Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  But the time was coming when there would have to be a distance between them. Activities of the American forces at the other end of Lake Erie compelled Brock to return there. In shipyards at the far end of the lake, the Americans were trying to build a navy fleet. There were raids and battles going on there that threatened the British supply route to Upper Canada. Here at Amherstburg, a young and dignified British navy commander named Barclay was building and arming a huge ship of war to keep control of the lake even if the Americans did succeed in building their fleet. Barclay had lost one arm in a great naval battle somewhere else in the world, and Brock esteemed him highly.

  Now Brock put his senior subordinate, Procter, in charge of the western theater and prepared to sail east to Niagara for a while. “But I will always answer to your needs, my friend,” he told Tecumseh. “Only send me a message.” He gave Tecumseh a gold compass engraved with both their names.

  Before boarding a warship for Niagara, Brock penned his report to the Crown on the capture of Detroit. Determined that his country should appreciate the value of its ally, he wrote of Tecumseh:

  A more sagacious man or a more gallant warrior does not, I believe, exist. He has the admiration of everyone.… Tecumseh’s followers responded to the dictates of honour and humanity; the instant the enemy submitted, his life became sacred.

  “Remember, my friend,” Brock said, “I cherish this green belt as much as anything I possess. As I told you when you gave it to me, I shall keep it till the day I die.”

  36

  FALLEN TIMBERS, ON THE MAUMEE

  April 25, 1813

  TECUMSEH AND THE REDCOAT GENERAL RODE OUT ON THE grassy slope of the bluff above the rapids of the Maumee-se-pe.

  This place was full of bad memory, even after almost twenty summers. Here Tecumseh had lost a brother and the Shawnees had lost everything that was important. Tecumseh would have spoken of these memories if the British general riding beside him had been Brock. But it was not. It was Procter, with whom Tecumseh would never have tried to share a sentiment. Procter did not seem to believe Indians could have sentiments.

  It was Procter riding beside him, an ally only because of the circumstances of war. Tecumseh knew Americans, his enemies, whom he liked better than Procter, his ally, but this fat-jowled Procter was his ally because it was he who had the cannons and supplies and boats and Redcoats Tecumseh needed to wage war on American forts. Thus it was Procter who rode now beside him onto the bluff of the Maumee overlooking the old battleground and the huge new American fort that had been built across the river from it.

  It was not Brock, the white man to whom Tecumseh had felt the strongest bond of friendship, because Brock was no more. Where the high spirits and hopefulness of Brock had glowed briefly in Tecumseh’s heart, there was now only caution and a kind of despair that would sometimes pull him down and make him doubt that the things that needed to be done could be done after all. Tecumseh had always been confident that the Great Good Spirit would help him do the task, and the inspiration from Brock had made him even more sure, for those two brief moons, but since the news of Brock’s death, Tecumseh sometimes had doubted.

  Now it seemed that his own spirit was the sole fountain from which his growing army of warriors could drink of hope and confidence. Once Open Door had provided much of their spiritual nourishment, but he had failed and now just hung around Tecumseh’s Indians like a bad memory. Once Brock had provided some of it, but a bullet had gone through his massive chest as he led his Redcoats on a charge against the Americans in a battle near Niagara.

  It was a sad thing about Brock. For his capture of Detroit he had been made a knight—an honor whose nature Tecumseh could only imagine—but had been killed before he had even known he was a knight.

  Tecumseh now was riding a black stallion, one of three that he had obtained at Detroit, and these were the finest horses he had ever ridden. Procter rode a fine, dappled British war-horse that to Tecumseh somehow always seemed far too grand for him. Procter was so portly and mean-looking that Tecumseh thought he would look better riding on a hog. Sometimes by imagining him that way Tecumseh could make himself smile a little.

