by James Laxer
At the second meeting, two days after the first, the mood was initially stormy. The natives brought with them a great wampum belt that had the figure of a heart woven into its centre. They planned to cut the belt, which symbolized their alliance with the British, to illustrate the breaking of that alliance.5 Procter decided that only a direct appeal to Tecumseh could salvage the situation. He sent a message to Tecumseh to meet with him and his senior commanders at the quarters of his staff adjutant.
Tecumseh stood at a table with the British officers with a large map of the region around Detroit spread before them. With Colonel Matthew Elliott, one of Procter’s officers, serving as translator, the British general explained to Tecumseh the military implications of Perry’s victory on Lake Erie.6 Tecumseh saw clearly the problem the British faced, and when Procter explained that his intention was to fortify Chatham at the Forks of the Thames and to make his stand there against the Americans, the Shawnee chief appeared reassured.
Tecumseh said he needed time to discuss the plan with the other chiefs. Within two hours, as Procter later reported, he had won over most of the chiefs and their warriors to the idea of making their stand at Chatham. In the council that followed, the natives agreed to accompany the British to the Forks of the Thames.
Even though Tecumseh had convinced most, but not all, of his followers to accept the retreat, the physical labour of the move to the new site would have to be endured. Native women and girls packed up most of the possessions from the houses they had constructed on Grosse Ile. They would be the ones who would have to do the principal work of establishing the new homes. Tecumpease, Tecumseh’s sister, was one of the women charged with the back-breaking ordeal of departing from one settlement en route to another. In addition to her brother, the move involved her husband, Wahsikegaboe, and the nephew she had raised, Paukeesaa, who was seventeen years old. As she laboured to take possessions to the new site where she would help build new dwellings, she had to think about the members of her family who would fight in the upcoming battle.
On the day after the council, the natives crossed the Detroit River to the Canadian shore and started up the trail to Sandwich. About twelve hundred warriors and their families — including Kickapoos, Winnebagoes, Ojibwas, Ottawas, Senecas, and a few Creek warriors, in addition to Shawnees — set out on the journey. Several hundred native followers of Tecumseh’s confederacy refused to join in the move. Disillusioned with what they saw as a faltering British alliance, they crossed over to the American shore.7
As the British and their native allies retreated up the Thames, the Americans marshalled their forces to take the offensive. William Henry Harrison merged his own units with troops from Kentucky. They served under the command of the state’s governor, Isaac Shelby, who at age sixty-six had raised three thousand volunteers, many of them still in their teens, with no military experience.8 In addition, one thousand Kentucky soldiers on horseback, under the command of Colonel Richard Mentor Johnson, set out from Fort Meigs to reinforce Harrison’s expedition.
Their route took them past the River Raisin, the site of the massacre of Kentucky troops the previous January by native warriors. They saw the bones of the slain strewn over a distance of close to five kilometres. This stoked the anger of the soldiers and their commander, who had been a War Hawk when he sat in Congress, beginning in December 1810. Johnson had accused the British of inciting their native allies to commit atrocities against American settlers. “If Great Britain would leave us to the quiet enjoyment of independence; but considering her deadly and implacable enmity, and her continued hostilities, I shall never die contented until I see England’s expulsion from North America and her territories incorporated with the United States,” he declared in a speech in the House of Representatives.9
On the afternoon of September 27, 1813, two and a half weeks after Perry’s victory on Lake Erie, Harrison led his troops ashore on Lake Erie, just five kilometres from Fort Malden. To mark the return of U.S. forces to this corner of Upper Canada for the first time in over a year, the troops played “Yankee Doodle” on their fifes and drums.10
As the Americans entered Amherstburg and came upon the burned-out remnants of Fort Malden, Tecumseh sat on his horse on a high point overlooking the scene. Mounted beside him was Colonel Elliott, who was well over seventy years old. As the British agent in the Indian Department, Elliott had known Tecumseh for years, and the two had become friends. Watching the Americans march into Amherstburg was a bitter and sad moment for both men. It had been at Fort Malden that the Shawnee chief had cemented his alliance with the British, the alliance that was crucial to his goal of creating a native state. Elliott was looking down on the place that had been his home. Finally, the two turned, putting the hopes of the past behind them, and rode north to join the retreating British forces.11
Over the next three days the British moved slowly along muddy paths in heavy rain. Tecumseh and Elliott stayed at the rear of the force, often close to the advancing Americans, urging the natives who had fallen behind to stay ahead of the invaders. When they reached Chatham, at the forks of the Thames River, Tecumseh was disgusted to find that Procter and the British had done next to nothing to ready themselves for a possible battle there. Elliott was reduced to tears as the Shawnee chief berated the British for their lack of serious preparation. By this point, Procter had lost the confidence of his own men, and the native allies had little faith that the general would stand and fight. Some were deserting, intent on coming to terms with the advancing Americans.
As native warriors loyal to Tecumseh skirmished with the advancing U.S. units, Procter left the army behind to survey the area around Moraviantown and see where he could make a stand. His absence from his troops contributed to the low morale.
