Tecumseh and Brock (12 page)

Tecumseh had not really expected a deal with Harrison, and he did not get one. The prospect of peace with the United States was closed at Vincennes.

In October 1810, Tecumseh turned to the British at Fort Malden, in the southwestern corner of Upper Canada. Constructed between 1797 and 1799, Fort Malden was the most important British military
post on Lake Erie. Prior to the implementation of Jay's Treaty between
Britain and the United States in 1796, which required the British to evacuate all forts located on American soil, the main British post had been at Detroit. Fort Malden was located at the site of the present-day town of Amherstburg, Ontario, a few kilometres south of Windsor. From the fort, the Indian Department maintained contact with native tribes that were friendly to the British. These tribes were vitally important to the defence of Upper Canada against a potential American assault. Fort Malden was also key to the protection of the crucial Amherstburg Naval Yard, where the British built and equipped ships to expand their fleet on Lake Erie.
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Arriving at the fort in mid-November 1810, accompanied by 134 men, 28 women, and 8 children of Shawnee, Potawatomi, Ottawa, Winnebago, and Sac descent, Tecumseh announced in a speech to British officers and officials that he wanted to rekindle their former alliance. At Fort Malden two years prior, Tecumseh had been unwilling to commit himself to backing the British side in an armed struggle with the United States. This time, he told the British that he expected war and his goal was to have the British on side. “We sit at or near the borders where the contest will begin,” he said. At the very least, he wanted supplies from the British. He had brought an old wampum belt, which signified the former native alliance with the British. During the meeting, he asked all those in attendance to touch the belt.

Then he said, “Father, intend proceeding toward the Mid Day [the south], and expect before next autumn and before I visit you again that the business will be done. I request, Father, that you will be charitable to our king's [old men], women and children. The young men can more easily provide for themselves than they.”
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The British wanted to keep Tecumseh on side in case hostilities with the United States erupted into armed conflict, but they did not want to be blamed by the Americans for a war between the native confederacy and the U.S. On November 25, 1810, Sir James Craig, who had not been present at Fort Malden, sent a message to the British chargé d'affaires in Washington telling him to alert the American government that the native confederacy was planning for war. On February 2, 1811, Craig again expressed his anxiety about a native attack on the Americans in a letter to Francis Gore, Upper Canada's lieutenant-governor, stressing that British policy was to urge the native peoples against war with the U.S. The message should be, he told Gore, that although the British would remain friends to the native confederacy, Tecumseh should not expect aid if his people went to war against the Americans.
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The British, as Tecumseh already believed, were not to be trusted as allies in a war against the United States, unless it was their war as well.

For the two years prior to the outbreak of the War of 1812, Tecumseh continued to travel throughout the regions on the western rim of American settlement. He was tireless in his campaign to win native peoples over to his cause. Some of his journeys are well documented, while others are less certain, handed down to future generations in the form of oral history. That he spent time with militant Muscogees (Creeks) is well established. Much less certain is the claim that he visited Cherokee leaders in the mountainous terrain of North Carolina. We hear of him in Chickasaw territory en route to the Mississippi. Other stories tell of him among the Cherokees in Tennessee, not far from the region where he and Cheeseekau had once spent time. There is evidence that he visited the Osages west of the Mississippi, counting on their anger at the Americans to offset a dispute with the Missouri Shawnees. On the northwestern leg of his journeys, Tecumseh traversed the Illinois country and the upper Mississippi. In this vast terrain, he was courting Potawatomis, Winnebagoes, Sacs, Foxes, Dakotas, Kickapoos, Ojibwas, and Ottawas.
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During these travels, which were monitored with concern by the Americans, Tecumseh was building an informal political organization, a grouping of peoples who shared a common vision. The Shawnee chief met with both successes and failures: he won some to his banner; others chose to sit on the sidelines; still others aligned themselves with the Americans (some of the latter group had grown dependent on annuities from the U.S. government).

