The Invasion of Canada

by Pierre Berton

  Sir James Craig agrees. He insists that Elliott and his colleagues “use all their influence to dissuade the Indians from their projected plan of hostility, giving them clearly to understand that they must not expect assistance from us.”

  Many months pass before Elliott is aware of this policy. Sir James is mortally ill with dropsy, his limbs horribly swollen, his energies sapped. Weeks go by before he is able to reply to Elliott’s request to maintain “the present spirit of resistance.” More weeks drag on before Elliott receives them. The regular mail service from Quebec extends no farther than Kingston and goes only once a fortnight. In the rest of Upper Canada post offices are almost unknown. Letters to York and Amherstburg often travel by way of the United States. It is March, 1811, before Elliott receives Craig’s statement of neutrality and the Indians have long since gone to their hunting camps, out of Elliott’s reach. He will not be in touch again for months. British policy has done an about-face on paper, but the Indians, goaded to the point of revolt by Harrison’s land hunger, are not aware of it. Events are starting to assume a momentum of their own.

  VINCENNES, INDIANA TERRITORY, July 30, 1811. Once again in the shade of an arbour on his estate of Grouseland, William Henry Harrison faces his Shawnee adversary in a great council. The stalemate continues over the disputed lands which, with Tecumseh’s threat still hanging over the territory, remain unsurveyed. The Governor is convinced that Tecumseh has come to Vincennes to strike a blow for the Indian cause-that here on Harrison’s home ground he intends to murder all the neutral chiefs and, if necessary, the Governor himself. He has ignored Harrison’s request to come with a small party; three hundred warriors have arrived on the outskirts of Vincennes by land and water.

  The town is in a panic; already in the back country some roving bands of Indians have been slaughtering white families encroaching on their territory. Harrison has responded with a show of force. On the day of Tecumseh’s arrival, July 27, he pointedly reviews some seven hundred militiamen. He places three infantry companies on duty, moving them about in such a way that the Indians will believe there are five. He shifts his dragoons about the town at night on foot and horseback in order to place Tecumseh’s followers in a state of “astonishment and Terror.”

  Tecumseh strides into the council with 170 warriors, all armed with knives, tomahawks, bows and arrows. Harrison meets him guarded by a force of seventy dragoons. Each man carries a sabre; each has two pistols stuck in his belt. In this warlike atmosphere the council begins, only to be interrupted by a violent downpour.

  Harrison is impatient to end it. He is tired of palaver; a plan of action is forming in his mind. If the Indians want war he intends to give it to them, whether Washington condones it or not. He refuses to negotiate further over the new purchase; that, he tells Tecumseh, is up to the President. But if Tecumseh really wants peace, as he claims, then let him turn over to Harrison the Potawatomi braves in his camp who murdered four white men the previous fall.

  Tecumseh speaks. His response, even Harrison admits, is artful. He affects to be surprised that the white men should be alarmed at his plans. All he wants to do is to follow the American example and unite the Indian tribes in the same way that the white men united the various states of the Union. The Indians did not complain of that union; why should the white men complain when the Indians want to accomplish the same thing? As for the murderers, they are not in his camp, and anyway, should they not be forgiven? He himself has set an example of forgiveness by refusing to take revenge on those who have murdered his people.

  Again he makes it clear that he will not allow surveyors to split up the newly purchased territories for sale to white settlers. Harrison responds bluntly: the moon will fall to earth before the President will suffer his people to be murdered, and he would put his warriors in petticoats before he would give up the land fairly acquired from its rightful owners.

