The Invasion of Canada (30 page)

F
ORT DEARBORN, ILLINOIS TERRITORY, August 15, 1812. Billy Wells has blackened his face in the fashion of a Miami warrior. It is a sign that he expects to be killed before sundown.

He has come to escort the garrison and the people of Chicago from the protection of the fort to the dubious security of Fort Wayne on the Maumee. It is not his doing; the move has been explicitly ordered by General Hull, who is himself only a day away from defeat and disgrace. Billy Wells has greater reason than Hull for pessimism; his blackened face betrays it.

Billy Wells is that curious frontier creature, a white man who thinks like an Indian – citizen of a shadow world, half civilized, half savage, claimed by two races, not wholly accepted by either. His story is not unusual. Captured by the Miami as a child, raised as a young warrior, he grew to manhood as an Indian, took the name of Black Snake, married the sister of the great war chief Little Turtle, became a leader of his adoptive people. As the years drifted by, the memories of his childhood – he is a descendant of a prominent Kentucky family – began to blur. Did he dream them? Was he really white? In the successful attacks on the Maumee against Harmar in 1790 and St. Clair in 1791 he fought with tomahawk and war club by the side of his brother-in-law. In that last battle – the greatest defeat inflicted on any American force by Indians in pre-Custer days – he butchered several white soldiers. But when the grisly work was done, old memories returned, and Billy Wells was haunted by a nagging guilt. Was it possible that he had actually killed some of his own kinsmen? Guilt
became obsession. The call of blood defeated the bonds of friendship. Wells could no longer remain an Indian: he must leave his wife, his children, his old crony Little Turtle and return to his own people. There was a legendary leave-taking: “We have long been friends [to Little Turtle]; we are friends yet, until the sun stands so high [pointing to the sky] in the heavens; from that time we are enemies and may kill one another.”

Billy Wells joined General Anthony Wayne, advancing down the Maumee, became chief of Wayne’s scouts, fought on the white side in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The battle over, his wife and family rejoined him. Billy Wells was appointed government agent and interpreter at Fort Wayne; Little Turtle, rendered docile by defeat, continued as his friend and confidant.

Yet no one can be quite sure of Billy Wells, who, like Matthew Elliott, prospers from his government and Indian connections. William Henry Harrison does not trust him, believes him to be secretly conniving with his former people. Tecumseh despises him and Little Turtle as turncoats. Billy Wells is history’s captive, and today he will become history’s victim.

As the heavy stockade gate swings open, he leads a forlorn group down the road that will become Michigan Avenue in the Chicago of the future. He has brought along an escort of thirty Miami warriors to lead to safety the entire population of the fort and the adjacent village of Chicago – some hundred soldiers and civilians. Half of his Miami escort rides beside him. Directly behind is Captain Nathan Heald, commander of the fort (the same man who, the previous spring, intercepted Brock’s couriers to Robert Dickson), with his wife Rebekah, who is Billy Wells’s niece, and his garrison of regular soldiers. A wagon train follows with the women and children of the settlement, the younger children riding in one of the covered carts. The Chicago militia and the remainder of Wells’s Miami bring up the rear.

Why are these people leaving the sturdy protection of an armed stockade and venturing into hostile Indian territory? Simply because General Hull, dismayed by the loss of Michilimackinac, has decided to evacuate the area. He has instructed Heald to destroy all arms and distribute the supplies, provisions, food, and blankets among the neighbouring Indians. The gesture, designed to placate the natives, has the opposite effect, especially as Heald decides to destroy all the garrison’s liquor as well as its arms. Since whiskey and guns are what the Indians desire most, the deliberate destruction of these prizes has put them in an ugly mood. Moreover, one of Tecumseh’s runners has
arrived with news of Hull’s crumbling position at Detroit. The momentum of British success and American failure has got their blood up. Just ahead, concealed behind a ridge of sand dunes, lurks a war party of six hundred Potawatomi, the tribe so prominent at the Battle of Tippecanoe.

