[530] In the memorial cited above (note 527) of the inhabitants of Michigan Territory to the President and Congress, December 8 and 10, 1811, the number of warriors that might be brought against Detroit was estimated at five thousand.
[531] Michigan Pioneer Collections, XV, 61-63, 70-72; Drennan Papers, Hull to Eustis, March 6, 1812. The Americans estimated the number of traders who would assist the British at four thousand.
That this force was not such as could safely be despised both the words and actions of the frontiersmen gave testimony. In more recent years on the western plains the forces of the regular army of the United States have time and again manifested their superiority over the Indians in open battle; and only rarely, when the advantage of numbers or position was greatly in their favor, have the red men won a victory over them. But in the old Northwest, where advantage could be taken of the heavy timber which covered so much of the country, the Indian warriors fighting on their own ground were superior, man for man, to any regular force that could be sent against them. In fifty years of warfare with the whites the northwestern Indians had never been defeated in open battle where the strength on both sides was nearly equal,[532] while time and again the forces of the whites had succumbed to inferior numbers. The one decisive American victory over these tribes down to the War of 1812 was that of Fallen Timbers in 1794. But this victory was won by a largely superior force under the command of the ablest general, with the possible exception of Clark, that the Americans had ever sent into the Northwest, and after two years of arduous preparation for the contest.
[532] Adams, op. cit., VI, 100; Dawson, Harrison, 216, 250.
The battle of Tippecanoe afforded the most recent illustration of the prowess of the native warriors. Harrison was probably better fitted to command in a campaign against the Indians than any other man in the Northwest, and in this campaign he had a force of one thousand soldiers[533] of as high quality, on the whole, as America could produce. In the actual battle his force outnumbered the Indians in the proportion of two to one.[534] Yet it was only with extreme difficulty and at the cost in killed and wounded of one-fourth of his army that the Indian attack was beaten off. Even this success was due in part to good fortune for the savages had purposely neglected far more favorable opportunities for attacking Harrison than the one they finally embraced. Furthermore, even Harrison's advocate grants that they fought with inferior arms and under circumstances which sacrificed the advantages which their style of fighting ordinarily afforded.[535] But for the absence of Tecumseh and the reluctance of the Indians to fight at all, it is not improbable that Harrison's army would have been overwhelmed.[536]
[533] The number of Harrison's troops cannot be stated with entire precision. For a discussion of this point see Adams, op. cit., W, 96, and note 534 below.
[534] Harrison himself stated his number in the battle as "very little above seven hundred men," aside from sixty dragoons whom he omitted from consideration because they were "unable to do us much service." They were present in the battle, however, and it is obvious that the mere fact of Harrison's failure to make effective use of them does not justify their omission from a statement of the strength of his army. The statement of Dawson, his biographer, therefore, that on the day before the battle he had "something more than eight hundred men," may be regarded as approximately correct. The number of the Prophet's followers can only be estimated. Harrison was "convinced that there were at least six hundred," but he admits that he had no data from which to form a correct statement. Henry Adams, allowing for "the law of exaggeration," concludes that there were not more than four hundred Indians in the battle. On the size of the two armies see American State Papers, Indian Affairs, I, 778; Dawson, Harrison, 216; Adams, op. cit., VI, 104-5.
[535] Dawson, Harrison, 211-12, 236-37.
[536] See in this connection the account of the campaign, and particularly of the plight of the army after the battle, in Dawson, Harrison, 233, 238-39; see also, Adams, op. cit., VI, chap. v.
An indecisive blow had thus been struck, after which Harrison's forces were disbanded or scattered, and the frontier again became as defenseless as before the Tippecanoe campaign. With the series of depredations and murders which marked the spring of 1812 the settlers became panic-stricken. Large numbers abandoned their farms and either took refuge in temporary stockade forts or fled to a safer retreat in the older settlements.[537] The peril from which they fled was graphically painted by the citizens of Detroit in their appeal to the government for protection, in December, 1811. "The horrors of savage belligerence, description cannot paint. No picture can resemble the reality. No effort can bring the imagination up to the standard of fact. Nor sex, nor age, have claims. The short remnant of life left to the hoary head, trembling with age and infirmities, is snatched away. The tenderest infant, yet imbibing nutrition from the mamilla of maternal love, and the agonized mother herself, alike await the stroke of the relentless tomahawk. No vestige is left of what fire can consume. Nothing which breathes the breath of life is spared. The animals reared by the care of civilized man are involved in his destruction. No human foresight can divine the quarter which shall be struck. It is in the dead of the night, in the darkness of the morn, in the howling of the storm, that the demoniac deed is done."[538]