Panther in the Sky (104 page)

The Americans on this side were too numerous and moving too fast to be stopped. There was not much to be done about them. Their objective was close to the fort, and there was little chance of trapping them. Tecumseh sent Walk-in-Water of the Wyandots off to the left with word for the warriors in those woods simply to shoot as many Americans as possible before they could return to the fort.

His own attention was drawn to the conflict on the far bank. He knew that if the Americans got up the bluff to the big guns, they would be a long way from the fort, on the wrong side of the river, and tired from the uphill assault. Maybe those could be caught.

Quickly he rallied a large number of warriors and sped through the woods to his usual crossing place at the island. There was heavy firing up on the bluff, and he saw in a rift in the smoke that the British flag over the batteries was already being pulled down. The big guns had stopped shooting. Those Americans had done their task quickly; they had already driven out the artillerymen and overrun those batteries. Tecumseh led his warriors pell-mell across the river—some fording, some swimming, some in the canoes that were always left there. A messenger met him on the north bank, saying that the Kentuckians had successfully spiked the cannons and then, apparently carried on by their success,
were pursuing the British and Indians on into the woods atop the bluff.

Tecumseh’s eyes sparkled at this news. He could not have hoped for the Americans to do anything more foolish. They were doing just what they had done thirty years ago at Blue Licks.

Tecumseh sent the messenger back up with the word that the Indians should keep up a fighting withdrawal and lure the Kentuckians farther away from the river, get them into a trap, then turn on them, that he would come up behind them and close off their escape.

Then he led his own large party quietly and quickly up over the same ground the Kentuckians had taken, following them. They passed through the batteries, surprising and killing the few Kentucky soldiers who had stayed there, and followed the rest on through the woods above the bluff. The river valley around the fort now was quiet, except for some shouting and a few stray gunshots. But in the woods above the batteries, gunfire roared and crackled, and the yodeling and whooping of several hundred exultant Kentucky militiamen filtered through the foliage. Here and there lay a dead, mutilated soldier or Indian amid the trampled undergrowth. Tecumseh sprinted on at the head of his hundreds of silent warriors, waving them onward, Thick Water right beside him. By now the Kentuckians had fought their way more than a mile from the river.

The pursued were doing just what they should. They were leading the Kentuckians up a ravine that would provide a perfect trap.

Tecumseh paused now, detecting a change in the uproar ahead. There was a sudden din of very concentrated gunfire ahead, and the Indians up there were howling their attack cry. There came a bugle call from up in the woods, and Billy Caldwell said it was the call to retreat. Tecumseh motioned to his warriors now to spread up the sides of the ravine and conceal themselves, and in a few moments the hundreds were almost invisible, waiting.

Soon there was a great rush of movement and noise a little way up the ravine. Tecumseh cocked his rifle and waited for the figures to appear through the foliage. He knew that the fleeing warriors had turned oil their pursuers and were chasing them back down. The voices of the approaching soldiers were full of alarm now.