Billy Wells’s trained eye spots the ambush. He gallops back to warn Heald, swings his hat in a circle to indicate that the force is surrounded, then leads a bayonet charge up the bank.

It is a tragic error of judgement, bold but foolhardy, for it leaves the wagon train unprotected. Heald’s two junior officers, together with twelve newly recruited militiamen and a handful of regulars, fight furiously with bayonet and musket butt but are quickly subdued by the superior force of Indians. Only one white civilian, John Kinzie, the Chicago trader, survives, spared, perhaps, by the same Indians with whom he is accustomed to do business. At the wagon train, the soldiers’ wives, armed with their husbands’ swords, fight as fiercely as the men. Two are hacked to pieces: a Mrs. Corbin, wife of a private, who has vowed never to be taken prisoner, and Mrs. Heald’s black slave, Cicely, who is cut down with her infant son.

Within the wagons, where the younger children are huddled, there is greater horror. One young Indian slips in and slaughters twelve single-handed, slicing their heads from their bodies in a fury of blood lust.

Billy Wells, a musket ball in his breast, his horse wounded and faltering, hears the clamour at the wagons and attempts to turn back in a last effort to save the women and children. As he does so, the horse stumbles, and he is hurled to the ground, one leg caught under the animal’s body. The Indians are bearing down, and Billy Wells knows that his hour has come. He continues to fire, killing at least one man. As he does so, he calls out to his niece Rebekah, bidding her goodbye. An Indian takes deliberate aim. Billy Wells looks him square in the eye, signals him to shoot.

A short distance away, Heald’s sergeant, Hayes, is engaged in a death struggle with a Potawatomi warrior. Their muskets have been discharged; there is no time to reload. The Indian rushes at Hayes, brandishing his tomahawk. As the blow falls, the sergeant drives his bayonet up to the socket into his enemy’s breast. They die together.

Walter Jordan, one of Wells’s men, has a miraculous escape. One ball takes the feather off his cap, another the epaulette from his shoulder, a third the handle from his sword. He surrenders to the Indians and is recognized by a chief:

“Jordan, I know you. You gave me tobacco at Fort Wayne. We won’t kill you, but come and see what we will do to your captain.” He leads him to where Wells’s body lies, cuts off the head, and places it on a long pole. Another cuts out the heart and divides it among the chiefs, who eat it raw, hoping thereby to absorb some of Wells’s courage.

Heald, wounded in arm and thigh, abandoned by Wells’s escort of Miami, half his force of regulars dead, all his officers casualties, decides to surrender. He approaches the Potawatomi chief, Black Bird, promises a ransom of one hundred dollars for everyone left alive if the Indians will agree not to kill the prisoners. Black Bird accepts; the soldiers lay down their arms and are marched back past the naked and headless bodies of the women and children. Heald, thinking he recognizes the torso of his wife, briefly repents the surrender, then is overjoyed to find that she is alive at the fort, weeping among a group of Indian women, saved apparently by the intervention of a friendly chief, Black Partridge.

Black Bird does not keep his promise. One of the wounded soldiers, Sergeant Thomas Burns of the militia, is killed almost immediately by the squaws. His is a more fortunate fate than that of five of his comrades who are tortured to death that night, their cries breaking the silence over the great lake and sending shivers through the survivors.

More than half the band that left the fort in the morning are dead by the following day. The remainder, twenty-nine soldiers, seven women, and six children, are captives of the Indians, destined to be distributed among the various villages in the area. Thus begins their long travail.

The Healds’ captivity is short-lived. After a few days, with Michigan now in British hands, most of the Indians take off to attack Fort Wayne, and Heald is able to buy his way to St. Joseph’s Island in British territory, where Captain Roberts sends them home under parole. At Detroit, Mrs. Heald’s “inimitable grace and fulness of contour” together with her “magnificence of person and brilliancy of character” make a lasting impression on the fifteen-year-old John Richardson, who, at the end of his life, gives her a certain immortality by making her the heroine of his novel
Wau-nan-gee
.

