Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (52 page)

In May, the Indians head for Detroit. On the way, they encounter another band which has just captured a young American surgeon in battle. What battle? Atherton has no way of knowing that an American fleet has captured York and that the British have badly mauled Harrison’s army during the siege of Fort Meigs on the Maumee. The two men converse
eagerly in the first English that Atherton has heard in three months; then the other departs, Atherton believes to his death
.

They reach Amherstburg, but Atherton has no hope of escape. With his long swarthy face and his matted brown hair, uncut for months, he is just another Indian to the British, who fail to notice his blue eyes. When the band moves across to Spring Wells to draw rations at the British commissary, Atherton’s Indian father learns, with delight, that his new son can write. He has him double the original number of family members on the chit, thus increasing the handout of provisions. Again, the British do not realize that Atherton is white
.

He loses track of time. Crawling with vermin, half-starved, with no hope of escape from the family that nurtures but also guards him, he throws himself on their mercy and pleads to be ransomed. To his surprise, his Indian father agrees, albeit reluctantly. It is clear that Atherton has become part of the family, more a son than a captive. They cannot refuse him, even though it means losing him. Eventually, in Detroit, they find a man who will give a pony for him. Atherton bids his Indian parents goodbye—not without sorrow, for they have, in their fashion, been kind—and becomes a prisoner of war. All that summer he is lodged in a British guardhouse, almost naked, sleeping on the floor with a log for a pillow, wondering about the course of the war
.

Fort George is assaulted and taken by the Americans. At Stoney Creek, a British force captures two American generals who mistake them for friends in the darkness. The Caughnawagas trounce the Americans at Beaver Dams, the battle that makes a heroine of Laura Secord. Of these triumphs and defeats Atherton knows nothing. Only when his captors return from the unsuccessful British siege of Fort Stephenson at Lower Sandusky, their faces peppered with small shot, does he have an inkling that beyond the guardhouse walls, all along the border, men are still fighting and dying
.

Summer gives way to fall. On September 10, Atherton and his fellow prisoners can hear the rumble of heavy guns reverberating across Lake Erie. Clearly, a naval battle is raging, but his captors refuse details. At last a private soldier whispers the truth: Oliver Hazard Perry has met the enemy and they are his. The British fleet is obliterated. Erie is an American lake
.

The victory touches off a major retreat. The British pack up hastily in the face of Harrison’s advancing army. Atherton can hardly wait for the Kentucky forces to arrive and free him, but that is not to be. The prisoners are hurried across to the Canadian shore and herded up the Thames Valley to Burlington, then on to York, Kingston, Montreal
.

It seems as if the entire city has turned out to stare at them—verminous, shaggy, half-starved after a journey of nine hundred miles. As Atherton trudges down the cobbled streets he notices the doors and windows crammed with curious women. In the jail they are given a little “Yankee beef,” taunted with the fact that it has been purchased by the British from Americans trading with the enemy
.

Two weeks later they are sent to Quebec City. Here, for the first time, Atherton learns that Harrison has captured Fort Amherstburg, rolled up the Thames, won the Battle of Moravian Town, and presided over the death of his enemy, Tecumseh
.

The Kentuckians’ reputation has preceded them. The Quebeckers think of them as a species of wildman—savage forest creatures, half-human, half-beast. They crowd to the jail, peering at the captives as they would at animals in a zoo, astonished, even disappointed, to find they do not live up to their billing. One man gazes at them for some minutes, then delivers the general verdict: “Why, they look just like other people.”

Beyond the prison, the war rages on. The two-pronged American attack designed to seize Montreal fizzles out at Châteauguay and Crysler’s Farm, but Atherton is only dimly aware of it. Fall turns to winter, with both sides once again deadlocked along the border. As the spring campaign opens, a more cheerful piece of news reaches Quebec: there is to be a general prisoner exchange. Eventually Atherton is released and sent back across the border, only a few weeks before the war’s bloodiest battle at Lundy’s Lane. In Pittsburgh he encounters a group of vaguely familiar men—British prisoners of war. Who are they? Where has he seen them before? He remembers: these are the soldiers who were once his guards when he was a captive in Detroit. It all seems a long time ago
.

