Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  The warriors butchered the oxen. Tecumseh hung the harness on the plow and left the yoke nearby for the boy to find. The warriors went into a woods to cook and eat the meat. Billy Caldwell joked to Tecumseh, “You should have told that boy, Go back to Europe and buy new oxen.”

  They resumed their reconnaissance in good spirits. It had been good to be away from the white armies’ terrible cannons, riding together in a peaceful countryside. They found no sign of American reinforcements and so turned and rode back with the late afternoon sun at their backs toward the thundering of the British guns.

  IT WAS THE FIFTH DAY OF THE BOMBARDMENT. TECUMSEH had gone down to Fort Miami to draw more ammunition and supplies for his warriors and to prod General Procter into doing something decisive. Tecumseh asked for Redcoats to help him storm the fort. Procter chose rather to keep up the shelling. He saw no reason to do anything drastic. There had been no sign of American reinforcements yet.

  When Tecumseh rode out of the fort, his face full of anger, someone ran out into the road in front of him. His horse shied and reared, but Tecumseh brought him down. A white boy was standing barefoot in the road. It was the one from whom he had bought the oxen. His dirty face was tear-streaked.

  “What, boy?” Tecumseh said.

  “Sir, that Colonel Elliott wouldn’t pay!” The boy’s face crumpled as if he were ready to cry again. “My pa don’t have anything now!”

  “Come with me.” Tecumseh turned his horse and rode back into the fort. The Redcoat sentries looked with amusement at the dirty-faced raggedy boy following the warrior chief’s horse.

  Tecumseh dismounted at Elliott’s building and strode in, pulling the boy by the hand. Elliott was at a paper-strewn counter and looked up. His face was careworn and tired-looking, and he did not seem happy to see the boy here again. He looked up at Tecumseh warily.

  “I bought ox from this boy to feed my scouts. He gave you my paper for a hundred dollars. Give him money.”

  Elliott shifted in his chair and licked his lower lip. “Ah, brother, that’s not the way we do things. We don’t buy food from Americans.”

  “I made him one hundred dollar promise, Elliott. My promise is good. Pay this boy.”

  Elliott shut his lips firmly and shook his head. Suddenly Tecumseh was leaning very close over him. He said in a low voice:

  “Before I came with my warriors to fight the battles of king of England, we had enough to eat from our hunting grounds. We had to ask and thank only the Master of Life and the Masters of the Game. We can return to our hunting grounds.” Some soldiers and Redcoat officers were standing near the counter, watching with amusement this exchange.

  Elliott slumped a bit. “Well, if I must pay, I suppose …” He pulled a heavy box from the recesses behind the counter. It was chained to the counter and had a hasp and lock. As he unlocked it, he protested, “I do wish you would keep in mind the way we do things, though.…” He raised the lid and lifted out some printed currency. But Tecumseh put his hand firmly on his arm and said:

  “Give him hard money, not rag money.”

  Elliott put the bills back with a sigh and counted out the equivalent of a hundred dollars in gold and silver coin and gave it to Tecumseh, who put it in the boy’s hand, then turned to Elliott and held out his palm.

  “One dollar more,” he said.

  Elliott closed the box as firmly as his lips, but Tecumseh’s rigid fingers nudged his chest.

  “One dollar more, Elliott.”

  Elliott reopened the box with a sigh and gave him another dollar in coin. Tecumseh put it in the boy’s hand. “That one is to pay you for trouble you had getting your money. Now come, boy. I have young men who will ride you home safe.”

  THE SCOUTS ON THE ROAD FROM THE WEST TOLD TECUMSEH that they had discovered some American messengers trying to get to the fort and had chased them.

  Quickly he sent a larger scouting party up the Maumee. It was the next morning before they returned, and their news was urgent: Up the river, camped on the shore near many boats, was another American army. Hundreds of militia soldiers. Maybe ten hundreds or more.

