Panther in the Sky (96 page)

The Prophet swelled up and hissed, but the contempt was only to conceal his fear. “Go back down,” he said in a hoarse voice, “and tell them to kill the rest of the soldiers. Say I have praised their bravery, and that Weshemoneto will help them strike the governor down!”

When Charcoal Burner had started back down the path, Open Door stood grimacing toward the ominous sky. He was quaking inside. He could hear the white officer-soldiers’ commands bellowing in the roar of the gunfire. The rain clouds crawled overhead.
It was light enough to see the clouds moving now, and features of the land were separating into different shades of gray: the woods, dark but full of the sparks of gunfire and overhung by a pale cloud of smoke, the marshy grasslands beyond, a shade lighter than the woods.

The Prophet’s bodyguards could see his robed figure now, the tall bulk of him. They saw him turn from the cliff and come toward them. He took the bridle of his horse from one of them and swung onto the animal without a word. He kicked in his heels and began to trot, then gallop, across the prairie toward his town. Bewildered, they looked at each other, then mounted and rode after him.

Why their prophet would stop invoking the Great Good Spirit’s protection while the warriors were still fighting, the bodyguards did not understand. But it was their duty to follow and protect him. So they followed him as he rode in a wide arc across the prairie, around the thunder of the battle, and down the slopes into Prophet’s Town.

A
S THE DAWN GRAYED
, G
ENERAL
H
ARRISON RODE FROM ONE
end of the long campground to the other, riding up behind each unit, conferring with its officers, giving them words of encouragement, then riding on. He was in plain sight now in the half-light, and scores of Indians saw him, saw the huge bicorn hat of an officer among the oaks and the smoke, and shot at him with gun or bow, but the missiles only barked trees around him or flipped through his cloak. It was as if he, not the Indians, had the protection of the Great Spirit around him—or that he had the stronger god. Major Floyd rode up to him and pleaded with him to take cover, but Harrison waved away the suggestion and rode on to the next unit, cheering the troops as he went.

The camp was a shambles of tattered tents and flags, overturned wagons, dead soldiers and Indians and horses, burnt woolen blankets, smoldering ashes, dense smoke, bloodstained mud and puddles, arrows sticking in everything. Every tree in the woods had been completely barked by bullets from waist height to head height. Wounded soldiers by the score lay crowded into half-sheltered coverts, wrapped in muddy blankets and bloody rags, the surgeon moving among them and squatting beside them. There were already at least fifty soldiers dead, Harrison estimated, and of the two hundred or so wounded, there were many who looked almost gone. One man’s whole jaw had been shot off, and his ghastly half face with its haggard, stunned eyes
was more than Harrison could bear to look at as he went through comforting the wounded and praising them. Some of them were busy in awkward postures trying to clean the waste out of their pants. The surgeon had told Harrison that many of the flesh wounds and abdominal wounds were particularly ugly because many of the savages had chewed their musketballs before going into battle—the surgeon showed him one he had just extracted—apparently to make them flatten or fragment on impact or perhaps to increase the chance of infection. There also were many arrows that had been dipped in excrement. As Harrison had looked at these things, an awful remorse had plummeted in his breast. He was thinking what an intense, profound hatred would have to grow in a people to make them create such things. And in this harsh, soggy, smoking, gray reality of a dismal morning, here within a mile of the Indians’ holy town—a place where he really had had no right to come, he could admit to himself now, himself only—he finally understood that the hatred manifested in those chewed musketballs and besmirched arrowheads had been created by his own race.

He clenched his teeth and shook his head to get this forlorn admission out of it and spurred his horse on toward the northern flank, where the shooting was growing heavier again. He was met by Colonel Daveiss of the Kentucky Dragoons, whose face and hands, like those of everybody else, were black from gunpowder and gunsmoke, and Daveiss repeated the same request he had made twice before: permission to charge a wooded rise from which a nest of Indians had been pouring gunfire into the compound. Daveiss’s red-rimmed eyes blazed in his sooty face. His white blanket coat, a mark of his flamboyance, was now filthy with mud and chaff and soot. This Joe Daveiss, a noted Kentucky lawyer, had once told Harrison that the two of them were the only two men west of the Alleghenies with any strategic sense. Now he said the best strategy would be to get control of that high place. Finally Harrison said, “Use your discretion, Colonel. If you think it’s light enough to see what you’re doing.” Then he rode off toward the front line, where the Fourth Infantry was having a terrific, noisy gunfight on a bigger scale.

