Early in the nineteenth century Boyd, who, as the result of the generous
rewards he had received from his royal employers, had by this time
become possessed of considerable means, left the service of the Nizam,
much against the wishes of that monarch, and organized an army of his
own. Numerically, it wasn't much of an army, as armies go, having at no
time exceeded two thousand men, but it was as businesslike a force as
ever responded to a bugle. Boyd, whose reputation as a cavalry leader
extended from Bengal to Malabar, had the horsemen of all India to draw
from, and he recruited nothing but the best, the men with whom he filled
his ranks being as hard as nails and as keen as razors. His second in
command was an Irish soldier of fortune named William Tone, a brother of
Wolf Tone, the famous rebel patriot.
As Boyd reckoned on counterbalancing the smallness of his force by its
extreme mobility, he adopted the novel expedient of transporting his
artillery on the backs of elephants, thus making it possible for the
guns to keep pace with the cavalry even on his whirlwind raids, for an
elephant, though burdened with a field-piece and half a dozen soldiers,
can put mile after mile behind it at a swinging, ungainly gait which it
will tax any horse to maintain. Military history presents no more
fantastic picture than that of this sun-tanned Yankee adventurer
spurring across an Indian countryside with a brigade of beturbaned
lancers and a score or so of lumbering elephants, the muzzles of brass
field-guns frowning from their howdahs, tearing along behind him. What a
pity that the folk in Newburyport could not have seen him!
The entire outfit--elephants, horses, cannon, and weapons--was Boyd's
personal property, and he rented it to those princes who had need of and
were able to pay for its service precisely as a garage rents an
automobile. The prices he obtained for it were enormous, and ere long he
became a wealthy man. From one end of the country to the other he led
his scarlet-coated mercenaries, selling their services in turn to his
former employers, the Nizam and the Peishwa, and to the rulers of
Gwalior and Indore. When a force was needed for a particularly desperate
service or for a hopeless hope they sent for Boyd. And he always
delivered the goods. Fighting was going on everywhere, and he never
lacked employment. But he was far too discerning not to recognize the
fact that the power of England was steadily, if slowly, increasing, and
that her complete domination of India, which could not much longer be
delayed, must inevitably put an end to independent soldiering as a
profitable profession. In 1808, therefore, he sold his army, elephants
and all, to Colonel Felose, a Neapolitan who had seen service under many
flags, and with misted eyes and a choking throat for the last time rode
along the lines of his faithful troopers. A few days later he set sail
for Paris, for, with the Corsican's star high in the heavens, there
seemed no better place for such a man to seek adventure and advancement.
Disappointed in his hope of obtaining a commission under the Napoleonic
eagles, he turned his face toward home, and in 1810, after an absence of
more than twenty years, he felt the cobblestones of his native
Newburyport beneath his feet once more.
Boyd's adventurous career under his own flag and in the service of his
own people forms quite another though a scarcely less thrilling story.
Trained and experienced officers being in those days few and far
between, the government offered him the colonelcy of the 4th Regiment of
Infantry, which he promptly accepted, displaying such energy in drilling
his men that when his regiment marched through the streets of Boston on
its way to Pittsburg the local papers commented editorially on the
smartness of its appearance. When William Henry Harrison, then governor
of the Territory of Indiana (which included the present States of
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin), realizing the imperative
necessity of smashing the great Indian confederation which Tecumseh, the
Shawnee warrior-statesman, was so painstakingly building to oppose the
white man's further progress westward, called for troops to do the
business, Boyd put his men on flat-boats, floated them down to the falls
of the Ohio, and marched them overland to Vincennes, his dusty, footsore
column tramping into Harrison's stockaded headquarters almost before
that veteran frontiersman had realized that they had started. Boyd was
in direct command, under Harrison, of the little expeditionary force of
nine hundred men throughout the whirlwind campaign which culminated on a
drizzling November morning in 1811 on the banks of the Tippecanoe
River. Tippecanoe was, I suppose, the only battle which our army ever
fought in high hats, for the absurd uniform of the American infantry,
discarded a few months later, consisted of blue, brass-buttoned
tail-coats, skin-tight pantaloons, and "stovepipe" hats with red, white,
and blue cockades. Though taken by surprise and outnumbered six to one,
Boyd's soldiery showed the result of their training by standing like a
stone wall against the onset of the whooping redskins, pouring in a
volley of buckshot at close range which left the hordes of warriors
wavering, undecided whether to come on or to retreat. At this
psychological moment Boyd ordered up the squadron of dragoons which he
had been holding in reserve for just such an opportunity. "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 the charge of the cavalry, delivered with all the smashing
suddenness with which a boxer delivers 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; Harrison was started on the road which was
to end in the White House; the peril of Tecumseh's Indian confederation
was ended forever, and the civilization of the West was advanced a
quarter of a century.
[Illustration: The battle of Tippecanoe.