On September 20, 1811, Tecumseh rode into Tuckhabatchee, the capital of the Muscogee people, in present-day Alabama. Twenty warriors — members of the Shawnee, Kickapoo, and Winnebago nations — rode with him. The last months of a tense peace between the United States and the native peoples were quickly passing. And with the War Hawks stoking the fires in Washington, the U.S. and Britain were well down the path to war.

Thousands of people watched the dramatic arrival of Tecumseh and his followers. Tuckhabatchee was overflowing with visitors, in town for the meeting of the Muscogee national council. Big Warrior, Hopoithle Miko, and other important chiefs were in attendance. Longtime North Carolina politician Benjamin Hawkins, the government-appointed representative to the Muscogee nation, came to Tuckhabatchee to serve as the eyes and ears of the United States and to speak up for U.S. interests. A number of white traders were also on hand, as well as representatives from the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee tribes, and even some from the Seminole nation in Spanish-ruled Florida.
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The Muscogee lived in settlements in the area now known as the Old Southwest (present-day Alabama and Mississippi) and western portions of Georgia, building their towns along the rivers and creeks of that lush territory, which is why settlers called them the “Creeks.” Tuckhabatchee was strategically located at the junction of the Tallapoosa and Coosa Rivers.

As was the case with the native peoples of the North, the arrival of white settlers in their territory had led to a growing crisis within Muscogee society. In the new territories, settlers could purchase land cheaply, at between $1.25 and $2.00 an acre, but many preferred simply to squat on the land in the hope that they wouldn't be bothered by the U.S. government or by the native peoples. Outfitted with slaves — some settlers bought their own and others purchased slaves from the Spaniards farther south — they aspired to become wealthy members of the planter class. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, the slave-owning settlers introduced the cotton gin in the Mississippi Territory (present-day Alabama and Mississippi). By 1810, slaves made up almost 40 percent of the population of the settlements along the Tombigbee River, one of the two major rivers (along with the Alabama) flowing from Mississippi south through Alabama.
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Slave ownership was also widespread among the Muscogees in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During the American Revolution, Muscogees allied to the British captured black slaves from southern whites. In the 1790s, the use of the cotton gin, which did so much to reinvigorate slavery in the South, promoted the institution of black slavery among the upper crust of Muscogee society. In some cases, Muscogee women were removed from work in the fields to be replaced by black slaves of both genders.
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The Muscogee chief Big Warrior was among those who grew wealthy and owned slaves.
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In 1805, the Muscogee ceded close to three million acres of land between the Oconee and Ocmulgee Rivers in Georgia. Within a short space of time, the settlers pushed across this area and moved into the lands west of the Ocmulgee River that remained, in theory at least, in the hands of the Muscogee. Big Warrior declared, “The Muscogee land is become very small . . . What we have left we cannot spare, and you will find that we are distressed.”
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The chief protested directly to President Thomas Jefferson that white settlers were violating the agreement and were seizing native land. In 1809, federal soldiers drove about seventeen hundred squatters off the land of the
Muscogee and the territory of the Chickasaws, farther to the
northwest. But such occasional attempts by Washington to stem the advance of the settlers proved utterly ineffectual. The federal government lacked both the means and the political will to stop that westward tide.

In the same years that the Muscogees endured the full brunt of the settler migration, they also were cursed with a sharp decline in the number of deer on their traditional lands. The herds had been overhunted. The Muscogees wrestled with two broad approaches. Some wanted to adapt to the ways of the white man; others passionately believed their survival as a people depended upon resisting the Americans and, if possible, driving them back, or at least holding the line against further cessions of land.

