Captain Wells and Captain Heald and the entire garrison of Fort Dearborn had been massacred. The news had just reached the Miami village. It had not yet reached the fort or any white man connected with the garrison—not even Major Stickney or the priest at the Catholic church—and probably would not reach them until the morrow. But it was not to be doubted. The thirty-five Miamis who had gone with Captain Wells to help in the evacuation of Fort Dearborn were all back at their homes. But the white men had perished.
With bated breath the Bondies discussed the massacre. They all knew Captain Wells; the Bondies had known him for twenty years and Alagwa for a few weeks only, but they all loved him. Forty years before, when a boy, he had been captured by the Miami Indians, had been brought up with them, and had married a Miami woman, the daughter of a chief. Later he had become interpreter and agent for the United States and was supposed to be in high favor with the Indians of all tribes. None of his associations, however, had availed to save him. Where would the blow fall next? Peter Bondie strove to console himself with the fact that the Miamis, who lived close at hand, were his sworn friends, and that the killing had been done by the Pottawatomies, whose homes were a hundred miles to the west, though many of them were always to be seen at and near Fort Wayne. But the consolation was rapidly losing its force.
Peter and Fantine were debating whether Peter should at once seek Major Stickney, who was ill with ague, and tell him the news or should wait till the morrow, when the Miamis who had accompanied Captain Wells would be ready to make formal report. Alagwa sat silent, troubled over the news, but thinking more of Jack’s words of the afternoon than she did of the possible consequences of the massacre.
Abruptly a shadow darkened the door and through it, into the room, stepped Metea. Offering no explanation of his presence nor of his absence for the past two weeks he sat down at the table and began to devour the food which Peter’s Miami wife placed before him. When at last he had finished he stood up.
“Behold,” he said, “my moccasins are worn with much travel. I come quickly from Yondotia (Detroit). I bring great news. The American chief and all his men have surrendered. He was a coward. When the red man shook his tomahawk he fell down and cried out. Over Yondotia now flies the flag of the white father who lives across the great water.”
No one spoke. The news from Fort Dearborn had been stirring but this from Detroit was overwhelming, both in its immensity and in the consequences it portended. The Bondies, Alagwa, and even Metea himself had come, through many years’ experience, to look upon the Americans as foes who fought to the death and who, even when conquered, took bitter toll of those who slew them. That Captain Heald and his garrison had been massacred was terrifying but not altogether amazing, for he was outnumbered and isolated. But that an army larger than any that had ever before been mustered in the northwest should have surrendered tamely, without a blow, seemed incredible. If it were true—and none questioned it—it would mean the destruction of American prestige and the rallying of thousands of savages to the British standard.
Metea voiced the situation. “The white men are women. They have talked much and have pretended to be great chiefs and the red man has believed them. But now he knows. They are women. At Yondotia they begged the redcoats to save them from the wrath of the red men. It was the red men who conquered and they will conquer again.”
Metea spoke the truth, though it was left to a later day to recognize it. All the early disasters of the war to the American arms were due not to the prowess of the British nor of the Indians, but to the fear of massacre. Hull’s surrender was not to actual foes but to possible ones, not to the threat of civilized warfare but to that of torture and murder by foes that kept no faith with the vanquished and that spared neither men nor women nor babes at the breast. “Surrender! If I have to attack I will not be able to restrain the fury of the Indians,” was in substance the message that brought about Hicks’s capitulation at Mackinaw, Heald’s massacre at Fort Dearborn, and Hull’s shameful surrender at Detroit. Hull was old, his communications were broken, he was surrounded by savages in unknown numbers, and the threat of massacre terrified him. So he yielded.
It was cowardly, of course, and unnecessary, too. The later history of the war and the history of all later Indian wars proved conclusively that no force of savages, even when backed by white men, could capture a fortified place if bravely defended. Even the little fort on the Sandusky, whose evacuation was later ordered because to defend it seemed impossible, was successfully held by a tiny garrison commanded by a real man against all the combined forces of the British General Proctor and of Tecumseh. The British victories in the west early in the war were won not by fighting but by diplomacy—by “bluff,” to use the vernacular of a later day.
Metea had paused and glanced about the room, awaiting a reply. It did not come and he went on, his glance lingering on Alagwa.