THE BEGINNING OF TROUBLE.
We all know how trouble begins. Whether a big or a little quarrel is the
thing about which we inquire, and whoever the parties to the dispute may
be, the trouble may always be traced back to some small occurrences
which led to larger ones, which in their turn provoked still greater,
until finally the trouble came.
We have seen that there was peace and justice between the Americans and
the Creek Nation, and that the Creeks had every reason in their own
interest to continue living upon friendly terms with the whites. A good
many of them fully understood this, too, and sought to persuade others
of it; and it is probable that when the first troubles came the great
majority of the Creeks earnestly wished to keep the peace, and to make
use of the means of advancement offered to them by the American
Government and people. Unluckily, they were the victims of bad advice,
and the old story followed: one thing led to another.
It is not easy, in this case, to say precisely what the one thing was
which led to another. That is to say, it is not easy to determine what
was the first of the long chain of events which led the prosperous and
improving Creeks into dissensions, and thence into the war out of which
they came a broken and disheartened remnant of a once powerful nation;
but tracing the matter as far back as it is necessary to carry the
inquiry, we discover that a public road was one of the earliest causes
of the trouble.
The Creeks were made masters of their own country by the Treaty of 1790,
and their absolute title to their lands was respected by the United
States Government, which defended them rigorously against encroachments
upon their domain. That government, having become possessed of a wide
tract of territory lying west of the Creek Nation, toward which the tide
of emigration was rapidly turning, wished to provide a more direct and
better road than any that existed, and with that end in view sought
permission of the Creeks to run the new Federal Road, as it was called,
by a direct route through the Creek territory. The principal chiefs,
beginning to learn some of the natural laws that govern commerce, saw
that the passage of a good road through the heart of the nation would
necessarily benefit them, and make their commerce with the outer world
easier and more profitable. Accordingly these chiefs gave the Creek
Nation's consent, and the road was made. Over this the people quarrelled
among themselves, dividing, as wiser people are apt to do, into two
fiercely antagonistic parties. Those of them who objected to the
thoroughfare were seriously alarmed by the great numbers of emigrants
who were constantly passing through their country to the region beyond.
They said that they would soon be walled up between white settlements on
every side. The land on the Tombigbee River was already becoming peopled
to such an extent that the hope, which many of the Creeks had secretly
cherished, of driving the whites away from the banks of that river and
recovering the territory to themselves must soon be abandoned, and they
held, therefore, that in granting the right of way for the road the
chiefs had betrayed the nation's interests.
There never yet was a quarrel which somebody did not find it to his
interest to stimulate, and in this case the Spanish settlers, or
squatters as they would have been called if they had lived thirty or
forty years later, did all they could to increase the bitterness of the
Creeks toward those chiefs who were disposed to be friendly with the
Americans, and toward the Americans. These Spaniards still insisted that
the territory in which they lived, and from which they were gradually
driven away, belonged of right to Spain, and they saw with great
jealousy the rapid peopling of that territory with Americans. The agents
of the British, with whom the United States was on the point of going to
war, added their voice to the quarrel, stimulating the Spanish and the
Indians alike to hostility. It was very clearly seen by these agents
that an Indian war, especially a war with the powerful Creeks, would
greatly weaken this country for its contest with Great Britain.
Emissaries of the British infested the Creek country, stirring up strife
and sowing the seeds of future hostility among them. The Spanish in
Florida, although our government was at peace with Spain, willingly
became the agents for the British in this work, and secret messages were
constantly sent through them promising arms, ammunition, and aid to the
Creeks in the event of a war.
All these things gave great anxiety to Colonel Hawkins, the agent who
had charge of the Creeks, but the trouble was not yet in a shape in
which he could deal vigorously with it. He called a council, and did all
that he could to convince the Indians of the government's kindly
disposition. The friendly chiefs assured him of their constancy, and
their assurance lulled his suspicions somewhat. He knew these chiefs to
be sincere, but neither he nor they knew to what extent their influence
with the nation had been weakened.
Then came Tecumseh, who, in the spring of the year 1811, arrived in the
Creek country, accompanied by about thirty of his warriors. He came with
a double mission: as the agent of the British he was charged with the
duty of preparing the tribes of the South to join in the approaching
war, as soon as a state of war should be declared; as Tecumseh he came
to execute his own purpose, namely, the formation of a great offensive
and defensive alliance between the tribes of the North and those of the
South, against the American nation and people.
Tecumseh did not come as a stranger to the Creeks. The fame of his
exploits in the North had reached them, and he was known to them even
more favorably in another way. Nearly twenty-five years before,
Tecumseh, then a young man, had dwelt among the Creeks for about two
years, and the stories of his feats as a hunter had lived after him as a
tradition. Hence when he came again in 1811 he was a sort of hero of
romance to the younger Creek warriors, a great man of whose deeds they
had heard stories during their childhood.
On his way to the South, Tecumseh tarried awhile with the Choctaws and
the Chickasaws, trying to win them to his scheme, but without success.
In Florida, he made easy converts of the warlike Seminoles; and
returning thence he visited the Creeks, arriving in October. While
Colonel Hawkins was holding the Grand Council at Tookabatcha, of which
we have spoken, and was trying to placate the Creeks, Tecumseh, followed
by his warriors, dressed in their most impressive savage costumes,
consisting of very little else than buffalo tails and other ornaments,
marched into the meeting. Marching solemnly round and round the central
square of the town, Tecumseh, when he had sufficiently impressed the
lookers-on with a proper sense of his dignity, went through the most
solemn ceremonies of friendship with his hosts. Greeting the chiefs in
the most cordial fashion, he and his followers exchanged tobacco with
them--a proceeding which attested their fellowship in the strongest
possible way.
