Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (106 page)

That is Sir George Prevost’s assessment. Dickson and his Indian followers were the key to the capture of Michilimackinac by the British in 1812. The following January, the Governor General persuaded the Red-Haired Man to give up the fur trade and become a government employee—agent to the Indians of the Northwest. When Elliott and his colleagues at Amherstburg tried to put obstacles in Dickson’s way, Prevost promoted him to a separate command, naming him Assistant Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Michigan Territory and all captured lands, reporting directly to Procter.

Thus Dickson is both diplomat and military leader. His task is to unite all the diverse and squabbling tribesmen against the Long Knives. In this cause, his peregrinations are extraordinary. He vanishes into the wilderness for months at a time, turns up unexpectedly, vanishes again. Though no one can ever be sure where Dickson is, one thing is certain: he covers astonishing distances in remarkably short periods of time. Leaving Montreal in mid-January, 1813, he set off on a fifteen-hundred-mile journey that few, if any, have equalled, travelling to Fort George, Amherstburg, Detroit, the Wabash, Chicago, Green Bay, and eventually arriving at Prairie du Chien on the Upper Mississippi in mid-April. He went on to Mackinac, took part with his Indians in the siege of Fort Meigs and the attack on Fort Stephenson, pushed on to Kingston to pick up presents for the Indians, moved overland from York by way of Lake Simcoe and the Nottawasaga River, crossed Lake Huron to Mackinac again, then set off for Garlic Island on Lake Winnebago, where he spent the winter.

He has lived a life of hardship without complaint while his brothers, Thomas and William, occupy fine homes at Queenston and Newark. On Lake Winnebago, while the Americans were burning William’s brick mansion in Newark, the Red-Haired Man was close to starvation. By February, he and his Indians had only eight handfuls of wild rice, ten pounds of black flour, two shanks of deer, three frozen cabbages, and a few potatoes left on which to exist.

By March, his situation was desperate. “I am heartily sick of this place,” he wrote. “There is no situation more miserable than to see objects around you dying of hunger and [to be] unable to give them
but little assistance. I have done what I could for them and in consequence will starve myself.”

He loves his people. He could easily leave them, but that is not his way. He hangs on until the snow melts in April, then goes off to Prairie du Chien to recruit more followers to the British cause. That accomplished, he sets off with his tribal army to defend Michilimackinac.

With Dickson’s arrival, McDouall seizes the opportunity to deliver to the assembled chiefs the kind of flowery speech required of army commanders. He chooses the King’s birthday—the same day on which John Richardson and his fellow prisoners decide to toast their sovereign in the hostile Kentucky capital.

The Americans, McDouall asserts in his Scots burr, are intent on destroying the Indians and seizing their lands:

“My children, you possess the Warlike spirit of your fathers. You can only avoid this horrible fate by joining hand in hand with my warriors in first driving the Big Knives from this Island and again opening the great road to your country.…”

The speech is popular and so is the speaker. The Indians like the way McDouall treats them. Dickson finds “the greatest satisfaction in conducting the Indian business in conjunction with him.”

The British are ready, and indeed eager, to defend the island; but the Americans do not come. The Indians grow restless. Some want to head down the lake and fight the enemy on the water—a dangerous proposal in the light of the Americans’ known naval strength.

Then, on June 21, two voyageurs beach a small bark canoe under the brow of the frowning cliffs and inform McDouall that an American raiding party, three hundred strong, has seized Prairie du Chien on the Upper Mississippi. Its leader is General William Clark, Governor of Missouri Territory. The following day, the Tête du Chien, one of the leading chiefs of the Winnebago, arrives with a grisly tale. Clark, on capturing the settlement, seized eight Winnebago, cajoled them at first with kindness, set food before them, and then as they were eating had them murdered in cold blood. Only one escaped. Worse
was to follow. Clark shut up four others in a log building and then shot them. One was the Tête du Chien’s brother, and another the wife of Wabasha, first chief of the Sioux.

The Indians are screaming for revenge, and McDouall is faced with a difficult decision. His task is to hold the fort: dare he chance an expedition down the Mississippi to recapture the outpost and to exact revenge for Clark’s depredations? To do so is to weaken his own position and to leave Michilimackinac wide open to enemy attack from across the lake.