  The grass down the slope and in the Maumee bottomland was tender, fresh spring green. Tecumseh could remember watching the troops of General Wayne maneuver over these same green slopes and bottomlands so long ago; he could remember seeing the Kentucky horse soldiers riding toward the blown-down forest to decoy the warriors out into the open. The fallen trees were hardly visible now. They were rotting into the ground and covered by a new growth of woods, a growth surely nourished by all the Indian blood that had been spilled there by the bayonets and bullets and buckshot of Wayne’s army.

  Now Tecumseh gazed toward the place where Anthony Wayne’s tent had been. He was able to pick out the exact place, though the land had been forever changing in the time since. And when he looked at that place, he remembered seeing Wayne through the spyglass—and also the young Blue-Coat officer who had stood beside him: that young man to whom Tecumseh’s eyes had been drawn and who had had the aura of an omen around him: Harrison!

  Again today that same Harrison was less than a mile away. He was in that enormous new American fort across the river.

  It was Harrison who had built the fort.

  The strangeness of it was full of meaning for Tecumseh.

  A new United States Army of the Northwest had been built to replace the one Hull had surrendered to Tecumseh and Brock at Detroit last summer. And Hull’s successor as commander of this new army was Harrison. And now here were Tecumseh and Harrison back at this place, facing each other again, further proof of the truth of Tecumseh’s premonitions.

  Harrison! How our fates are woven together!

  As it had seemed to Tecumseh for so many years now, this conflict was like a simple fight to death between two men, behind whom there happened to be gathered the armies of their respective races. Though Tecumseh could not now see Harrison over there in that sprawling, palisaded fort across the river, he felt as close to him as he had in Vincennes that day when they had stood with their eyes locked together, their breath intermingling, one holding a raised tomahawk, the other a bared sword.

  HARRISON HAD MADE HIMSELF THE GRANDEST FORT EVER. Its dimensions were stupendous.

  As usual, he had had plenty of critics, who did not believe he should have stopped here to build a fort at all but should have gone right on to attack Canada. But he believed the huge stronghold was necessary.

  Some of those same critics who said he should not have built the fort were the ones who had roasted him for not building defenses at Tippecanoe, he would recall with a wry smirk.

  How many hundreds of thousands of words of explaining he had written to regain favor after Tippecanoe!

  Harrison had named the huge post Fort Meigs, in honor of Ohio’s new governor. Its palisades enclosed ten acres, and there were eight blockhouses around its perimeter. Cannon stood on platforms facing over the Maumee and also covering the two roads that led to the fort, one from the west along the river, the other from the south. And, despite huge troubles and overcharges by contractors—which gave his critics more fodder—it had turned out to be a well-made fort, with an excellent situation, standing on a high wedge of land where a creek converged with the Maumee just below its rapids.

  Harrison meant this to be the primary post to defend Ohio against the British and Indians from Canada and also to serve as a main supply base for the offensives he would make soon enough against Canada. Among the long rows of tents inside the palisade stood a headquarters building and a massive log structure filled to the rafters with supplies.

  General Harrison always had replies for his critics. For those who derided his fort, he replied that he was not going to rush headlong into disaster as old Winchester had done last winter.

  Recklessly seeking to reverse the capture of Detroit, General James Winchester, a Tennessee planter and Revolutionary War veteran, had sped up the western shore of Lake Erie
with eight hundred fifty soldiers, getting as far as Frenchtown on the River Raisin. There, huddling in shelter against zero-degree weather, Winchester’s whole army had been killed or captured by a thousand warriors and Redcoats. Roundhead the Wyandot and the British General Procter had simply marched across the frozen mouth of the Detroit River from Fort Malden and attacked in the frigid dawn light by complete surprise. In Tecumseh’s absence, the warriors had massacred a hundred sick and wounded Americans. It had been another of those disasters wrought by rashness and poor planning. And Harrison, schooled in campaign warfare by the Roman caesars and by Mad Anthony Wayne, was determined not to make any rash mistakes. His byword was caution now, and this huge fort was a manifestation of that word.