Four or five whitefaces in hunting shirts suddenly broke into sight. Tecumseh shot one in the chest. His warriors’ guns cracked to the left and right, and in a moment the woods were aswarm with panicky militiamen, some falling, some stopping and raising
their guns, others running onto those from behind. Tecumseh’s warriors now raised their bloody war cry and loaded and fired as fast as they could. Many were using bows instead of guns. At this short range the bow was a perfect weapon, and it could be shot five times as fast as a gun. A tall militiaman burst into view just in front of Tecumseh, his long legs carrying him at an incredible pace down the slope, but his legs collapsed, and he crashed at Tecumseh’s feet with two arrows sticking out of his flank and one out of his ear. Tecumseh, having had no time to reload his rifle, shot two Kentuckians down with the brace of pistols Brock had given him, then stuck the guns back in his belt and began darting to and fro with war club and knife, striking at every militia soldier he could reach. His arms and legs were full of power. He felt as quick and keen as he ever had felt as a young warrior. He was fighting again on the O-hi-o soil of his fathers’ lands, fighting face to face with the guilty invaders, and his club and knife grew crimson with their blood. His howls and bellowing cries encouraged his warriors and himself as well. The fleeing Kentuckians were running full tilt down the draw, trying to get back to the river; they came blundering and sprinting through the woods, sometimes stumbling over bodies or colliding with each other, like a roaring river of white men, like a panicky herd. There were so many that the warriors could not shoot and strike fast enough to kill them all. Some plunged by so fast that they got through unscathed. Others staggered through or crashed through, bleeding from wounds. Thick Water was panting from his effort to stay near his leader. Tecumseh was pouring sweat. The air in the woods was thick now with choking, blinding smoke. A few of the Kentuckians had stopped, realizing they were surrounded, and were loading and firing into the woods around them. But they were so crowded in the ravine, and so jostled by their fleeing comrades, that this resistance was ineffective. Some officers were among them, men in beaver hats and frock coats with elegant epaulets and sashes, yelling, waving swords and pistols, and trying to rally the stampeding troops, but these officers were special targets and were shot down as soon as they were seen. The noise was deafening—musket fire, pistol shots, shouts, thuds, crackling and rustling, the clatter and clank of weapons parrying weapons, the groans and screams of the hurt. Tecumseh struck and dodged as fast as he could move, his cries searing his smoke-stung throat, his mouth dry, eyes red and watering. He put himself in the way of every white man he could reach, but none of them could strike or shoot him before he killed
them. He had no idea how many he himself had killed or hurt. Somewhere his knife had been knocked from his hand. He ducked down and reloaded the pretty pistols Brock had given him, then stood up, shot a white man in the forehead with one, and with the other shot into the waist of a big, bearish man who was trying to club Thick Water with a rifle butt.

Few Indians were falling. They were fighting with confidence and daring, knowing they were winning something important. The whitefaces were so swept by panic that they seemed to have no strength, no aim. Their bodies were piling up two or three deep; sometimes Tecumseh was stepping on dead men instead of ground as he darted about. His arms were red to the elbows with fresh blood, his palms sticky with it.

Now the circle of warriors was tightening upon the struggling mass of Kentuckians, killing from the edges in toward the center, and some of the white men had thrown down their guns and stood with their hands up screaming for mercy and trying to surrender before they were killed. Others were fighting just as desperately to save themselves from the fate of Indian captivity. On a far slope of the ravine Tecumseh could see the scarlet of a number of British uniforms; apparently some of the British infantry had come from Fort Miami to help.

W
HEN THE REMAINING WHITE MEN HAD BEEN ROUNDED UP
as prisoners, they were a wretched, smoke-blackened, blood-spattered, wild-eyed lot. There were only about a hundred and fifty prisoners. Perhaps that many more had escaped to the river and were trying to make their way back to the fort. But here in the ravine where Tecumseh’s warriors had caught them, nearly five hundred lay dead. In this quick action, Tecumseh’s warriors had wiped out almost as many Long Knives as Little Turtle’s three thousand confederated warriors had done in St. Clair’s defeat twenty years before. Now began the harvest of scalps and the gathering of booty.

Tecumseh told the officer of the British troops to march the prisoners safely to Fort Miami, where they could be confined and the wounded could be treated by Procter’s army surgeons. As they were led away eastward, Tecumseh looked one more time at the awesome heap of bodies on the slaughter ground, where the warriors were working vigorously with their scalping knives and gathering up weapons. He remembered those days in his youth when Kentuckians like these had ridden up year after year into the Shawnee homelands to kill warriors and burn towns and
destroy crops. His chest was heaving and his blood was still hot, and he looked without pity at the carnage, and the words of his mother came into his head again, and he uttered them softly, as if scolding the dead:

“You should have stayed out of our land.”

He summoned Charcoal Burner and Stands Firm and Billy Caldwell. “This is done, and done well,” he said. “Now we must go back across the river. Harrison might come out of his groundhog burrow. It would finish the day well if we could catch him, too.”

When they reached the batteries, they found Major Adam Muir there. His Redcoats had recaptured the big guns and raised the British flag over them again and were pulling out the spikes the Americans had hastily driven into the touchholes, and the artillerymen were preparing to resume the siege of Fort Meigs.