  Now, Tecumseh thought as he rode toward Fort Miami to report this news to Procter, how will it go now? Will Harrison come out and fight so we can win? Or will he just fill up his hole so full of groundhogs that it will take the cannons a year to kill them? He thought quickly of all the ways it could happen. It would be tomorrow, whatever it was. The scouts had said the army was but two hours up the Maumee.

  Harrison surely does not know yet that they are there, Tecumseh thought. Could I attack them where they are with no walls around them? He thought of getting up the river with warriors, Redcoats, and cannon, and ambushing their boats before they reached the American fort.

  He knew that would be the best thing to do, but he knew it could not be done because Procter would refuse or take too long to move even if he did agree.

  BUT THE INITIATIVE WAS TAKEN OUT OF TECUMSEH’S HANDS. A messenger from the reinforcements slipped through and got into the fort to tell Harrison.

  Harrison had already decided how to use the arriving militia. He needed to stop that bombardment. There were nearly a hundred graves in the fort by now and almost that many wounded in the hospital. Conferring quickly with his officers, he outlined a daring two-pronged sortie against the British batteries.

  The order was for General Clay to float down through to the foot of the rapids and to divide his force just above the fort. The larger part, eight hundred commanded by Colonel William Dudley, was to land on the north shore of the river, storm the British batteries on the bluff, and spike the big cannons to render them useless, then return to their boats and cross to the safety of the fort. The remaining four hundred Kentuckians would land on the south shore near the fort, where a large contingent of Harrison’s troops would rush out and join them for a quick assault on the mortar and howitzer emplacements southeast of the fort, and then those troops too would retreat into the fort before they could be fully engaged by Tecumseh’s Indians. In his orders, Harrison then warned General Clay against the kinds of mistakes that could result from too much of that reckless Kentucky courage, which, he wrote, “if persisted in is as fatal in its results as cowardice.”

  THE BOATS CAME DOWN THROUGH THE RAPIDS EARLY THE next morning, after the daily bombardment had already begun. Tecumseh’s warriors were shooting at them from the banks even before they landed, and he could see by the way the boats were being maneuvered that they were going to land on both sides of the river.

  Tecumseh kept the main body of his warriors in the woods near the east end of the fort and watched to see what the Americans were going to do. Off in the distance to the north he could hear heavy gunfire as his warriors and a few British soldiers attacked the Americans landing on that shore. Gunsmoke and dust caught the rising sun, and it was hard to see anything. He could see the hundreds of American troops coming around the road on the south side of the fort now and could see that they were not heading for the south gate, but toward the mortar batteries, running and cheering themselves on. At that moment he saw the south gate of the fort open and heard another throaty yell as about three hundred soldiers from the fort hurried out to join the others in a hard charge through the clearing toward the mortar batteries. And now that it was clear to Tecumseh that these Americans were going for the batteries on this side, he knew that was what those on the other side would be doing, too. They would be trying to storm the big guns. Harrison was smart and bold.

  The Americans on this side were too numerous and moving too fast to be stopped. There was not much to be done about them. Their objective was close to the fort, and there was little chance of trapping them. Tecumseh sent Walk-in-Water of the Wyandots off to the left with word for the warriors in those woods simply to shoot as many Americans as possible before they could return to the fort.

  His own attention was drawn to the conflict on the far bank. He knew that if the Americans got up the bluff to the big guns, they would be a lon
g way from the fort, on the wrong side of the river, and tired from the uphill assault. Maybe those could be caught.

  Quickly he rallied a large number of warriors and sped through the woods to his usual crossing place at the island. There was heavy firing up on the bluff, and he saw in a rift in the smoke that the British flag over the batteries was already being pulled down. The big guns had stopped shooting. Those Americans had done their task quickly; they had already driven out the artillerymen and overrun those batteries. Tecumseh led his warriors pell-mell across the river—some fording, some swimming, some in the canoes that were always left there. A messenger met him on the north bank, saying that the Kentuckians had successfully spiked the cannons and then, apparently carried on by their success, were pursuing the British and Indians on into the woods atop the bluff.

  Tecumseh’s eyes sparkled at this news. He could not have hoped for the Americans to do anything more foolish. They were doing just what they had done thirty years ago at Blue Licks.