  There now occurs an oddly chilling incident that illustrates Tecumseh’s remarkable self-possession as well as his power over his followers. A Potawatomi leader known as the Deaf Chief because of impaired hearing wishes to challenge Tecumseh’s protestations of peace. A friend informs him that as a result Tecumseh has given orders that he is to be killed. The Deaf Chief, undismayed, puts on his war paint, seizes a rifle, tomahawk, war club, and scalping knife, and descends on Tecumseh’s camp to find the Shawnee engaged in conversation with Barron, the interpreter. The Deaf Chief rails at him, calls him a coward and an assassin, and then cries out, “Here am I now. Come and kill me!” Tecumseh makes no answer, continues to talk with Barron. The Deaf Chief heaps more insults on him. “You dare not face a warrior!” he screams. Tecumseh, unmoved, keeps up his quiet conversation. The Deaf Chief raves on, calling Tecumseh a slave of the British redcoats. No response; it is as if the Deaf Chief did not exist. At last, exhausted and out of invective, he departs. But that is the last anyone in Vincennes sees of the Deaf Chief, alive or dead.

  Tecumseh’s zeal and his influence over his people win Harrison’s admiration, even as the Governor plans to destroy him:

  “The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him is really astonishing and more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses, which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things. If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would perhaps be the founder of an Empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico or Peru. No difficulties deter him. His activity and industry supply the want of letters. For four years he has been in constant motion. You see him today on the Wabash and in a short time you hear of him on the shores of Lake Erie, or Michigan, or the banks of the Mississippi and wherever he goes he makes an impression favourable to his purpose.”

  These words are written on August 7, 1811. Harrison can afford to be generous in his estimation of his adversary, for Tecumseh has removed himself from the area. He is off on a six-month tour of the southern United States to try to persuade the tribes – Creek, Choctaw, Osage, and others – to join his confederacy. For the moment he poses no threat, and in his absence Harrison sees his chance. “I hope,” he writes to Eustis, the Secretary of War, “… before his return that that part of the fabrick, which he considered complete will be demolished and even its foundations rooted up.” Now that the brothers are separated it will be easier to tempt the Prophet into battle. As the Deaf Chief discovered, Tecumseh cannot be provoked unless he wishes to be. But “the Prophet is imprudent and audacious … deficient in talents and firmness.”

  The plan that has been forming in Harrison’s mind has become a fixation. The confederacy is growing; the British are undoubtedly behind it. It must be smashed before Tecumseh returns, smashed on the enemy’s home ground, at Prophet’s Town on the banks of the Tippecanoe. Harrison cannot submit to further stalemate. He will march in September.

  THE BATTLE OF TIPPECANOE is not the glorious victory that Harrison, down through the years, will proclaim. It is not even a battle, more a minor skirmish, and indecisive, for Harrison, in spite of his claims, loses far more men than the Indians. Overblown in the history books, this brief fracas has two significant results: it is the chief means by which Harrison will propel himself into the White House (his followers chanting the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”); and, for the Indians, it will be the final incident that provokes them to follow Tecumseh to Canada, there to fight on the British side in the War of 1812.

  Tippecanoe is unnecessary. It is fought only because Harrison needs it to further his own ambitions. For while the Governor is writing to Washington branding the Prophet as an aggressor (“I can assure you Sir that there is not an Indian … that does not know and acknowledge when asked that he is determined to attack us and wonder at our forbearance”), Tecumseh is warning his brother that he must on no account be goaded into battle.

  Harrison means to goad him, but Washington, in the person of Dr. Eustis, the Secretary of War, equivocates. “I have been particularl
y instructed by the President,” the Secretary writes, “to communicate to your excellency his earnest desire that peace may, if possible, be preserved among the Indians, and that to this end every proper measure be adopted. By this it is not intended … that the banditti under the prophet should not be attacked and vanquished, provided such a measure should be rendered absolutely necessary.”

  That is good enough for Harrison. He shores up his position with a series of letters making it clear that such measures are absolutely necessary. As soon as Tecumseh is safely out of the way, he informs Eustis that he intends in September to move up to the upper line of the New Purchase (the territory ceded at Fort Wayne) with two companies of regulars, fourteen or fifteen companies of militia, and two troops of dragoons, the latter consisting of about one hundred men. Harrison makes it seem that this is purely a precautionary measure. But “should circumstances render it necessary to break up the Prophet’s establishment by force,” well then, he adds – preparing Eustis for the inevitable – he can easily get more men to fight, as well as plenty of mounted volunteers from Kentucky, where Indian fighting is a glorious tradition.

