Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (11 page)

Elliott is in a delicate position and knows it. If war should come, the Indians have been told, Elliott will be its messenger. The previous July he had told a Miami chief: “My son, keep your eyes fixed on me; my tomahawk is up now; be you ready but do not strike until I give the signal.” The Indians are more than ready. Patience is not among their virtues; how does one keep them keyed up to fight, yet hold them back from action for months, perhaps years? For Elliott, it is an impossible task.

He is an old man, into his seventies, trying to act like a young man. This year he has taken his first legal wife, an Irish girl, Sarah Donovan, half a century his junior. No doubt she sees him as a father, for she married him shortly after the death of her own father, a schoolmaster. But it is no token relationship; she will bear him two sons.

He is wealthy enough to retire, has been for a generation. He is by far the richest farmer in the area, though farmer is scarcely the word for Elliott, who runs three thousand acres as a plantation with a staff of overseers, clerks, and several score slaves, both Indian and Negro. Some of the latter go back thirty years to his raids in Kentucky with Alexander McKee and the Girty brothers. The Indians have made Elliott a fortune. Some of the land on which his handsome home rests was bought directly from the Wyandot and Ottawa tribes in contravention of British government policy (but winked at by his superiors, who have so often winked at his activities).

His mansion, with its neat lawn, ornamented by tree clumps running down to the river, is furnished as few homes are. He has enough flatware and plate to serve one hundred people. His wife has at least fifty dresses and thirteen pairs of kid gloves. He himself owns eleven hats. There are no banks in the Canadas; one’s wealth is stored in the attic. In one trunk, Elliott keeps nine hundred pounds’ worth of silver plate.

It does not occur to the old man that he can retire. This is his life; he knows no other. He is close to exhaustion, but the job must be done. He dictates a note to his superior, Superintendent William
Claus. Restraint is necessary, of course, he agrees, but—a little wistfully—would it not be proper to keep up “the present spirit of resistance”? Claus sends the note to Gore at York, who passes it on to the ailing governor general, Sir James Craig, at Quebec, who chews over it for months.

Craig is faced with the same dilemma; his own policy has brought about this problem. A distressing possibility confronts him: what if the Indians should attack prematurely and the British be blamed? His conscience tweaks him, and on November 25 he writes to the British
chargé d’affaires
in Washington asking him to warn the American secretary of state that he suspects the Indians are planning to attack the American frontier. That surreptitious message forms one of the strands in the skein of events that will lead to a bloody denouement the following year at Prophet’s Town on the Tippecanoe.

As the Governor General attempts to conciliate the Americans at the possible expense of the Indians, his underlings at Amherstburg have been attempting to conciliate the Indians at the possible expense of the Americans. For the traditional dispensation of presents includes a generous supply of hatchets, guns, and ammunition, ostensibly for hunting game but equally serviceable in the kind of frontier skirmish that is already arousing Yankee dander. Within a year the discovery of some of these weapons will fuel the growing American demand for war.

The ceremony follows a time-honoured ritual. Each chief hands Matthew Elliott a small bundle of cedar sticks to the number of his tribe, cut in three lengths to represent men, women, and children. With these, Elliott’s clerks determine how the gifts are to be dispersed. Now the presents are brought from the storehouse and heaped around a series of stakes, each of which bears the name of a tribe. Elliott makes a brief speech, calls the chiefs forward, points to the mounds of gifts—bales of blankets and calico cloth, great rolls of tobacco, stacks of combs, scissors, mirrors, needles, copper pots, iron kettles—and weapons. On a signal the young men dart forward, carry the presents to the waiting canoes. Within three minutes the lawn is empty.

This lavish distribution disturbs the new commander of the British forces in Upper Canada, Brigadier-General Isaac Brock. How, he asks Governor General Craig, can the Indians be expected to believe the British are strictly neutral “after giving such manifest indications of a contrary sentiment by the liberal quantity of military stores with which they were dismissed”? Brock is critical of Elliott—“an exceedingly good man and highly respected by the Indians; but having in his youth lived a great deal with them, he has naturally imbibed their feelings and prejudices, and partaking in the wrongs they continually suffer, this sympathy made him neglect the considerations of prudence, which ought to have regulated his conduct.” In short, Elliott can help to start an Indian war.

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.