Panther in the Sky (115 page)

But in mutilating these corpses here on the battlefield, they had done their worst mischief, in Harrison’s mind. Now he could not
say for certain whether Tecumseh was dead or not. Harrison knew his old anxiety would be with him until he was sure Tecumseh was dead. And now he could not be sure. So for now in his reports to the government he would not make such a claim, only to have it refuted someday when Tecumseh showed up alive on still another battlefield. Harrison had learned the hard way, after Tippecanoe, not to exaggerate his claims of what he had done against these Shawnees.

The only things that made him feel reasonably sure Tecumseh had fallen were the sudden cessation of the chief’s great voice and the curious way the battle had ended. One minute the Indians had been fighting with stubborn ferocity. But after that voice had fallen still, the resistance had simply melted away.

I
N ANOTHER PART OF THE BATTLEFIELD,
C
ANADIAN FARMERS
were digging graves for Indian corpses. They had been called together for the task by Benjamin Arnold, the mill owner. Arnold was grim and silent. The sight of the American militiaman and soldiers prowling the field like buzzards picking away at the dead warriors disgusted him more than anything he had ever seen in his life. He believed the Indians’ statements that his friend Tecumseh was dead. But he had not seen his body on this field, and he was thankful for that.

One of his grave diggers threw a shovelful of dirt, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then paused to watch some Kentuckians cutting and then strenuously pulling skin off the thigh of a dead warrior. The grave digger spat in their direction and said, “Workin’ hard, aren’t you, boys?”

“Damn right, Canajun! This here Tecumsey’s tough as an ol’ tom turkey!”

“I hate to dash y’ down after all your hard labor, lads, but you aren’t skinning who you think you are.”

A soldier snickered.

“I reckon when we get back to Kaintuck, won’t nobody know no difference!”

O
N THE MORNING WHEN THE
A
MERICANS WERE PEELING
carcasses at the Thames River battleground, four Shawnee warriors many miles away were peeling slabs of bark off a large elm. The tree was very hard to peel. The bark squealed and groaned as if the living tree were in pain.

Two hundred paces away, warriors and chieftains were digging a grave, using none of the iron tools of white men. They dug with elk-bone hoes in the rich ground beside a creek, under a tree they had aligned with other landmarks. They had made a pledge among themselves. They would never forget where the grave was, and no white man would ever be told of it.

In a
wigewa
off from the edge of a village, Star Watcher knelt on a reed mat on the floor beside the naked body of her brother. Her gray hair was unbraided and hung about her head and shoulders, hiding her face. She washed off his red and black war paint and the dried blood from his mouth and chin. She squeezed the cloth in a kettle of warm water, and then she began washing and rubbing off the encrusted blood that covered the deep chest. In the thick muscle near his left nipple were a puckered, black-edged bullet hole and three small buckshot holes. She washed the wounds gently, as if they might hurt. Upon her heart was a weight so heavy she could hardly draw breath. She remembered how, when he was newborn, she had helped wipe the slime of birth off his tiny body. She remembered how, when he was a boy, she had washed the cuts and gashes and splinter gouges that he got in his rough play, and that he had never cried or even whimpered. She could still see some of those little scars on his hairless bronze skin and could remember how he had gotten each one, and the sight of each little scar gave her a sweet pain.

And there were the bigger scars.

She cleaned the dark-scabbed wound in his left arm from the battle two days ago at the Forks and the hard-ridged shot scar in his leg from the battle at Monguagon a year ago. And she washed his sinewy legs, the straight one, then the crooked one
broken in a bison hunt on the prairie near the Mother of Rivers half a lifetime ago.

Weshemoneto may help a man escape death many times, she thought. But he does not let a man live forever in one body.

And as she washed his skin she was remembering too the many wounds she had washed and healed on the beloved flesh of her husband, Stands Firm, in the years of his life. The sweet and bitter burden grew still heavier on her heart. Her husband’s body still lay wherever it had fallen on the battlefield far away.

