The Invasion of Canada (11 page)

The Wabash

He moves cautiously, expecting Indians behind every tree, suspicious of ambush. Nothing. At two-thirty on the afternoon of November 6, some dozen miles from his objective, he reaches a small wood, halts, draws up his force in battle order, sends scouts forward. There are Indians just ahead, flitting through the trees, but they will not speak to the interpreters.

Back comes Major Daviess, eager for battle, urging an immediate attack against the insolent savages. Why is Harrison vacillating? Have the troops come this far for nothing? The Governor hesitates, mindful of Washington’s order that he must try for a peaceful settlement; then, with his men murmuring their eagerness, moves on, yielding “to what
appeared to be the general wish.” It matters to no one that Prophet’s Town is on land that has never been ceded to the United States.

Three Indians approach. Harrison recognizes one: Chief White Horse, principal counsellor to the Prophet. They are conciliatory. They have been trying to reach Harrison, but the messengers have been looking for him on the south side of the river; Harrison has taken the north bank. He assures them that all he seeks is a proper camping ground and they agree to parley on the morrow.

As the town comes into view, Harrison raises his field glass and through it observes the inhabitants running about in apparent terror and confusion behind a breastwork of logs. After some reconnoitring he camps his army about a mile to the northwest among the leafless oaks on a triangle of ground a few feet above the marshy prairie. Here, in the chill of the night, the men slumber, or try to (some have no blankets), in the warmth of huge fires, their loaded guns beside them, bayonets fixed, their coats covering the musket locks to keep them dry. Harrison has dug no trenches, erected no stakes because, he claims later, he has not enough axes.

What are the Indians thinking and planning? No one knows or will ever know, for most of the accounts of the battle come from white men. Those Indian accounts that do exist are second hand and contradictory, filtered through white reports.

Some things are fairly certain: the Indians, not trusting Harrison, expect him to attack and are determined to strike first; the battle, when it comes, is started accidentally when neither side is prepared; and of the several tribes represented at Prophet’s Town it is the Winnebago and the Potawatomi and not the Shawnee who are the fiercest in wanting to disobey Tecumseh’s orders not to fight.

It is four o’clock, the night still dark and overcast, a light rain rustling the bushes. On the left flank, directly in front of Captain Robert Barton’s infantry company, a shivering picket, Private William Brigham, on his knees, his musket on charge, nervously tries to pierce the gloom. He cannot see farther than three feet. Suddenly – footsteps. Brigham raises his musket and almost shoots his fellow picket, William Brown, who has imprudently left his own post in a state of near terror, certain that Indians are lurking in the bushes ahead. His instinct is to flee at once.

“Brigham,” he whispers, “let us fire and run …”

But Brigham fears a false alarm.

Suddenly something swishes past them. An arrow? Terrified, they turn and dash back toward the camp. Beside them a rifle barks. Another sentry, Stephen Mars, has fired at something moving in the gloom and also dashed toward safety.

The Battle of Tippecanoe

In Tent No. 1, Sergeant Montgomery Orr springs awake. Somebody has just rushed past, touching the corner of his tent. He jogs his corporal, David Thompson, awake. Something strikes the tent. Thompson leaps up, seizes his gun as four shots ring out accompanied by a high screaming and yelling. The corporal tumbles back upon the sergeant.

“Corporal Thompson, for God’s sake don’t give back!” cries Orr, then realizes he is talking to a dead man. He plunges out of the tent, gets a confused impression of a melee-soldiers and Indians firing at each other, Captain Barton trying vainly to form up his men.

Harrison is pulling on his boots when he hears a cacophony of yells and a burst of musketry. One of his officers and two of his men have already been tomahawked and scalped. He calls for his terrified black servant, George, to bring up his favourite mount – a pale grey mare. The boy cannot find her, so Harrison borrows another officer’s horse-a black one – and rides into confusion. His men, perfect silhouettes in front of the fires, are falling about him. On the left, Barton’s company is already badly mauled. Another has broken. When one of his colonels, mounted on a pale grey mare similar to his missing animal, tumbles to the ground, dead from an Indian musket ball, Harrison realizes that the Indians have mistaken the dead man for himself. An aide rides out on a similar horse; Harrison shoos him back for a black one.

Harrison moves swiftly to reinforce his shattered flank, rides from point to point trying to control the battle. After it is over he will write a careful account, describing the action as if it were a set piece, reconstructing all the movements, making them sound like parade-ground manoeuvres. But at this moment, with the blackened Indians shrieking, the musket fire deafening, the steam rising from fires quickly doused, the clouds of black gun smoke adding to the general overcast, it is impossible for anyone to tell exactly what is happening.

As in every battle, there are moments of horror and moments of heroism.

The Indians are acting in a most un-Indian-like fashion, responding with considerable discipline to signals made by the rattling of deer horns, firing a volley, retreating out of range to reload, advancing again. As Harrison approaches Captain Spier Spencer’s company of Kentuckians, known as Yellow Jackets, on the right flank, he can hear the veteran Spencer crying, “Close up, men! Steady! Hold the line!” The Indians have mounted a third attack, so fierce that the balls are shredding the bark from the trees. One strikes Spencer in the head. He continues to shout. Another tears into his thigh, and then another. He calls out for help, and two men rush over, raise him up just as another ball penetrates his body, killing him.

Harrison rides up, sees young John Tipton sighting down a barrel.

“Where’s your captain?”

“Dead, sir!”

“Your first-lieutenant?”

“Dead, sir!”

