WHEN WE SMASHED THE PROPHET’S POWER
WHEN WE SMASHED THE PROPHET’S POWER
IT is a curious and interesting fact that, just as in the year 1754 a collision between French and English scouting parties on the banks of the Youghiogheny River, deep in the American wilderness, began a war that changed the map of Europe, so in 1811 a battle on the banks of the Wabash between Americans and Indians started an avalanche which ended by crushing Napoleon.
The nineteenth century was still in its swaddling-clothes at the time this story opens; the war of the Revolution had been over barely a quarter of a century, and a second war with England was shortly to begin. Though the borders of the United States nominally extended to the Rockies, the banks of the Mississippi really marked the outermost picket-line of civilization. Beyond that lay a vast and virgin wilderness, inconceivably rich in minerals, game, and timber, but still in the power of more or less hostile tribes of Indians. Up to 1800 the whole of that region lying beyond the Ohio, including the present States of Indiana,Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Missouri, was officially designated as the Northwest Territory, but in that year the northern half of this region was organized as the Indian Territory, or, as it came to be known in time, the Territory of Indiana.
The governor of this great province was a young man named William Henry Harrison. This youth—he was only twenty-seven at the time of his appointment—was invested with one of the most extraordinary commissions ever issued by our government. In addition to being the governor of a Territory whose area was greater than that of the German Empire, he was commander-in-chief of the Territorial militia, Indian agent, land commissioner, and sole lawgiver. He had the power to adopt from the statutes upon the books of any of the States any and every law which he deemed applicable to the needs of the Territory. He appointed all the judges and other civil officials and all military officers below the rank of general. He possessed and exercised the authority to divide the Territory into counties and townships. He held the prerogative of pardon. His decision as to the validity of existing land grants, many of which were technically worthless, was final, and his signatureupon a title was a remedy for all defects. As the representative of the United States in its relations with the Indians, he held the power to negotiate treaties and to make treaty payments.
Governor Harrison was admittedly the highest authority on the northwestern Indians. He kept his fingers constantly on the pulse of Indian sentiment and opinion and often said that he could forecast by the conduct of his Indians, as a mariner forecasts the weather by the aid of a barometer, the chances of war and peace for the United States so far as they were controlled by the cabinet in London. The remark, though curious, was not surprising. Uneasiness would naturally be greatest in regions where the greatest irritation existed and which were under the least control. Such a danger spot was the Territory of Indiana. It occupied a remote and perilous position, for northward and westward the Indian country stretched to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, unbroken save by the military posts at Fort Wayne and Fort Dearborn (now Chicago) and a considerable settlement of whites in the vicinity of Detroit. Some five thousand Indian warriors held this vast region and were abundantly able to expel every white man from Indiana if theirorganization had been as strong as their numbers. And the whites were no less eager to expel the Indians.
No acid ever ate more resistlessly into a vegetable substance than the white man acted on the Indian. As the line of American settlements approached the nearest Indian tribes shrunk and withered away. The most serious of the evils which attended the contact of the two hostile races was the introduction by the whites of whiskey among the Indians. “I can tell at once,” wrote Harrison about this time, “upon looking at an Indian whom I may chance to meet, whether he belongs to a neighboring or a more distant tribe. The latter is generally well-clothed, healthy, and vigorous; the former half-naked, filthy, and enfeebled by intoxication.” Another cause of Indian resentment was that the white man, though not permitted to settle beyond the Indian border, could not be prevented from trespassing far and wide on Indian territory in quest of game. This practice of hunting on Indian lands in direct violation of law and of existing treaties had, indeed, grown into a monstrous abuse and did more than anything else, perhaps, to fan the flame of Indian hostility toward the whites. Every autumn great numbers of Kentucky settlers used to crossthe Ohio River into the Indian country to hunt deer, bear, and buffalo for their skins, which they had no more right to take than they had to cross the Alleghanies and shoot the cows and sheep belonging to the Pennsylvania farmers. As a result of this systematic slaughter of the game, many parts of the Northwest Territory became worthless to the Indians as hunting-grounds, and the tribes that owned them were forced either to sell them to the government for supplies or for an annuity or to remove elsewhere. The Indians had still another cause for complaint. According to the terms of the treaties, if an Indian killed a white man the tribe was bound to surrender the murderer for trial in an American court; while, if a white man killed an Indian, the murderer was also to be tried by a white jury. The Indians surrendered their murderers, and the white juries at Vincennes unhesitatingly hung them; but, though Harrison reported innumerable cases of wanton and atrocious murders of Indians by white men, no white man was ever convicted by a territorial jury for these crimes. So far as the white man was concerned, it was a case of “Heads I win, tails you lose.” The opinion that prevailed along the frontier was expressed in the frequent assertion that “the only good Indian isa dead one,” and in the face of such public opinion there was no chance of the Indian getting a square deal.
