northwestern Indians. He kept his fingers constantly on the pulse of
Indian sentiment and opinion and often said that he could forecast
by the conduct of his Indians, as a mariner forecasts the weather by
the aid of a barometer, the chances of war and peace for the United
States so far as they were controlled by the cabinet in London. The
remark, though curious, was not surprising. Uneasiness would naturally
be greatest in regions where the greatest irritation existed and which
were under the least control. Such a danger spot was the Territory of
Indiana. It occupied a remote and perilous position, for northward
and westward the Indian country stretched to the Great Lakes and the
Mississippi, unbroken save by the military posts at Fort Wayne and Fort
Dearborn (now Chicago) and a considerable settlement of whites in the
vicinity of Detroit. Some five thousand Indian warriors held this vast
region and were abundantly able to expel every white man from Indiana
if their organization had been as strong as their numbers. And the
whites were no less eager to expel the Indians.
No acid ever ate more resistlessly into a vegetable substance than the
white man acted on the Indian. As the line of American settlements
approached the nearest Indian tribes shrunk and withered away. The
most serious of the evils which attended the contact of the two
hostile races was the introduction by the whites of whiskey among the
Indians. “I can tell at once,” wrote Harrison about this time, “upon
looking at an Indian whom I may chance to meet, whether he belongs
to a neighboring or a more distant tribe. The latter is generally
well-clothed, healthy, and vigorous; the former half-naked, filthy,
and enfeebled by intoxication.” Another cause of Indian resentment was
that the white man, though not permitted to settle beyond the Indian
border, could not be prevented from trespassing far and wide on Indian
territory in quest of game. This practice of hunting on Indian lands
in direct violation of law and of existing treaties had, indeed, grown
into a monstrous abuse and did more than anything else, perhaps, to fan
the flame of Indian hostility toward the whites. Every autumn great
numbers of Kentucky settlers used to cross the Ohio River into the
Indian country to hunt deer, bear, and buffalo for their skins, which
they had no more right to take than they had to cross the Alleghanies
and shoot the cows and sheep belonging to the Pennsylvania farmers. As
a result of this systematic slaughter of the game, many parts of the
Northwest Territory became worthless to the Indians as hunting-grounds,
and the tribes that owned them were forced either to sell them to the
government for supplies or for an annuity or to remove elsewhere. The
Indians had still another cause for complaint. According to the terms
of the treaties, if an Indian killed a white man the tribe was bound
to surrender the murderer for trial in an American court; while, if
a white man killed an Indian, the murderer was also to be tried by a
white jury. The Indians surrendered their murderers, and the white
juries at Vincennes unhesitatingly hung them; but, though Harrison
reported innumerable cases of wanton and atrocious murders of Indians
by white men, no white man was ever convicted by a territorial jury
for these crimes. So far as the white man was concerned, it was a case
of “Heads I win, tails you lose.” The opinion that prevailed along the
frontier was expressed in the frequent assertion that “the only good
Indian is a dead one,” and in the face of such public opinion there
was no chance of the Indian getting a square deal.
As a result of these outrages and injustices, the thoughts of the
Indians turned longingly toward the days when this region was held by
France. Had Napoleon carried out his Louisiana scheme of 1802, there
is no possible doubt that he would have received the active support
of every Indian tribe from the Gulf to the Great Lakes; his orders
would have been obeyed from Tallahassee to Detroit. When affairs in
Europe compelled him to abandon his contemplated American campaign,
the Indians turned to the British for sympathy and assistance--and the
British were only too glad to extend them a friendly hand. From Maiden,
opposite Detroit, the British traders loaded the American Indians
with gifts and weapons; the governor-general of Canada intrigued with
the more powerful chieftains and assured himself of their support in
the war which was approaching; British emissaries circulated among
the tribes, and by specious arguments inflamed their hostility toward
Americans. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, had our people
and our government treated the Indians with the most elementary justice
and honesty, they would have had their support in the War of 1812, the
whole course of that disastrous war would probably have been changed,
and the Canadian boundary would, in all likelihood, have been pushed
far to the northward. By their persistent ill treatment of the Indians
the Americans received what they had every reason to expect and what
they fully deserved.
During the first decade of the nineteenth century there was really
no perfect peace with any of the Indian tribes west of the Ohio, and
Harrison’s abilities as a soldier and a diplomatist were taxed to
the utmost to prevent the skirmish-line, as the chain of settlements
and trading-posts which marked our westernmost frontier might well
be called, from being turned into a battle-ground. Harrison’s most
formidable opponent in his task of civilizing the West was the Shawnee
chieftain Tecumseh, perhaps the most remarkable of American Indians.