  Tecumseh sent the messenger back up with the word that the Indians should keep up a fighting withdrawal and lure the Kentuckians farther away from the river, get them into a trap, then turn on them, that he would come up behind them and close off their escape.

  Then he led his own large party quietly and quickly up over the same ground the Kentuckians had taken, following them. They passed through the batteries, surprising and killing the few Kentucky soldiers who had stayed there, and followed the rest on through the woods above the bluff. The river valley around the fort now was quiet, except for some shouting and a few stray gunshots. But in the woods above the batteries, gunfire roared and crackled, and the yodeling and whooping of several hundred exultant Kentucky militiamen filtered through the foliage. Here and there lay a dead, mutilated soldier or Indian amid the trampled undergrowth. Tecumseh sprinted on at the head of his hundreds of silent warriors, waving them onward, Thick Water right beside him. By now the Kentuckians had fought their way more than a mile from the river.

  The pursued were doing just what they should. They were leading the Kentuckians up a ravine that would provide a perfect trap.

  Tecumseh paused now, detecting a change in the uproar ahead. There was a sudden din of very concentrated gunfire ahead, and the Indians up there were howling their attack cry. There came a bugle call from up in the woods, and Billy Caldwell said it was the call to retreat. Tecumseh motioned to his warriors now to spread up the sides of the ravine and conceal themselves, and in a few moments the hundreds were almost invisible, waiting.

  Soon there was a great rush of movement and noise a little way up the ravine. Tecumseh cocked his rifle and waited for the figures to appear through the foliage. He knew that the fleeing warriors had turned oil their pursuers and were chasing them back down. The voices of the approaching soldiers were full of alarm now.

  Four or five whitefaces in hunting shirts suddenly broke into sight. Tecumseh shot one in the chest. His warriors’ guns cracked to the left and right, and in a moment the woods were aswarm with panicky militiamen, some falling, some stopping and raising their guns, others running onto those from behind. Tecumseh’s warriors now raised their bloody war cry and loaded and fired as fast as they could. Many were using bows instead of guns. At this short range the bow was a perfect weapon, and it could be shot five times as fast as a gun. A tall militiaman burst into view just in front of Tecumseh, his long legs carrying him at an incredible pace down the slope, but his legs collapsed, and he crashed at Tecumseh’s feet with two arrows sticking out of his flank and one out of his ear. Tecumseh, having had no time to reload his rifle, shot two Kentuckians down with the brace of pistols Brock had given him, then stuck the guns back in his belt and began darting to and fro with war club and knife, striking at every militia soldier he could reach. His arms and legs were full of power. He felt as quick and keen as he ever had felt as a young warrior. He was fighting again on the O-hi-o soil of his fathers’ lands, fighting face to face with the guilty invaders, and his club and knife grew crimson with their blood. His howls and bellowing cries encouraged his warriors and himself as well. The fleeing Kentuckians were running full tilt down the draw, trying to get back to the river; they came blundering and sprinting through the woods, sometimes stumbling over bodies or colliding with each other, like a roaring river of white men, like a panicky herd. There were so many that the warriors could not shoot and strike fast enough to kill them all. Some plunged by so fast that they got through unscathed. Others staggered through or crashed through, bleeding from wounds. Thick Water was panting from his effort to stay near his leader. Tecumseh was pouring sweat. The air in the woods was thick now with choking, blinding smoke. A few of the Kentuckians had stopped, realizing they were surrounded, and were loading and firing into the woods around them. But they were so crowded in the ravine, and so jostled by their fleeing comrades, that this resistance was ineffective. Some officers were among them, men in beaver hats and frock coats with elegant epaulets and sashes, yelling, waving swords and pistols, and trying to rally the stampeding troops, but these officers were special targets and were shot down as soon as they were seen. The noise was deafening—musket fire, pistol shots, shouts, thuds, crackling and rustling, the clatter and clank of weapons parrying weapons, the groans and screams of the hurt. Tecumseh struck and dodged as fast as he could move, his cries searing his smoke-stung throat, his mouth dry, eyes red and watering. He put himself in the way of every white man he could reach, but none of them could strike or shoot him before he killed them. He had no idea how many he himself had killed or hurt. Somewhere his knife had been knocked from his hand. He ducked down and reloaded the pretty pistols Brock had given him, then stood up, shot a white man in the forehead with one, and with the other shot into the waist of a big, bearish man who was trying to club Thick Water with a rifle butt.