Atherton reaches his home at Shelbyville, Kentucky, on June 20, 1814, almost two years to the day since war was first declared. The invasion goes on. The battles of Chippawa and Lundy’s Lane, the long siege of Fort
Erie, and the naval encounter on Lake Champlain all lie ahead. But Atherton is out of it. He has had enough, will not fight again
.

His story is not unique. Eighty or ninety Kentuckians have been captured by the Potawatomi braves, and of these a good number have been adopted into Indian families. Timothy Mallory has all his hair shaved off except for a scalp lock, his face painted half black, half red, his ears pierced for rings. John Davenport is painted, adorned with earrings, bracelets, and a silver band wound round his shaved skull. “We make an Indian out of you,” one of his captors promises, “and by’n by you have squaw, by’n by you have a gun and horse and go hunting.”

Both these men live as Indians for several months and like Atherton, who prefers his treatment by the Indians to that of the British (he finds them “brave, generous, hospitable, kind and … honest”), are surprised to discover that their Indian families are genuinely fond of them, that the women go out of their way to protect them when the braves indulge in drinking bouts, and that when at last they are ransomed, the Indians are clearly reluctant to part with them
.

No one knows exactly how many Kentucky volunteers are held captive by the natives, adopted into families that have lost sons in the battle. No one knows exactly how many have escaped or been ransomed. It is possible, even probable, that as the war rolls on there are some Kentuckians who have gone entirely native, taken Indian wives and removed themselves from white society
.

There is irony in this; but then it has been a war of irony and paradox—a war fought over a grievance that was removed before the fighting began; a war that all claimed to have won except the real victors, who, being Indians, were really losers; a war designed to seize by force a nation that could have been attached by stealth. Are there in the forests of Michigan among the Potawatomi—those veterans of Tippecanoe—certain warriors of lighter skin and alien background? If so, that is the final irony. Ever since Jefferson’s day it has been official American policy to try to turn the Indians into white men. Who can blame the Indians if, in their last, desperate, doomed resistance, they should manage in some measure to turn the tables?

Sources and Acknowledgements

This work is based largely on primary sources—official documents and correspondence, military reports and records, public speeches, private letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, and contemporary newspaper accounts. I have as well made a reconnaissance of those battlefields whose sites have not been obliterated by the advance of civilization.

As every lawyer knows, witnesses to any event rarely agree; thus it has often been necessary to compare various conflicting reports to arrive at an approximation of the truth. Confused recollections of even minor skirmishes are not easy to untangle. Each participant sees the engagement from his own point of view. Opposing generals invariably underestimate their own strength and overestimate that of the enemy, seeking in a variety of ways to shape their reports to make themselves seem brilliant. The memories of junior officers and common soldiers are distorted by the heat of the moment and often clouded by the passage of time. Fortunately, in almost every case there is such a richness of material available on the events of 1812–13 (much of the human detail ignored by historians) that it is possible to arrive at a reasonably clear and accurate account of what occurred, not only tactically and politically but also in the hearts and minds of the participants.

For each incident I have had to ask myself these questions: was the narrator—diarist, officer, soldier, correspondent, memoirist—present at the event described? How soon after the event did he set down his account of what happened? How competent was he as a witness? Can some of his statements be cross-checked against those of others to assess his credibility? A memoir written thirty years after the events, obviously, cannot be considered as reliable as one scribbled down on the spot.

Students of the war may be surprised that I have set aside John Richardson’s famous account of the death of the young American captive after the battle of Brownstown (
this page
) in favour of a less well known description by Thomas Vercheres de Boucherville. Richardson, after all, belongs to the pantheon of early Canadian novelists; de Boucherville was only a fur trader and storekeeper. The two versions were both set down many years after the event and differ considerably in detail, Richardson’s being the more dramatic. But a close reading of his account reveals that the future novelist, who was only fifteen at the time, was not actually present at the scene he describes while de Boucherville was. De Boucherville was also twelve years older and experienced in Indian customs. There can be no doubt that his version is the more reliable.

