Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (10 page)

The two do not even look like brothers. If Tecumseh is grudgingly admired, the Prophet is universally despised. To the white romantics one is a “good” Indian, the other “bad”—the noble savage and the rogue native, neat stereotypes in the bosom of a single family. Part of the contrast is physical. Tecumseh is almost too handsome to be true; his younger brother is ugly, awkward, and one-eyed, a handkerchief masking the empty socket, mutilated in childhood by a split arrow. One is a mystic, mercurial and unpredictable, the other a clear-eyed military genius. Yet the two are indivisible, their personalities and philosophies interlocking like pieces of an ivory puzzle.

In looking forward to a new future for the tribes, the brothers are gazing back upon an idyllic past when the vast hunting grounds were open to all. The idea of land held in common springs directly from the Shawnee experience and must have been held by others before them. Always partially nomadic, the Shawnee were deprived of any share of the profits from lands sold to white men in Kentucky. The sedentary Iroquois pocketed the cash while the advancing pressure of settlement forced the Shawnee northward and westward always onto lands occupied by other tribes. For years now they have been hunting over the disputed territory east of the Wabash, but in Harrison’s conventional view they do not “own” it because the Miami were there first. Tecumseh’s own wanderings underline the Shawnee dilemma. He has no fixed home but has moved northward from settlement to settlement, from Kentucky to Indiana to Ohio to Prophet’s Town on the Tippecanoe. Men with such a history must feel the land belongs to all.

Unlike the Prophet, Tecumseh is a warrior. The major influence in his life was his older brother, Cheeseekau, fourteen years his senior and clearly a replacement for his father, who died when Tecumseh was an infant. Cheeseekau taught him to hunt with bow and arrow (nurturing in him a contempt for firearms, which frighten away deer), to fight with a tomahawk, and to develop his scorn and
hatred of the white man, especially white Americans. From the age of fifteen, when he survived his first skirmish at his brother’s side against the Kentucky volunteers, he has done battle with American frontiersmen and American soldiers. He has fought in every major engagement, rising to band leader after Cheeseekau’s death in the Cherokee war in 1792 and emerging unscathed two years later at the disastrous Battle of Fallen Timbers, when another brother fell to an American musket ball.

Tecumseh’s Frontier

Yet his closest companion for fifteen years was a white youth, Stephen Ruddell, who has become a Methodist missionary to the Shawnee. Captured by the tribe during the Revolution and adopted into a Shawnee family, young Ruddell was present on the famous occasion when, at sixteen, Tecumseh impassively watching a white prisoner being consumed by the slow fire of the stake, rose up and in a speech that foreshadowed later eloquence swore he would never again allow such horror in his presence.

It is this mixture of savagery and compassion that baffles men like Harrison. In battle, stripped naked save for a breech cloth, his face daubed with ochre, his tomahawk stained with blood, Tecumseh is demonic. Yet Ruddell remembers that from his boyhood he was “remarkable … for the dignity and rectitude of his deportment.” He does not like to take prisoners in battle, but when he does he treats them with humanity. Nor will he allow the killing of women and children.

Like his younger brother, he has managed to conquer alcohol, not as the result of the mystical experience that transformed the Prophet from an idler and a wastrel into a native messiah but as a simple act of will. Alcohol befuddled his ambition, interfered with the clarity of his vision.

For similar reasons he has managed to free himself from the tyranny of sex. To him, women are inferior creatures; he treats them with courtesy but will not hunt in their company. And like alcohol, they may divert him from his purpose. As a young man he realized his own attraction to the tribal beauties but was determined not to be ensnared. “The handsome are now anxious for me,” he told a white acquaintance, “and I am determined to disappoint them.”

His first wife, Manete, whom he married at twenty-eight, was a mixed blood, considerably older than he and certainly no beauty. From her as from all his other women he demanded affection and absolute obedience. The day of reckoning came when he asked her to make him a pouch to hold his war paint. She told him she did not know how and offered to find a friend who did. It was the end of the marriage. Tecumseh snatched back the materials, declared that he would save her the trouble, gave her some presents, and banished her forever.

Another wife—the Shawnee are allowed as many as they wish—received a similar rebuff. Tecumseh had killed a turkey and invited friends to dine; he was discomfited to find a few feathers clinging to the fowl when his wife served it. After his guests had gone, he handed her a bundle of clothing and ordered her to leave. Tears, entreaties, promises to do better next time all failed to move him. “I am ashamed of you,” said Tecumseh. “We must separate.” He did not see her again.

One woman, it is said, intrigued him above all others: Rebecca Galloway, a white girl of sixteen, the daughter of a literate frontiersman at Old Chillicothe, Ohio. She spoke his language, taught him English, introduced him to the Bible, Alexander the Great, Shakespeare’s plays (his favourite was
Hamlet)
. The passionate Shawnee fell in love; he brought her gifts (a silver comb, a birchbark canoe, furs, venison), called her Star of the Lake, asked for her hand in marriage offering thirty silver brooches as a lure. She was agreeable but made one condition: he must give up the Indian life, adopt white customs and dress. Tecumseh struggled with this dilemma, but his decision was foreordained. He could not bring himself to adopt a course that would cost him the respect of his people. Reluctantly they parted, never to meet again.

Now he is determinedly single. His last wife, White Wing, a Shawnee woman whom he married in 1802, parted from him in 1807. There would be no more women in Tecumseh’s life. He is wedded irrevocably to an ideal.

