Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (8 page)

On and off, he has been a member of the Indian Department since the days of the Revolution when he fought with the Shawnee
against the Americans. (It remains a secret to the day of his death that he once acted as an emissary for the Americans to try to keep the Shawnee neutral before hostilities began.) Even while out of favour he has acted unofficially for the department, for he is part of that clique, like a band of brothers who follow their own conventions—men who have spent long years with the tribes, who speak the languages fluently, who have lived with Indian women, fathered Indian children, attended Indian councils, fought when necessary on the Indian side. It is a family compact: son often follows father in the service, and the sons are sometimes of mixed blood.

It is toward the Shawnee, especially, that the officers of the Indian Department lean—“that contemptible tribe … always more insolent and troublesome than any other,” in the words of Elliott’s nemesis, Captain Hector McLean. It was McLean’s observation, in 1799, that “the whole of the Officers of the Department are indeed in some way connected with this tribe either by Marriage or Concubinage.” That is certainly true of Elliott, who has fathered two sons by a Shawnee woman and often taken Shawnee chieftains as guests under his roof.

Captain McLean was the cause of Elliott’s dismissal, under a cloud, in 1798. The scandal revolved around the traditional British practice of dispensing annual “presents” to the tribes—food, dry goods, tools, weapons. McLean, then in command at the fort, was convinced that Elliott was adding to his departmental pittance by diverting a generous portion of government largess to his own use. How else could he stock his extensive farm with cattle and feed and clothe some fifty servants and slaves? Trapping the slippery Elliott became a minor obsession with McLean. His chance came in the winter of 1797 when he was able to prove that the agent had requisitioned supplies for 534 Indians in a settlement whose total population was only 160. On this evidence Elliott was dismissed.

But now, in 1808, the government, set on a new and more aggressive course, finds it cannot do without him. Elliott’s successor, Thomas McKee, son of his old comrade Alexander McKee, is a hopeless drunkard who cannot be depended upon to preside over delicate negotiations. Even before his official reappointment, Elliott
has been working for the government without McKee’s knowledge, dispatched on a secret mission to sound out the major chiefs in private: to impress upon them “with Delicacy and caution” that England expects their aid in the event of war and to remind them that the Americans are out to steal their lands. And who better than Elliott to invite the Prophet to attend the Amherstburg council? He, of all the Indian agents, knows the family most intimately; his chief clerk is married to the Prophet’s sister. So here he is, back in charge again, his honour restored by Gore’s convenient fiction that the charges against him were never proved.

A strange creature, this Elliott, Gore must feel—rather ugly and more than a little haughty, swarthy, with small features and a pug nose—a black Donegal Irishman transplanted early into the American wilderness, a rough diamond who has experienced everything, shrunk from nothing. There are Americans who believe that he and Alexander McKee took more scalps after General Arthur St. Clair’s disastrous defeat by Little Turtle in 1791 than did the Indians. He cannot read or write; it is an effort for him to put his signature to a document; a clerk accompanies him everywhere to handle his extensive business. He has been a justice of the peace and is now a member of the legislature of Upper Canada, the richest farmer in the region. Though he is in his seventieth year, he will be quite prepared to lead his troops into battle in the war to come.

Elliott had expected the Prophet to travel to Amherstburg for the council, but the Prophet does not appear. In his stead comes his older brother, Tecumthe or Tecumseh, of whom the British have little if any knowledge. Of all the chieftains present at Amherstburg, only this tall catlike Shawnee is in favour of war with the Americans, as Gore, in his letter to his superior, Sir James Craig, the Governor General of the two Canadas, makes clear:

“The Prophet’s brother, who is stated to me to be his principal support and who appears to be a very shrewd intelligent man, was at Amherstburg while I was there. He told Colonel Claus and Captain Elliott that they were endeavouring to collect the different Nations to form one settlement on the Wabash about 300 miles
South West of Amherstburg in order to preserve their country from all encroachment. That their intention at present is not to take part in the quarrels of White People: that if the Americans encroach upon them they are resolved to strike—but he added that if their father the King should be in earnest and appear in sufficient force they would hold fast by him.”

Tecumseh makes it clear that he does not fully trust the British. The Indians have long memories. They have not forgotten how, when Mad Anthony Wayne defeated them at Fallen Timbers in 1794, the British closed the gates of nearby Fort Miami, and he now reminds Elliott of the number of chiefs who fell as a result. Tecumseh is ready to fight beside the British, but on his own terms. If they are preparing to use him for their own ends (as they are) he is also planning to use them for his.

FORT WAYNE ON THE MAUMEE RIVER
, September 22, 1809. William Henry Harrison has ridden deep into Indian territory to bargain for land. He is hungry for it. At Vincennes he has felt himself cramped, hemmed in, frustrated in his ambition. The country to the south of the capital is sunken and wet; the sere prairie to the northwest will not be fit for settlement for many years. But just beyond the Indiana border, twenty-one miles to the north along the eastern bank of the Wabash, lie three million acres of farm land, the hunting grounds of the tribes. Harrison means to have it all, has already secured the agreement of the President, James Madison, Jefferson’s successor, who makes one stipulation only: get it as cheaply as possible.

