The warriors were very intent upon his words now; here their leader was contrasting their bravery with Procter’s cowardice, and they were stirred and proud.
Now Tecumseh reminded them of an English perfidy that a few of them were old enough to remember personally and the rest of them had heard of many times. “At the Battle of the Rapids in the Fallen Trees last war, the Americans defeated us, and when we retreated to our father’s fort at that place, the gates were shut against us. We were afraid that the same might be done here, but instead of that, we now see our British father preparing to march out of his garrison!
“Father! You have got the arms and ammunition which the great father sent for his red children. If you have an idea of going away, give them to us, and you may go, and welcome. As for us, our lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit. He gave to our ancestors the lands which we possess. We are determined to defend them, and if it be his will, our bones shall whiten on them, but we will never give them up!”
The warriors’ response to this was so surprising and menacing that Procter’s purpled face drained of color. Many of the warriors leaped to their feet, shaking their tomahawks at the British, their angry voices roaring to the high ceiling.
Procter waited for the din to subside, then rose, saying only that he would answer in another council, and hastened out a nearby door with Tecumseh’s anger drilling into his back, palpable as an arrow. Procter’s own officers were confused and awkward, torn between their desire to jeer him and their fear that the hundreds of aroused warriors might simply rush at them; some of the officers were standing there applauding Tecumseh while others were sidestepping out of the council hall with tears in their blinking eyes and their chins jutting. It was left to old Elliott to try to restore order in the echoing hall.
So Procter still had not answered, but now there was no doubt in Tecumseh’s mind. The British ships had surely been sunk.
Now how could there ever be a hope of carrying the war back into the homelands in O-hi-o?
38
FORT MALDEN, ONTARIO
September 23, 1813
THE NIGHT SKY WAS FULL OF RED SMOKE.
Star Watcher and Open Door stood together, their faces lit by the glow of the burning shipyard and the fort. They stood at the roadside and looked back at the fires while heavy-laden wagons trundled and groaned past, going north on the river road. It was the same road where Tecumseh had ambushed the American army at the beginning of this war, to save Fort Malden from the Redcoats; now, fourteen moons later, the Redcoats themselves had set it on fire and were fleeing from it without an enemy in sight. Nearby stood old Colonel Elliott, his eyes glinting with tears in their wrinkled sockets. Elliott had labored in his old age to build an estate here, and now it would be lost, a ruin. He had helped the Shawnees for as long as they could remember, but now there was nothing they could do to help him, and this made a deep ache in Star Watcher’s heart.
The shipyard had been burning like a forest fire all day. The unfinished ship hulls burned with roaring flames that leaped and spiraled a hundred feet high. As their sheathing burned through and fell off to reveal the curving rib timbers, showers and swirls of sparks rose into the lurid smoke and brightened it to yellow. The stacks of oak logs and hewn timbers and planks looked as if they would burn forever. They would burn, then shift and settle and rumble, and the flames would lick higher. Masts and wooden derricks and gin poles flamed like standing torches; when their stays burned through they fell, whooshing and banging, sending up still more eddies of sparks and setting roofs and shacks and lumber on fire.
After he had ordered the shipyard set afire, General Procter had finished packing everything from Fort Malden, and then the fort too had been set ablaze. The old, dry, wood-shingled roofs flared up so fast, they were almost like explosions.
A company of the Forty-first Regiment Redcoats now tramped by, part of the rear guard for the wagon convoy, and their coats were garish in the firelight. Many of their uniforms had black holes in them where sparks blown by the lake wind had fallen on the soldiers. The soldiers’ eyes glinted with fireglow as they glanced at Star Watcher and Open Door.
Now Open Door cried out in his piercing voice, and the Indian families began filling the road behind the Redcoats, hundreds of women and children and elders, carrying bags and kettles and babies, leading horses that carried packs or pulled pole drags. Bent-backed old women limped by, leaning on staffs.