He dreams Pontiac’s ancient dream of an Indian confederacy stretching from Florida to Lake Erie—a confederacy strong enough to resist white pressure. To that end he is prepared to travel astonishing distances preaching to the tribes—to the Kickapoo, Wea, Creek, Wyandot, Sauk, Fox, Potawatomi, Miami, Choctaw, Osage and other Indian bands who, like Balkan communities, argue and squabble among themselves, to their own misfortune and the white man’s benefit. The nucleus of this alliance already exists at the mouth of the Tippecanoe where the disaffected members of half a dozen tribes have flocked in response to the mystic summons of Tecumseh’s younger brother.

The Prophet’s background is as remarkable as Tecumseh’s, though quite different. Born after his father’s death, he was raised by a sister who clearly favoured his older brother. While Tecumseh was dazzling his fellow tribesmen with his skill as a hunter and, later, his prowess as a warrior, the future Prophet, born Laulewausika, was a layabout. He seemed to be a man with no future, no ambition. Then, with the suddenness of a rocket’s flare, he changed, overcome by a sense of sin. There was talk of a trance, a visit to the Great Spirit, a vision in which he saw a forked road before him—misery in one direction, happiness in the other. What brought about this miraculous transformation that caused him to be as one reborn? There are only hints, but it is believed in Vincennes that the Shaker preachers, who were influential in the area (their new home only a few miles distant), had their effect. The new name that he adopted to symbolize his reform, Tenskwatawa, is translated as “I am the door,” a phrase used by Jesus, and much of his preaching, which began in 1805, resembles fundamentalist Christianity. He urges his followers to give up strong liquor (as he himself did instantly), to stop beating their wives, to cease intertribal warfare, to renounce crimes of theft.

But there is something more, which suggests that the Prophet is in the mainstream of a mystical movement going back to the Delaware prophet who, in 1762, laid the basis for Pontiac’s confederacy. The same movement will go forward to future prophets including the most influential of all, Wovoka of the Paiutes, who in the late eighties will spread the ritual of the Ghost Dance across the nation.

These native messiahs invariably appear during the death struggles of a threatened culture; their authority is supernatural, their message nostalgic: their people are to return to the old customs and rid themselves of the white man’s ways. Tenskwatawa, the Open Door, preaches that his followers must revert to the clothing, the implements, the weapons, the foods that were in use before the Europeans reached North America. Implicit in this philosophy is a rejection of the white man. Harrison has been told, specifically, by two Indian messengers that the Prophet preaches that “the Great Spirit will in a few years destroy every white man in America.”

Tecumseh has been fighting white Americans since 1783; how much has he contributed to the Prophet’s thoughts? Harrison cannot know, but it is clear to him that at some time in the first decade of the century the two brothers, who like, respect, and listen to one another, have come together in their thinking. The Prophet’s followers become Tecumseh’s followers; onto the Prophet’s religion is grafted the politics of the older brother. It is a dangerous combination; Harrison cannot suffer it much longer, especially with the Indians leaning toward the British. The time is ripe for a preventive war.

FORT AMHERSTBURG, UPPER CANADA
, November 15, 1810. Matthew Elliott sits in the council circle on the parade ground overlooking the wooded islands in the Detroit River and contemplates his dilemma. With him are the officers of the 100th Regiment, his clerk, George Ironsides (married to one of Tecumseh’s sisters), James Girty, an Indian Department interpreter, and some two hundred Potawatomi, Ottawa, Winnebago, Sauk, and Fox. They have come to hear Tecumseh speak, and it is Tecumseh’s words that illustrate Elliott’s dilemma. The Indian Department has plainly done its work too well.

The Shawnee war chief has in his hands a great belt of wampum—thousands of small coloured shells sewn together—given to his predecessors by the British after the defeat of the French, a talisman,
sacred in Indian eyes, symbolizing a treaty of friendship between the British and the natives.

“Father,” says Tecumseh, “I have come here with the intention of informing you that we have not forgot (we can never forget) what passed between you English Men and our Ancestors—And also to let you know our present determination.…

“Father we have a belt to show you, which was given to our Kings when you laid the French on their back. Here it is, Father; on one end is your hand, on the other, that of the Red people … and in the middle the hearts of both. This belt, Father, our great Chiefs have been sitting upon ever since, keeping it concealed.… Now the Warriors have taken all the Chiefs and turned their faces toward you, never again to look towards the Americans; and we the Warriors now manage the affairs of our Nation; and we sit at or near the Borders where the Contest will begin.

“Father—It is only five Years ago that I discovered this Belt and took it from under our Kings. You Father have nourished us, and raised us up from Childhood we are now Men, and think ourselves capable of defending our Country, in which cause you have given us active assistance and always advice—We now are determined to defend it ourselves, and after raising you on your feet leave you behind, but expecting you will push towards us what may be necessary to supply our Wants.…”

The belt is passed around so that all may examine it. It shows two hands, dark against a white background (the Indian hand darker than the British) outstretched in friendship. As the belt moves round the circle, Tecumseh declares that his followers will never quit their father or let go his hand.

The translation is awkward, but the meaning is clear. The younger warriors who follow the Prophet and his brother have overridden the advice of their elders and are bent on war with the Americans; they want the British to help them. Elliott, it seems, has been too successful in implementing the government’s Indian policy. His instructions were to win the tribes over to the British side. Well, he has done that. The difficulty is that in turning the Indians against
the Americans and toward the British, he and his colleagues have brought the country to the brink of an Indian war.