For Honour's Sake (11 page)

Two months earlier, citizens from Knox County had descended on Vincennes, Indiana, to deliver a resolution to Harrison that demanded the destruction of Prophetstown. As the village was only 150 miles up the Wabash from the territorial capital, they claimed it constituted a
clear and present danger to the settlers. Prophetstown and the confederacy it embodied, they said, “is a British scheme, and … the agents of that power are constantly exciting the Indians to hostilities against the United States.” Another resolution, forwarded by residents of St. Clair, Illinois, called “the seditious village … the great nursery of hostile Indians and traitorous British Indian traders.”

The
Kentucky Gazette
railed: “From the friendly course pursued by Mr. Jefferson, towards our red neighbors, and which has been followed by Mr. Madison, we had supposed the Indians would never more treat us otherwise than as brethren. But we have been mistaken—British intrigue and British gold, it seems, has greater influence with them of late than American justice and benevolence …. We have in our possession information which proves beyond doubt, the late disturbances to be owing to the too successful intrigues of British emissaries.”
¹¹
Tellingly, the evidence of British intriguing was never produced.

All this fervour suited Harrison well, for he planned a military operation to wipe out the village the whites were beginning to call Tippecanoe. The possibility that such an attack might provoke war with Britain was even welcome. “The people of this Territory and Kentucky are extremely pressing in offers of their service for an expedition into the Indian Country. Any number of men might be obtained for this purpose or for a march into Canada.” Harrison declared that vast numbers of Indians were returning from British trading posts laden with rifles, fuses, powder, and lead. “And that the language and measures of the Indians indicate nothing but war.”
¹²

In reality, Tecumseh was keeping his people in check, for the time was not yet ripe for military action. The confederacy could not act alone. But the warrior chief believed war between Great Britain and America was inevitable and that then the confederacy could act and possibly succeed. Until then he urged the warriors to bide their time and chastened those who carried out small running raids against frontier settlers during the summer of 1811. Tecumseh knew the actions of these renegades could well provide the excuse that Harrison needed.

Not that Harrison needed the excuses of others. He manufactured his own quite capably. As the Twelfth Congress started assembling that
November in Washington for a new session and its members openly talked of war, Harrison closed upon Tippecanoe with a force of about one thousand regulars and militia. From intelligence reports, Harrison knew that Tecumseh had recently departed on a winter-long tour to build support for the confederacy among the Creek to the south. “I hope,” Harrison wrote to Eustis on the eve of his march, “before his return that that part of the fabrick, which he considered complete will be demolished and even its foundation rooted up.”
¹³
Harrison intended to destroy Tippecanoe and kill or scatter its residents.

On November 6, the Americans cut through a series of swamps and dense thickets to reach a plateau overlooking the village from a distance of about a mile. Harrison sent a message to the Prophet that he was willing to talk, but a deserter from the American camp warned that this was a deception; the plan was to attack Tippecanoe in the morning. The warriors with the Prophet decided that they had no recourse but to try to seize the advantage by assaulting Harrison's camp that night. Only about 500 strong, they could never hope to fend off the Americans if they were allowed to move against the village in full battle order. The Prophet sought the counsel of the spirits and reported not only that the Americans would be surprised but that their gunpowder would turn to sand. For added measure, the Indians would be rendered bulletproof.

Heavy cloud cover cloaked the warrior advance on the camp in inky darkness, but just as the order for the attack was imminent a sentry fired a shot in alarm. With a scream of defiance the warriors rushed the camp, sending the sentries reeling toward its centre, where the Americans formed a defensive line. Although the American formation buckled several times, forcing a short withdrawal to regroup, the Indians were unable to break it completely. Finally, as the first glimmer of dawn tinged the eastern skyline, Harrison saw that he outnumbered the Indians and ordered a counterattack on both flanks. Caught in the open, the warriors were quickly routed, falling back to the village. After two and a half hours Harrison's men had won the field. The butcher's bill was staggering for the Americans. Harrison counted 68 of his men dead and 120 wounded—almost one-fifth of his entire
force. Although defeated, the Indians had fared better. Estimates ranged from 20 to 50 killed.

Having taken such a hard battering, the Americans failed to assault the village. Fearing a renewed attack, they threw up fortifications and hunkered in their shelter for the next two days except for brief sorties out onto the field to scalp the Indian corpses left behind. Some fixed these grisly trophies to their gun muzzles. As darkness fell on November 8, a patrol probed the village and found it deserted save a wounded warrior and an old woman both accidentally left behind during the withdrawal. Harrison ordered the village plundered of anything useful to the Indians such as pots and utensils, seized what corn stocks could be used by his men, and then burned the village to the ground. He made sure that the granary, vital to winter survival, was torched. The next day, the Americans loaded their many wounded on wagons and trailed slowly away from the blackened, smouldering ruins of Prophetstown.
¹⁴

When Tecumseh returned to the village in the early spring of 1812, he later recalled, standing “upon the ashes of my own home … 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.”
¹⁵