Though not a chieftain by birth, Tecumseh had risen by the strength of
his personality and his powers as an orator to a position of altogether
extraordinary influence and power among his people. So great was his
reputation for bravery in battle and wisdom in council that by 1809
he had attained the unique distinction of being, to all intents and
purposes, the political leader of all the Indians between the Ohio and
the Mississippi.
With the vision of a prophet, Tecumseh saw that if this immense
territory was once opened to settlement by whites the game upon which
the Indians had to depend for sustenance must soon be exterminated
and that in a few years his people would have to move to strange and
distant hunting-grounds. Taking this as his text, he preached a gospel
of armed resistance to the white man’s encroachments at every tribal
council-fire from the land of the Chippewas to the country of the
Creeks. And he had good reasons for his warnings, for the Indians were
being stripped of their lands in shameless fashion. In fact, the Indian
agents were deliberately ordered to tempt the tribal chiefs into debt
in order to oblige them to sell the tribal lands, which did not belong
to them, but to their tribes. The callousness of the government’s
Indian policy was frankly expressed by President Jefferson in a letter
to Harrison in 1803:
“To promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to
spare and we want for necessaries which we have to spare and they
want we shall push our trading houses and be glad to see the good and
influential individuals among them in debt; because we observe that
when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay they become
willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.”
The tone of cynicism, inhumanity, and greed which characterizes
that letter makes it sound more like the utterance of a usurious
money-lender than an official communication to a Territorial governor
from the President of the United States. It is hard to believe that it
was penned by the same hand which wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson’s Indian policy was continued by his successor, for in 1809
Governor Harrison, acting under instructions from President Madison,
concluded a treaty with the chiefs of the Delaware, Pottawatomie,
Miami, Eel River, Wea, and Kickapoo tribes, whereby, in consideration
of eight thousand two hundred dollars paid down and annuities amounting
to two thousand three hundred and fifty more, he obtained the cession
of _three million acres of land_. Think of it, my friends! Perhaps the
most fertile land in all the world sold at the rate of _three acres for
a cent_! It was like stealing candy from a child. Do you wonder that
Tecumseh declared the treaty void, denounced as traitors to their race
the chiefs who made it, and asserted that it was not in the power of
individual tribes to deed away the common domain? This was the basis of
Tecumseh’s scheme for a general federation of all the Indians, which,
had it not been smashed in its early stages, would have drenched our
frontiers with blood and would have set back the civilization of the
West a quarter of a century.
Throughout his campaign of proselytism Tecumseh was ably seconded by
one of his triplet brothers, Elkswatana, known among the Indians as
“the prophet.” The latter, profiting by the credulity and superstition
of the red men, obtained a great reputation as a medicine-man and seer
by means of his charms, incantations, and pretended visions of the
Great Spirit, thus making himself a most valuable ally of Tecumseh in
the great conspiracy which the latter was secretly hatching. Meanwhile
the relations between the Americans and their neighbors across the
Canadian border had become strained almost to the breaking point, the
situation being aggravated by the fact that the British were secretly
encouraging Tecumseh in spreading his propaganda of resistance to the
United States and were covertly supplying the Indians with arms and
ammunition for the purpose. The winter of 1809-10, therefore, was
marked by Indian outrages along the whole length of the frontier. And
there were other agencies, more remote but none the less effective, at
work creating discontent among the Indians. It seems a far cry from
the prairies to the Tuileries, from an Indian warrior to a French
Emperor, but when Napoleon’s decree of what was virtually a universal
blockade imposed terrible hardships on American shipping as well as
on the British commerce at which it was aimed, even the savage of the
wilderness was affected. It clogged and almost closed the chief markets
for his furs, and prices dropped so low that Indian hunters were hardly
able to purchase the powder and shot with which to kill their game.
At the beginning of 1810, therefore, the Indians were ripe for any
enterprise that promised them relief and independence.
In the spring of 1808 Tecumseh, the prophet, and their followers had
established themselves on the banks of the Wabash, near the mouth of
the Tippecanoe River, about seven miles to the north of the present
site of Lafayette, Indiana. Strategically, the situation was admirably
chosen, for Vincennes, where Harrison had his headquarters, lay one
hundred and fifty miles below and could be reached in four and twenty
hours by canoe down the Wabash; Fort Dearborn was a hundred miles to
the northwest; Fort Wayne the same distance to the northeast; and,
barring a short portage, the Indians could paddle their canoes to
Detroit in one direction or to any part of the Ohio or the Mississippi
in the other. Thus they were within striking distance of the chief
military posts on the frontier and within easy reach of their British
friends at Malden. On this spot the Indians, in obedience to a command
which the prophet professed to have received in a dream from the Great
Spirit, built a sort of model village, where they assiduously tilled
the soil and shunned the fire-water of the whites. For a year or more
after the establishment of Prophet’s Town, as the place was called,
things went quietly enough, but when it became known that Harrison had
obtained the cession of the three million acres in the valley of the
Wabash already referred to, the smouldering resentment of Tecumseh and
his followers was fanned into flame, the Indians refusing to receive
the “annuity salt” sent them in accordance with the terms of the treaty
and threatened to kill the boatmen who brought it, whom they called
“American dogs.”
