USA > Ohio > The Old Northwest : a chronicle of the Ohio Valley and beyond > Part 8
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In his reply Harrison declared that the Indians were not one nation, since the Great Spirit had "put six different tongues in their heads, " and argued that the Indiana lands had been in all re- spects properly bought from their rightful owners. Tecumseh's blood boiled under this denial of his main contention, and with the cry, "It is false," he gave a signal to his warriors, who sprang to their feet and seized their war-clubs. For a moment an armed clash was imminent. But Harrison's cool manner enabled him to remain master of the situ- ation, and a well-directed rebuke sent the chieftain and his followers to their quarters.
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On the following morning Tecumseh apologized for his impetuosity and asked that the conference be renewed. The request was granted, and again the forest leader pressed for an abandonment of the policy of purchasing land from the separate tribes. Harrison told him that the question was for the President, rather than for him, to decide. "As the great chief is to determine the matter," re- sponded the visitor grimly, "I hope the Great Spirit will put sense enough into his head to induce him to direct you to give up this land. It is true he is so far off he will not be injured by the war. He may sit still in his town, and drink his wine, while you and I will have to fight it out."
Still the clash was averted. Once more, in the summer of 1811, Tecumseh appeared at Vincennes, and again the deep issue between the two peoples was threshed out as fruitlessly as before. An- nouncing his purpose to visit the southern tribes to unite them with those of the North in a peace- ful confederacy, the chieftain asked that dur- ing his absence all matters be left as they were, and promised that upon his return he would go to see President Madison and "settle everything with him."
Naturally, no pledge of the kind was given, and
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no sooner had Tecumseh and twenty of his warriors started southward on their mission to the Creeks than Harrison began preparations to end the men- ace that had been so long hanging over the western country. Troops were sent to Harrison; and vol- unteers were called for. As fast as volunteers came in they were sent up to the Wabash to take possession of the new purchase. Reinforcements arrived from Pittsburgh and from Kentucky, and in a short while the Governor was able to bring together at Fort Harrison, near the site of the pres- ent city of Terre Haute, twenty-four companies of regulars, militia, and Indians, aggregating about nine hundred well-armed men.
Late in October this army, commanded by Har- rison in person, set forth for the destruction of the Tippecanoe rendezvous. On the way stray red- skins were encountered, but the advance was not resisted, and to his surprise Harrison was enabled to lead his forces unmolested to within a few hundred yards of the Prophet's headquarters. Emissaries now came saying that the invasion was wholly unexpected, professing peaceful intentions, and asking for a parley. Harrison had no idea that anything could be settled by negotiation, but he preferred to wait until the next day to make an
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attack; accordingly he agreed to a council, and the army went into camp for the night on an oak- covered knoll about a mile northwest of the village. No entrenchments were thrown up, but the troops were arranged in a triangle to conform to the con- tour of the hill, and a hundred sentinels under experienced officers were stationed around the camp-fires. The night was cold, and rain fell at intervals, although at times the moon shone brightly through the flying clouds.
The Governor was well aware of the proneness of the Indians to early morning attacks, so that about four o'clock on the 7th of November he rose to call the men to parade. He had barely pulled on his boots when the forest stillness was broken by the crack of a rifle at the farthest angle of the camp, and instantly the Indian yell, followed by a fusillade, told that a general attack had begun. Before the militiamen could emerge in force from their tents, the sentinel line was broken and the red warriors were pouring into the enclosure. Des- perate fighting ensued, and when time for reloading failed, it was rifle butt and bayonet against toma- hawk and scalping knife in hand-to-hand combat. For two hours the battle raged in the darkness, and only when daylight came were the troops able to
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charge the redskins, dislodge them from behind the trees, and drive them to a safe distance in the neighboring swamp. Sixty-one of Harrison's offi- cers and men were killed or mortally wounded; one hundred and twenty-seven others suffered serious injury. The Governor himself probably owed his life to the circumstance that in the con- fusion he mounted a bay horse instead of his own white stallion, whose rider was shot early in the contest.