Daveiss grinned and ran to his dragoons. It would not be a mounted charge. Most of their horses were dead or leaking from bullet holes. Daveiss gathered twenty young men and told them to follow him and, saber waving, sprinted in his dirty white coat out of the lines toward the muzzle flashes on the rise. Quite a few
of his dragoons thought it was a foolhardy thing to do and didn’t follow.

The next time Harrison rode to the dragoons’ sector, they were still firing at the same elevation Daveiss had tried to charge. Colonel Daveiss, his dirty blanket coat now soaked with blood, lay at the roots of a sycamore tree where his soldiers had carried him back and laid him down to die.

N
OW IT WAS NEARLY DAYLIGHT, OR AS LIGHT AS IT WAS
going to get on this drizzly day. Harrison had formed the units at the north end into massed ranks for a bayonet charge into the woods where the battle had started and where the strongest concentration of Indians seemed to be.

The warriors had fought with inspired bravery and unusual prowess for more than two hours, defending something that had somehow become more important to them than even self or tribe. Even as their brothers had fallen before the guns that were not supposed to work, fired by soldiers who were supposed to be dead or crazy, even as they had seen their assured victory thwarted time after time by the brave and stubborn Americans, still the warriors had fought on, even rushing against the dreaded buckshot and bayonets; even after they had lost faith in the Prophet’s promises and charms, they had fought on, charging again and again, for something extraordinary that had grown in their hearts.

But finally, seeing the Blue-Coats massing and trooping forward with their indestructible general riding among them with his saber raised, and noticing that the prayers of the Prophet were no longer coming down from the far bluff, the warriors fired a few parting volleys of bullets and arrows into the many-legged army that came crunching and howling toward them, then turned and melted into the forest, taking all their wounded with them.

The white soldiers had not won the battle, nor had the allied warriors. But in the end the red men had lost something more important than a battle: they had lost the faith that for a few years had been the most cherished force in their lives.

T
HE WAR CHIEFS WITHDREW INTO
P
ROPHET’S
T
OWN WITH
stormy eyes. They placed their warriors to defend the women and children and old men in case the army should come on and try to attack the town. Then they went seeking the Prophet. They found him hunched near a small fire in the gloom of his medicine lodge, running his sacred beans and deer hooves through the
smoke, and he called out that he did not want to come out because he was praying for more power to finish destroying Harrison and his army. Before this day, they would never have entered the medicine lodge without his invitation. But by now they had deduced that his medicine was nothing to be timid about, and they pushed in, all sooty and muddy, some smeared with blood, and stood over him. One of them actually shoved the sacred reed effigy aside to make room to stand. They held their blood-dark clubs and tomahawks and looked as if they would be pleased to use them on him. He pretended to be astonished by their menacing manner, but inside his clothes he was pouring the sweat of terror.

“Why are you here?” he asked. “Have you finished the army?”

Charcoal Burner loomed over him and bent to stare fire in his face. “You are a false prophet. You told us Harrison would die at once and his soldiers would be helpless. Harrison still lives and rides, and he made his soldiers fight like demons. Many of our young men died, many are hurt so they will die today. Only their courage hurt the Long Knives. All your medicine was but useless noise!”

Open Door cringed before this devastating indictment, then he replied in a voice that was almost a whine:

“No! I have at last determined what is wrong! It was my wife’s fault that the medicine did not work yet.” They recoiled in muttering indignation at this outlandish excuse, but he explained: “When she helped me with my prayers before the vision, she handled the sacred articles and had not told me she was in her flowing moon.… That as you know is forbidden, and it corrupted the medicine.” He emitted a terrible, false laugh, then made his face most earnest and seemed to swell with power for a moment. “I have been cleansing the articles and am ready to enchant the white soldiers so they will be helpless, and you can finish yet this day what you have so bravely begun.”

