Panther in the Sky (76 page)

Then he walked to his place and sat down, and it was plain
that all the red men thought that everything worth saying had been said.

With few more words, none about Myers, the commissioners closed the council, and it dissolved in apparent good spirit. The three hundred warriors and chieftains elected to remain at Springfield for three more days, to engage in sports and competitions of skill. Stephen Ruddell and Tecumseh had a warm reunion, but a certain distance separated them because of Ruddell’s attachment to the faction of Black Hoof, who was his adoptive father, and because of his obvious antipathy toward Open Door’s religion.

The white men who observed the ensuing games noticed that Tecumseh, though nearly twice the age of many of the competitors, won nearly every contest.

What the white men did not notice was that while he was winning athletic victories on the sunny field, he was also winning hearts and minds at the little fireside councils at night. By the time the red men left Springfield, many young men of Black Hoof’s Shawnees and the Crane’s Wyandots had come to believe that his way was better than the way of their old tame chiefs and had pledged to come and join him at the village in Greenville.

T
HE PROPER PLACE FOR
O
PEN
D
OOR’S SOUL WAS ON THE
Road of Stars between earth and heaven, he felt, either going there alone to receive more divine instruction or leading the red people there by his words. Therefore he did not like having to deal with the earthly problems of running a crowded town or making the kinds of decisions the white men required. Those matters he liked to leave to Tecumseh or, if Tecumseh were absent, to his own wife, who was becoming an able women’s chief, or to Star Watcher, who seemed to know how Tecumseh would have handled something.

Now Tecumseh was gone, and a white man had come with an important message. This was a big, shrewd-eyed man in fine clothes. Open Door peeked out the door of his lodge and recognized the man. He was John Conner, who with his brother William ran a trading post in the Indiana Territory. Open Door had known him in the days of Tecumseh’s village near the Delawares.

Open Door guessed that Conner had come with a message from Harrison. He came out to meet him. Conner looked at him indirectly and asked to be taken to the chief and head man of the Shawnees here. He said he had a letter for them from the governor
of the Indiana Territory. Open Door said, “I am here before you. You may read the letter to me.”

Conner looked confused. He had not expected this well-known drunkard and fool to be the head man. When the warriors and chieftains assured him that Open Door was indeed the principal man, Conner had no choice but to begin reading the letter, and it was at once apparent why he had not wanted to.

The Prophet’s expressions went from anger to exaggerated imitations of hurt feelings as he listened.

The letter scolded the Shawnees for listening to a fool whose words were not truly the words of the Great Spirit, but of the Devil and of British agents. The letter ridiculed and abused Open Door openly. It accused him of summoning tribes from far away in order to mislead them, and it told the Shawnees they should send him to the lands beyond the Great Lakes, where he could hear the British more distinctly. Sheepishly, Conner finished the letter and waited for the worst.

Open Door stalked about for a while, swelling up and looking furious, then shaking his head and looking pitiful. It was plain to him: Harrison simply could not believe that this movement had grown among the Shawnees themselves, out of their own needs, that this was purely an Indian refuge from the troubles the Long Knives had brought. Harrison, like all the Americans, had to blame it on the Americans’ old enemies, the British.

Open Door did not reply the way he would have wanted to. He wanted to call Harrison the real fool and taunt him about how he had answered his stupid challenge to make the sun stand still. He wanted to curse him as a thief of the red men’s lands.

But Tecumseh had warned time after time: “Do not provoke this Harrison. He is dangerous, and we are not yet ready to defy him. We must play with him and confuse him so that he knows not which way to move.”

So Open Door, cooled from angry to crafty, directed Conner to write a reply:

When John Conner rode out of the Prophet’s town with this surprisingly mild reply, he was almost singing, he was so surprised to find himself alive.

“T
HIS
H
ARRISON HEARS HIS OWN CONSCIENCE AND THINKS
it is the voices of the British!” Tecumseh cried when he returned and heard about the letter. “He never admits the great crimes his treaties are, but blames the British for troubling us! Though we are not even in his territory, he cannot leave us alone!” Then he put his hand on Open Door’s shoulder. “It is good how you answered his insults, without anger. Listen. The matter of the dead man called Myers is settled. The governor in O-hi-o is going to send his farmer-soldiers home.

“But the settlers who live close to us will not lie easy. If a horse wanders or a hog is killed, it will be blamed on us. Black Hoof will never stop complaining to his white fathers about us. He learned how Blue Jacket got annuity money for us from Hull at Detroit, and screams that we do not deserve it because we are not treaty markers. Ha!”

Now Tecumseh made a statement that astonished Open Door. “It would be better for us if we did move from this place.”

“But … my brother! This is the place the Great Good Spirit sent me to! This is the place my poor People know! Look at them, how happy they are here!”

“Yes. This has been a good place for its time. But I feel that the Great Good Spirit may soon send you a sign to move elsewhere. Surely he does not want us in conflict with the white people now as you create peace among the tribes. But we are on land within the treaty boundaries, and they will not let us rest here long.”

“Boundaries? Is this my brother Tecumseh who speaks now of boundaries? You said you know no such thing as boundaries!”

Tecumseh put a calming hand on his arm. “I still do not believe in boundaries. But I do see that those lines do exist in the white men’s minds, and on their sheets of paper, and they feel these lines give them a cause to molest us. That is why I say we should move into land they do not yet even claim. From there we will be free
to watch the boundaries, and if a white man puts his foot over, we can put him back. There, we can build our nation of all red men, without so many spies and soldiers and nervous whitefaces coming to the edge of our camp. And there we can better avoid more treaties.”

Open Door frowned, thinking hard. “West would be closer to Harrison. Besides west, there is nothing but Canada.”

“The closer to Harrison, the better we can watch and confuse him.”

