Tecumseh and Brock (25 page)

Then he turned to ridicule. “You always told us, that you would never draw your foot off British ground; but now, father, we see you are drawing back . . . We must compare our father's conduct to a fat animal, that carries its tail upon its back, but when affrighted, it drops between its legs, and runs off.” When the interpreter rendered these words into English, the British officers laughed.

Tecumseh concluded by telling Procter that if the British intended to retreat they should leave their weapons and ammunition for the native warriors to use. “Our lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit — we are determined to defend our lands, and if it is his will, we wish to leave our bones upon them.”
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Following his peroration, the natives on hand rose to their feet, shouted, and shook their tomahawks. Procter took in the message. Fearful that the British alliance with the natives was about to come apart, he requested another council in two days, at which time he would respond to the case made by Tecumseh. This was far from forthright. It was Procter's resolve to retreat, but so far he had been unwilling to share his plans, not only with his native allies but also with subordinate British officers. During the next two days, Tecumseh's warriors watched the British transport weapons, ammunition, and supplies from Fort Malden en route to the Thames.

At the second meeting, two days after the first, the mood was initially stormy. The natives brought with them a great wampum belt that had the figure of a heart woven into its centre. They planned to cut the belt, which symbolized their alliance with the British, to illustrate the breaking of that alliance.
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Procter decided that only a direct appeal to Tecumseh could salvage the situation. He sent a message to Tecumseh to meet with him and his senior commanders at the quarters of his staff adjutant.

Tecumseh stood at a table with the British officers with a large map of the region around Detroit spread before them. With Colonel Matthew Elliott, one of Procter's officers, serving as translator, the British general explained to Tecumseh the military implications of Perry's victory on Lake Erie.
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Tecumseh saw clearly the problem the British faced, and when Procter explained that his intention was to fortify Chatham at the Forks of the Thames and to make his stand there against the Americans, the Shawnee chief appeared reassured.

Tecumseh said he needed time to discuss the plan with the other chiefs. Within two hours, as Procter later reported, he had won over most of the chiefs and their warriors to the idea of making their stand at Chatham. In the council that followed, the natives agreed to accompany the British to the Forks of the Thames.

Even though Tecumseh had convinced most, but not all, of his followers to accept the retreat, the physical labour of the move to the new site would have to be endured. Native women and girls packed up most of the possessions from the houses they had constructed on Grosse Ile. They would be the ones who would have to do the principal work of establishing the new homes. Tecumpease, Tecumseh's sister, was one of the women charged with the back-breaking ordeal of departing from one settlement en route to another. In addition to her brother, the move involved her husband, Wahsikegaboe, and the nephew she had raised, Paukeesaa, who was seventeen years old. As she laboured to take possessions to the new site where she would help build new dwellings, she had to think about the members of her family who would fight in the upcoming battle.

On the day after the council, the natives crossed the Detroit River to the Canadian shore and started up the trail to Sandwich. About twelve hundred warriors and their families — including Kickapoos, Winnebagoes, Ojibwas, Ottawas, Senecas, and a few Creek warriors, in addition to Shawnees — set out on the journey. Several hundred native followers of Tecumseh's confederacy refused to join in the move. Disillusioned with what they saw as a faltering British alliance, they crossed over to the American shore.
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As the British and their native allies retreated up the Thames, the Americans marshalled their forces to take the offensive. William Henry Harrison merged his own units with troops from Kentucky. They served under the command of the state's governor, Isaac Shelby, who at age sixty-six had raised three thousand volunteers, many of them still in their teens, with no military experience.
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In addition, one thousand Kentucky soldiers on horseback, under the command of Colonel Richard Mentor Johnson, set out from Fort Meigs to reinforce Harrison's expedition.

Their route took them past the River Raisin, the site of the massacre of Kentucky troops the previous January by native warriors. They saw the bones of the slain strewn over a distance of close to five kilometres. This stoked the anger of the soldiers and their commander, who had been a War Hawk when he sat in Congress, beginning in December 1810. Johnson had accused the British of inciting their native allies to commit atrocities against American settlers. “If Great Britain would leave us to the quiet enjoyment of independence; but considering her deadly and implacable enmity, and her continued hostilities, I shall never die contented until I see England's expulsion from North America and her territories incorporated with the United States,” he declared in a speech in the House of Representatives.
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On the afternoon of September 27, 1813, two and a half weeks after Perry's victory on Lake Erie, Harrison led his troops ashore on Lake Erie, just five kilometres from Fort Malden. To mark the return of U.S. forces to this corner of Upper Canada for the first time in over a year, the troops played “Yankee Doodle” on their fifes and drums.
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As the Americans entered Amherstburg and came upon the burned-out remnants of Fort Malden, Tecumseh sat on his horse on a high point overlooking the scene. Mounted beside him was Colonel Elliott, who was well over seventy years old. As the British agent in the Indian Department, Elliott had known Tecumseh for years, and the two had become friends. Watching the Americans march into Amherstburg was a bitter and sad moment for both men. It had been at Fort Malden that the Shawnee chief had cemented his alliance with the British, the alliance that was crucial to his goal of creating a native state. Elliott was looking down on the place that had been his home. Finally, the two turned, putting the hopes of the past behind them, and rode north to join the retreating British forces.
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Over the next three days the British moved slowly along muddy paths in heavy rain. Tecumseh and Elliott stayed at the rear of the force, often close to the advancing Americans, urging the natives who had fallen behind to stay ahead of the invaders. When they reached Chatham, at the forks of the Thames River, Tecumseh was disgusted to find that Procter and the British had done next to nothing to ready themselves for a possible battle there. Elliott was reduced to tears as the Shawnee chief berated the British for their lack of serious preparation. By this point, Procter had lost the confidence of his own men, and the native allies had little faith that the general would stand and fight. Some were deserting, intent on coming to terms with the advancing Americans.

