Boyd[C] was one of the most picturesque figures which our country has ever produced. Born in Newburyport in 1764, the last British soldier had left our shores before he was old enough to realize the ambition of his life by obtaining a commission in the American army. But his was not the disposition which could content itself with the tedium of garrison life in time of peace; so, before he had passed his four-and-twentieth birthday he had handed in his papers and taken passage for India. The closing years of the eighteenth century saw fighting going on from one end of Hindustan to the other. The British were fighting the French, and the Hindus were fighting the Mohammedans, so that men with military training found there a profitable market for their services and their swords.
After serving for a time as cavalry instructor in the armies of the Peishwa, as the ruler of the Mahratta tribes was called, Boyd obtained a commission as colonel in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad, distinguished himself in a series of whirlwind raids which he led into the territory of the Sultan of Mysore during the campaign which ended with the death of that tyrant in a last desperate stand at the gates of his capital of Seringapatam, and was rewarded by the Nizam giving him the command of a brigade of ten thousand turbaned troopers. Having by this time accumulated a modest fortune as a result of the lavish pay he had received from his princely employers, he resigned from the Nizam’s service and organized an army of his own. The horses, elephants, and guns were his personal property, and he rented his army to those native princes who stood in need of its services and were able to pay for them, very much as a garage rents an automobile.
Foreseeing the eventual conquest of India by the British and realizing that it would mean the end of independent soldiering in that country, he sold his army, elephants and all, to an Italian soldier of fortune and turned his face toward his native land once more. At that time soldiering was neither a very popular nor a very profitable profession in the United States, so that Boyd, whose reputation as a daring leader and a rigid disciplinarian had preceded him, had no difficulty in again obtaining a commission under his own flag and in the service of his own country, being offered by the government and promptly accepting the colonelcy of the 4th Regiment of foot. An October evening in 1811, then, saw him riding into Vincennes at the head of his travel-weary regulars, in response to Governor Harrison’s request for reinforcements.
The news brought in by the scouts that war-dances were going on in the Indian villages and that the threatened storm was about to break served to hasten Harrison’s preparations. The small, but exceedingly businesslike, expedition which marched out of Vincennes on the 1st day of November under the leadership of Governor Harrison, with Colonel Boyd in direct command of the troops, consisted of the nine companies of regulars which Boyd had brought from Pittsburg, six companies of infantry of the Indiana militia, two companies of Indiana dragoons, two companies of Kentucky mounted rifles, a company of Indiana mounted rifles, and a company of scouts—about eleven hundred men in all. Their uniforms would have looked strange and outlandish indeed to one accustomed to the serviceable, dust-colored garb of the present-day soldier, for the infantry wore high felt hats of the “stovepipe” pattern, adorned with red-white-and-blue cockades, tight-waisted, long-tailed coats of blue cloth with brass buttons, and pantaloons as nearly skin-tight as the tailor could make them. The dragoons were gorgeous in white buckskin breeches, high, varnished boots, “shell” jackets which reached barely to the hips, and brass helmets with streaming plumes of horsehair. Because the mounted riflemen who were under the command of Captain Spencer wore gray uniforms lavishly trimmed with yellow, they bore the nickname among the troops of “Spencer’s Yellow-Jackets.” The only men of the force, indeed, who were suitably clad for Indian warfare were the scouts, who wore the hunting-shirts, leggings, and moccasins of soft-tanned buckskin, which were the orthodox dress of the frontier.
Commanded by men of such wide experience in savage warfare as Harrison and Boyd, it is needless to say that every precaution was taken against surprise, the column moving in a formation which prepared it for instant battle. The cavalry formed advance and rear guards, and small detachments rode on either flank; the infantry marched in two columns, one on either side of the trail, with the baggage wagons, pack-animals, and beeves between them, while the scouts, thrown far out into the forest, formed a moving cordon of skirmishers. After crossing the Vermilion River the troops found themselves upon an immense prairie, which stretched away, level as a floor, as far as the eye could see—as far as the Illinois at Chicago, the guides asserted. It filled the soldiers, who came from a rugged and heavily forested country, with the greatest astonishment, for few of them had ever seen so vast an expanse of level ground before. Shortly afterward, however, they left the prairie and marched through open woods, over ground gashed and furrowed by deep ravines. Here the greatest precautions had to be observed, for clouds of Indian scouts hung upon the flanks of the column, and the broken nature of the country fitted it admirably for ambushes.