  The volunteers, in fact, flock to Vincennes. The best known is Joseph Daviess, one of Kentucky’s most eloquent lawyers, a brilliant orator, a popular hero, and a mild eccentric, notorious both for his prosecution of Aaron Burr and for his addiction to colourful and often startling costumes. He has a habit of appearing in court wearing a coonskin cap and deerskin leggings and carrying a hunting rifle. In one memorable appearance before the Supreme Court in Washington (the first for any western lawyer) he turned up in ripped corduroy trousers, a threadbare overcoat, and a pair of dilapidated and muddy shoes, and proceeded to down a quantity of bread and cheese while his opponent tried to marshall his case. Now he is hot to do battle in any capacity under the leadership of his hero, Harrison.

  “I make free to tell you,” he declares, “that I have imagined there were two men in the west who had military talents: And you sir, were the first of the two.… I go as a volunteer, leaving to you sir, to dispose of me as you choose.…” He arrives along with some sixty others from his state-former army men and Indian fighters – a commanding figure, thirty-seven years old, resplendent in the uniform of the Kentucky mounted volunteers, the plumes in his hat accentuating his six-foot stature. To one eyewitness, it seems “nothing could be more magnificent. He was the very model of a cavalry officer …. With his tall, muscular form and face of strong masculine beauty, he would have been the pride of any army, and the thunderbolt of a battlefield.”

  Harrison and the Indians are moving at cross purposes. On September 25, the Prophet sends off runners from his village on the Tippecanoe with a message of peace for Harrison. At ten o’clock the following morning, the Governor dispatches his troops on his “demonstration of force.” They move up the Wabash in shallow flatboats, the regulars in brass-buttoned tailcoats and stove-pipe hats, the citizen soldiers of the militia in deerskin jackets and bearskin caps. When they reach the disputed territory, they build a blockhouse – Fort Harrison – the eloquent Daviess, now a major, chosen to smash a bottle over the new logs. There is much sickness, especially among the regulars, unused to frontier conditions, forced to wade up the Wabash in their skin-tight pantaloons. Shortly, however, the force is augmented by another two hundred and fifty regular soldiers of the 4th U.S. Infantry. On October 28 Harrison leaves the new fort and pushes on toward Prophet’s Town at the head of one thousand men – a commanding figure in a fringed calico shirt and a beaver hat into which he has jauntily stuck an ostrich feather.

  The Wabash

  He moves cautiously, expecting Indians behind every tree, suspicious of ambush. Nothing. At two-thirty on the afternoon of November 6, some dozen miles from his objective, he reaches a small wood, halts, draws up his force in battle order, sends scouts forward. There are Indians just ahead, flitting through the trees, but they will not speak to the interpreters.

  Back comes Major Daviess, eager for battle, urging an immediate attack against the insolent savages. Why is Harrison vacillating? Have the troops come this far for nothing? The Governor hesitates, mindful of Washington’s order that he must try for a peaceful settlement; then, with his men murmuring their eagerness, moves on, yielding “to what appeared to be the general wish.” It matters to no one that Prophet’s Town is on land that has never been ceded to the United States.

  Three Indians approach. Harrison recognizes one: Chief White Horse, principal counsellor to the Prophet. They are conciliatory. They have been trying to reach Harrison, but the messengers have been looking for him on the south side of the river; Harrison has taken the north bank. He assures them that all he seeks is a proper camping ground and they agree to parley on the morrow.

  As the town comes into view, Harrison raises his field glass and through it observes the inhabitants running about in apparent terror and confusion behind a breastwork of logs. After some reconnoitring he camps his army about a mile to the northwest among the leafless oaks on a triangle of ground a few feet above the marshy prairie. Here, in the chill of the night, the men slumber, or try to (some have no blankets), in the warmth of huge fires, their loaded guns beside them, bayonets fixed, their coats covering the musket locks to keep them dry. Harrison has dug no trenches, erected no stakes because, he claims later, he has not enough axes.