He has little choice. If he does not accede to the Indians’ wishes he loses the support of the tribes. If that happens the Americans will win the Upper Mississippi—the gateway to the Canadian Northwest: “The total subjugation of the Indians on the Mississippi would either lead to their extermination … or they would be spared on the express condition of assisting them to expel us from Upper Canada.”

The chiefs of the Winnebago and the Sioux ask two favours of McDouall. They want a white man from the Indian Department to command the expedition, and they want an artillery piece. McDouall cannot spare more than eighteen of his regulars, but he assigns Sergeant James Keating of the Royal Artillery to accompany a force of civilian volunteers with a brass three-pounder. William McKay, an officer of the North West Company, is appointed temporary lieutenant-colonel in charge of the force. Two members of the Indian Department, Thomas G. Anderson and Joseph Rolette, decked out in red coats and epaulettes, with red feathers in their hats, are detailed to raise two companies of local volunteers while Dickson detaches part of his Indian force—two hundred Sioux, three hundred Winnebago.

On June 28, this hastily assembled strike force sets off down Lake Michigan to be joined by seventy-five Menominee, twenty-five Chippewa, and a company of Green Bay Fencibles, while McDouall, in his fort above the cliffs of Mackinac, awaits the inevitable attack upon his island.

MICHILIMACKINAC ISLAND, LAKE HURON, JULY 26, 1814

Daybreak. From the island’s highest promontory, McDouall’s sentinels see the blurred outlines of half a dozen sailing ships emerging from the fog—part of Perry’s former fleet on Lake Erie. The long-expected invasion of the island is about to begin.

McDouall cannot understand why the Americans have waited so long. The breathing space of several weeks has given him time to strengthen his defences. If the Americans had come even a week or so earlier, he would not have had at his disposal those Indians who have just returned from the expedition down the Mississippi. He would like to have the remainder of the Mississippi force, but at least he has the consolation of knowing that the Union Jack flies over Prairie du Chien. The upper river is a British waterway and will remain so if McDouall can hold Michilimackinac.

Why the delay? The answer is to be found in American procrastination, hesitancy, bad planning, wrong decisions. The expedition was projected as long ago as April, then cancelled (in the mistaken belief that the British were not eager to command the upper lakes), and revived again. The fleet did not sail until July, when it set out for a British supply base reported at Macadesh Bay on the southeastern extremity of Lake Huron. Nobody, as it turned out, knew how to get there. Nobody had thought to bring a pilot who could lead the fleet through the maze of fog-shrouded islands and sunken rocks behind which the bay was concealed.

At that point, the fleet’s commander, Captain Arthur Sinclair, in an incredible decision, overruled the army commander, Lieutenant-Colonel George Croghan, defender of Fort Stephenson. Croghan wanted to make sail for Mackinac without delay; Sinclair insisted on first attacking and burning the deserted British fort on St. Joseph’s Island, forty miles to the north.

Now, at last, the Americans are standing off Mackinac—the big brigs
Lawrence
and
Niagara
, the smaller schooners
Scorpion
and
Tigress
, and two gunboats. With one thousand soldiers, Croghan outnumbers the defenders two to one. On the island, the older
settlers gaze upon the fleet with mixed feelings, some anxious for an American victory so that they may renew acquaintances and cement old loyalties, others fearful that should the invasion succeed, they may be hanged as traitors. Allegiances on this rock-bound island are fragile. In two decades it has changed hands three times.

From his vantage point in the fort, 120 feet above the village, McDouall is uneasy. His defences are in good shape, but he has only 140 soldiers. The Indians are an unknown quantity, “as fickle as the wind.” Worse, he is desperately short of supplies. Dickson’s followers have so badly depleted his stores that he has had to refuse rations to their wives and children and to reduce those of his white garrison. The enemy can beat him merely by sitting still, blockading the island, starving him into submission.

But the Americans plan an assault. The big guns are already booming, but the range is too far; and when the fort’s cannon return the fire, the fleet moves into the lee of Bois Blanc Island. Here McDouall’s sentries spot an American work party on shore, clearing an area for artillery. Three hundred Indians in bark canoes swiftly put a stop to that, seizing one luckless American who has tarried too long to pick raspberries. The British save him from death and from him learn something of the enemy strength and plans.