Late in the afternoon of November 6, 1811, in a cold and drizzling rain, Harrison gave orders to bivouac for the night on a piece of high but swamp-surrounded ground on the banks of the Tippecanoe River, near its junction with the Wabash, and barely five miles from the Prophet’s Town. It was a triangular-shaped knoll, dotted with oaks, one side of which dropped down in a sharp declivity to a little stream edged with willows and heavy underbrush, while the other two sides sloped down more gradually to a marshy prairie. The camp was arranged in the form of an irregular parallelogram, with the regulars—who were the only seasoned troops in the expedition—forming the front and rear, the flanks being composed of mounted riflemen supported by militia, while two troops of dragoons were held in reserve. In the centre of this armed enclosure were parked the pack-animals and the baggage-train. Though late in the night the moon rose from behind a bank of clouds; the night was very dark, with occasional flurries of rain. The troops lay on the rain-soaked ground with rifles loaded and bayonets fixed, but they slept but little, I fancy, for they had brought no tents, few of them were provided with blankets, and top-hats and tail-coats are not exactly adapted to camping in the forest in November.
From his experience in previous campaigns, Harrison had learned that, while in the vicinity of any considerable body of Indians, it was the part of precaution to arouse his men quietly an hour or so before daybreak, for it was a characteristic of the Indians to deliver their attacks shortly before the dawn, which is the hour when tired men sleep the soundest. Meanwhile, in the Indian camp preparations were being stealthily made for the surprise and extermination of the white invaders. Tecumseh was not present, being absent on one of his proselyting tours among the southern tribes, but the prophet brought out the sacred torch and the magic beans, which his followers had only to touch, so he assured them, to become invulnerable to the enemy’s bullets. This ceremony was followed by a series of incantations, war songs and dances, until the Indians, now wrought up to a frenzy, were ready for any deed of madness. Slipping like horrid phantoms through the waist-high prairie grass in the blackness of the night, they crept nearer and nearer to the sleeping camp, intending to surround the position, stab the sentries, rush the camp, and slaughter every man in it whom they could not take alive for the torture stake.
In pursuance of his custom of early rising, Harrison was just pulling on his boots before the embers of a dying camp-fire, at four o’clock in the morning, preparatory to rousing his men, when the silence of the forest was suddenly broken by the crack of a sentry’s rifle. The echoes had not time to die away before, from three sides of the camp, rose the shrill, hair-raising war-whoop of the Indians. As familiar with the lay of the land as a housewife is with the arrangements of her kitchen, they had effected their plan of surrounding the camp, confident of taking the suddenly awakened soldiers so completely by surprise that they would be unable to offer an effectual resistance. Not a warrior of them but did not look forward to returning to the Prophet’s Town with a string of dripping scalp-locks at his waist.
The Indians, quite unlike their usual custom of keeping to cover, fought as white men fight, for, made reckless by the prophet’s assurances that his spells had made them invulnerable and that bullets could not harm them, they advanced at a run across the open. At sight of the oncoming wave of bedaubed and befeathered figures the raw levies from Indiana and Kentucky visibly wavered and threatened to give way, but Boyd’s regulars, though taken by surprise, showed the result of their training by standing like a stone wall against the onset of the whooping redskins. The engagement quickly became general. The chorus of cheers and yells and groans and war-whoops was punctuated by the continuous crackle of the frontiersmen’s rifles and the crashing volleys of the infantry. Harrison, a conspicuous figure on a white horse and wearing a white blanket coat, rode up and down the lines, encouraging here, cautioning there, as cool and as quiet-voiced as though back on the parade-ground at Vincennes.
The pressure was greatest at the angle of the camp where the first attack was made, the troops stationed at this point having the greatest difficulty in holding their position. Seeing this, Major Joseph H. Daviess, a brilliant but hot-headed young Kentuckian who had achieved fame by his relentless attacks on Aaron Burr, twice asked permission to charge with his dragoons, and twice the governor sent back the answer: “Tell Major Daviess to be patient; he shall have his chance before the battle is over.” When Daviess for a third time urged his importunate request, Harrison answered the messenger sharply: “Tell Major Daviess he has twice heard my opinion; he may now use his own discretion.” Discretion, however, was evidently not included in the Kentuckian’s make-up, for no sooner had he received Harrison’s message than, with barely a score of dismounted troopers, he charged the Indian line. So foolhardy a performance could only be expected to end in disaster. Daviess fell, mortally wounded, and his men, such of them as were not dead, turned and fled for their lives.