[Illustration: TECUMSEH ENTERING THE COUNCIL.]
In the main the Creeks received Tecumseh cordially, returning his
protestations of brotherhood in kind; but one chief, Captain Isaacs,
whose fidelity to his obligations as a friend of the whites was proved
afterward on the battle-field, rejected the overtures of the men from
the North. He shook his head when asked to shake hands; he refused to
exchange tobacco; and, with the frankness of a brave man convinced of
his duty, he told Tecumseh to his face that he was a bad man, and added,
"You are no greater than I am."
Tecumseh had come to the council for the purpose of using it for his own
ends, but while Colonel Hawkins remained he made no effort to put his
plan into execution. Colonel Hawkins could have thwarted him, in part at
least, if the wily Indian had openly avowed the object of his visit; but
Tecumseh was too shrewd to do that. Colonel Hawkins prolonged the
council from day to day, but still Tecumseh kept silence. Each day he
would say, "The sun has gone too far to-day; I will make my talk
to-morrow." But the to-morrow of the promise did not come while Colonel
Hawkins remained, and finally, worn out with the delay, that officer
brought his conference with the chiefs to an end and departed.
Then Tecumseh opened his lips. Calling the people together, he made them
a speech, setting forth his views and urging them upon the Creeks. He
told them that the red men had made a fatal mistake in adopting the ways
of the whites and becoming friendly with them. He exhorted them to
return at once to their former state of savagery; to abandon the ploughs
and looms and arms of the white men; to cast off the garments which the
whites had taught them to wear; to return to the condition and customs
of their ancestors, and to be ready at command to become the enemies of
the whites. The work they were learning to do in the fields, he said,
was unworthy of free red men. It degraded them, and made them mere
slaves. He warned them that the whites would take the greater part of
their country, cut down its forests and turn them into cornfields, build
towns, and make the rivers muddy with the washings of their furrows, and
then, when they were strong enough, would reduce the Indians to slavery
like that of the negroes. There is every reason to believe that Tecumseh
was convinced of the truth of all this. He was convinced, too, that the
whites had no right to live on this continent. He told the Creeks, as he
had told General Harrison, that the Great Spirit had given this land to
the red men. He said the Great Spirit had provided the skins of beasts
for the red men's clothing, and that these only should they wear. Then
he came to the subject of the British alliance, telling the Creeks that
the King of England was about to make a great war in behalf of his
children the red men, for the purpose of driving all the Americans off
the continent, and that he would heap favors upon all the Indians who
should help him to do this.
A prophet who accompanied Tecumseh followed him with a speech, in which
he reiterated what his chief had said, but gave it as a message from the
Great Spirit; still further to encourage the war spirit among them, this
teacher by authority promised a miracle in behalf of the Creeks. He
assured them that if they should join in the war they would do so at no
personal risk; that not one of them should be hurt by the enemy; that
the Great Spirit would encircle them wherever they went with impassable
mires, in which the Americans would be utterly destroyed, with no power
or opportunity to harm the divinely protected Indians.
All this was well calculated to stir the already moody and discontented
Creeks to a feeling of hostility, and when the speech-making was over
there was a strong party, probably more than a majority of the Creeks,
ready and anxious to make immediate war upon the Americans. Colonel
Hawkins's long labors in the interest of peace had been rendered
fruitless, and the war party in the nation was more numerous and more
firmly resolved upon mischief than ever.
Tecumseh's labors were not yet finished, however. As a shrewd politician
works and argues and pleads and persuades in private as well as in his
public addresses, so Tecumseh, who was a particularly shrewd politician,
went all through the nation winning converts to his cause. He won many,
but although he was received as an honored guest by the chief
Tustinnuggee Thlucco, or the Big Warrior, he could make no impression
upon that wise warrior's mind. It was not that Big Warrior was so firm a
friend to the whites that nothing could arouse him to enmity. He had his
grudges, and was by no means in love with things as they were; but he
foresaw, as Tecumseh did not, that the war, if it should come, would
bring destruction to his nation. He estimated the strength of his foes
more accurately than his fellows did, and was convinced that there was
no hope of success in the war which Tecumseh was trying to bring about.
He was valorous enough, but he was also discreet, and he therefore
obstinately remained true to his allegiance. His obstinacy at last
roused Tecumseh's ire, and it was to him that Tecumseh made his
celebrated threat that when he reached Detroit he would stamp his foot
on the ground and shake down all the houses in Tookabatcha--a threat
which it is said that an earthquake afterward led the Creeks to believe
he had carried out. The story of the earthquake is repeated by all the
writers on the subject, but some of the accounts of it contradict facts
and set dates at defiance; and so, while it is not impossible and
perhaps not improbable that an opportune earthquake did seem to make
Tecumseh's threat good, the story must be received with some caution, as
the different versions of it contradict each other. So, for that matter,
it is not safe to trust the records upon any point, without diligent
examination and comparison. Thus the fact that the battle of Tippecanoe
was fought during this Southern journey of Tecumseh makes it certain
that the mission was accomplished in the year 1811; yet Pickett, in his
History of Alabama, gives 1812 as the year, and several other writers
follow him. Again, some of the writers to whom we must look for the
facts of this part of American history confound Tecumseh's two years'
sojourn among the Creeks about the year 1787 with his visit in 1811,
saying that that visit lasted two years--a statement which would make
great confusion in the mind of any one familiar with the history of
events in the North in which Tecumseh bore a part. A careful comparison
of dates shows that Tecumseh started to the South in the spring of the
year 1811, and returned to the North soon after the battle of Tippecanoe
was fought--that is to say, near the end of the same year.