Panther in the Sky (86 page)

The British officers were fascinated with Tecumseh. Here was one red man they did not treat with condescension. Not only was he an appealing specimen at first glance, he was good-humored, amiable, and charming. He could speak clear English and was one of those rare natives who had some concept of European culture and military strategy. So the officers were attentive as he presented the wampum belt, and they heeded his words respectfully.

“Father, we have a belt to show you, which was given to our chiefs when you laid the French on the ground. Here it is, Father. On one end is your hand, see; on the other, that of the red people. Both hands are in white wampum, but the Indian end of the belt is darker than the other, and in the middle you see the hearts of both. Father, our old chiefs have been sitting on this belt ever since, keeping it concealed and running our country. But now the warriors have become the chiefs, and have turned their faces toward you, never again to look toward the Americans. We the warriors now manage the affairs of our nations. We sit at the border, where the contest will begin. Father, I discovered this belt and took it out from under our chiefs. Take it and look.” He handed the belt to the senior British officer, who passed it on for all to see and touch. Tecumseh went on:

“Your father has nourished us, and raised us up from childhood. We are now men arid think ourselves able to defend our country. In our cause you have always given us active help and advice.” Tecumseh restrained himself from mentioning the British officers’ cowardice at Fallen Timbers; this was a diplomatic mission. “Now we are determined to defend our country ourselves; we expect that you will forward to us what may be necessary to supply our wants.

“Father, I intend to go toward the midday to summon the southern nations into our confederation, and expect before I see you again next autumn, that that will be done. I ask you to be charitable to our women and children. The young men can more easily provide for themselves than they.

“Now, Father,” Tecumseh said, the wind from the lake buffeting the feather in his turban and whipping his cloak around his legs, “I thank you for what you can do for us. I want you to believe
that when the Long Knives try to come to Canada, my warriors will never quit their father or let go his hand.”

My God, Elliott was thinking as he watched James Girty write all this down. What a stir this is going to cause up the line! These Shawnee brothers are like sparks around a powder keg!

T
HE
S
HAWNEE HUNTERS IN THE WET WOODS HEARD THE
sound coming down from the north like a windstorm and saw the treetops and underbrush beginning to shake, but wind never had sounded like this, and they cringed down, looking up in terror toward the high branches.

The wind sound was full of chattering and squeaking, so loud it was painful in the ears, and dark things could be seen moving, coming from that northerly direction, as if it were a wind full of crazy birds. It came on, and the dark things were so numerous, they darkened the woods with shadow, and the treetops shuddered with the agitation of their coming, and the shrieking grew louder. Suddenly one of the hunters, his eyes wide with disbelief, cried out:

“A-ne-quoi!”

Squirrels!

This was not a wind rushing through the treetops or a cloud of birds, but a horde of squirrels, hundreds of hundreds of squirrels, leaping from branch to branch or bounding along the ground, chattering and squeaking as they fled southward.

It was a sign. Squirrels lived in small families, not herds or packs. But under some direction of the Great Good Spirit—or perhaps of the Evil Spirit—they were fleeing in hordes, countless squirrels moving with one common will.

Now as the cloud of squirrels passed over, leaf debris and insects, even some squirrels, rained from the treetops onto the warriors below. For a long time they knelt with their heads bent down
and prayed as the squeaking multitudes went over and around them and rushed shrilly onward toward the O-hi-o-se-pe.

When their din had finally faded to silence, there were injured squirrels squirming on the ground and dead squirrels by dozens, all for the gathering. These men had been hunting in the woods for many days, for food for Prophet’s Town, and had found hardly any game. It was as if all the animals had left the place, frightened off by the strangeness of the season, and the hunters were hungry. But they would not touch the squirrels that had fallen at their feet. These animals, acting in this frightening and desperate way, must be full of bad medicine and should not be eaten.

