And as she washed her brother’s wounds, she was also washing the many wounds of all the Shawandasse, the South Wind People, because Tecumseh had been the People.
When she had finished bathing the body of her brother and had combed his hair, she dressed him in a clean and unadorned suit of deerskins and put upon his feet a new pair of elkhide moccasins decorated with beads, the pair she had made for him before the flight from Fort Malden. When she had made them she had thought he would wear them to walk upon this earth. She pulled down on his crooked leg and pushed up the other so that the feet were side by side, so that he would not have to limp anymore where he went. Tears were running down both sides of her nose, leaving cold wetness on her mouth.
Now he was ready. She sat back on her heels and parted her hair from her face and looked at him. In the smoky beam of daylight from the smokehole in the roof, his face looked serene and young and beautiful, shimmering with silver light through the wetness of her eyes. He appeared to be a man who had never been troubled, a peaceable man who was having a pleasant dream. As she looked at him she remembered the other side of the Circle of Time, before the Long Knives had come, and she saw a misty land of green meadows and corn fields and a large town of gray wigewas in a valley between bluffs gushing with springs, and her father and mother sitting in front of their lodge, and Tecumseh as a boy sitting before them and listening to what his father told him.
Now that she had done the preparations and had no more to do, she could no longer bear the weight on her heart, and she began the lament.
When they heard the vibrating wail from inside the wigewa, Open Door, Thick Water, Charcoal Burner, and Cat Pouncing rose from where they had been sitting in prayer. They walked single file down to the creek and waded into the cold water. They drank from their hands until they could hold no more water, then made themselves vomit until their insides were empty and clean. Then they went back up to the wigewa and went in. Each took one end of a pole at a corner of the blanket litter upon which the body now lay, and with Star Watcher following and wailing they carried him down to the grave. They lowered him down and placed him within the bark slabs, in such a way that if anyone ever dug up a body and said it was the body of Tecumseh, as many would surely do over the next hundred years, the Shawnees would know whether it was true.
Open Door pinched sacred tobacco out of a bag and went to each of the four sides of the grave and sprinkled it in, chanting barely above a whisper. Then he stood and held his fire stick against his chest. Star Watcher stopped wailing. The wind off the wide lake flapped Open Door’s cape and shook the feathers and ornaments of the grave diggers and bearers and blew Star Watcher’s thick gray hair away from her face. Her face was smeared with ashes and was as gray as her hair. Her fists were clenched at her abdomen as if she were trying to keep from falling open.
Then her brother the Prophet moved the fire stick over the grave. And Thick Water, who had not wanted to leave his beloved leader before the great battle, groaned and shivered as the last slab of elm bark was put in place, hiding forever this body of Tecumseh. Cat Pouncing shut his eyes and bit inside his mouth until he tasted blood, and kept from crying out.
Now they would all have to do the hardest thing they had ever done since the Eye of the Panther had crossed the sky. They would have to go on, with Tecumseh behind their hopes instead of in front of them. They would have to go on that way until he found a way to come around to them again.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For the red man of that day, the warpath was the path to a quick death; peace was the path to a lingering death. For the white man, the warpath was often the path toward the White House or Governor’s Mansion.
William Henry Harrison campaigned successfully for the presidency in 1840 with a slogan evoking his “victory” at Tippecanoe. Never a man to use one word when a thousand would do, he gave a two-hour inaugural address in a cold wind, took ill, and died after only thirty-one days in office.
Richard Mentor Johnson rode to the vice presidency in 1836 on the jingle “Rumpsey dumpsey, rumpsey dumpsey, Richard Johnson killed Tecumseh”—though in the chaos of that battle it was never determined who really shot the great warrior down. Other veterans of the Battle of the Thames garnered votes for decades afterward for their part in defeating Tecumseh’s warriors.
Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee prophet, lingered on with a dwindling following of believers until 1836, when he died in Kansas. He was not, as some popular writers have stated, disowned or banished from the tribe by his brother.
Black Hoof, who had led the Shawnees in decades of resistance and then had tried to accommodate the conquerors, lived to see the last corner of Ohio partitioned out from under his people. He died at the age of 105 in 1831, and that year his followers left Ohio for Kansas.
The Shawnees who had remained loyal to Tecumseh until his death fought on against the Americans through the War of 1812 but were not effective without his leadership. Years after the war they began filtering back from Canada into Ohio and Indiana. Now a few hundred of their descendants make up the Shawnee Nation United Remnant Band, whose principal chief is Tukemas/Hawk Pope, a descendant of Thick Water. With patience and effort, they have managed to buy a secluded twenty-eight-acre plot in their ancestral lands for a ceremonial ground. For the first time in more than a century and a half, Tecumseh’s people have a piece of their homeland, and it is sacred to them.