It is Croghan’s idea to land on a beach on the southwest side of the island where an open field and sparse woods, almost devoid of undergrowth, will allow him to fight a set-piece battle, which the Indians abhor. He intends to “annoy the enemy by gradual and slow approaches.” Incredibly, nobody on the American side has paid any attention to the island’s natural defences. When Sinclair attempts to batter the fort with his guns, he discovers he cannot elevate them enough to do any damage. The shells fall harmlessly in the gardens of the villagers, who have sought safety within the bastion. Sinclair now realizes that the island is “a perfect Gibraltar.” One hundred and twenty feet above the fort the British have a second gun, which Sinclair’s naval cannon cannot reach. Faced with the loss of artillery support, Croghan decides to launch his assault from the only other beach on the island, at its far northwest corner—a fatal mistake.

This is ideal Indian country. A labyrinth of trees and tangled undergrowth extends almost to the water’s edge, cut by narrow footpaths and thin cart tracks, unsuitable for the massing of troops or guns. Equally serious is the distance of this landing place from the army’s objective. The fort lies at the other end of the island, three miles away, at the crest of a steep slope. McDouall’s men are already blocking all the paths but one (which they will use) to slow the assault.

Fog shrouds the lake. A week passes before the ships can move. Then, on August 4, in clear weather, the fleet moves up to within three hundred yards of the beach and one thousand men push off in rowboats, supported by a sheet of fire from the American carronades.

In one of these craft stands Croghan’s young deputy, Major Andrew Hunter Holmes, resplendent in blue and gold. Croghan’s guide, Ambrose Davenport, a Mackinac resident exiled to the United States after the British victory in 1812, has urged Holmes to wear nothing more distinct than a common hunting suit, lest the Indians make him a target. But the stubborn major declares that the uniform was meant to be worn, and he intends to wear it. If it should be his day to fall, he says, then he is willing to die.

The troops land in a hail of musket balls. The thickets are alive with Indians, gorgeously plumed, hideously painted. Croghan halts his men at the edge of a small clearing. In the woods, at the far end he can see the British line, two artillery pieces at its centre, the riflemen forming an arc on either side.

McDouall has stripped his fort of defenders, leaving only twenty-five untrained militia behind, taking the field with 140 soldiers and some 350 tribesmen. The regulars lurk behind a ridge, protected by a hastily built abatis of roots and tangled branches. The Indians hold the flanks.

McDouall’s two guns, a six-pounder and a three-pounder, open fire but without effect. The Americans return it. Now McDouall’s defensive strategy is thrown into disarray by a false rumour. Sinclair’s two brigs, it is said, are landing men farther down the island. To prevent entrapment, he pulls back. Most of the Indians follow.

A small group of Menominee—Dickson’s followers—hold fast on the left flank under their celebrated chief, Tomah, concealed behind rocks, boulders, and trees that they have hacked down to form a breastwork. One of the younger braves, Yellow Dog, wants to follow McDouall and turns to his uncle, L’Espagnol, a huge, raw-boned Menominee, said to be part Spanish.

“Let us go with the others,” says Yellow Dog.

“No,” says L’Espagnol. “I shall remain; if you wish to go you can, but you ought to show proper respect for your uncle by standing by him.”

At this juncture, Croghan determines to outflank the retiring British by circling around their left on the lake side. He orders Major Holmes to lead his men in a charge through the woods.

Yellow Dog spots the gaudily dressed officer, his silver braid glinting in the sunlight. As a reward for his fidelity, L’Espagnol gives the young man the honour of shooting the American leader. On come the enemy, the officers casually swinging their swords. The Indians, uttering their war cry, open fire. Yellow Dog’s gun misses fire, but Holmes falls dead with five bullets in his body, one of them from L’Espagnol’s gun. The warrior runs forward, seizes Holmes’s cap and sword, and vanishes into the forest.

The charge peters out as quickly as it began—and at fearful cost. Holmes’s second-in-command falls, seriously wounded. Two of the senior officers are mortally stricken. McDouall, hearing the Indian cries, returns only to be forced back by Croghan’s regulars advancing in ragged line. But the Indians on the flanks—the same Indians McDouall despised as “fickle as the wind”—are too much for the Americans. At last Croghan realizes what he should have known at the outset—that he cannot possibly move his men three miles through this snarled jungle, especially with the guns on the heights above him.