Others are less fortunate. That winter one captive freezes to death on the trail; two more, who cannot keep up, are tomahawked; nine exist as slaves for almost a year before they are ransomed through the efforts of the red-headed trader, Robert Dickson.

The family of John Needs, one of Heald’s regular soldiers, manages to survive the massacre only to die in captivity. The Needs’s only child, crying with hunger, so annoys the Indians that they tie it to a tree to perish from starvation. Needs also dies of cold and hunger. His wife expires the following January.

The family of the murdered Sergeant Burns is shattered. One grown son is killed in the fighting; two small children are victims of the wagon massacre. A nine-year-old daughter, though scalped, succeeds in freeing herself. She, her mother, and an infant in arms survive for two years among the Indians before being ransomed by a white trader. For the rest of her life the scalped girl is marked by a small bald spot on the top of her head.

In the fate of the Lee family are all the ingredients of a nineteenth-century frontier novel. All its members except the mother and an infant daughter are killed in the fighting. The two survivors are taken by Black Partridge to his camp. Here the baby falls ill and Black Partridge falls in love – with Mrs. Lee. In order to win her hand he determines to save the infant’s life. He takes her back to Chicago where a newly arrived French trader named Du Pin prescribes for her and cures her. Learning of Black Partridge’s romantic intentions, Du Pin ransoms Mrs. Lee, then marries her himself.

These stories pale before the long odyssey of Mrs. John Simmons, whose husband also perishes during the defence of the wagons. Believing that the Indians delight in tormenting prisoners who show any emotion, this remarkable woman resolves to preserve the life of her six-month-old child by suppressing all outward manifestations of grief, even when she is led past a row of small, mutilated corpses which includes that of her two-year-old boy, David. Faced with this grisly spectacle, she neither blinks an eye nor sheds a tear, nor will she during the long months of her captivity.

Her Indian owners set out for Green Bay on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Mrs. Simmons, carrying her baby, trudges the entire distance, working as a servant in the evenings, gathering wood and building fires. When the village is at last reached, she is insulted, kicked, and abused. The following day she is forced to run the gauntlet between a double line of men and women wielding sticks and clubs. Wrapping the infant in a blanket and shielding it in her arms, she races down the long line, emerging bruised and bleeding but with her child unharmed.

She is given over to an Indian “mother,” who feeds her, bathes her
wounds, allows her to rest. She needs such sustenance, for a worse ordeal faces her – a long tribal peregrination back around the lake. Somehow Mrs. Simmons, lightly clad, suffering from cold, fatigue, and malnutrition, manages to carry her child for the entire six hundred miles and survive. She has walked with the Indians from Green Bay back to Chicago, then around the entire eastern shore of the lake to Michilimackinac. But a second, even more terrible trek faces her – a three-hundred-mile journey through the snow to Detroit, where the Indians intend to ransom her. Ragged and starving, she exists on roots and acorns found beneath the snows. Her child, now a year old, has grown much heavier. Her own strength is waning. Only the prospect of release sustains her.

Mrs. Simmons’s Trek

Yet even after her successful ransom her ordeal is not over. The route to her home near Piqua, Ohio, is long and hard. By March of 1813 she reaches Fort Meigs on the Maumee. Here she manages to secure passage in a government wagon, part of a supply train that winds its way through swampy roads, depositing her, in mid-April, four miles from her father’s farm.

Mother and child walk the remaining distance to find that the family, which has long since given her up for dead, has taken refuge in a blockhouse against Indian marauders. Here, safe at last, she breaks down and for several months cannot contain her tears. In August, she has further reason to weep. Her sister and brother-in-law,
working in a nearby flax field, are surprised by Indians, shot, tomahawked, and scalped in front of their four horrified children. Such, in part, is the legacy of Tippecanoe and all that preceded it.