In the 175 years since Tecumseh was killed, scholars and historians have quibbled over details of his life, career, and death—thus perpetuating and compounding some myths and, here and there, probably preserving a truth.
Was Tecumseh born near Piqua, as he reportedly told some white men, or near Chillicothe, as one of his descendants reportedly told other white men? Was he married once or twice? Was he a sexual profligate who left half-breed descendants all over the country? Did he really propose marriage to Rebekah Galloway, or was that just the Galloway family’s romanticized version of a more earthy incident? Did Tecumseh make one recruiting journey among the southern tribes or two? Was Tecumseh the whole intelligence behind his brother’s religious movement, or was the Shawnee prophet an inspired leader in his own right? Did Simon Kenton recognize and refuse to identify Tecumseh’s corpse on the battlefield the morning after the Battle of the Thames, or had the body been removed during the night?
My own extensive research for this book was not for the purpose of resolving those and other perennial disputes, many of which I know cannot be answered unequivocally. Not only do white scholars still argue over them, the various surviving factions of the Shawnee nation have their conflicting traditions. Even eyewitnesses, both red and white, changed their accounts as they grew old and started depending more upon what they had heard than on what they had seen.
No, my research was aimed at something beyond those old contentions. Though I pored over the usual documents, diaries, treaties, memoirs, history books, and battle accounts, paced over old battlegrounds in the United States and Canada, and interviewed experts red and white to be as historically right as possible throughout this book, I was looking especially for insights into the culture, morality, ceremony, and psychic condition of the Shawnee people in the time of their greatest crisis. Neither Tecumseh nor Tenskwatawa nor other great chiefs of the woodland tribes can be understood outside the context of their tribal ways or the disasters visited upon them by the Anglo-American invasion.
Often in this book I have written the red people’s version of some particular incident. Sometimes their version can be reconciled with that of white historians, but not always. Often I have chosen the red man’s version because that is the way my principal characters would have perceived it and sometimes just because I found it more credible.
Although I have carefully sought the ascertainable truth, sometimes I have had to choose one unprovable version over another in order to proceed with the story; I hope that readers will not cite my work as an authority on one side or the other of any of the perennial quibbles.
Too many readers have been led astray already by authors who claimed to have found the last word. I have not broken much new ground; this field has already been plowed over too often. I have instead tried to understand and interpret, to make my reader walk in the Shawnees’ moccasins, to help him appreciate what they once had and comprehend the devastation they were suffering.
One element of my story that might raise still another dispute is the relationship between Tecumseh and Rebekah Galloway. The idyllic account given by the Galloway family historian, verified nowhere else and repeated uncritically by scores of book, magazine, and newspaper writers ever since, I have long found suspect. I could not believe that this exemplary red leader would mock and jeopardize the holy cause of his life by proposing to marry a white teenage girl.
My research showed me that the attitude of the red man toward his homeland was never obvious to Anglo-Americans, even when explained by Tecumseh and many other eloquent chiefs.
It still isn’t, as I learned one evening beside a campfire. Two talkers, a compassionate, liberal-minded white man and a Shawnee veteran of Viet Nam, had been conversing earnestly for hours about matters close to their hearts. Now my fellow white man shook his head and blurted something I had almost known he would say:
“But, my God! How can you go and fight a war for a country that’s treated your people the way it has?”
The Shawnee smiled and wagged his head slowly. He put his fist against the man’s knee, chuckled, and said, “You palefaces still can’t understand that this is our country, can you?”
About the Author
JAMES ALEXANDER THOM lives in the Indiana hill country near Bloomington with his wife, Dark Rain of the Shawnee Nation, United Remnant Band. He has been a U.S. Marine, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a member of the faculty at the Indiana University Journalism School. Thom’s historical novels are Long Knife, Follow the River, From Sea to Shining Sea, The Children of First Man, and Panther in the Sky, for which he won the prestigious Western Writers of America award for best historical novel.
THE CHILDREN
OF FIRST MAN
by
James Alexander Thom
Three hundred years before Columbus, a Welsh Prince named Madoc—an invincible blond Giant of a man—crossed the Atlantic with a fleet of wooden boats to plant a colony in the paradise he called Iarghal. For countless generations Prince Madoc’s blue-eyed descendants migrated along the great waterways of the primeval New World, mingling their blood, their legends, and their dreams with the native peoples. And as epidemics raged, love and marriage flourished, and savage wars erupted, Prince Madoc’s vision of peace with the natives of Iarghal was forgotten. But his spirit of chivalry lived on in the people who called themselves the Mandans.…
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Panther in the Sky Page 87