Once again the Indian families were fleeing in the fire-reddened night, refugees from invading Long Knife soldiers, and Star Watcher remembered the many times before. But this time they were not in their homeland in the O-hi-o country, but in Canada, far from old Chillicothe and Piqua and Maykujay Town, far from Tippecanoe and going still farther into an unfamiliar land, following the British, who had promised to protect them and help them regain their homelands but who instead were being protected by the red men—and fleeing from an enemy that was not yet even in sight.
Open Door, his chest aching with sadness and his mouth tasting bitterness, nevertheless smiled and spoke reassurances to his People as they went past, those who did not make war but who were always its sorriest victims. “Be strong,” he said. “The Great Good Spirit favors our People; all will be well. Follow the Redcoat soldiers. You will go to a safer place. All will be well. Colonel Elliott will feed you, as he always has done. All will be well, Grandmother.…” With a pang in his heart, he remembered how it had been to comfort the People. He glanced at his sister, who was saying the same reassurances. Tecumseh had put them in charge of caring for the refugees and keeping them from straggling too far behind the retreating Redcoats. It would be a heavy and sad burden for them, but the kind of burden they had been carrying for years—the care of the People.
Another wooden roof in the fort caved in, sending up another tower of fire to show them their road.
THICK WATER COULD FEEL IN THE WIND THAT MUCH RAIN was coming. He frowned and pulled his blanket closer around his neck, shifted his tired body in the saddle, and sighed. Another wet autumn was coming, and once again the People were homeless.
To warm his heart then he turned his thoughts to his beautiful wife and children. They at least would be sheltered, though probably hungry, in the Wyandot town on the other side of the great lake. How good it would be to have a time of peace and live with them close to the cookfire, to sleep with the embers warming him on one side and her body warming him on the other.
But Thick Water’s duty, by his own choice, was here. Tecumseh sat on his horse a few paces away, between Elliott and Withered Hand, on the road above the smoking ruins of Fort Malden, watching Harrison’s huge army come ashore from their ships. The American fleet was large now; it included the ships that Perry had captured from One-Arm Barclay. To guard Tecumseh was Thick Water’s self-appointed duty, it had been for many years, and from that duty there came another kind of inner fire. But protecting Tecumseh had always been a difficult duty, full of hardships and dangers, and it was especially so now. Reluctant to retreat, Tecumseh seemed inclined to prowl the very edge of peril. The Redcoats and the warriors and the refugees had long since gone, up the river road to Sandwich Town, then east toward the river Thames, destroying bridges behind them. But Tecumseh lingered miles behind the retreat, choosing to watch the approaching Long Knives from barely a gunshot away, always looking for a sight of Harrison.
General Procter had persuaded Tecumseh not to desert the Redcoats, demonstrating on maps why they needed to retreat to more defensible ground, showing him how the American fleet could go around to Lake St. Clair and cut the Redcoats off from their supply route. Procter had promised Tecumseh that a full-fledged battle against the Americans would be made at the town of Chatham on the Forks of the Thames, where the Thames was too narrow and shallow for the American gunboats to navigate. Once convinced, Tecumseh in turn had persuaded most of his chiefs to stay by the Redcoats, though he would have preferred to fight here and keep Harrison’s army from putting one foot onto
the Canadian shore at all.
Now Thick Water saw Tecumseh point toward the multitude of Blue-Coats and heard him say:
“Look at them. Now they are out of their groundhog hole, and I can defeat them. But I will have to defeat them at a place called Chatham, whose ground I do not know, instead of here, on a place I know so well. And Detroit, that Brock and I took from them on that good day last year! It will fall back into their hands. Oh, I do not like this!”
Colonel Elliott looked aside at Tecumseh, face full of disbelief. He said in Shawnee, “But look how many! There are forty hundred, at least!”
“Forty hundred is only counting,” Tecumseh replied. “Fighting is not counting, old Father. It is strong hearts and being right. In times past you know I have defeated five times as many as my own.”
Thick Water’s heart swelled at these words. It was true. He knew it because he had been with his chief at many such times past.
