselves, Gov’nor?”

  The militia officers were eager. Harrison held up his hand, tilted his head, and lightly shut his ey
es and waited for their clamor to stop. A cavalry troop was noisily setting up its camp on either side of the staff officers’ compound. “Gentlemen,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the noise, “no one is more eager than I to break up this nest of banditti. That’s why I brought you here. But the president and the secretary of war both have urged me to do it without force if that’s at all possible. So we shall try that by talk. If talk doesn’t work, as I expect it won’t, we’ll treat them to buckshot and bayonets. Your boys will have their chance to do what they came here for.”

  Actually, Harrison well knew in his own mind, the president probably would have apoplexy if he knew the army was here. Harrison had been authorized to march his army only to the edge of the treaty lands as a show of force. By coming into the heart of the Indian lands like this, he was committing just such an act of aggression as the old Greenville Treaty forbade. But the president was too far removed from the Prophet’s establishment to understand what a Damocles’ sword it was over Vincennes, what an obstacle it was to settlement and statehood, what a vipers’ pit of British intrigue it had become. Harrison figured that he knew the situation and its remedy better, and that the national administration would, after he had solved the problem quickly and neatly, admit that the end had justified his means.

  DUSK SETTLED EARLY OVER THE WABASH VALLEY, UNDER the gloom of low, drizzling clouds. Charcoal Burner’s scouts watched Harrison build his camp on the narrow, wooded plateau a mile west of Prophet’s Town, and they noted every detail. The plateau was covered with an open oak forest, among whose trees the army had set up a defensive perimeter in somewhat the shape of a footprint. The long east side of the elevation looked over a marshy, grassy bottomland that stretched along the Wabash toward Prophet’s Town, and along this side, for a distance of three hundred paces, were posted a large part of the Blue-Coat regulars, interspersed with units of the Indiana Hunting-Shirts. At the south end, or heel, of the encampment, the Yellow Jacket militia could be clearly seen setting up their tight salient, their horses tethered inside. In the woods at the wider north end of the camp were the Beaver-Hats, also with their horses tethered inside. The west side of the plateau dropped off abruptly twenty feet into a willow-thicketed ravine through which gurgled a fast, rocky-bottomed creek on its way to the Wabash-se-pe. This long side of the camp was guarded by a small body of Blue-Coats and a long line of Indiana Hunting-Shirts. In the heart of the camp stood the officers’ white tents, protected by horse soldiers. Supply wagons were also inside the perimeter, the beef cattle were grazing in the lowland beyond the camp of the Yellow Jackets, and there were sentries stationed everywhere outside the lines. Charcoal Burner noticed that although the soldiers were cutting a great amount of wood, they were not building breastworks with it but only making big stacks of firewood.