The Indian losses were small, and for twenty- four hours Harrison's forces kept their places, hourly expecting another assault. "Night," wrote one of the men subsequently, "found every man mounting guard, without food, fire, or light and in a drizzling rain. The Indian dogs, during the dark hours, produced frequent alarms by prowling in search of carrion about the sentinels." There be- ing no further sign of hostilities, early on the 8th of November a body of mounted riflemen set out for the Prophet's village, which they found deserted. The place had evidently been abandoned in haste, for nothing - not even a fresh stock of English guns and powder - had been destroyed or carried off. After confiscating much-needed provisions and other valuables, Harrison ordered the village
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to be burned. Then, abandoning camp furniture and private baggage to make room in the wagons for the wounded, he set out on the return trip to Vincennes. A company was left at Fort Harrison, and the main force reached the capital on the 18th of November.
Throughout the western country the news of the battle was received with delight, and it was fondly believed that the backbone of Tecumseh's conspiracy was broken. It was even supposed that the indomitable chieftain and his brother would be forthwith surrendered by the Indians to the authorities of the United States. Harrison was acclaimed as a deliverer. The legislatures of Ken- tucky, Indiana, and Illinois formally thanked him for his services; and if, as his Federalist enemies charged, he had planned the whole undertaking with a view to promoting his personal fortunes, he ought to have been satisfied with the result. It was the glamour of Tippecanoe that three decades afterwards carried him into the President's chair.
In precipitating a clash while Tecumseh, the master-mind of the fast-growing confederacy, was absent, the Prophet committed a capital blunder. When reproached by his warriors, he declared that all would have gone well but for the fact that on the
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night before the battle his squaw had profanely touched the pot in which his magic charms were brewed, so that the spell had been broken! The explanation was not very convincing, and ominous murmurings were heard. Before the end of the year, however, word came to Vincennes that the crafty magician was back at Tippecanoe, that the village had been rebuilt, and that the lives of the white settlers who were pouring into the new purchase were again endangered.
Still more alarming was the news of Tecumseh's return in January, 1812, from a very successful visit to the Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees. He began by asking leave to make his long-projected visit to Washington to obtain peace from the Presi- dent, and he professed deep regret for "the unfor- tunate transaction that took place between the white people and a few of our young men at our vil- lage." To the British agent at Amherstburg he declared that had he been on the spot there would ยท have been no fighting at Tippecanoe. It is reason- able to suppose that in this case there would have been, at all events, no Indian attack; for Tecumseh was thoroughly in sympathy with the British plan, which was to unite and arm the natives, but to prevent a premature outbreak. The chieftain's
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presence, however, would hardly have deterred Harrison from carrying out his decision to break up the Tippecanoe stronghold.
The spring of 1812 brought an ominous renewal of depredations. Two settlers were murdered within three miles of Fort Dearborn; an entire fam- ily was massacred but five miles from Vincennes; from all directions came reports of other bloody deeds. The frontier was thrown into panic. A general uprising was felt to be impending; even Vincennes was thought to be in danger. "Most of the citizens of this country," reported Harrison, on the 6th of May, "have abandoned their farms, and taken refuge in such temporary forts as they have been able to construct." Scores fled to Ken- tucky and to even more distant regions.
Tecumseh continued to assert his friendship for his "white brothers" and to treat the battle at Tippecanoe as a matter of no moment. The mur- ders on the frontier he declared to be the work of the Potawatomi, who were not under his control, and for whose conduct he had no excuse. But it was noted that he made no move to follow up his pro- fessed purpose to visit Washington in quest of peace, and that he put forth no effort to restrain his over-zealous allies. It was plain enough that he
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was simply awaiting a signal from Canada, and that, as the commandant at Fort Wayne tersely reported, if the country should have a war with Great Britain, it must be prepared for an Indian war as well.