  Now Harrison was summoned by an excited aide to come to one of the batteries facing over the Maumee.

  “Damned if it ain’t Tecumseh and that murderin’ Procter themselves,” exclaimed an officer of the battery, handing Harrison his spyglass and pointing to two riders high on the opposite bluff, an Indian on a black horse, a Redcoat on a gray. Harrison turned the powerful telescope on them, and his heartbeat quickened. There was no mistaking the slender red man with his long black hair and turban. Harrison had not seen Tecumseh for more than two years, but the Shawnee had been uppermost in his mind ever since, and there was no mistaking him. Harrison had never seen Procter before, but there were men in the battery who had been at the fall of Detroit, and they knew him by sight.

  Harrison watched them moving on the distant grassy height, and he knew that their presence must mean only one thing: they were reconnoitering for an assault on Fort Meigs.

  “I wonder,” Harrison said to the artillery officer, “whether those two gentlemen on that slope over there are in cannon range. Maybe you could satisfy my curiosity, Captain.” He did not really expect anything so outrageously lucky as a direct hit on the tiny figures a half mile away, but they were totally exposed, and such fortunes sometimes were granted, and how many problems could be solved if Tecumseh could be killed right now! Harrison listened to the artillery officer’s loading commands, watched Tecumseh and Procter through the telescope, and prayed for a bit of outrageous good fortune.

  PROCTER WAS SAYING TO TECUMSEH:

  “The man’s made himself a nice fort there, but he’s done a rather stupid job of placing it.” He pointed eastward along the bluff upon which they were standing. “That spot over there is a bit higher than the fort, and a damned good place for my twenty-four-pounders. They could probably throw a thousand cannonballs a day across the river and inside the walls of that fort, and not miss a shot.” Then he swung his arm slightly to the southeast and pointed across the river to a mile-wide, stump-dotted clearing beyond the fort, where the logs had been cut to build the blockhouses and palisades. “They’ve been kind enough to clear us a shooting range over there. Howitzers and mortars set near the edge of that clearing could lob bombshells into that part of the fort the twenty-four-pounders can’t reach. And ammunition could be hauled in through those woods and the creek ravine all day with no danger to us whatsoever. I believe your enemy is rather stupid, Chief.”

  That remark, surprisingly, annoyed Tecumseh. Of course he hoped Harrison would prove himself stupid, and Procter’s plan for the artillery positions did seem to make sense. But Procter seemed to think everyone was stupid except himself. Tecumseh had seen some evidence that Harrison was not stupid and considerable evidence that Procter was. But he did not comment on that. He said:

  “I think the two-bang balls could make that fort a bad place to live in.” That was his term for the explosive shells, which banged when the cannon fired them and banged again when they reached their target. He found these to be most amazing and really did not give Harrison’s men, crowded in that fort, much chance against them. He would not want to live inside a palisade like that with nowhere to hide from two-bang balls. And it was so easy to bring all the artillery to this place. British ships controlled Lake Erie and could sail right out from Fort Malden and across the west end of the lake and into the wide mouth of the Maumee, bringing the big guns to within a few miles of this place. Barges could then carry the guns the rest of the way up the river, and that stretch of the lower Maumee was protected by British guns set in the partially rebuilt ruins of old Fort Miami. Procter and Tecumseh had two thousand Redcoats and warriors waiting near the old British fort, to be deployed around Fort Meigs. Tecumseh’s hopes were up now. He was carrying the war from Canada back to O-hi-o, back to his old homeland. The recovery of the stolen lands looked more possible all the time, and if this had been Brock beside him instead of Procter, Tecumseh would have had no doubt at all about the outcome.

  Now, just as he took another look over at Harrison’s fort, he saw puffs of blue-white smoke billow out from the palisade. Instantly he kicked his horse in the flanks and cried, just as the boom of the cannons rolled up: “Go, Procter!”