A small but powerful group of mixed-blood planters, some of them slave owners, emerged as a new upper class in the native society, rupturing the long-held communal land ownership traditions of the Muscogees. This group, whose members embraced American concepts of land tenure and the acquisition of wealth, was reinforced in 1796, when Hawkins was appointed as the federal government's agent to the Muscogees. He was an avid advocate of winning the Muscogees over to the techniques of white agriculture. Instead of continuing as hunters, he proselytized, they should become farmers, raising livestock and growing cotton, using slave labour, and adopting the plantation system.
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At the meeting of the Muscogee National Council in 1811, Tecumseh regarded Hawkins as his foe.

Hawkins believed that by promoting class divisions among the Muscogees and encouraging intensive methods of agricultural land use, he could quickly assimilate this people and draw them into American life. But Muscogees who were strongly attached to traditional ways and who saw no economic advantage in the American approach fiercely opposed those who counselled a deal with the United States.

In 1811, the U.S. government insisted on opening a federal road through Muscogee territory, which inevitably meant more settlers.
With its starting point in Augusta, Georgia, the road crossed Muscogee
country all the way to Fort Stoddert, just forty-eight kilometres north of Mobile, still under Spanish rule. In the first six months of its use, thirty-seven hundred people travelled the road in search of land. In 1806, the Cherokees ceded land that opened the Tennessee River Valley, in what is now northern Alabama, to settlers from Tennessee.
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Big Warrior, while not openly backing the construction of the road, profited from the monopolies along its route, taking his share in the earnings from toll bridges, ferries, and taverns.
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When the pliant political leadership in the Muscogee National Council failed to stop the road and deal effectively with the issue of white settlement, a militant opposition formed. In growing numbers, Muscogees turned to the spiritual leadership provided at the village level by shamans, who had previously been of little consequence politically but had considerable local influence. Just as peoples in the North had been drawn to the teachings of the Prophet and Tecumseh's native confederacy, a spiritual movement to rid the Muscogee people of the ways of the white man became a force to be
reckoned with in the South.
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Hawkins found that the socio-economic
program he favoured was being rejected, and along with it the viability of the national council.

This spiritual revolt, which took its most militant form among the Red Sticks, cut right across Muscogee society. Even some of the well-to-do with mixed-blood ancestry joined the movement. It was not a simple matter of conservative elements fighting to retain traditional ways; it was fierce resistance to assimilation. At stake was Muscogee sovereignty.

So there was great anticipation in Tuckhabatchee about what Tecumseh, the famous Shawnee chief, would say in his address. He had reason to believe that his message would be well received by many, but not all, in Tuckhabatchee. Although he came from the distant Ohio country with its markedly different terrain, Tecumseh had personal ties to the Muscogees; this visit was partly a homecoming, not just a diplomatic venture to win over peoples who were not his own.

On the day he arrived, the Shawnee chief marched with his accompanying warriors to the square. They were naked except for their breechcloths and ornaments. Their faces were painted black and their heads were decorated with eagle feathers. Suspended from their waists and arms were buffalo tails, which dragged behind them. Though some in attendance regarded their appearance as hideous, Tecumseh and his party drew the fascinated attention of all who were present.
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Tecumseh stayed at the council for a number of days but refrained from speaking as long as Hawkins remained in town. He had no intention of sharing his message to the Muscogee council with a representative of the United States government. Each day, Tecumseh remarked laconically, “The sun has gone too far today. I will make my talk tomorrow.”
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More than a week passed before Hawkins departed. That same evening, with a multitude gathered, Tecumseh entered the council house and offered a wampum bag and a peace pipe to Big Warrior. Big Warrior smoked the peace pipe before passing it to the other chiefs. Tecumseh stood before the assemblage for a few minutes, looking out at the crowd.

Accompanying Tecumseh that memorable evening, as he had throughout the long tour, was Sikaboo, his interpreter. A proficient linguist, Sikaboo spoke Muskogean, Choctaw, and English in addition to Shawnee.
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When Tecumseh spoke to a crowd or negotiated with American or British political or military leaders, he did so in Shawnee. His knowledge of English was very limited, and he rarely attempted to speak to whites in their language.
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