Open Door cocked his head. “If we were west, true, my followers from the northwest would not have to come so many hard days.”

“And thus would not be so hungry when they arrived.” “Where would this new town be?”

“Will not the Great Good Spirit tell you?” Tecumseh replied. “Some sign will come, pointing to the place.”

I
N THE AUTUMN THERE CAME TO THE GOOD TOWN A MAN
whose glory was in being bad.

Main Poc, Withered Hand, of the Potawatomi rode in from the northwest with a large bodyguard of warriors, his arrival creating a great stir among the Ojibways and Sauks and Menominees in the holy town. Open Door had never met Withered Hand before, but Tecumseh had visited him often in his own travels.

Withered Hand was a brawny, ugly giant in his middle years, respected and feared throughout northern Illinois and west of Lake Mis-e-ken. His influence extended beyond his own tribe and into the Winnebagoes and Sauks and Ojibways. His favorite pastimes were drinking liquor until he was full of thunder and striking like lightning across the Missi-se-pe against the Osages. Main Poc’s name referred to his left hand. He had been born without fingers or thumb on that hand, and he boasted that this was his special sign. Though he could not shoot with a bow, he could use a musket with his right hand alone and was said to have killed Osages with the stump of his left, as with a war club. Withered Hand was both a chief and a shaman, which was permitted in his nation but not in the Shawnee. He was a member of the Wabeno, or Fire Handler Society, and possessed such medicine that bullets and arrows could not hit him. That he had come this great distance to see the Shawnee prophet increased Open Door’s prestige even more.

But Withered Hand was not the kind of man who comes to look up at another man. He had come as an equal, to meet another
great shaman and orator like himself, a prophet of whom he had heard much from the Ojibways passing through.

When the two came face to face, the people looking on saw their strong medicine passing both ways between them. They not only respected each other, but liked each other at first sight. Each recognized the other’s disfigurement as a special gift of the Creator. Withered Hand said he had come to stay for a long while. From what he had heard, he had come to believe that Open Door was a great man who had been delivered to the red men because one was needed. Withered Hand, without any humility, said he was here to learn the Prophet’s doctrines with his own eyes and ears and to go home and spread them deeper into the north and west. Some of the warriors he had brought with him, he said, he had selected because they too showed promise of being effective disciples.

Tecumseh had long foreseen that Withered Hand’s wide influence and his bravery could be important in the confederation of red nations. That was why he himself had gone so often to talk to Withered Hand. The Potawatomi chief had welcomed Tecumseh and had accorded him much respect but had not shown any enthusiasm for the unification of tribes. To Withered Hand, intertribal warfare was natural and traditional. It was the way a warrior and chief found glory and proved his tribe’s superiority. Tecumseh had tried to convince him that there was greater glory to be found in fighting the red man’s common enemy, the Americans, than each other. But until lately Withered Hand had been remote from the white man’s evil and had never engaged in such great struggles as the war with Clark or St. Clair’s defeat, so his mind had not yet been turned in that way. Lately, though, the Americans were becoming more of a bother up and down the Missi-se-pe valley and near Lake Mis-e-ken, and he was starting to think more about them.

Now, as the two ugly shamans conferred with each other day after day, Open Door began to realize that Withered Hand would probably never give up liquor. He loved liquor and stated over and over: “If I quit making war and quit drinking whiskey, I would become a common man. This the Great Spirit has told me. He has spoken to me, as well as to you.” Most of the other tenets of the Prophet’s teaching, however, he found good, so their bond of friendship grew stronger as his visit extended over the next two moons.

And when, in the Hard Moon, Withered Hand and his warriors rode homeward, he left Open Door with an invitation:

“On the Wabash-se-pe, where the Tippecanoe flows into it, there is a valley so rich and pleasant that tribes have been living in it since the Ancient Times. It is sheltered from the strong winds off the prairies, and it is far from Fort Wayne and far from Vincennes. It is in the center of the Indian lands. My own ancestors were in that part of the valley for many years. You should move to that place and make your holy town there.” He told the Prophet that it would be especially easy to move there, to carry everything by raft and canoe. Not far north of Greenville rose the headwaters of the Mississinewa. One could float down the Mississinewa to the place where it flowed into the Wabash-se-pe, then down the Wabash-se-pe a little farther, and there the Tippecanoe flowed in, and there was the place. It was not far above Weatanon, the old French trading post and the home of the Wea tribe of the Miami nation.

Tecumseh had seen the place often. He remembered the wide, fertile bottomlands, the wooded bluffs rising to the prairies above. “Yes,” Tecumseh told his brother, “he speaks true. It is a good place.”

And after Withered Hand had ridden away with his warriors into the wet, leafless woods, Open Door slept a night and told Tecumseh the next day:

“I dreamed. Weshemoneto spoke and said that I should lead our people to the Tippecanoe on the Wabash-se-pe, when the ice breaks in the springtime.”

“Good,” Tecumseh said. “I was confident that the sign would come.” He smiled. It was always good to let Open Door think an idea was his own, for only then would he dedicate himself to it.

T
ECUMSEH AND
T
HICK
W
ATER LOOKED AT EACH OTHER
with pain and sadness in their faces when they gazed down from
the bluff over the site of the old Shawnee town. There were square houses and dirt roads in every part of the valley. Fields were separated from each other by great, shaggy windrows of rotting brush and stumps. In sloping places, eroded bare earth showed like gashes through the weeds and scrub. Giant hardwood trees, their bark girdled by the settlers long ago, stood gray, rotting from the top, or lay broken, the cornrows plowed around them. Smoke rose from brushpiles and chimneys everywhere in the valley. Pigs wandered all about, dogs barked from horizon to horizon. The corn was not very tall and looked parched and spindly in the dusty fields. Brambles and tall horseweeds choked every unplowed corner.