“Your second-lieutenant?”

“Dead, sir!”

“Your ensign?”

“Here, sir!”

Harrison searches about for reinforcements, sees Robb’s militia company faltering, rallies them in support of the Yellow Jackets, braces the flank with a company of regulars. A close friend, Thomas Randolph, falls, mortally wounded. Harrison dismounts, bends over his friend, asks if there is anything he can do. Nothing, gasps Randolph, except to look after his child. Harrison keeps that promise.

The impetuous Major Daviess, in charge of the dragoons, is chafing at the rear. He wants to roar into action, but Harrison is holding him back:

“Tell Major Daviess to be patient, he will have an honourable station before the battle is over.”

Daviess cannot stand the inaction; he presses Harrison again, gets the same reply, continues to nag. At last the Governor gives in:

“Tell Major Daviess he has heard my opinion twice; he may now use his own discretion.”

Daviess has spotted Indians lurking behind some scattered logs seventy-five yards away. Gathering a force of twenty men, he prepares to charge the foe. He has dressed with his customary panache – an unmistakable target, six feet tall, in a white blanket coat that stands out starkly in the gloom. As he leads his men toward the enemy, three balls pierce his body. “I am a dead man,” cries Jo Daviess. His followers carry him to the cover of a sycamore tree as the Indians vanish. He has not long to live. “Unfortunately, the Major’s gallantry determined him to execute the order with a smaller force than was sufficient,” Harrison comments, a little dryly, in his report of the action.

By the time Daviess falls, the entire line is engaged. Daybreak is at hand. As the Indians begin to falter, Harrison determines on a charge from the flanks. This is the climax of the battle. The level of sound is almost unbearable – an ear-splitting mixture of savage yells, shrieks of despair, roar of musketry, agonizing screams, victorious shouts, dying cries mingling in a continuous terrifying uproar that will ring in the ears of the survivors long after the last wound is healed.

Harrison’s charge succeeds. The Indians, out of ammunition and arrows, retire across the marshy prairie where horses cannot follow. The Americans shout cries of triumph, utter prayers of thanks, bind up their wounds, scalp all the dead Indians, kill one who is wounded.

Two days later, they sweep through Prophet’s Town, empty save for one aged squaw, on a mission of revenge and plunder. They destroy everything including all the beans and corn that they themselves cannot eat – some three thousand bushels stored up for the winter. In the houses they find British weapons, presents dispensed at Amherstburg the previous year; it confirms their suspicion that British agents have been provoking the Indians to attack (though American weapons distributed by the war department as part of the annuity payments to the tribes are also found). Then they burn all the houses and sheds and take their leave. Thus ends the Battle of Tippecanoe, which has often been called the first battle in the War of 1812.

Harrison has lost almost one-fifth of his force. Thirty-seven white corpses lie sprawled on the battlefield. One hundred and fifty men have been wounded of whom twenty-five will die of their injuries,
including the luckless sentry Brigham. No one can be sure how many Indians took part in the skirmish. Nobody knows how many died. Harrison, like most military commanders, overestimates the enemy’s losses, declares that the Prophet’s casualties run into the hundreds. This is wishful thinking; only thirty-six Indian corpses are found.

The battered army limps back to Vincennes. As soon as Harrison is gone, the Indians, who have retreated across the Wabash, return to the ruins of their village. Although a Kickapoo chief reports to the British that “the Prophet and his people do not appear as a vanquished army,” Harrison, intent on beating out some flames of dissent from Kentucky (where Daviess’s death is mourned and Harrison’s strategy and motives scrutinized), has already launched the long propaganda battle that will convince his countrymen that Tippecanoe was a glorious victory.

What has it accomplished? Its purpose was to teach the Indians a lesson they would never forget, to break Tecumseh’s confederacy and the Prophet’s power, and to stop the sporadic raids on frontier settlements. But the raids increase in fury. Settlers and soldiers are ambushed. Whole families are wiped out, scalped, mutilated. Farmers abandon their fields and cabins; neighbours club together to build blockhouses; some flee the territory. At Grouseland, Harrison constructs an underground escape tunnel, ships his wife and eight children off to safety in Kentucky, buffers the principal homes of Vincennes with log parapets. Instead of terrifying the Indians, Tippecanoe has stirred them to fury. In March, 1812, both Governor Howard of Missouri Territory and General William Clark, the explorer and superintendent of Indian Affairs, voice the opinion that a formidable combination of Indians are on the warpath, that a bloody war must ensue is almost certain, and that the Prophet is regaining his influence.

Tecumseh returns that same month to Prophet’s Town. Later he speaks of his experience:

“I stood upon the ashes of my own home, where my own wigwam had sent up its fires to the Great Spirit, and there I summoned the spirits of the braves who had fallen in their vain attempts to protect their homes from the grasping invader, and as I snuffed up the smell of their blood from the ground I swore once more eternal hatred-the hatred of an avenger.”

His mission to the south has failed. The Sauk and Osage tribesmen will not follow him. But his northern confederacy is not shattered as
Harrison keeps repeating (and repeating it, is believed). Tecumseh sends runners to the tribes; twelve respond, each sending two leading chiefs and two war chiefs. By May, Tecumseh has six hundred men under his command, making bows and arrows (for they no longer have guns). In Washington, war fever rises on the tales of frontier violence and the legend of Tippecanoe. Tecumseh waits, holds his men back for the right moment. For a while he will pretend neutrality, but when the moment comes, he will lead his confederacy across the border to fight beside the British against the common enemy.