For the leading British, American, and Canadian figures in the war, a wealth of easily authenticated biographical and background material is available. But for the Indians, with two exceptions, there is very little. This was really their war; for them the stakes were higher, the victories more significant, the defeats more devastating. One would have liked to know more about Roundhead, Walk-in-the-Water, Black Bird, Little Turtle, and all the other shadowy tribesmen who appear briefly and often violently on the stage. History, alas, ignores them. They have come down to us as faceless “savages,” brandishing their tomahawks, shouting their war cries, scalping their victims, melting into the forests.

Only Tecumseh and to some degree his brother, the Prophet, stand out as individuals—flesh-and-blood figures with human strengths, human weaknesses, and human emotions. Here, nevertheless, one must tread cautiously, for so much of their story—especially that of their early years—is overlaid with legend. It was Charles Goltz who recently revealed in his superb doctoral dissertation on the Shawnee brothers that one widely accepted tale of Tecumseh’s early years was pure myth.

Most of his biographers have tried to explain Tecumseh’s hatred of the white man with an anecdote about his father’s death. As the story goes, the father was killed by a group of white hunters when he refused to act as their guide and died in the arms of his son, denouncing the faithlessness of white men. There is much detail: the mother at the graveside urging the young Shawnee to seek eternal revenge; Tecumseh’s yearly visits to the scene to renew his pledge; and so on. But, as Goltz discovered, this web of convincing evidence was the invention of an Indiana woman who, in 1823, entered it in a fiction contest sponsored by the
New York Mirror
. The following year a Canadian magazine reprinted the tale, and it became accepted as history.

In compiling and sifting all this mountain of material I have again depended upon the extraordinary energy and wise counsel of the indefatigable Barbara Sears, for whom the term “research assistant” is scarcely adequate. I cannot praise her labours too highly. She and I wish to thank a number of people and institutions who helped make this work possible.

First, the Metropolitan Library of Toronto, with special thanks to Edith Firth and her staff at the Canadian History Department, to Michael Pearson and the staff of the History Department, and to Norma Dainard, Keith Alcock, and the staff of the newspaper section. Thanks also to Robert Fraser of the editorial staff of the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography
.

Second, the Public Archives of Canada, with special thanks to the staff of the manuscript division, to Patricia Kennedy of the Pre-Confederation Archives, to Peter Bower, Gordon Dodds, Bruce Wilson, and Brian Driscoll of British Archives, and to Glenn T. Wright and Grace Campbell of the Public Records Division; the Ontario Archives; the Library of Congress Manuscript Division; the Filson Club of Kentucky; and Peter Burroughs of Dalhousie University.

Third, the U.S. National Archives, Washington; the Buffalo Historical Society (Art Detmers); the Chatham Kent Museum (Mary Creasey); the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Indiana State Library; the Kentucky Historical Society; the Wisconsin Historical Society; the Lundy’s Lane Historical Society; the Niagara Historical Society; the Niagara Parks Commission’s Fort Erie staff; Parks Canada’s staff at Fort George and Fort Malden; Robert S. Allen and Elizabeth Vincent at Parks Canada, Ottawa; the Public Record Office, London, England; the Tennessee State Museum; Esther Summers; Bob Green; Paul Romney; and Professor H.N. Muller.

I am especially grateful for the useful comments and suggestions made by Janice Tyrwhitt, Charles Templeton, Roger Hall, Elsa Franklin, Janet Berton, and Leslie Hannon, who read the manuscript at various stages. The several versions were typed by Ennis Armstrong, Catherine Black, and Lynne McCartney. I was rescued from certain grammatical imbecilities by my wife, Janet, and from various textual inconsistencies by my editor Janet Craig, for whose unsparing eye and great common sense I am specially grateful. The errors that remain are mine.