As native warriors loyal to Tecumseh skirmished with the advancing U.S. units, Procter left the army behind to survey the area around Moraviantown and see where he could make a stand. His absence from his troops contributed to the low morale.

On October 2, Harrison's men began a rapid passage across the wet countryside in pursuit of Procter's army and Tecumseh's warriors. The American advance forced Procter to make a stand just downriver from Moraviantown, in a place not of his own choosing. Unless he fought there, U.S. mounted troops would overtake the British, whose progress was slowed by the presence of the wounded and the women and children.

Only five hundred warriors remained with Tecumseh on October 5,
the day of the battle. A thousand men had deserted him over the previous month. That morning, the Shawnee chief reconnoitered the
American troops to see if they planned to march toward Moraviantown.
He then rode across the Thames to join his warriors. Tecumseh had reasons for being downcast about the coming fight, but he did not show any such emotion to his followers. Dressed in deerskin leggings and a hunting shirt, Tecumseh inspected his men, well aware that they drew inspiration and courage from him. Later, he walked down the British line and shook hands with each officer. He addressed words of encouragement to them in Shawnee. While there are different accounts about Tecumseh's last words to Procter, the general's aide-de-camp reported that he said, “Father! Have a big heart!”
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With Harrison at Moraviantown was Richard Johnson, the Kentuckian who commanded one thousand U.S. troops on horseback (though they were not in fact a cavalry unit). Some of the first Americans to attack the enemy line were quickly cut down. After Harrison and Johnson consulted about tactics, Harrison ordered the Kentuckian to attack the native warriors on the left while he mustered his troops to attack the British on the right. Johnson urged his superior to allow him to ride forward with his mounted soldiers in a frontal assault on the British line.

The attack ruptured the right side of the British line, and only three of the Kentuckians were wounded. Johnson's troops dismounted, turned, and seized the British position, forcing those on the first line and then the second to lay down their arms. Effectively, that was the end of the British in the battle.

Tecumseh and his men fought long and hard, on swampy ground and in the woods, against Harrison's army. The warriors could see Tecumseh firing his musket and rallying his men. His face was painted black and red. He had a bandage around one arm, worn as a result of a slight wound he had received a couple of days earlier in a skirmish with the Americans. Around his neck, he wore the King George III medal. Both Johnson's men and Tecumseh's warriors undertook charges, only to be repulsed. Then Tecumseh rushed forward to rally his men to mount another charge. An American soldier raised his loaded gun, aimed it, and fired in the direction of Tecumseh's left side. The bullet struck the Shawnee chief in the chest, killing him.

The news quickly spread among the warriors that their great leader was dead.
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By then, the British had withdrawn. The warriors slipped away from the battlefield into the woods.
§§§
Thirty-three warriors died, eighteen British soldiers were killed, and twenty-five of the British were wounded. On the American side, only seven were killed and twenty-five were wounded, five of them dying after the fight.
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Despite the low casualty rate, one death was enormously significant. When they killed Tecumseh, the Americans knocked a major foe out of the war. Although the British sorely missed Brock, who had died a year earlier, their state and military structure allowed for an orderly succession of command. The death of Tecumseh was different. There was no succession of command within the native confederacy. With its towering leader gone, the confederacy disintegrated.

While the longer-term implications of the loss of Tecumseh would
soon be felt, an immediate consequence was squalid behaviour by tro
phy-hunters. A number of Kentuckians spied a native corpse decorated with plumes and war paint and assumed that this was the fallen Tecumseh. They cut strips of flesh from his back and thighs as souvenirs.

Some American soldiers rushed to claim to have fired the shot that killed Tecumseh. The most prominent of these was Colonel Johnson. After the war, Johnson used this supposed deed to demonstrate his fitness for political office. In 1836, when he successfully ran for the vice presidency of the United States, supporters of his chanted: “Rumpsey dumpsey! Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh!”
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To Americans, the death of Tecumseh meant they had finally succeeded in breaking the native peoples' resistance to the westward march of the settlers. In his celebrated history of the naval battles of the War of 1812, Theodore Roosevelt, writing in the early 1880s, summed up the Battle of Moraviantown: “Tecumseh died fighting, like the hero that he was.”

On its wider significance, he concluded, “The battle ended the campaign in the Northwest. In this quarter it must be remembered that the war was, on the part of the Americans, mainly one against Indians. . . . The American armies . . . were composed of the armed settlers of Kentucky and Ohio, native Americans, of English speech and blood, who were battling for lands that were to form the heritage of their children. In the West, the war was only the closing act of the struggle that for many years had been waged by the hardy and restless pioneers of our race, as with rifle and axe they carved out the mighty empire that we their children inherit; it was but the final effort with which they wrested from the Indian lords of the soil the wide and fair domain that now forms the heart of our great Republic. It was the breaking down of the last barrier that stayed the flood of our civilization; it settled, once and for ever, that henceforth the law, the tongue, and the blood of the land should be neither Indian, nor yet French, but English.”
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Tecumseh was not the only leader to envision a union of native peoples living on their own land. Others came before, and still others tried after him. But in his time, he was peerless — a man of enormous energy whose political gifts and willingness to work with others, whether they were native or white, made him singular in his determination to change the history of the continent. When Tecumseh fell, the War of 1812 had reached its midpoint, but the combat in the northwest theatre had effectively come to an end. The whole of Tecumseh's life was devoted to the struggle to hold on to native land in the Ohio country, in the Indiana Territory, and indeed along the western edge of American settlement to the Gulf of Mexico. With his death on a battlefield on the Thames River in Upper Canada, a chapter in the Endless War to defend native peoples and their lands was closed.