On October 2, Harrison’s men began a rapid passage across the wet countryside in pursuit of Procter’s army and Tecumseh’s warriors. The American advance forced Procter to make a stand just downriver from Moraviantown, in a place not of his own choosing. Unless he fought there, U.S. mounted troops would overtake the British, whose progress was slowed by the presence of the wounded and the women and children.
Only five hundred warriors remained with Tecumseh on October 5, the day of the battle. A thousand men had deserted him over the previous month. That morning, the Shawnee chief reconnoitered the American troops to see if they planned to march toward Moraviantown. He then rode across the Thames to join his warriors. Tecumseh had reasons for being downcast about the coming fight, but he did not show any such emotion to his followers. Dressed in deerskin leggings and a hunting shirt, Tecumseh inspected his men, well aware that they drew inspiration and courage from him. Later, he walked down the British line and shook hands with each officer. He addressed words of encouragement to them in Shawnee. While there are different accounts about Tecumseh’s last words to Procter, the general’s aide-de-camp reported that he said, “Father! Have a big heart!”12
With Harrison at Moraviantown was Richard Johnson, the Kentuckian who commanded one thousand U.S. troops on horseback (though they were not in fact a cavalry unit). Some of the first Americans to attack the enemy line were quickly cut down. After Harrison and Johnson consulted about tactics, Harrison ordered the Kentuckian to attack the native warriors on the left while he mustered his troops to attack the British on the right. Johnson urged his superior to allow him to ride forward with his mounted soldiers in a frontal assault on the British line.
The attack ruptured the right side of the British line, and only three of the Kentuckians were wounded. Johnson’s troops dismounted, turned, and seized the British position, forcing those on the first line and then the second to lay down their arms. Effectively, that was the end of the British in the battle.
Tecumseh and his men fought long and hard, on swampy ground and in the woods, against Harrison’s army. The warriors could see Tecumseh firing his musket and rallying his men. His face was painted black and red. He had
a bandage around one arm, worn as a result of a slight wound he had received a couple of days earlier in a skirmish with the Americans. Around his neck, he wore the King George III medal. Both Johnson’s men and Tecumseh’s warriors undertook charges, only to be repulsed. Then Tecumseh rushed forward to rally his men to mount another charge. An American soldier raised his loaded gun, aimed it, and fired in the direction of Tecumseh’s left side. The bullet struck the Shawnee chief in the chest, killing him.
The news quickly spread among the warriors that their great leader was dead.13 By then, the British had withdrawn. The warriors slipped away from the battlefield into the woods.§§§ Thirty-three warriors died, eighteen British soldiers were killed, and twenty-five of the British were wounded. On the American side, only seven were killed and twenty-five were wounded, five of them dying after the fight.14
Despite the low casualty rate, one death was enormously significant. When they killed Tecumseh, the Americans knocked a major foe out of the war. Although the British sorely missed Brock, who had died a year earlier, their state and military structure allowed for an orderly succession of command. The death of Tecumseh was different. There was no succession of command within the native confederacy. With its towering leader gone, the confederacy disintegrated.
While the longer-term implications of the loss of Tecumseh would soon be felt, an immediate consequence was squalid behaviour by trophy-hunters. A number of Kentuckians spied a native corpse decorated with plumes and war paint and assumed that this was the fallen Tecumseh. They cut strips of flesh from his back and thighs as souvenirs.
Some American soldiers rushed to claim to have fired the shot that killed Tecumseh. The most prominent of these was Colonel Johnson. After the war, Johnson used this supposed deed to demonstrate his fitness for political office. In 1836, when he successfully ran for the vice presidency of the United States, supporters of his chanted: “Rumpsey dumpsey! Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh!”15
To Americans, the death of Tecumseh meant they had finally succeeded in breaking the native peoples’ resistance to the westward march of the settlers. In his celebrated history of the naval battles of the War of 1812, Theodore Roosevelt, writing in the early 1880s, summed up the Battle of Moraviantown: “Tecumseh died fighting, like the hero that he was.”
On its wider significance, he concluded, “The battle ended the campaign in the Northwest. In this quarter it must be remembered that the war was, on the part of the Americans, mainly one against Indians. . . . The American armies . . . were composed of the armed settlers of Kentucky and Ohio, native Americans, of English speech and blood, who were battling for lands that were to form the heritage of their children. In the West, the war was only the closing act of the struggle that for many years had been waged by the hardy and restless pioneers of our race, as with rifle and axe they carved out the mighty empire that we their children inherit; it was but the final effort with which they wrested from the Indian lords of the soil the wide and fair domain that now forms the heart of our great Republic. It was the breaking down of the last barrier that stayed the flood of our civilization; it settled, once and for ever, that henceforth the law, the tongue, and the blood of the land should be neither Indian, nor yet French, but English.”16
Tecumseh was not the only leader to envision a union of native peoples living on their own land. Others came before, and still others tried after him. But in his time, he was peerless — a man of enormous energy whose political gifts and willingness to work with others, whether they were native or white, made him singular in his determination to change the history of the continent. When Tecumseh fell, the War of 1812 had reached its midpoint, but the combat in the northwest theatre had effectively come to an end. The whole of Tecumseh’s life was devoted to the struggle to hold on to native land in the Ohio country, in the Indiana Territory, and indeed along the western edge of American settlement to the Gulf of Mexico. With his death on a battlefield on the Thames River in Upper Canada, a chapter in the Endless War to defend native peoples and their lands was closed.