As a result of these outrages and injustices, the thoughts of the Indians turned longingly toward the days when this region was held by France. Had Napoleon carried out his Louisiana scheme of 1802, there is no possible doubt that he would have received the active support of every Indian tribe from the Gulf to the Great Lakes; his orders would have been obeyed from Tallahassee to Detroit. When affairs in Europe compelled him to abandon his contemplated American campaign, the Indians turned to the British for sympathy and assistance—and the British were only too glad to extend them a friendly hand. From Maiden, opposite Detroit, the British traders loaded the American Indians with gifts and weapons; the governor-general of Canada intrigued with the more powerful chieftains and assured himself of their support in the war which was approaching; British emissaries circulated among the tribes, and by specious arguments inflamed their hostility toward Americans. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, had our people and our government treated the Indians with the most elementary justice and honesty, they would havehad their support in the War of 1812, the whole course of that disastrous war would probably have been changed, and the Canadian boundary would, in all likelihood, have been pushed far to the northward. By their persistent ill treatment of the Indians the Americans received what they had every reason to expect and what they fully deserved.
During the first decade of the nineteenth century there was really no perfect peace with any of the Indian tribes west of the Ohio, and Harrison’s abilities as a soldier and a diplomatist were taxed to the utmost to prevent the skirmish-line, as the chain of settlements and trading-posts which marked our westernmost frontier might well be called, from being turned into a battle-ground. Harrison’s most formidable opponent in his task of civilizing the West was the Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh, perhaps the most remarkable of American Indians. Though not a chieftain by birth, Tecumseh had risen by the strength of his personality and his powers as an orator to a position of altogether extraordinary influence and power among his people. So great was his reputation for bravery in battle and wisdom in council that by 1809 he had attained the unique distinction of being, to all intents and purposes, thepolitical leader of all the Indians between the Ohio and the Mississippi.
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 themin 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 ofthree million acres of land. Think of it, my friends! Perhaps the most fertile land in all the world sold at the rate ofthree 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 whomade 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 canoedown 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 sentword 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 fewpaces 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 useit 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 soldiersdashed 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 persistin 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 notime 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 theregiment 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.
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 instructorin 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 profitableprofession 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 andoutlandish 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 infantrymarched 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 attacksshortly 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 thecamp, 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 crashingvolleys 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.
The Indians, panic-stricken at the sight of the oncoming troopers, broke and ranThe Indians, panic-stricken at the sight of the oncoming troopers, broke and ran.
The Indians, panic-stricken at the sight of the oncoming troopers, broke and ran.
The Indians, panic-stricken at the sight of the oncoming troopers, broke and ran.
The prophet, who had been chanting appeals to the Great Spirit from the top of a rock within view of his warriors but safely out of range of the American rifles (he evidently had some doubts as to the efficacy of his charms), realized that, as a result of the unforeseen obstinacy of the Americans’ resistance, victory was fast slipping from his grasp and that his only hope of success lay in an overwhelming charge. Roused to renewed fanaticism by his fervid exhortations, the Indians once again swept forward, whooping like madmen. But the Americans were ready for them, and as the yelling redskins came within range they met them with a volley of buckshot which left them wavering, undecided whether to come on or to retreat. Harrison, whose plan was to maintain his lines unbroken until daylight and then make a general advance, and who had been constantly riding from point to point within the camp to keep the assailed positions reinforced, realized that the crucial moment had arrived. Now was his chance to drive home the deciding blow. Boyd, recognizing as quickly as Harrison the opportunity thus presented, ordered a bugler to sound thecharge, and his infantry roared down upon the Indian line in a human avalanche tipped with steel. At the same moment he ordered up the two squadrons of dragoons which he had been holding in reserve. “Right into line!” he roared, in the voice which had resounded over so many fields in far-off Hindustan. “Trot! Gallop!Charge!Hip, hip, here we go!” It was this charge, delivered with the smashing suddenness with which a boxer gets in a solar-plexus blow, which did the business. The Indians, panic-stricken at the sight of the oncoming troopers in their brass helmets and streaming plumes of horsehair, broke and ran. Tippecanoe was won, though at a cost to the Americans of nearly two hundred killed and wounded, including two lieutenant-colonels, two majors, five captains, and several lieutenants. The discredited prophet, now become an object of hatred and derision among his own people, fled for his life while the victorious Americans burned his town behind him. Tecumseh, returning from the south to be greeted by the news of the disaster to his plans resulting from his brother’s folly, threw in his lot with the British, commanded England’s Indian allies in the War of 1812, and died two years later at the battle of the Thames, when his old adversary,Harrison, once again led the Americans to victory. For his share in the Tippecanoe triumph, Boyd received a brigadier-general’s commission. Harrison was started on the road which was to end at the White House. The peril of the great Indian confederation was ended forever, and the civilization of the West was advanced a quarter of a century.