  The horses had hardly moved when clods of grassy earth leaped up from the ground around the place where they had been standing. As they galloped along the slope toward cover, Tecumseh was laughing. Two more booms came, and more dirt flew, but far behind them. Procter was not laughing. His flesh and jowls jiggled as he rode for his life, and against the scarlet of his coat his face was blanched.

  WHEN HARRISON SAW THE BRITISH BUILDING BIG GUN EMPLACEMENTS on that high bluff across the river, he realized at once that his whole big fort would be nothing more than a slaughter pen unless he could come up with something very clever. To keep his whole army from being blown to shreds, he might even have to abandon the fort. But he was determined not to do that. Meanwhile, his troops were growing very nervous about something equally ominous: in the dense woods east of the fort, across the little creek and no more than three hundred feet away, there were Indians. So many of them were infesting the woods there that the spring foliage seemed to be vibrating with movement. Those woods over there should have been cleared back another one or two hundred yards, it was apparent now. To make that matter worse, the cannon in the blockhouse at that end could not be lowered or maneuvered far enough to command those woods. It was painfully clear that Harrison had overlooked a few important details in building his grand fort and that the enemy was already taking advantage of his oversights. Quickly Harrison conferred with his engineers and artillery officers, and they came up with some modifications in the fort’s design to meet those emergencies. The blockhouse at the extreme east end of the compound, so recently built that its timbers were still fresh and green, was dismantled and replaced by a low-walled gun battery, in which two or three cannons could be maneuvered easily to fire north, east, or south. To discourage any assault on this salient, the soldiers ringed it with an abatis of slash, pointed poles and tree trunks until the steep ground in front of the emplacement looked as inviting as a porcupine.

  The bigger modification of the fort could not be observed from outside, not even from the British batteries high on the other side of the river. Working like slaves in the heat, hundreds of American soldiers and militiamen with picks and shovels dug two trenches, deeper than a man’s height, running parallel to each other from one end of the fort to the other, within the palisade. These trenches were seven hundred and nine hundred feet long. The earth thrown out of each trench was piled into a traverse about ten feet high and twenty feet thick. Then, underground rooms were dug off to the sides of the trenches and braced from inside by timbers. A deep powder magazine was excavated, braced up, and covered with several feet of logs and earth. The militiamen, very much an undisciplined collection of individualists, complained loud and long against this exhausting, dirty kind of labor, grumbling that it was “fitten work for niggers.” But the sight of the big cannon batteries being built on the far bluff inspired them to labor on.

  After twenty-four hours of such work, the troops fell into an exhausted sleep. Harrison, with officers carrying lanterns, toured the ditches. The smell of fresh earth and sweaty bodies was dense, and sometimes he would get a whiff of fre
sh-cut sassafras roots. Harrison nodded as he went along this subterranean world of clods and roots.

  “There’s never been anything quite like this, I’ll wager,” murmured an officer.

  “I feel like a proper mole, don’t you?” said another.

  Harrison smiled. He didn’t mind being thought of as an innovator. And no critic would ever be able to fault him again for underfortifying.

  Now he was ready for siege. The British guns did worry him. His observers were of the opinion that they were twenty-four-pounders. Neither he nor any of his men had ever been in battle with or against such huge guns, except for a few old officers from the Revolution. He would look at the mass of earth covering a shelter and think, Nothing can get through that.

  But then he would think of the force with which a twenty-four-pound iron ball must come down after arcing through the air for half a mile, and he would feel very queasy. He also worried about the Indian-size gaps a missile like that could make in a log palisade. He thought of the twelve hundred men crowded into this ten acres of grass and raw earth and sometimes wondered if any of them would get out alive.

  But if any place ever was ready for a siege, he thought, this is. If we can hold it long enough under the pounding that’s likely in store for us …

  Two things were happening that could terminate the siege, but they were so far away that he could hardly guess when or whether they would succeed.