Burl

by Morrison Heady

And the great Indian sachem had become the ally of the little English king. And why? Because the little English king and his rich people had promised the great Indian sachem and his poor people to restore to them their hereditary lands if they would take up the hatchet and help their great father—the little English king—to wrest the lands in question from the Americans, the children who had behaved so unbecomingly to the great father thirty-seven years before. The hereditary lands in question were in fact but the disputed territory, the principal cause of the contests between the two white powers, hence not so much to be viewed as a lost inheritance to be restored to the rightful owners as a prize to be secured by the rival claimants. John Bull said, "It is mine, because I took it from the French;" Brother Jonathan said, "It is mine, because I took it from the English;" while neither party gave any heed to the poor Indian, who never ceased saying, "It is mine, because my fathers gave it to me, and the Great Spirit gave it to my fathers."

A hard, hard necessity must it have been which could have forced the poor, hunted wanderers of the wilderness to fly for refuge and protection from the talons and beak of the eagle to the claws and teeth of the lion. It was but a change, and made with but little hope of its being for the better. None saw this more clearly, felt it more deeply, than the sagacious Tecumseh; and his proud spirit groaned under the humiliating thought that after all he and his warriors were not viewed as allies having an equal interest in the result of the struggle going on, but rather as instruments merely, which might be made useful to the purpose in hand, then dropped. To use his own expression: "They were but a pack of starved hounds, hallooed upon the Americans by the English."

Along the Northern lakes and rivers full many a battle had been fought—on a small scale, it is true, but bloody and ugly enough, especially to the Americans, who up to this time had usually been the worsted party. But now the fortunes of war were beginning to turn in our favor. Perry had won his brilliant little naval victory over the English fleet on Lake Erie, and had written to the Secretary of the Navy with Cæsar-like conciseness: "We have met the enemy, and they are ours!" By land, too, the British had been met and beaten back at every point, till now they were without a foothold on the disputed territory—the hereditary lands.

But, true to himself, true to the now quite hopeless cause for which he had labored and fought so long, the magnanimous sachem still kept his faith with the great father unbroken and inviolable, while the great father was immensely less concerned that he had failed to restore the hereditary lands to his red allies than that he had failed to wrest the disputed territory from his white enemies. So the little English king went on sipping his dainty wines in his marble palace over yonder on the other side of the globe, and took no further thought of the great Indian sachem who was breaking his heart over here in the wilderness of America, as true to his ally as had he been a Christian, baptized by an apostolic successor into the Church of England.

But to make another start toward the end of our story. The English people, like the majority of mankind, are a good enough people in a general way, and in a general way, like those of most nations, their soldiers are brave enough. Good people, yet they have had their bad rulers—the great father, for example; and their brave soldiers have had their cowardly leaders—for example, General Proctor; concerning whom we must now say something—a very little; the least possible.

Having with unsoldierly dispatch cleared his red skirts of the disputed territory, grown at least too hot for comfort, this Proctor—a fat poltroon—was now in hurried retreat through the forest-wilds of Canada West, at the head, not the rear, of an army composed of about nine hundred British regulars and two thousand Indian allies under the leadership of Tecumseh. On, in swift pursuit, with a stretch of about a half day's march between, came General Harrison—a gaunt hero—at the head, not the rear, of an army consisting of two companies of United States regulars and about three thousand volunteers, nearly all of whom were tall, stalwart Kentuckians, under the leadership of General Shelby, the venerable Governor of Kentucky. No Indian allies. In the van of the pursuing army, at the head of his regiment of mounted riflemen, one thousand strong, the very flower of green Kentucky's chivalry, rode Colonel Richard M. Johnson, afterward made Vice-president of the United States by his grateful countrymen, because—rumpsey-dumpsey—Dick had killed Tecumseh.

And there in the van, at the head of his company of mounted riflemen, mounted on a splendid Kentucky bay, and rigged out in his dashing backwoods uniform, rode Captain Bushrod Reynolds, whom we left twenty-four years ago in the Paradise a sturdy urchin of nine, and still a candidate for breeches and boots. Yes, there he rode, a tall, athletic man, in the prime of his days, frank-faced, clear-eyed, bold-browed, and with a nose that had gradually ripened from the pug into the Roman, as he had ripened in years and experience, just as we predicted when drawing his portrait where he sat on the topmost rail of a scraggy worm-fence, watching the squirrels and crows. Nor was it true that he had become a married man and a man of family, and a captain too—all pretty much as the far-seeing Burl had prophesied at the same early period.

At present, however, having been married but a year, his family was small. For, since reaching the stature and years of manhood, Bushrod Reynolds had spent many years in the great North-west, where as an Indian-trader he had pushed his fortunes with great energy and success, yet with clean hands, never in all the time selling or bartering a single gallon of whisky to the Indians—a virtue quite rare, we fear, in Indian-traders, and one for which he was highly commended by Tecumseh himself, who never drank any thing but water. The address, prudence, and integrity he displayed in this vocation had attracted the notice of General Harrison, then Governor of the North-west Territory, through whose influence the young Kentuckian received the appointment of United States Indian Agent in that quarter. Here again he had acquitted himself in the same clean-handed manner, never touching a dollar of the money intrusted to him, saving so far as officially authorized.

And there, conspicuous among the camp-followers, with a fund of good humor and laughter rich enough to keep the whole rear of the army in spirits, even when cut down to short rations and pushed to long marches—there, gigantic as life and shaggy with bear-skin from top to toe, was our old friend Big Black Burl—Cap'n Rennuls, the Fighting Nigger, the Big Black Brave with a Bushy Head, Mish-mugwa—whom we left twenty-four years ago in the Paradise, treading with unmoccasined feet the peace-path, and filling the resounding woods from morning till night with the echoes of his peace-songs. Yes, as gigantic as life, and still as jolly as gigantic, with never a regret in all these years of servile toil that he had sewed it up in his bear-skin cap instead of accepting at once the priceless blessing which his good mistress, in the unspeakable gratitude of her mother's heart, had bidden him to take as his forever.

Time and the world had evidently dealt kindly by our hero, the ebony smoothness of his wide-snouted mug unfurrowed as yet by those lines of care and thought we so often find disfiguring the faces of Shem and Japheth, nor grizzled yet his fleecy locks, although he had left his fiftieth year behind him—an age when the heads of most men begin to whiten under the snows of life's winter. For all that, though they may not have brought him wrinkles and whitened his locks, the passing years had brought him wisdom and whitened the color of his thoughts, once so crimson. In proof whereof, he had long since taken unto himself a wife, and was now the father of a large family of large children. In further proof, he had long since left off fighting and gone to preaching, there being now in the Paradise more black sinners to be mended than red heathen to be demolished; more friends to be led across the Jordan than foes to be driven across the Ohio.