T
HE DAY WAS NOT OLD YET, BUT
G
ENERAL
H
ARRISON HAD
already lost at least three-fourths of the reinforcements for whom he had been so long waiting. He stood on the grand battery in his fort with General Green Clay, stood there red with fury, fists and jaw clenched, watching the remnants of Colonel Dudley’s brigade straggle and flounder down the far riverbank to get into the boats and come to safety.

Clay stood nearby on a crutch, face white with pain and despair. He had sprained an ankle in his successful assault on the mortars southeast of the fort, but his dismay over Dudley’s disaster on the other side of the river was so great that he could hardly feel anything else.

“I warned you not to let them be rash!” Harrison muttered to Clay.

“I told them that, sir!” Clay protested, as if afraid the blame would fall on him. “I told them, and not just once!”

When that fool Dudley gets back here, I’ll court-martial him, Harrison thought.

But the returning survivors made it clear there would be no court-martial needed to do justice to Dudley. “Him bein’ a bit hefty, as he was, y’know,” sobbed an eyewitness, “he couldn’t run fast enough.… He was ’mongst the first they got.”

Then I can only hope, Harrison thought, that he lived long enough to comprehend the enormity of what he did. “Damn,
damn,”
he groaned. “Why will men never follow my orders?”

Just then, smoke billowed from the British cannon batteries across the river, and fountains of dirt and splinters began spurting
up again in the fort, and the officers and troops hurried for the cover of their diggings. Soon the mortars on the other side of the fort began popping, and shrapnel was humming in the air, whacking against everything, as it had been for days. Nothing had changed, except that some five or six or seven hundred Kentuckians who had been alive that morning were now dead. And Harrison’s long-held notion that the Shawnee chief Tecumseh might be the most dangerous enemy in the land had once again been confirmed.

T
ECUMSEH WAS ABOUT TO LEAVE THE BATTERIES WHEN A
young Shawnee runner arrived, sent from Fort Miami by a British officer.

The Indians around the fort had got out of control, he said. They were running the American prisoners through a gauntlet and killing them.

With a bellow of dismay and outrage, Tecumseh seized the reins of a British officer’s horse, mounted, and lashed it into a gallop down the artillery road. He began passing naked white bodies, battered, cut, and scalped. The war-horse, shying at the smell of blood and the corpses, reared and whirled and pawed the air, trying to bolt, but Tecumseh got him under control, kicked him, and thundered on toward the British fort. The road was littered with torn clothing and bloody shoes, pieces of canteens, hats, broken powder horns, and every kind of discarded paraphernalia, along with the sliced-up corpses, and some warriors making their way along the road were stooping to pick up things and keep them or throw them down. Tecumseh scattered these scavengers as he rode, his heart torn by shame and disgust and pounding with urgency. The gauntlet evidently had been a wanton, murderous affair—he had seen about twenty or thirty corpses on the road already—and he dreaded what he might find when he got into the fort. Or maybe Procter and his officers had put a stop to it this time.

Today had been one of the greatest days of Indian resistance, a day for pride, when his warriors, many of them untried in battle before, had fought swiftly and courageously and intelligently against the invaders and had all but wiped out a whole brigade of American reinforcements. But now they were reverting to their old cowardice, crazed by bloodletting, lusting to make more pain and terror, despite his orders, despite his repeated exhortations. Even if he defeated every army Harrison or any American general could raise, and drove the Americans back over the O-hi-o and
the mountains, and achieved the total victory that had been his great dream, the government of the Americans would never council with his red alliance, would never honor its demands, if it regarded it as nothing but a murdering, cruel throng.

Why?
his mind screamed.
Why will my People never rise to the will of their Creator?

Now he galloped toward that same gate of Fort Miami that he had limped to in defeat with his slain brother in his arms two decades ago, that same gate the British had shut against his people, and although the gate was open to him now and he was the victor instead of the vanquished, the fury and agony in his heart were no less than they had been then. His own people, like those of Moses in the Bible story of the whites’ religion, were his worst enemy.