Even though Harrison had marched against Prophetstown with the clear intent to annihilate it, Americans in the west and many congressmen in Washington were quick to declare the night attack on his camp clear evidence of Indian treachery. Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson, commander of the Tennessee militia and a man who never hesitated to slaughter an Indian whenever possible, wrote to congratulate Harrison on the action. But, he said, the “blood of our murdered countrymen must be avenged. I do hope that Government will see that it is necessary to act efficiently and that this hostile band which must be excited to war by the secret agents of Great Britain must be destroyed.”
¹⁶

The Battle of Tippecanoe became a rallying cry for the pro-war movement. Preposterous accounts were published in newspapers and pamphlets that elevated each fallen soldier or militaman into a heroic
martyr who surrendered life in order to protect innocent American settlers from being murdered in their homes by savage Indians. In Kentucky, the legislature passed a resolution blaming Great Britain for “inciting the savages … to murder the inhabitants of our defenceless frontiers—furnishing them with arms and ammunition … to attack our forces; to the loss of a number of our brave men.”
¹⁷
In the House, Tennessee's Felix Grundy declared that America must “drive the British from our Continent.” Doing so would ensure that “they will no longer have an opportunity of intriguing with our Indian neighbors, and setting on the ruthless savage to tomahawk our women and children. That nation will lose her Canadian trade, and, by having no resting place in this country, her means of annoying us will be diminished.”
¹⁸

There was little truth to these accusations against the British. As Tecumseh, the Prophet, and their followers had shown increasing hostility toward America, the British representatives with whom they had contact counselled caution and moderation. Maj. Gen. Isaac Brock, Upper Canada's military commander, enunciated British policy clearly in instructions issued in the spring of 1811 to his officers stationed on the frontier. “I am decidedly of opinion that upon every principle of policy our interest should lead us to use all our endeavours to prevent a rupture between the Indians and the subjects of the United States.” His officers and those of the Indian Department were “to use all their influence to dissuade the Indians from their projected plan of hostility, given them clearly to understand that they must not expect any assistance from us. The officers, however, must be extremely cautious in pointing out to them, that it is for their good only that this advice is given to them, and not from any dereliction of that regard with which we always view their interests.”
¹⁹

These were not just empty words. Throughout 1811, British agents stationed at frontier trading posts reduced the amounts of gunpowder and lead normally issued to the Indians so they would have sufficient supply to enable hunting but no surplus for military use. In past years, one report stated, the Indians coming to Amherstburg had been issued almost 3,200 pounds of powder; this was cut to 1,211 pounds.
²⁰

The British effort to avert war on the American frontier had little to do with altruism toward either the Indians or the settlers. Unlike the
politicians in London, Brock fully expected that Canada could face attack from the United States at any moment. He hoped that by constraining the Indians to keep the peace, their military potential could be retained until the Americans declared war outright. Then he would rally the Indians to the British cause and deploy them effectively in concert with his own regulars and Canadian militiamen. If the Indians acted independently, Brock feared they would be slaughtered by the American troops, resulting in the confederacy being scattered and its members so demoralized they would be of no use in the future defence of Canada.

Brock's pragmatic approach was typical of British North American dealings with Indians, which largely continued the policies of New France. For the 150 years of its duration New France's European settler population had always been grossly outnumbered by the Indians. To secure their power in North America, the French had entered into alliances with various Indian nations that established military and commercial inter-dependencies. Fur-trade camps, missionary outposts, and military garrisons were scattered thinly through the frontier beyond the St. Lawrence River's banks where most of the
habitant
settlers lived. New France's influence over the Indian nations was cemented by the mutual benefits realized through the fur trade more than military dominance. Indeed, without these military alliances, New France could not have survived.

New France was almost perpetually at war with the British colonies south of it. On the northern frontier of these colonies the British authorities established similar trade and military alliances with Indian nations that were pitted against those allied to the French. When New France was vanquished in 1769, the British conquerors not only undertook to quell discontent among the
habitants
but also sought to develop peaceful relationships with the majority of the Indian nations, for, like the French had been, they were grossly outnumbered. Also like the French, the British commercial interest in the newly acquired colonies was based on the fur trade rather than agricultural expansion. This was no longer the case in the older southern colonies that would form the United States.

The fur trade simply could not exist without a wilderness peopled by Indians who could trap and skin animals and then deliver their pelts
to the traders in exchange for European goods. This coexistent relationship meant that the Europeans living in British North America did not see the Indians as savage enemies impeding the march of progress. While Indian nations were displaced by settlement within Upper and Lower Canada, the pace of this agrarian expansion was sufficiently slow that the advance was not preceded by bloody territorial warfare.

Heavily influenced by the church, the British administration also looked upon the Indian nations with a paternalistic eye. The French missionaries had sought to convert the Indians in order to save their souls and gradually wean them from a hunting-and-gathering life considered at odds with the influence of Christianity. But missionary zeal after Britain conquered New France became less vigorous as the power of the Roman Catholic Church was reduced. Instead the British governors made little effort to undermine the traditional Indian way of life so long as the natives kept the peace and continued to work in the fur trade. And, knowing the thin line of redcoats and Canadian militia could not alone repel any determined American invasion, the British continued to foster a web of military alliances with the Indians on the frontier and to husband their power so that they could be unleashed against any invading force.