  What are the Indians thinking and planning? No one knows or will ever know, for most of the accounts of the battle come from white men. Those Indian accounts that do exist are second hand and contradictory, filtered through white reports.

  Some things are fairly certain: the Indians, not trusting Harrison, expect him to attack and are determined to strike first; the battle, when it comes, is started accidentally when neither side is prepared; and of the several tribes represented at Prophet’s Town it is the Winnebago and the Potawatomi and not the Shawnee who are the fiercest in wanting to disobey Tecumseh’s orders not to fight.

  It is four o’clock, the night still dark and overcast, a light rain rustling the bushes. On the left flank, directly in front of Captain Robert Barton’s infantry company, a shivering picket, Private William Brigham, on his knees, his musket on charge, nervously tries to pierce the gloom. He cannot see farther than three feet. Suddenly – footsteps. Brigham raises his musket and almost shoots his fellow picket, William Brown, who has imprudently left his own post in a state of near terror, certain that Indians are lurking in the bushes ahead. His instinct is to flee at once.

  “Brigham,” he whispers, “let us fire and run …”

  But Brigham fears a false alarm.

  Suddenly something swishes past them. An arrow? Terrified, they turn and dash back toward the camp. Beside them a rifle barks. Another sentry, Stephen Mars, has fired at something moving in the gloom and also dashed toward safety.

  The Battle of Tippecanoe

  In Tent No. 1, Sergeant Montgomery Orr springs awake. Somebody has just rushed past, touching the corner of his tent. He jogs his corporal, David Thompson, awake. Something strikes the tent. Thompson leaps up, seizes his gun as four shots ring out accompanied by a high screaming and yelling. The corporal tumbles back upon the sergeant.

  “Corporal Thompson, for God’s sake don’t give back!” cries Orr, then realizes he is talking to a dead man. He plunges out of the tent, gets a confused impression of a melee-soldiers and Indians firing at each other, Captain Barton trying vainly to form up his men.

  Harrison is pulling on his boots when he hears a cacophony of yells and a burst of musketry. One of his officers and two of his men have already been tomahawked and scalped. He calls for his terrified black servant, George, to bring up his favourite mount – a pale grey mare. The boy cannot find her, so Harrison borrows another officer’s horse-a black one – and rides into confusion. His men, perfect silhouettes in front of the fires, are falling about him. On the left, Barton’s company is already badly mauled. Another has broken. When one of his colonels, mounted on a pale grey mare similar to
his missing animal, tumbles to the ground, dead from an Indian musket ball, Harrison realizes that the Indians have mistaken the dead man for himself. An aide rides out on a similar horse; Harrison shoos him back for a black one.

  Harrison moves swiftly to reinforce his shattered flank, rides from point to point trying to control the battle. After it is over he will write a careful account, describing the action as if it were a set piece, reconstructing all the movements, making them sound like parade-ground manoeuvres. But at this moment, with the blackened Indians shrieking, the musket fire deafening, the steam rising from fires quickly doused, the clouds of black gun smoke adding to the general overcast, it is impossible for anyone to tell exactly what is happening.

  As in every battle, there are moments of horror and moments of heroism.

  The Indians are acting in a most un-Indian-like fashion, responding with considerable discipline to signals made by the rattling of deer horns, firing a volley, retreating out of range to reload, advancing again. As Harrison approaches Captain Spier Spencer’s company of Kentuckians, known as Yellow Jackets, on the right flank, he can hear the veteran Spencer crying, “Close up, men! Steady! Hold the line!” The Indians have mounted a third attack, so fierce that the balls are shredding the bark from the trees. One strikes Spencer in the head. He continues to shout. Another tears into his thigh, and then another. He calls out for help, and two men rush over, raise him up just as another ball penetrates his body, killing him.