CHAPTER IX
THE WAR OF 1812 AND THE NEW WEST
THE spring of 1812 thus found the back country in a turmoil, and it was with a real sense of relief that the settlers became aware of the American de- claration of war against Great Britain on the 18th of June. More than once Governor Harrison had asked for authority to raise an army with which to "scour" the Wabash territory. In the fear that such a step would drive the redskins into the arms of the British, the War Department had with- held its consent. Now that the ban was lifted, the people could expect the necessary measures to be taken for their defense. In no part of the country was the war more popular; nowhere did the mass of the able-bodied population show greater eager- ness to take the field.
According to official returns, the Westerners were totally unprepared for the contest. There were but five garrisoned posts between the Ohio
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and the Canadian frontier. Fort Harrison had fifty men, Fort Wayne eighty-five, Fort Dearborn fifty-three, Fort Mackinac eighty-eight, and Detroit one hundred and twenty - a total force of fewer than four hundred. The entire standing army of the United States numbered but sixty-seven hundred men, and it was obvious that the trans- Alleghany population would be obliged to carry almost alone the burden of their own defense. The task would not be easy; for General Brock, commanding in upper Canada, had at least two thousand regulars and, as soon as hostilities be- gan, was joined by Tecumseh and many hundred redskins.
While the question of the war was still under de- bate in Congress, President Madison made a re- quisition on Ohio for twelve hundred militia, and in early summer the Governors of Indiana and Illinois called hundreds of volunteers into service. Leaving their families as far as possible under the protection of stockades or of the towns, the pa- triots flocked to the mustering-grounds; many, like Cincinnatus of old, deserted the plough in mid- field. Guns and ammunition in sufficient quan- tity were lacking; even tents and blankets were often wanting. But enthusiasm ran high, and only
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capable leadership was needed to make of these frontier forces, once they were properly equipped, a formidable foe.
The story of the leaders and battles of the war in the West has been told in an earlier volume of this series.' It will be necessary here merely to call to mind the stages through which this contest passed, as a preliminary to a glimpse of the conditions under which Westerners fought and of the new position into which their section of the country was brought when peace was restored. So far as the regions north of the Ohio were concerned, the war developed two phases. The first began with General William Hull's expedition from Ohio against Fort Malden for the relief of Detroit, and it ended with the humiliating surrender of that important post, together with the forced abandon- ment of Forts Dearborn and Mackinac, so that the Wabash and Maumee became, for all practical purposes, the country's northern boundary. This was a story of complete and bitter defeat. The second phase began likewise with a disaster - the needless loss of a thousand men on the Raisin River, near Detroit. Yet it succeeded in bringing Wil-
I See The Fight for a Free Sea, by Ralph D. Paine (in The Chronicles of America).
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liam Henry Harrison into chief command, and it ended in Commodore Perry's signal victory on Lake Erie and Harrison's equally important defeat of the disheartened British land forces on the banks of the Thames River, north of the Lake. At this Battle of the Thames perished Tecumseh, who in point of fact was the real force behind the British campaigns in the West. Tradition describes him on the eve of the battle telling his comrades that his last day had come, solemnly stripping off his British uniform before going into battle, and ar- raying himself in the fighting costume of his own people.
For two-thirds of the time, the war went badly for the Westerners, and only at the end did it turn out to be a brilliant success. The reasons for the dreary succession of disasters are not difficult to discover. Foremost among them is the charac- ter of the troops and officers. The material from which the regiments were recruited was intrinsi- cally good, but utterly raw and untrained. The men could shoot well; they had great powers of endurance; and they were brave. But there the list of their military virtues ends.