Early in the following summer Harrison sent word to Tecumseh that he
would like to see him, and on August 12, 1810, the Indian chief with
four hundred armed warriors arrived at the governor’s headquarters at
Vincennes. The meeting between the white man who stood for civilization
and the red man who stood for savagery took place in a field outside
the stockaded town. The youthful governor, short of stature, lean
of body, and stern of face, sat in a chair under a spreading tree,
surrounded by a group of his officials: army officers, Territorial
judges, scouts, interpreters, and agents. Opposite him, ranged in a
semicircle on the ground, were Tecumseh, his brother, the prophet,
and a score or more of chiefs, while back of them, row after row
of blanketed forms and grim, bepainted faces, sat his four hundred
fighting men. Tecumseh had been warned that his braves must come to the
conference unarmed, and to all appearances they were weaponless, but
no one knew better than Harrison that concealed beneath the folds of
each warrior’s blanket was a tomahawk and a scalping-knife. Nor, aware
as he was of the danger of Indian treachery, had he neglected to take
precautions, for the garrison of the town was under arms, the muzzles
of field-guns peered through apertures in the log stockade, and a few
paces away from the council, ready to open fire at the first sign of
danger, were a score of soldiers with loaded rifles.
In reply to Harrison’s formal greeting, Tecumseh rose to his feet,
presenting a most striking and impressive figure as he stood, drawn to
his full height, with folded arms and granite features, the sunlight
playing on his copper-colored skin, on his belt and moccasins of beaded
buckskin, and on the single eagle’s feather which slanted in his hair.
The address of the famous warrior statesman consisted of a recital of
the wrongs which the Indian had suffered at the hands of the white
man. It was a story of chicanery and spoliation and oppression which
Tecumseh told, and those who listened to it, white men and red alike,
knew that it was very largely true. He told how the Indians, the
real owners of the land, had been steadily driven westward and ever
westward, first beyond the Alleghanies, and then beyond the Ohio, and
now beyond the Missouri. He told how the white men had attempted to
create dissension among the Indians to prevent their uniting, how they
had bribed the stronger tribes and coerced the weaker, how again and
again they had tried to goad the Indians into committing some overt act
that they might use it as an excuse for seizing more of their land. He
told how the whites, jeering at the sacredness of treaty obligations,
systematically debauched the Indians by selling them whiskey; how they
trespassed on the Indians’ lands and slaughtered the game on which the
Indians depended for support; of how, when the Indians protested, they
were often slaughtered, too; and of how the white men’s courts, instead
of condemning the criminal, usually ended by congratulating him. He
declared that things had come to a pass where the Indians must fight or
perish, that the Indians were one people and that the lands belonging
to them as a race could not be disposed of by individual tribes, that
an Indian confederacy had been formed which both could and would fight
every step of the white man’s further advance. As Tecumseh continued,
his pronunciation became more guttural, his terms harsher, his gestures
more excited, his argument changed into a warlike harangue. He played
upon the Indian portion of his audience as a maestro plays upon a
violin, until, their passions mastering their discretion, they sprang
to their feet with a whoop, brandishing their tomahawks and knives.
In the flutter of an eyelash everything was in confusion. The waiting
soldiers dashed forward like sprinters, cocking their rifles as they
ran. The officers jerked loose their swords, and the frontiersmen
snatched up their long-barrelled weapons. But Harrison was quickest
of all, for, drawing and cocking a pistol with a single motion, he
thrust its muzzle squarely into Tecumseh’s face. “Call off your men,”
he thundered, “or you’re a dead Indian!” Tecumseh, realizing that he
had overplayed his part and appreciating that this was an occasion when
discretion was of more avail than valor, motioned to his warriors, and
they silently and sullenly withdrew.
But it was no part of Tecumseh’s plan or of the British who were behind
him to bring on a war at this time, when their preparations were as
yet incomplete; so the following morning Tecumseh, who had little to
learn about the game of diplomacy, called on Harrison, expressed with
apparent sincerity his regret for the violence into which his young
men had been led by his words, and asked to have the council resumed.