T
ECUMSEH NODDED WHEN HUNTERS CAME IN AND TOLD HIM
of the great flights of the
a-ne-quoi.
Bands of hunters in several places had seen such flights. It was happening all over. Most of the squirrels drowned when they reached the flooding O-hi-o-se-pe and tried to cross it. Tecumseh remembered one other time when this strangeness had swept through the squirrels. It was when he was a very young boy. It had been followed by the troubles with the Long Knives, by the war between the British and the Americans, and by other strange signs. Tecumseh sat and thought of the signs. Since the melting of the deep snows this spring, all of the world had been troubled and full of omens.

Rains had come early, days and days of rains heavier than anyone could remember. With the melting snows these rains had fed the rivers until they were yellow-gray and swift and high, and then they had flowed over their banks and covered the bottomlands. These floods, to Tecumseh, were like the flood of white men coming ever into the country, as he had told Harrison. Tribes along the Wabash-se-pe and its tributaries had moved their camps up onto the hillsides and prairies, and the rains had kept falling, and the days were dark, the nights cloudy and moonless. Waters of the turbid Wabash came up within inches of the House of the Stranger at Prophet’s Town, and only by praying and using his greatest medicine was Open Door able to stop the river from rising far up into his town.

This stopping of the flood had been Open Door’s first demonstration of power for many years—since the Black Sun, in fact—but he had little time to bask in the glory of what he had achieved before a greater evil fell upon the People, one against which he seemed to have almost no power at all. It was a terrible new disease. Children and adults grew feverish and could not swallow
and declined into states of weakness. Something like dirty gray skin grew in their throats, bloody mucus poured from their noses, their necks swelled, their hearts skipped and fluttered, and dozens quickly died. Many who did not die could not move their hands or feet for weeks, and some were left with uncontrollably trembling hands, others with an overpowering weakness. Open Door with all his chants and remedies had been able to cure only a few, and some of those had suddenly died after they thought they were well, so his powers as a healer came under doubt.

And then when at last, in the Green Moon, the rains stopped and the sky cleared, another awesome sign redoubled the People’s fear:

There was something in the sky!

It was bright like a star but was not a point of light like a star; it was long, a streak. It was in the northern sky, in a place where usually no major star was. It reappeared on every clear night, just perceptibly higher, as if it were moving slowly across the sky toward the south. All the red people watched it and wondered at it and turned to their shamans for answers, but in virtually every Indian town it was thought to be connected with the Shawnee prophet, who, five years ago, had made the sun go dark. Nobody could look at the bright streak in the distant sky without thinking of the Shawnee prophet or of the great sign predicted by his brother, the sign that would come when the alliance was ready and the red men would turn back the white men. To Tecumseh, who had been born under a shooting star, it had to be a part of his pattern of signs. One thing he knew: he must go to the southern tribes. This year the oneness would have to be completed.

Thus for those who were committed to the Shawnee brothers, the bright thing in the sky was a speck of hope; for the others it was a troubling omen of a conflict they did not want.

Being one on the other, it unsettled everyone, and people began doing strange things. All over the frontier, things began happening that should not have happened. The world was unsettled this year, and the People began behaving from the darker side of their souls.

T
HE
S
PANIARD
B
AZADONE, INNKEEPER AND TRADER IN VINCENNES
, a man known to have a penchant for trouble, was in one of his dark moods when the knock came at his door. It was very late at night, and he had been poring over a huge portfolio of papers that always put him in a bad mood.

A quarter of a century ago, when General George Rogers
Clark had been to Vincennes on his campaign against Little Turtle’s confederation, Clark had seized a boatload of Bazadone’s goods to help provision his troops. Bazadone had begun a lawsuit against Clark, a lawsuit that had by now moved into its second generation of lawyers and still was not settled, even though it had helped substantially to bring the old general to financial ruin and transform him into a bitter old drunkard. The litigation had taken its toll on Bazadone’s soul, too. Now at the knock on the door, he slapped down the papers and went to open it, holding up a lantern.