The scheme of military organization relied upon throughout the West was that of the volunteer
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militia. In periods of ordinary Indian warfare the system served its purpose fairly well. Under stern necessity, the self-willed, independence-loving backwoodsmen could be brought to act together for a few weeks or months; but they had little sys- tematic training, and their impatience of restraint prevented the building up of any real discipline. There were periodic musters for company or regi- mental drill. But, as a rule, drill duty was not taken seriously. Numbers of men failed to re- port; and those who came were likely to give most of their time to horse-races, wrestling-matches, shooting contests - not to mention drinking and brawling - which turned the occasion into mere merrymaking or disorder. The men brought few guns, and when drills were actually held these soldiers in the making contented themselves with parading with cornstalks over their shoulders. "Cornstalk drill" thus became a frontier epithet of derision. It goes without saying that these troops were poorly officered. The captains and colonels were chosen by the men, frequently with more re- gard for their political affiliations or their general standing in the community than for their capacity as military commanders; nor were the higher offi- cers, appointed by the chief executive of territory,
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state, or nation, more likely to be chosen with a view to their military fitness.
So it came about, as Roosevelt has said, that the frontier people of the second generation "had no military training whatever, and though they pos- sessed a skeleton militia organization, they derived no benefit from it, because their officers were worthless, and the men had no idea of practising self-restraint or obeying orders longer than they saw fit."I When the War of 1812 began, these backwoods troops were pitted against British regu- lars who were powerfully supported by Indian allies. The officers of these untrained American troops were, like Hull, pompous, broken-down, political incapables; while to the men themselves may fairly be applied Amos Kendall's disgusted characteriza- tion of a Kentucky muster: "The soldiers are under no more restraint than a herd of swine. Reasoning, remonstrating, threatening, and ridiculing their officers, they show their sense of equality and their total want of subordination." Not until the very last of the war, when under Harrison's direction capable and experienced officers drilled them into real soldiers, did these backwoods stalwarts become an effective fighting force.
I Winning of the West, vol. Iv, p. 246.
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There were also shortcomings of another sort. None was more exasperating or costly than the lack of means of transportation. Even in Ohio, the oldest and most settled portion of the North- west, roads were few and poor; elsewhere there were practically none of any kind. But the re- gions in which the war was carried on were far too sparsely populated to be able to furnish the sup- plies, even the foodstuffs, needed by the troops; and materials of every sort had to be transported from the East, by river, lake, and wilderness trail. Up and down the great unbroken stretches between the Ohio and the Lakes moved the floundering supply trains in the vain effort to keep up with the armies, or to reach camps or forts in time to avert starvation or disaster. Pack-horses waded knee- deep in mud; wagons were dragged through mire up to their hubs; even empty vehicles sometimes became so embedded that they had to be aban- doned, the drivers being glad to get off with their horses alive. Many times a quartermaster, taking advantage of a frost, would send off a convoy of provisions, only to hear of its being swamped by a thaw before reaching its destination. One of the tragedies of the war was the suffering of the troops while waiting for supplies of clothing, tents, medi-
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cines, and food which were stuck in swamps or frozen up in rivers or lakes.
Beset with pleurisy, pneumonia, and rheumatism in winter, with fevers in summer, and subject to attack by the Indians at all times, these frontier soldiers led an existence of exceptional hardship. Only the knowledge that they were fighting for their freedom and their homes held them to their task. An interesting sidelight on the conditions under which their work was done is contained in the following extract from a letter written by a volunteer in 1814:
On the second day of our march a courier arrived from General Harrison, ordering the artillery to advance with all possible speed. This was rendered totally impos- sible by the snow which took place, it being a complete swamp nearly all day. On the evening of the same day news arrived that General Harrison had retreated to Portage River, eighteen miles in the rear of the encamp- ment at the rapids. As many men as could be spared determined to proceed immediately to re-enforce him. At two o'clock the next morning our tents were struck, and in half an hour we were on the road. I will candidly confess that on that day I regretted being a soldier. On that day we marched thirty miles under an incessant rain; and I am afraid you will doubt my veracity when I tell you that in eight miles of the best of the road, it took us over the knees, and often to the middle. The Black Swamp would have been considered
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impassable by all but men determined to surmount every difficulty to accomplish the object of their march. In this swamp you lose sight of terra firma altogether - the water was about six inches deep on the ice, which was very rotten, often breaking through to the depth of four or five feet. The same night we encamped on very wet ground, but the driest that could be found, the rain still continuing. It was with difficulty we could raise fires; we had no tents; our clothes were wet, no axes, nothing to cook with, and very little to eat. A brigade of pack-horses being near us, we procured from them some flour, killed a hog (there were plenty of them along the road); our bread was baked in the ashes, and our pork we broiled on the coals - a sweeter meal I never partook of. When we went to sleep it was on two logs laid close to each other, to keep our bodies from the damp ground. Good God! What a pliant being is man in adversity. I
The principal theater of war was the Great Lakes and the lands adjacent to them. Prior to the campaign which culminated in Jackson's victory at New Orleans after peace had been signed, the Mississippi Valley had been untrodden by British soldiery. The contest, none the less, came close home to the backwoods populations. Scores of able-bodied men from every important community saw months or years of toilsome service; many failed to return to their homes, or else returned I Dawson, William H. Harrison, p. 369.