* * *
*** The Battles of the River Raisin are commemorated in annual re-enactments in Monroe, Michigan. The U.S. National Park Service operates the River Raisin National Battlefield Park along with an interpretive centre.
††† It was not uncommon for native warriors, who served as they wished, to grow weary of a lengthy siege and return to their homes.
‡‡‡ Fort Meigs has been rebuilt as an historical site. Along with an interpretive centre, the fort is open to the public. Operated by the Fort Meigs Society on behalf of the Ohio Historical Society, the Fort Meigs Center presents annual re-enactments of the battles fought around the fort. Participants with period costumes and muskets portray the U.S., British, and native forces in the battle. Canadians, dressed in the attire of the 41st Foot, participate with the Americans, who portray the U.S. units.
§§§ Near the spot where Tecumseh fell, the Government of Canada has erected a monument to his memory.
Chapter 14
The Creek War
FAR TO THE SOUTH of the Great Lakes where Tecumseh had fought, another native struggle was underway. The great Shawnee chief had helped sow the seeds for what came to be known as the Creek War.
Tecumseh’s journey to Tuckhabatchee in September 1811 won a militant Muscogee faction called the Red Sticks to his cause. The war of the Muscogees was waged in the land now known as the Old Southwest. This region, in which Spain, France, and Britain had had imperial interests, was a magnet for settlers, especially wealthy landowners who hungered to create a new cotton kingdom to replace the land farther east, where the soil had been depleted by intensive agriculture.
To make sense of the Creek War, the stage needs to be set for the southern theatre of conflict. The influence of the Red Sticks, who drew their name from the red war clubs that they carried as a symbol of justice, spread rapidly through Upper Creek settlements in the early months of 1812. The movement was one of resistance, not only to the encroachment of settlers on Muscogee land but also to the increasing influence of American ways upon Muscogee society. Adherents of the Red Stick movement attacked and intimidated those who did not share their views, in some cases murdering them.1
The great earthquake that struck the area around New Madrid, Missouri, on December 16, 1811, reinforced support for the rebel movement. So too did the sight of a comet in the heavens in the autumn of 1811. Some Muscogees associated the comet with the words Tecumseh had spoken at their council, when he said, “You shall see my arm of fire stretched athwart the sky.”2 The Shawnee chief had prophesied events that would shake the world. His prophesy seemed to many to carry great meaning. As elsewhere among native peoples, the earthquake and the comet were interpreted as a signal of the Great Spirit’s displeasure with the native peoples’ adoption of the European lifestyle.
By June 1812, when war erupted in the North against Great Britain, the Americans were also embroiled in a conflict across their southern border in Florida, with the Seminole natives and with runaway blacks who had escaped from slavery in Georgia. With the tacit support of Washington, freelance military operations were mounted from Georgia to seize territory in Florida from the weak Spanish administration. For the Seminole natives, resistance to the American intruders was similar in character to movements elsewhere on the continent to protect native land and sovereignty. For the blacks (known as the Maroons), the prospect of an American occupation threatened them with no less than enslavement. In July and August 1812, the two groups resisted an incursion of self-proclaimed U.S. Patriots and drove them back across the border.3 Subsequent U.S. attacks were also rebuffed. The pattern on the southern frontier was the same as on the western and northern frontiers of the United States: where American settlers and their political backers saw opportunities for expansion, they acted on them, and the native population resisted.
In 1810 Americ
an freelancers had seized Baton Rouge and adjacent parts of Spanish West Florida and had called on the U.S. Congress to annex the area. On October 27, 1810, President James Madison proclaimed that the portion of West Florida between the Mississippi and Perdido Rivers was now U.S. territory.4 In February 1813, the Madison administration took action to acquire another piece of territory on the Gulf Coast, instructing the commander of the U.S. Seventh Military District at New Orleans to seize Mobile from Spain. Two months later, General James Wilkinson, who later commanded American units in the northern war against the British, led the landing of six hundred American troops against the Spanish bastion near Mobile. The Spaniards surrendered without firing a shot. Thus the Americans obtained Mobile, gateway to much of the Alabama interior.
On the road to their own war with the United States, the Red Sticks were involved in the fighting between the British and the Americans as backers of Tecumseh’s native confederacy. Fanning the flames of American resentment against the militant Muscogee faction, a number of Red Sticks allied with Tecumseh participated in the January 1813 battles at the River Raisin.
The following month, another incident incited rage among Americans. Red Sticks returning south from the River Raisin murdered members of seven white families in the Ohio Valley. When he received word of the murders, Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins called on the leaders of the Muscogee National Council to punish the perpetrators. A party led by William McIntosh, an influential mixed-blood Muscogee, set out to hunt down the killers, ambushing them in the house where they slept. When the culprits ran out of ammunition and refused to lay down their weapons, McIntosh had the house set alight and five of the murderers were either burned to death or died trying to get away. The next day the leader of the Red Stick group was also hunted down and killed.