Withered Hand, the terrible Potawatomi, was looking at the horde of Americans moving ashore in the near distance and saying nothing. Thick Water thought that Withered Hand did not look very brave now. Much of his celebrated ferocity seemed to have been dampened by the huge scale of things in this white man’s war. It was not like raiding Osage villages or isolated cabins of white settlers in Illinois, as in the old days. Thick Water had seen that look in the faces of other chiefs in recent days, chiefs who had grown doubtful about their British allies and had decided to take their people and go home, and Thick Water wondered how much longer Withered Hand would stay faithful to Tecumseh’s cause. He sniffed the ashy, tangy smell of smoldering oak as the dank lake wind blew up from the ruins of the shipyard and fort. He felt the hint of the coming autumn rains in the air and heard the deep, steady hush and drone of noises from the invading army, and his heart grew heavy again. He heard hooves on the cobbles at the other end of the little town and saw American horse soldiers come riding slowly around the corner of a stone house. Elliott and Withered Hand looked very impatient, ready to flee up the road.
Finally, then, Tecumseh took one last, long look at the oncoming Blue-Coats, sighed, turned his horse, and rode slowly up the beaten road of retreat. To Thick Water he said as he rode past, “Come, brother. We will destroy that army another day.”
THE HEAVY RAINS BEGAN AS THE RETREATING REDCOATS moved eastward from Sandwich along the shore of Lake St. Clair and continued day after day.
General Procter stayed far ahead of the retreat, traveling in a carriage with his wife and daughter. Far behind him came his army and its enormous baggage convoy and its herd of beef cattle, beating and churning the road into a porridge of mud; behind them came the fatigued and hungry Indian families; behind them came Tecumseh’s warriors, a thousand of them. And behind them always came Tecumseh, always a step ahead of Harrison’s advancing army, deploying his chieftains to obstruct and harass them at every opportunity, to snipe at scouts, to ambush columns at the bridges and fords, slowing the Long Knives to let the refugees stay ahead at a safe distance. He patrolled the fringes of the invading army like a wolf and nipped it whenever he saw a chance.
But the circumstances grew more and more bleak as the refugees and the Redcoats plodded eastward toward the mouth of the Thames. Confusing orders came back from General Procter; soon, units of the Forty-first Regiment were out of touch with each other, the commissary was failing to get food to the bivouacs, and riverboats full of arms and supplies fell far behind. The Indian Department could not obtain food for the refugees, and they, weakening, sick, straggled farther and farther behind on the miry roads. Star Watcher and Open Door demanded and begged for their people, but the agents could only shrug and blame the commissary, which in turn blamed the general. Withered Hand groused and sneered about how the British had destroyed his faith in them, then finally broke off and took away large numbers of his Potawatomies, as well as some Ottawas, Ojibways, and Sauks who were under his influence, saying he was tired of running and would rejoin Tecumseh and the Redcoats only if they stopped and defeated Harrison.
Then came a runner to Tecumseh, saying that one of Harrison’s brigades, backed up by Perry’s American warships in the Detroit River, had driven the few remaining Indian defenders out of Detroit, lowered the British flag that Tecumseh and Brock had raised over the fort a year ago, and raised the American flag. Everything, it seemed, was falling like the dead leaves.
As the retreating column left Lake St. Clair and moved eastward on the road along the Thames under the gray sky, some of the smaller American gunships passed on through the Detroit River channel into Lake St. Clair and entered the mouth of the Thames in pursuit. Tecumseh watched them coming on the rainy west wind, their sails white through the autumn foliage, and saw an opportunity to play wolf again. The river was narrow, so he put warriors along its banks and in trees to shoot down into the American gunships. At last, unable to proceed under such fire, the ships dropped back down the river.
Stopping the gunships was a momentary victory for Tecumseh, but he had no chance to rejoice over it. Another runner came. Roundhead, that staunch friend since the beginning, had been killed while harassing the edges of Harrison’s army. Tecumseh’s heart grew harder and colder. The bitter worm of vengeance was eating in his soul, and he was impatient to reach Chatham at the Forks. There at Chatham, Procter had said, showing him a map, stood a blockhouse, several strong log houses, and two bridges nearly a mile apart that the Americans would have to try to cross. It did sound like a good place to ambush Harrison and stop his army. Surely Procter was there already with his Redcoats and cannons, building breastworks, as he had promised he would do. The refugees would go across the bridges to safety, then the warriors would cross and tear up the bridges behind them and turn around to fight Harrison at the Forks, to kill him for his great crime of trespass. Tecumseh’s blood was seething for battle now. His dead father and brothers, his great friends Brock and Roundhead, his teacher Black Fish, all who had been killed by the white men’s bullets and diseases, all sang in his soul their wish for revenge, and he was eager to die if the Master of Life meant to sacrifice him for it.