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crippled, weakened, or stricken with fatal diseases; crops were neglected, or had only such care as could be given them by old men and boys; trade lan- guished; Indian depredations wrought further ruin to life and property and kept the people continually in alarm. Until 1814, reports of successive de- feats, in both the East and West, had a depress- ing influence and led to solemn speculation as to whether the back country stood in danger of fall- ing again under British dominion.
It was, therefore, with a very great sense of re- lief that the West heard in 1815 that peace had been concluded. At a stroke both the British menace and the danger from the Indians were removed; for although the redskins were still numerous and discontented, their spirit of resist- ance was broken. Never again was there a general uprising against the whites; never again did the Northwest witness even a local Indian war of any degree of seriousness save Black Hawk's Rebellion in 1832. Tecumseh manifestly realized before he made his last stand at the Thames that the cause of his people was forever lost.
For several years the unsettled conditions on the frontiers had restrained any general migration thither from the seaboard States. But within a
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few months after the proclamation of peace the tide again set westward, and with an unprecedented force. Men who had suffered in their property or other interests from the war turned to Indiana and Illinois as a promising field in which to rebuild their fortunes. The rapid extinction of Indian titles opened up vast tracts of desirable land, and the conditions of purchase were made so easy that any man of ordinary industry and integrity could meet them. Speculators and promoters indus- triously advertised the advantages of localities in which they were interested, boomed new towns, and even loaned money to ambitious emigrants.
The upshot was that the population of Indiana grew from twenty-five thousand in 1810 to seventy thousand in 1816, when the State was admitted to the Union. Illinois filled with equal rapidity, and attained statehood only two years later. Then the tide swept irresistibly westward across the Mississippi into the great regions which had been acquired from France in 1803. As late as 1812 the Territory of Missouri, comprising all of the Louisiana Purchase north of the present State of Louisiana, had a population of only twenty-two thousand, including many French and Spanish settlers and traders. But in 1818 it had a popu-
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lation of more than sixty thousand, and was ask- ing Congress for legislation under which the most densely inhabited portion should be set off as the State of Missouri. Thus the Old Northwest was not merely losing its frontier character and taking its place in the nation on a footing with the sea- board sections; it was also serving as the open gate- way to a newer, vaster, and in some respects richer American back country.
In the main, southern Indiana and Illinois - as well as the trans-Mississippi territory - drew from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and the remoter South. North of the latitude of Indianapolis and St. Louis the lines of migration led chiefly from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. But many of the settlers came, immediately or after only a brief interval, from Europe. The decade following the close of the war was a time of unprece- dented emigration from England, Scotland, Ire- land, and Germany to the United States; and while many of the newcomers found homes in the eastern States, where they in a measure offset the depopula- tion caused by the westward exodus, a very large proportion pressed on across the mountains in quest of the cheap lands in the undeveloped interior. During these years the western country was re-
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peatedly visited by European travelers with a view to ascertaining its resources, markets, and other attractions for settlers; and emigration thither was powerfully stimulated by the writings of these observers, as well as by the activities of sundry founders of agricultural colonies.
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