Harrison well knew the great ability and influence of Tecumseh and was
anxious to conciliate him, for, truth to tell, the Americans were no
more prepared for war at this time than were the Indians. When asked
whether he intended to persist in his opposition to the cessions of
territory in the valley of the Wabash, Tecumseh firmly asserted his
intention to adhere to the old boundary, though he made it clear that,
if the governor would prevail upon the President to give up the lands
in question and would agree never to make another treaty without the
consent of all the tribes, he would pledge himself to be a faithful
ally of the United States. Otherwise he would be obliged to enter into
an alliance with the English. Harrison told him that the American
Government would never agree to his suggestions. “Well,” rejoined
Tecumseh, as though he had expected the answer he received, “as the
Great Chief is to decide the matter, I hope the Great Spirit will put
sense enough into his head to induce him to direct you to give up the
land. True, he is so far off that he will not be injured by the war. It
is you and I who will have to fight it out while he sits in his town
and drinks his wine.”
It only needed this open declaration of his hostile intentions by
Tecumseh to convince Harrison that the time had come to strike,
and strike hard. If the peril of the great Indian league of which
Tecumseh had boasted was to be averted, it must be done before that
confederation became too strongly organized to shatter. There was no
time to be lost. Harrison promptly issued a call for volunteers to take
part in a campaign against the Indians, at the same time despatching a
messenger to Washington requesting the loan of a regiment of regulars
to stiffen the raw levies who would compose the major part of the
expedition. News of Harrison’s call for men spread over the frontier
States as though disseminated by wireless, and soon the volunteers came
pouring in: frontiersmen from Kentucky and Tennessee in fur caps and
hunting-shirts of buckskin; woodsmen from the forests of Michigan and
Wisconsin, long-barrelled rifles on their shoulders and powder-horns
slung from their necks; militiamen from Indiana and Illinois, and
grizzled Indian-fighters from the towns along the river and the
backwoods settlements, who volunteered as much from love of fighting
as from hatred of the Indians. Then, one day, almost before Harrison
realized that they had started, a column of dusty, footsore soldiery
came tramping into Vincennes with the unmistakable swing of veterans.
It was the 4th Regiment of United States Infantry, commanded by Colonel
John Parker Boyd, who, upon receiving orders from Washington to hurry
to Harrison’s assistance, had put his men on flatboats at Pittsburg,
where the regiment was stationed, floated them down to the falls of
the Ohio, and marched them overland to Harrison’s headquarters at
Vincennes, accomplishing the four-hundred-mile journey in a time which
made that veteran frontiersman open his eyes with astonishment when he
heard it.
Boyd[C] was one of the most picturesque figures which our country
has ever produced. Born in Newburyport in 1764, the last British
soldier had left our shores before he was old enough to realize the
ambition of his life by obtaining a commission in the American army.
But his was not the disposition which could content itself with the
tedium of garrison life in time of peace; so, before he had passed
his four-and-twentieth birthday he had handed in his papers and taken
passage for India. The closing years of the eighteenth century saw
fighting going on from one end of Hindustan to the other. The British
were fighting the French, and the Hindus were fighting the Mohammedans,
so that men with military training found there a profitable market for
their services and their swords.
After serving for a time as cavalry instructor in the armies of the
Peishwa, as the ruler of the Mahratta tribes was called, Boyd obtained
a commission as colonel in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad,
distinguished himself in a series of whirlwind raids which he led into
the territory of the Sultan of Mysore during the campaign which ended
with the death of that tyrant in a last desperate stand at the gates of
his capital of Seringapatam, and was rewarded by the Nizam giving him
the command of a brigade of ten thousand turbaned troopers. Having by
this time accumulated a modest fortune as a result of the lavish pay he
had received from his princely employers, he resigned from the Nizam’s
service and organized an army of his own. The horses, elephants, and
guns were his personal property, and he rented his army to those native
princes who stood in need of its services and were able to pay for
them, very much as a garage rents an automobile.
Foreseeing the eventual conquest of India by the British and realizing
that it would mean the end of independent soldiering in that country,
he sold his army, elephants and all, to an Italian soldier of fortune
and turned his face toward his native land once more. At that time
soldiering was neither a very popular nor a very profitable profession
in the United States, so that Boyd, whose reputation as a daring leader
and a rigid disciplinarian had preceded him, had no difficulty in again
obtaining a commission under his own flag and in the service of his
own country, being offered by the government and promptly accepting
the colonelcy of the 4th Regiment of foot. An October evening in 1811,
then, saw him riding into Vincennes at the head of his travel-weary
regulars, in response to Governor Harrison’s request for reinforcements.