  Few Indians were falling. They were fighting with confidence and daring, knowing they were winning something important. The whitefaces were so swept by panic that they seemed to have no strength, no aim. Their bodies were piling up two or three deep; sometimes Tecumseh was stepping on dead men instead of ground as he darted about. His arms were red to the elbows with fresh blood, his palms sticky with it.

  Now the circle of warriors was tightening upon the struggling mass of Kentuckians, killing from the edges in toward the center, and some of the white men had thrown down their guns and stood with their hands up screaming for mercy and trying to surrender before they were killed. Others were fighting just as desperately to save themselves from the fate of Indian captivity. On a far slope of the ravine Tecumseh could see the scarlet of a number of British uniforms; apparently some of the British infantry had come from Fort Miami to help.

  WHEN THE REMAINING WHITE MEN HAD BEEN ROUNDED UP as prisoners, they were a wretched, smoke-blackened, blood-spattered, wild-eyed lot. There were only about a hundred and fifty prisoners. Perhaps that many more had escaped to the river and were trying to make their way back to the fort. But here in the ravine where Tecumseh’s warriors had caught them, nearly five hundred lay dead. In this quick action, Tecumseh’s warriors had wiped out almost as many Long Knives as Little Turtle’s three thousand confederated warriors had done in St. Clair’s defeat twenty years before. Now began the harvest of scalps and the gathering of booty.

  Tecumseh told the officer of the British troops to march the prisoners safely to Fort Miami, where they could be confined and the wounded could be treated by Procter’s army surgeons. As they were led away eastward, Tecumseh looked one more time at the awesome heap of bodies on the slaughter ground, where the warriors were working vigorously with their scalping knives and gathering up weapons. He remembered those days in his youth when Kentuckians like these had ridden up year after year into the Shawnee homelands to kill warriors and burn towns and destroy crops. His chest was heaving and his blood was still hot, and he looked without pity at the carnage, and the words of his mother came into his head again, and he uttered them softly, as if scolding the d
ead:

  “You should have stayed out of our land.”

  He summoned Charcoal Burner and Stands Firm and Billy Caldwell. “This is done, and done well,” he said. “Now we must go back across the river. Harrison might come out of his groundhog burrow. It would finish the day well if we could catch him, too.”

  When they reached the batteries, they found Major Adam Muir there. His Redcoats had recaptured the big guns and raised the British flag over them again and were pulling out the spikes the Americans had hastily driven into the touchholes, and the artillerymen were preparing to resume the siege of Fort Meigs.

  THE DAY WAS NOT OLD YET, BUT GENERAL HARRISON HAD already lost at least three-fourths of the reinforcements for whom he had been so long waiting. He stood on the grand battery in his fort with General Green Clay, stood there red with fury, fists and jaw clenched, watching the remnants of Colonel Dudley’s brigade straggle and flounder down the far riverbank to get into the boats and come to safety.

  Clay stood nearby on a crutch, face white with pain and despair. He had sprained an ankle in his successful assault on the mortars southeast of the fort, but his dismay over Dudley’s disaster on the other side of the river was so great that he could hardly feel anything else.

  “I warned you not to let them be rash!” Harrison muttered to Clay.

  “I told them that, sir!” Clay protested, as if afraid the blame would fall on him. “I told them, and not just once!”

  When that fool Dudley gets back here, I’ll court-martial him, Harrison thought.

  But the returning survivors made it clear there would be no court-martial needed to do justice to Dudley. “Him bein’ a bit hefty, as he was, y’know,” sobbed an eyewitness, “he couldn’t run fast enough.… He was ’mongst the first they got.”