At nightfall yesterday after the battle, Charcoal Burner had stolen in among the American sentries on the battlefield with two warriors, and they had gone to the place by the big fallen tree where they had seen the bloody officer kill their chief. In the black night they had found Tecumseh’s body by touch. Through the greatest stealth and effort, they had carried his body off the battlefield from among the sentries, outside the glow of Harrison’s hundreds of campfires, hearing in the distant camp the thousands of Long Knives laughing and singing in celebration of their victory. Charcoal Burner and his warriors had carried the body of Tecumseh a long way through swamps and dark woods to their horses. They had tied his body across the saddle of his own white horse and had ridden the rest of the night to this town, the town of a tribe that the Americans supposed was neutral in the white men’s war.

They had not been able to find the body of Stands Firm. If they had, Star Watcher could not have prepared it anyway because Stands Firm had been a Chalagawtha Shawnee, and she, his wife, was a Kispoko. So now she touched her husband’s body only in her memory while she washed her brother’s body with her hands.

And as she washed her brother’s wounds, she was also washing the many wounds of all the Shawandasse, the South Wind People, because Tecumseh had been the People.

When she had finished bathing the body of her brother and had combed his hair, she dressed him in a clean and unadorned suit of deerskins and put upon his feet a new pair of elkhide moccasins decorated with beads, the pair she had made for him before the flight from Fort Malden. When she had made them she had thought he would wear them to walk upon this earth. She pulled down on his crooked leg and pushed up the other so that the feet were side by side, so that he would not have to limp anymore where he went. Tears were running down both sides of her nose, leaving cold wetness on her mouth.

Now he was ready. She sat back on her heels and parted her
hair from her face and looked at him. In the smoky beam of daylight from the smokehole in the roof, his face looked serene and young and beautiful, shimmering with silver light through the wetness of her eyes. He appeared to be a man who had never been troubled, a peaceable man who was having a pleasant dream. As she looked at him she remembered the other side of the Circle of Time, before the Long Knives had come, and she saw a misty land of green meadows and corn fields and a large town of gray
wigewas
in a valley between bluffs gushing with springs, and her father and mother sitting in front of their lodge, and Tecumseh as a boy sitting before them and listening to what his father told him.

Now that she had done the preparations and had no more to do, she could no longer bear the weight on her heart, and she began the lament.

When they heard the vibrating wail from inside the
wigewa,
Open Door, Thick Water, Charcoal Burner, and Cat Pouncing rose from where they had been sitting in prayer. They walked single file down to the creek and waded into the cold water. They drank from their hands until they could hold no more water, then made themselves vomit until their insides were empty and clean. Then they went back up to the
wigewa
and went in. Each took one end of a pole at a corner of the blanket litter upon which the body now lay, and with Star Watcher following and wailing they carried him down to the grave. They lowered him down and placed him within the bark slabs, in such a way that if anyone ever dug up a body and said it was the body of Tecumseh, as many would surely do over the next hundred years, the Shawnees would know whether it was true.

Open Door pinched sacred tobacco out of a bag and went to each of the four sides of the grave and sprinkled it in, chanting barely above a whisper. Then he stood and held his fire stick against his chest. Star Watcher stopped wailing. The wind off the wide lake flapped Open Door’s cape and shook the feathers and ornaments of the grave diggers and bearers and blew Star Watcher’s thick gray hair away from her face. Her face was smeared with ashes and was as gray as her hair. Her fists were clenched at her abdomen as if she were trying to keep from falling open.

Then her brother the Prophet moved the fire stick over the grave. And Thick Water, who had not wanted to leave his beloved leader before the great battle, groaned and shivered as the last slab of elm bark was put in place, hiding forever this body of Tecumseh.
Cat Pouncing shut his eyes and bit inside his mouth until he tasted blood, and kept from crying out.

