The road to glory

by E. Alexander Powell

With the vision of a prophet, Tecumseh saw that if this immense territory was once opened to settlement by whites the game upon which the Indians had to depend for sustenance must soon be exterminated and that in a few years his people would have to move to strange and distant hunting-grounds. Taking this as his text, he preached a gospel of armed resistance to the white man’s encroachments at every tribal council-fire from the land of the Chippewas to the country of the Creeks. And he had good reasons for his warnings, for the Indians were being stripped of their lands in shameless fashion. In fact, the Indian agents were deliberately ordered to tempt the tribal chiefs into debt in order to oblige them to sell the tribal lands, which did not belong to them, but to their tribes. The callousness of the government’s Indian policy was frankly expressed by President Jefferson in a letter to Harrison in 1803:

“To promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to spare and we want for necessaries which we have to spare and they want we shall push our trading houses and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them in debt; because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.”

The tone of cynicism, inhumanity, and greed which characterizes that letter makes it sound more like the utterance of a usurious money-lender than an official communication to a Territorial governor from the President of the United States. It is hard to believe that it was penned by the same hand which wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson’s Indian policy was continued by his successor, for in 1809 Governor Harrison, acting under instructions from President Madison, concluded a treaty with the chiefs of the Delaware, Pottawatomie, Miami, Eel River, Wea, and Kickapoo tribes, whereby, in consideration of eight thousand two hundred dollars paid down and annuities amounting to two thousand three hundred and fifty more, he obtained the cession of three million acres of land. Think of it, my friends! Perhaps the most fertile land in all the world sold at the rate of three acres for a cent! It was like stealing candy from a child. Do you wonder that Tecumseh declared the treaty void, denounced as traitors to their race the chiefs who made it, and asserted that it was not in the power of individual tribes to deed away the common domain? This was the basis of Tecumseh’s scheme for a general federation of all the Indians, which, had it not been smashed in its early stages, would have drenched our frontiers with blood and would have set back the civilization of the West a quarter of a century.

Throughout his campaign of proselytism Tecumseh was ably seconded by one of his triplet brothers, Elkswatana, known among the Indians as “the prophet.” The latter, profiting by the credulity and superstition of the red men, obtained a great reputation as a medicine-man and seer by means of his charms, incantations, and pretended visions of the Great Spirit, thus making himself a most valuable ally of Tecumseh in the great conspiracy which the latter was secretly hatching. Meanwhile the relations between the Americans and their neighbors across the Canadian border had become strained almost to the breaking point, the situation being aggravated by the fact that the British were secretly encouraging Tecumseh in spreading his propaganda of resistance to the United States and were covertly supplying the Indians with arms and ammunition for the purpose. The winter of 1809-10, therefore, was marked by Indian outrages along the whole length of the frontier. And there were other agencies, more remote but none the less effective, at work creating discontent among the Indians. It seems a far cry from the prairies to the Tuileries, from an Indian warrior to a French Emperor, but when Napoleon’s decree of what was virtually a universal blockade imposed terrible hardships on American shipping as well as on the British commerce at which it was aimed, even the savage of the wilderness was affected. It clogged and almost closed the chief markets for his furs, and prices dropped so low that Indian hunters were hardly able to purchase the powder and shot with which to kill their game. At the beginning of 1810, therefore, the Indians were ripe for any enterprise that promised them relief and independence.

In the spring of 1808 Tecumseh, the prophet, and their followers had established themselves on the banks of the Wabash, near the mouth of the Tippecanoe River, about seven miles to the north of the present site of Lafayette, Indiana. Strategically, the situation was admirably chosen, for Vincennes, where Harrison had his headquarters, lay one hundred and fifty miles below and could be reached in four and twenty hours by canoe down the Wabash; Fort Dearborn was a hundred miles to the northwest; Fort Wayne the same distance to the northeast; and, barring a short portage, the Indians could paddle their canoes to Detroit in one direction or to any part of the Ohio or the Mississippi in the other. Thus they were within striking distance of the chief military posts on the frontier and within easy reach of their British friends at Malden. On this spot the Indians, in obedience to a command which the prophet professed to have received in a dream from the Great Spirit, built a sort of model village, where they assiduously tilled the soil and shunned the fire-water of the whites. For a year or more after the establishment of Prophet’s Town, as the place was called, things went quietly enough, but when it became known that Harrison had obtained the cession of the three million acres in the valley of the Wabash already referred to, the smouldering resentment of Tecumseh and his followers was fanned into flame, the Indians refusing to receive the “annuity salt” sent them in accordance with the terms of the treaty and threatened to kill the boatmen who brought it, whom they called “American dogs.”

Early in the following summer Harrison sent word to Tecumseh that he would like to see him, and on August 12, 1810, the Indian chief with four hundred armed warriors arrived at the governor’s headquarters at Vincennes. The meeting between the white man who stood for civilization and the red man who stood for savagery took place in a field outside the stockaded town. The youthful governor, short of stature, lean of body, and stern of face, sat in a chair under a spreading tree, surrounded by a group of his officials: army officers, Territorial judges, scouts, interpreters, and agents. Opposite him, ranged in a semicircle on the ground, were Tecumseh, his brother, the prophet, and a score or more of chiefs, while back of them, row after row of blanketed forms and grim, bepainted faces, sat his four hundred fighting men. Tecumseh had been warned that his braves must come to the conference unarmed, and to all appearances they were weaponless, but no one knew better than Harrison that concealed beneath the folds of each warrior’s blanket was a tomahawk and a scalping-knife. Nor, aware as he was of the danger of Indian treachery, had he neglected to take precautions, for the garrison of the town was under arms, the muzzles of field-guns peered through apertures in the log stockade, and a few paces away from the council, ready to open fire at the first sign of danger, were a score of soldiers with loaded rifles.