There in the night stood an Indian, a Muskogee far, far from home, to whom Bazadone had sold some rum earlier in the day. The Indian was now quite drunk, grinning crookedly, swaying, and asking for more rum. Bazadone knew the Indian had nothing left with which to pay for any more rum, so he told him to go away.

The Muskogee, weaving this way and that like a tree about to fall over, began to plead, and Bazadone slammed the door in his face with a curse. When the Indian began knocking on the door again, Bazadone grabbed down his flintlock, which was loaded with bird shot. He flung open the door and discharged the gun point-blank into the Indian’s abdomen, spewing blood and innards all over the yard.

W
ITHERED
H
AND THE
P
OTAWATOMI WAS ALWAYS VERY SENSITIVE
to signs, and when he was unsettled by those this spring, he interpreted them to mean that he must do something to stop the white men who were spreading out from Kaskaskia into his hunting grounds in the Illinois country. Withered Hand considered himself the most important ally of Tecumseh and Open Door, but he also considered himself their equal in judgment and ability, and he did not feel bound to sit and wait for their signal to resist the white men. In the spring, as soon as there was sufficient grass to feed horses, he rode out with a band of warriors and began raiding isolated farms. Settlers began deserting their homesteads and fleeing to Kentucky and Kaskaskia.

A
PARTY OF GOVERNMENT SURVEYORS UP FROM
C
INCINNATI
, in black hats and greatcoats, with their supplies and instruments on packhorses, moved up the Wabash, past the mouth of Raccoon Creek to a meadow surrounded by budding hardwoods. They unloaded their equipment, made a camp, built a fire, and marked the point that was to be the western end of the Ten o’Clock Treaty
line according to Governor Harrison’s treaty of 1809. They were cold and hungry. They would rest now and begin their survey the next morning.

“Look,” one whispered, raising his head from a canvas-wrapped transit he had just set down. “Injuns right yonder.”

The warriors, clad in plain, unadorned deerhide clothing, had appeared in the moist young grass of the meadow without a sound. They were three or four times the number of men in the surveyors’ party, and they carried muskets. They had on no war paint.

The party’s guide, a hunter from Vincennes, calmed the surveyors with a chuckle.

“Them’s Weas,” he said. “Friendly little fellers from just up-river, never gave anybody a bit o’ trouble. Heh, heh! Fact, they help keep th’ gov’nor informed o’ what mischief them Shawnee scoundrels is up to. Ready to share with some guests, gents?” And he got up and started walking toward the Weas with his right hand up and a big smile on his stubbly face.

But the warriors walked past him as if they had not seen him and went into the camp. Without a word they snatched up all the surveyors’ gear, their guns and provisions. They dumped some of the instruments in the fire, threw some in the creek, and broke others by hurling them against rocks. They emptied the priming powder out of the white men’s guns. When one big surveyor tried to shove away an Indian who was reaching for his powder horn, three warriors converged on him and threw him to earth. Then the first yanked off his powder horn, breaking the strap.

When the whites at last were thoroughly disarmed and stripped of their possessions, one of the Weas pointed southward and said in English:

“Go that way. Go past Vincennes very fast and not stop. If your faces are in our country again, you will not be happy we see you.”

G
OVERNOR
H
ARRISON COULD SEE THE PATTERN BEGINNING
to emerge. Horses were being stolen from farms in the border areas. Potawatomis known to be under the influence of the Shawnee prophet were raising hell in Illinois. Pacane, a Miami chief who had signed the Treaty of Fort Wayne, had now turned around and balked at receiving annuities, protesting that he had been forced to put his mark on the treaty. A party sent out to
survey the Fort Wayne Treaty lands had been threatened and chased out, just as Tecumseh had warned him they would be.

There was no doubt of it in Harrison’s mind: the Indians under the leadership of the Shawnee brothers at Prophet’s Town were commencing their hostilities. The governor had been fretting all winter about the vulnerability of Vincennes, which could be reached in a few days by canoe from Prophet’s Town.