“No!” shouted one of the Kickapoo chieftains, actually shaking his hatchet before Open Door’s face. “We are through with all this, with starving in your town while you get us in trouble with the Long Knives! We put our families in your hands, and now the Blue-Coat army is this close to them! Listen! You can hear the women and children crying with fear! I, for one, am going to take my people to the safety of our towns, at once. Will I pause long enough to kill you for what you have done? My brothers’ bodies are being mutilated in the army camp now! I should kill you for killing them! But rather will I let you live, cast out of your importance, to slink around the edges of the towns
like a beggar dog, crying over your guilt for the rest of your years!”

“Loud Noise,” snarled a Shawnee man who had long known him, contemptuously using his old name, “if you want to finish the Americans, perhaps you should go over to their camp by yourself and thunder them with your Thunder-Sucker! Perhaps you should blow them away with the gas of your bowels!”

The worst had happened, and Open Door sat looking down, a sheen of sweat on his ugly face, his heart breaking.

He had fallen to what he had been before.

A
ND SO IT WAS THAT, WITHIN SIGHT OF EACH OTHER, THE
two mightiest forces in the Middle Ground licked their wounds under a drizzling sky and tried to direct themselves toward their futures.

In his muddy, trampled, bullet-riddled, blood-soaked oak grove, Governor Harrison put his exhausted troops to the most dismal sort of hard labor, digging mass graves for sixty dead soldiers, a large proportion of whom had been officers. They laid them in rows, covered them with earth and then with piles of deadwood, then set the wood on fire to hide the signs of grave digging. Other soldiers were put to work with axes and shovels to build the breastworks they should have built the evening before. Harrison was afraid that the Indians, who had fought with such unexpected recklessness and perseverance, were not through and would return under cover of darkness, either this evening or, more likely, on the dawn of the morrow. One mortally wounded warrior was dragged into the camp and questioned about what the Indians intended to do, but he said nothing; he knew nothing. Harrison tried to learn from him whether Tecumseh had led the Indians’ attack. The wounded Indian shook his head and answered that Tecumseh was not back yet from the south and warned Harrison that he had better watch out when he returned.

In their moments of leisure between grave digging and defense building, the troops diverted themselves by sniping at the warriors who had been posted to watch the camp and by scalping and flaying the corpses of the forty warriors they found lying on the ground or in hastily scooped graves around the perimeter. As forty scalps would not go far among several hundred soldiers, most of the scalps were divided among comrades. One scalp, cut into quarters, decorated four rifle barrels the rest of that dismal day. Fingers, moccasins, bracelets, ears, foreskins and scrotums, and strips of skin went farther, however, and hardly a man of
that army had to go home without a souvenir. When finally discarded, the Indian corpses were mostly bloody, flayed lumps of carrion. As for noncarnal trophies, there were thousands of arrows, which lay and bristled everywhere.

Across the brown fields toward the Tippecanoe, Star Watcher witnessed the dissolution of the holy town. Warriors, tribal units, families, many orphans and widows, trailed out from the sprawling town all day, walking, riding, pulling their goods and their wounded brothers on travois drags, dispersing along the muddy trails up the Tippecanoe and across the prairie, swinging far out to skirt the army camp, going home in profound sorrow and anger. A few men were burying six warriors who had died since the retreat to town. Many of the bands of embittered warriors, burning with frustration and vengeance, went out vowing to kill every white man and burn every white man’s house they saw on the way. By his invasion, Governor Harrison had kicked open a dormant hornets’ nest, and the settlers were in more danger than they had been in since the Greenville Treaty of seventeen years ago. Tethered to a stake in front of the council lodge, Open Door sat awaiting a decision about his fate. He understood that had he not been the brother of Tecumseh, he would have been burned at this very stake by now.

Charcoal Burner and Black Partridge, a Winnebago, had tried desperately to persuade the warriors to remain nearby, perhaps to make a new camp across the Wabash-se-pe and await Tecumseh’s return from the south. Only a few had decided to stay, some forty young warriors who were still fervently devoted to Tecumseh, who still vaguely yearned toward his beautiful dream of red brotherhood and victory.