Now they would all have to do the hardest thing they had ever done since the Eye of the Panther had crossed the sky. They would have to go on, with Tecumseh behind their hopes instead of in front of them. They would have to go on that way until he found a way to come around to them again.

For the red man of that day, the warpath was the path to a quick death; peace was the path to a lingering death. For the white man, the warpath was often the path toward the White House or Governor’s Mansion.

William Henry Harrison campaigned successfully for the presidency in 1840 with a slogan evoking his “victory” at Tippecanoe. Never a man to use one word when a thousand would do, he gave a two-hour inaugural address in a cold wind, took ill, and died after only thirty-one days in office.

Richard Mentor Johnson rode to the vice presidency in 1836 on the jingle “Rumpsey dumpsey, rumpsey dumpsey, Richard Johnson killed Tecumseh”—though in the chaos of that battle it was never determined who really shot the great warrior down. Other veterans of the Battle of the Thames garnered votes for decades afterward for their part in defeating Tecumseh’s warriors.

Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee prophet, lingered on with a dwindling following of believers until 1836, when he died in Kansas. He was not, as some popular writers have stated, disowned or banished from the tribe by his brother.

Black Hoof, who had led the Shawnees in decades of resistance and then had tried to accommodate the conquerors, lived to see the last corner of Ohio partitioned out from under his people. He died at the age of 105 in 1831, and that year his followers left Ohio for Kansas.

The Shawnees who had remained loyal to Tecumseh until his death fought on against the Americans through the War of 1812 but were not effective without his leadership. Years after the war they began filtering back from Canada into Ohio and Indiana. Now a few hundred of their descendants make up the Shawnee Nation United Remnant Band, whose principal chief is Tukemas/Hawk Pope, a descendant of Thick Water. With patience and effort, they have managed to buy a secluded twenty-eight-acre
plot in their ancestral lands for a ceremonial ground. For the first time in more than a century and a half, Tecumseh’s people have a piece of their homeland, and it is sacred to them.

In the 175 years since Tecumseh was killed, scholars and historians have quibbled over details of his life, career, and death—thus perpetuating and compounding some myths and, here and there, probably preserving a truth.

Was Tecumseh born near Piqua, as he reportedly told some white men, or near Chillicothe, as one of his descendants reportedly told other white men? Was he married once or twice? Was he a sexual profligate who left half-breed descendants all over the country? Did he really propose marriage to Rebekah Galloway, or was that just the Galloway family’s romanticized version of a more earthy incident? Did Tecumseh make one recruiting journey among the southern tribes or two? Was Tecumseh the whole intelligence behind his brother’s religious movement, or was the Shawnee prophet an inspired leader in his own right? Did Simon Kenton recognize and refuse to identify Tecumseh’s corpse on the battlefield the morning after the Battle of the Thames, or had the body been removed during the night?

My own extensive research for this book was not for the purpose of resolving those and other perennial disputes, many of which I know cannot be answered unequivocally. Not only do white scholars still argue over them, the various surviving factions of the Shawnee nation have their conflicting traditions. Even eyewitnesses, both red and white, changed their accounts as they grew old and started depending more upon what they had heard than on what they had seen.

No, my research was aimed at something beyond those old contentions. Though I pored over the usual documents, diaries, treaties, memoirs, history books, and battle accounts, paced over old battlegrounds in the United States and Canada, and interviewed experts red and white to be as historically right as possible throughout this book, I was looking especially for insights into the culture, morality, ceremony, and psychic condition of the Shawnee people in the time of their greatest crisis. Neither Tecumseh nor Tenskwatawa nor other great chiefs of the woodland tribes can be understood outside the context of their tribal ways or the disasters visited upon them by the Anglo-American invasion.

Often in this book I have written the red people’s version of some particular incident. Sometimes their version can be reconciled with that of white historians, but not always. Often I have
chosen the red man’s version because that is the way my principal characters would have perceived it and sometimes just because I found it more credible.