In reply to Harrison’s formal greeting, Tecumseh rose to his feet, presenting a most striking and impressive figure as he stood, drawn to his full height, with folded arms and granite features, the sunlight playing on his copper-colored skin, on his belt and moccasins of beaded buckskin, and on the single eagle’s feather which slanted in his hair. The address of the famous warrior statesman consisted of a recital of the wrongs which the Indian had suffered at the hands of the white man. It was a story of chicanery and spoliation and oppression which Tecumseh told, and those who listened to it, white men and red alike, knew that it was very largely true. He told how the Indians, the real owners of the land, had been steadily driven westward and ever westward, first beyond the Alleghanies, and then beyond the Ohio, and now beyond the Missouri. He told how the white men had attempted to create dissension among the Indians to prevent their uniting, how they had bribed the stronger tribes and coerced the weaker, how again and again they had tried to goad the Indians into committing some overt act that they might use it as an excuse for seizing more of their land. He told how the whites, jeering at the sacredness of treaty obligations, systematically debauched the Indians by selling them whiskey; how they trespassed on the Indians’ lands and slaughtered the game on which the Indians depended for support; of how, when the Indians protested, they were often slaughtered, too; and of how the white men’s courts, instead of condemning the criminal, usually ended by congratulating him. He declared that things had come to a pass where the Indians must fight or perish, that the Indians were one people and that the lands belonging to them as a race could not be disposed of by individual tribes, that an Indian confederacy had been formed which both could and would fight every step of the white man’s further advance. As Tecumseh continued, his pronunciation became more guttural, his terms harsher, his gestures more excited, his argument changed into a warlike harangue. He played upon the Indian portion of his audience as a maestro plays upon a violin, until, their passions mastering their discretion, they sprang to their feet with a whoop, brandishing their tomahawks and knives. In the flutter of an eyelash everything was in confusion. The waiting soldiers dashed forward like sprinters, cocking their rifles as they ran. The officers jerked loose their swords, and the frontiersmen snatched up their long-barrelled weapons. But Harrison was quickest of all, for, drawing and cocking a pistol with a single motion, he thrust its muzzle squarely into Tecumseh’s face. “Call off your men,” he thundered, “or you’re a dead Indian!” Tecumseh, realizing that he had overplayed his part and appreciating that this was an occasion when discretion was of more avail than valor, motioned to his warriors, and they silently and sullenly withdrew.

But it was no part of Tecumseh’s plan or of the British who were behind him to bring on a war at this time, when their preparations were as yet incomplete; so the following morning Tecumseh, who had little to learn about the game of diplomacy, called on Harrison, expressed with apparent sincerity his regret for the violence into which his young men had been led by his words, and asked to have the council resumed. Harrison well knew the great ability and influence of Tecumseh and was anxious to conciliate him, for, truth to tell, the Americans were no more prepared for war at this time than were the Indians. When asked whether he intended to persist in his opposition to the cessions of territory in the valley of the Wabash, Tecumseh firmly asserted his intention to adhere to the old boundary, though he made it clear that, if the governor would prevail upon the President to give up the lands in question and would agree never to make another treaty without the consent of all the tribes, he would pledge himself to be a faithful ally of the United States. Otherwise he would be obliged to enter into an alliance with the English. Harrison told him that the American Government would never agree to his suggestions. “Well,” rejoined Tecumseh, as though he had expected the answer he received, “as the Great Chief is to decide the matter, I hope the Great Spirit will put sense enough into his head to induce him to direct you to give up the land. True, he is so far off that he will not be injured by the war. It is you and I who will have to fight it out while he sits in his town and drinks his wine.”

It only needed this open declaration of his hostile intentions by Tecumseh to convince Harrison that the time had come to strike, and strike hard. If the peril of the great Indian league of which Tecumseh had boasted was to be averted, it must be done before that confederation became too strongly organized to shatter. There was no time to be lost. Harrison promptly issued a call for volunteers to take part in a campaign against the Indians, at the same time despatching a messenger to Washington requesting the loan of a regiment of regulars to stiffen the raw levies who would compose the major part of the expedition. News of Harrison’s call for men spread over the frontier States as though disseminated by wireless, and soon the volunteers came pouring in: frontiersmen from Kentucky and Tennessee in fur caps and hunting-shirts of buckskin; woodsmen from the forests of Michigan and Wisconsin, long-barrelled rifles on their shoulders and powder-horns slung from their necks; militiamen from Indiana and Illinois, and grizzled Indian-fighters from the towns along the river and the backwoods settlements, who volunteered as much from love of fighting as from hatred of the Indians. Then, one day, almost before Harrison realized that they had started, a column of dusty, footsore soldiery came tramping into Vincennes with the unmistakable swing of veterans. It was the 4th Regiment of United States Infantry, commanded by Colonel John Parker Boyd, who, upon receiving orders from Washington to hurry to Harrison’s assistance, had put his men on flatboats at Pittsburg, where the regiment was stationed, floated them down to the falls of the Ohio, and marched them overland to Harrison’s headquarters at Vincennes, accomplishing the four-hundred-mile journey in a time which made that veteran frontiersman open his eyes with astonishment when he heard it.