BUT WHEN TECUMSEH AND HIS REAR GUARD CROSSED THE bridge over the fork and arrived at Chatham, they found no fortifications. On the other bank of the river a few Redcoats were casually encamped, doing nothing but trying to keep themselves dry. Three cannons lay dismantled on the south riverbank, and a hut had been filled with muskets, but there were no British here, except old Elliott, who stood pale and shaken amid a horde of yelling, infuriated chieftains and warriors who were demanding to know why there was no fort here as Procter had promised there would be. Walk-in-Water was waving a club, howling that he would kill Procter if he saw him, that he would kill Elliott now. Charcoal Burner seemed to be shielding the old agent, but only halfheartedly; he, too, turned to him and bellowed, “Father, your Redcoats are cowards! They are liars!”
Some of the chiefs even met Tecumseh himself with lightning in their eyes and thunder in their mouths. “Did you not promise us the fat general would have a fort here, and supplies for us?” cried South Wind, a tall Ojibway chief, with tears of frustration in his narrowed eyes. As if this question had suddenly thrown the weight of their suspicion upon Tecumseh, many began crowding toward him, yelling, thrusting up their arms. Thick Water, suddenly tense, drew his tomahawk and rode his horse between them and his chief, forcing some of them back, and others of the bodyguard began to form a circle around him.
But Tecumseh himself was soon able to shout down the uproar. He shamed the crowd for accusing him and convinced them that he was as bewildered as they were. Elliott got close to Tecumseh and hung near his stirrup as if to save himself. Tecumseh reached down and grasped the shoulder of his coat.
“Old Father! What is this fat general doing? Does he not tell even you?”
Elliott was shaking his head, his mouth slack and drooling, his whole frame trembling. He moved his lips with no voice, then finally croaked out: “I’m confused.… He told us … yesterday? �
� told us we would fight back at the Dolsen farm … yes, Dolsen’s, it was, that it was a better place than this … more buildings there, but … then changed his mind again, I suppose. I’m sorry! I’m confused. Procter’s made such a botch of it all.… My friend, tell them it’s not my fault. My God!” he cried in English then. “I’ve given my whole life to your people! My whole bloody life; you know that’s true!”
A voice called from downstream that Redcoats were coming up the river road, up the other side. Tecumseh released Elliott’s shoulder and stood in his stirrups. He heard troops coming, saw scarlet uniforms through the distant foliage. “Let this be Procter,” he said. “I will have an answer from him. Clear a way for me!” he shouted, urging his horse toward the bridge that crossed the river.
When he careened onto the road at the other end of the bridge and galloped to meet the British column, he recognized at its head not Procter but his first subordinate, Colonel Warburton of the Forty-first Regiment. Following the colonel were some three or four hundred foot soldiers, a few dragoons tall on their horses, and a cluster of refugee Indians, mostly women. Tecumseh reined in alongside the officer, crying, “Warburton! Where is Procter?”
Colonel Warburton, looking awfully angry himself, pointed up the river road. “Gone on ahead, I suppose. Who really knows?”
Tecumseh clenched his jaw. “Why has he gone ahead? Why has he made no fort here? Is this not Chatham? He said he would stand here with me and meet the Long Knives! Why is he up that road? I want to know!”
Warburton tilted his head and replied with sarcasm: “As you may or not know, Chief, I’m not one of that select group of officers whom the general deigns to favor with information. I’m merely his second-in-command. But from what I can gather of it all, he’s changed his mind, and wants to fortify at the missionary town instead.”
Panther in the Sky Page 81