The Governor has travelled on horseback for 350 miles on one of those tireless peregrinations for which he is so well fitted, temperamentally as well as physically. He has summoned the chiefs of the affected tribes—the Miami, Delaware, Eel, Potawatomi—to a great council here at Fort Wayne. But he has not summoned the Shawnee, for they are nomads and, in Harrison’s view, have no claim to the land.

Harrison’s Purchase

The council fire is lit. Eleven hundred tribesmen, squatting in a vast circle, listen as Harrison speaks against the murmur of the Maumee. Four sworn interpreters translate his message: the European war has ruined the price of furs, therefore the tribes must adopt a new way of life. The government will buy their lands, pay for them with a permanent annuity. With that income they can purchase domestic animals and become farmers. The Indians, says Harrison, wrongly blame their own poverty and the scarcity of game on the encroachment of white settlers—but that is not the true cause of their misfortunes. The British are to blame! It is they who have urged the wanton destruction of game animals for furs alone.

The chiefs listen, retire, drink Harrison’s whiskey, wrangle among themselves. The Potawatomi, who are the poorest and most wretched of the tribes, want to sell; the Delaware waver. But the Miami are inflexible. The British have urged them to hold the lands until they are surveyed and can be sold at the going price of two dollars an acre. Harrison is offering a mere fraction of that sum. Why should they take less?

To counter this recalcitrance, Harrison summons all his histrionic abilities and at the next council fire on the twenty-fifth presents himself in the guise of a patient but much-injured father, betrayed by his own offspring:

“My Children: My Heart is oppressed. If I could have believed that I should have experienced half of the mortification and disappointment which I now feel, I would have entreated your Father the President to have chosen some other Representative to have made known his wishes to you. The proposition which I have made you, I fondly hoped would have been acceptable to all.… Is there some evil spirit amongst us?” This evil spirit, Harrison makes clear, is British.

The speech rolls on. Ironically, Harrison is urging tribal solidarity—Tecumseh’s crusade—though for very different reasons. War with Great Britain is never far from his mind. The solidarity he proposes must include, also, the white Americans. (“The people upon the other side of the big water would desire nothing better than to set us once more to cut each other’s throats.”)

He ends with a remarkable pledge:

“This is the first request your new Father has ever made you. It will be the last, he wants no more of your land. Agree to the proposition which I now make you and send on some of your wise men to take him by the hand. He will set your Heart at ease. He will tell you that he will never make another proposition to you to sell your lands.”

The palaver lasts for five more days, and in the end Harrison persuades the Miami to give up the idea that the land is worth two dollars an acre. “Their tenaciousness in adhering to this idea,” he comments, “is quite astonishing and it required no little pains to get them to abandon it.” And, he might have added, no little whiskey. A drunken frolic follows, in which one of the Miami braves is mortally wounded.

Harrison is jubilant. “The compensation given for this cession of lands … is as low as it could possibly be made,” he writes to Washington. “… I think … upon the whole that the bargain is a better one for the United States than any that has been made by me for lands south of the Wabash.” As soon as the treaty is ratified and a sales office opened “there will be several hundred families along this Tract.”

Well may Harrison savour his triumph. The annuities paid the Indians for relinquishing the land are minuscule: the Miami, who get the most, will receive a total of only seven hundred dollars a year. To pay all the annuities forever the government will not have to set aside more than fifty thousand dollars. At two dollars an acre—the price the settlers will pay—the land is potentially worth six million dollars. Thanks to Harrison the government has made an enormous paper profit. No wonder, when his third term of office ends, a grateful legislature recommends him for a fourth, praising his “integrity, patriotism and firm attachment to the general government.”

There remains one small cloud on the horizon: Harrison has ignored the Shawnee. By spring the cloud looms larger. The Prophet and his brother Tecumseh, furious with the old chieftains, refuse to concede that any land cession is valid unless approved by all the tribes. The Great Spirit, so the Prophet says, has directed him to collect all the Indians at the mouth of the Tippecanoe, where it joins the Wabash, whereupon one thousand tribesmen forsake their elders and flock to the new settlement, appropriately named Prophet’s Town. With the Indians in ferment, Harrison does not dare put surveyors on the newly purchased land. Settlement comes to a standstill. Families flee the frontier. More will leave “unless the rascally prophet is driven from his present position or a fort built somewhere on the Wabash about the upper boundary of the late purchase.”

It is not easy to cow the Prophet into submission. Some of the old chiefs have tried, but “this scoundrel does not appear however to be intimidated.” In fact, the old chiefs are in fear of their lives. Harrison, determined to threaten his adversary with a show of force, sends for a detachment of regular troops. There is much bustling about with the local militia in Vincennes—constant musterings, parades and reviews—which serves only to increase the panic of the white settlers. Finally, Harrison dispatches his interpreter, James Barron, with a letter intended to convince the Prophet of the folly of taking up arms against the United States:

“Our bluecoats are more numerous than you can count, and our hunting shirts are like leaves of the forests or the grains of sand on
the Wabash. Do not think that the red coats can protect you, they are not able to protect themselves, they do not think of going to war with us, if they did in a few moons you would see our flags wave on all the Forts of Canada.”