Panther in the Sky (53 page)

But this general was not like Harmar and St. Clair. He was more like Clark, except slower and more deliberate. He had kept
a whole company of swift, skillful scouts out at a distance all the time and built a fortified camp at the end of every day’s march, so he could never be surprised. His soldiers were tough and well trained and high-spirited and did not straggle. Some of them even dressed as Indians and moved in parties to nearby villages, where they terrorized the women and children. This army thus had moved much farther north than any American army had done before and was in fact now within a day’s march of Lake Erie, threatening the new British fort and trading post at the foot of the Maumee-se-pe rapids. This General Wayne crept along like a cold serpent but never closed his eyes or stopped flicking his tongue, and Blue Jacket was growing desperate.

Blue Jacket was the war chief of the united tribes now. Little Turtle had voted that they should not try to strike another Long Knife army, that it was useless to try to stop an aggressive people who kept coming in numbers too great to count. Feeling this way, he had not been elected the main war chief this time, though he was here as the leader of his Miami warriors. So for the first time in years, it was a Shawnee who led the confederation of defenders. It was Blue Jacket, a man who had been born as white as General Anthony Wayne.

Tecumseh lowered the spyglass from the red-and-blue flag to look again at the American general. The general’s image in the telescope was wavery in the heat waves rising out of the meadow. It was now the Plum Moon, the hottest of the year. There was no wind, hardly enough to make the general’s flag flap lazily about its pole. The sun beat down on the valley of the Maumee-se-pe through a steamy haze, and high, slow-moving rain clouds were piled along the western sky far away.

The general was now wiping his face with a cloth. His lips were still moving. Tecumseh wondered what he was saying and to whom he was doing all this talking. Surely to another chief, he thought, and he moved the spyglass over to look at the other officer.

When he saw the face, he felt a chill. He had seen this face. His mind raced. He had seen this face.…

Yes. In the dream when the bison were running over him!

This man standing in the circle of glass was lean and narrow-shouldered. And he was very young, with dark hair. His face was homely, big-nosed, but with a certain intensity in the eyes that made it remarkable. It was such an extraordinary face that Tecumseh had remembered it from a dream of six years ago. This young man appeared to be listening to the general; Tecumseh saw
him nod once or twice, but he was looking all about like an eagle as he listened.

For a long while Tecumseh found himself unable to take the spyglass off this young officer’s face.

Once it seemed as if the officer’s scanning eye had come to rest upon Tecumseh himself. He stared in this direction for a long moment. No doubt he could see this warrior with a telescope watching him from the edge of the woods. And Tecumseh sent a concentration of thought toward him.

You cannot see my face as I see yours. But mark me well, for I am my People.

L
IEUTENANT
W
ILLIAM
H
ENRY
H
ARRISON HAD BEEN LISTENING
to Mad Anthony Wayne talk about tactics when suddenly he had an intense sensation of being watched.

“… savages get confused when they have to wait for action,” the general was saying. “I’ve heard they’ll just walk off and go home if something doesn’t pop right away. Believe me, my boy, I’m making good use of our time. Who knows how many of them are straying off while we stand here seeming to do nothing? I know there are impatient elements among the officers. I know they call me ‘Big Turtle’ because my method isn’t rash enough to suit them. Heh, heh!” He wagged his head. “I’m used to nicknames. In the war I got to be known as ‘Mad Anthony’ for what they saw as too much rashness. But I always know what I’m doing, and why. Caution’s the word, my lad, way out here where we are.”

Lieutenant Harrison, who was Wayne’s aide, nodded and said, “Yes, sir.” He had heard the “Big Turtle” nickname used by a certain cadre of self-styled wits among the legion’s officers. He had also heard Wayne referred to as “that cumbrous body” and as “Mars.” But Harrison had no quarrel with Wayne’s method and was learning many valuable lessons from the old campaigner. Harrison was, like Wayne, a scholar of Roman campaigns. He liked it that Wayne called his army “the legion,” and he liked the strong discipline and order that Wayne demanded. Wayne was the kind of man to tame barbarians and civilize a wilderness, like a Caesar. Young Harrison considered himself quite lucky to have obtained this position as the old hero’s aide-de-camp, though he knew it had been more than luck. The young officer’s father had been one of the Virginia signers of the Declaration of Independence and a personal acquaintance of President Washington. That connection had enabled the young man, after his decision
to forsake a medical career for a military one, to get a personal audience with Washington and thus a commission and a brisk start upward in the military hierarchy.

During the long months of training and then the slow, methodical advance into the Indian country, Harrison had grown used to feeling watched. He had thought with constant wonder that among all the trees and brushlands along the route, there were always savages watching. Often the Indian scouts had been visible. Harrison had sometimes wondered how their primitive brains perceived as they watched this great legion. He could fancy that their savage heads were full of the same sort of brute fear and dark cunning and murderous anger that the ancient tribes of Huns and Scots and Levantines must have known centuries ago as the gleaming legions of civilized Rome moved into their unruly domains.

But just now, while listening to his commandant, he had felt the eyes upon him with such an intensity that he had felt compelled to scan the woods at the edge of the clearing.

“How singular,” he remarked into a pause in the general’s discourse. “Sir, have you ever seen an Indian scout use a spyglass?”

Wayne chortled. “Well,” he said, “I’ll wager it’s got a British trademark on it.”

T
HE WARRIORS HAD PURGED THEMSELVES AND FASTED TO
purify themselves for the battle, and then the battle had not come that day. Instead the Long Knife general had moved his army around for a while in the valley and then settled in one place. And the warriors, waiting in the woods for his attack, had eaten nothing for a second day, thinking he would attack on that day. The warriors prayed and lay in wait, and their bodies felt lighter and more pure, and their heads hummed like the mosquitoes in the wet summer heat. Their sight grew terribly clear, and for a while they could see every detail of the army in the distance, the white tents, the blue lines of men, the many mounted soldiers in the lush green valley. Sometimes drums would rattle and a regiment would form up and start to move toward the bluff, or a bugle would call and a troop of the horse soldiers would mount up and ride about with the plumes on their shiny helmets shaking in the air, and the warriors would grow tense and the thin blood in their veins would quicken. But then the regiment or the horsemen would go back into the camp, and the hungry waiting would go on.

Then the warriors’ vision grew more dreamlike as they lay hungry,
and sometimes these moving parts of the army would seem like phantoms drifting this way and that in the distance.

A heavy rain poured all night on the hungry and unsheltered warriors, and they were cold and wet and could not sleep, and on the morning after that night they were feeling weak and could not see well, and when the sun rose behind clouds of mist and heated the wet air, the warriors grew drowsy.

Loud Noise was on the line for the first time as a warrior and was having a very hard time with this fasting. Hunger to him was almost as bad as death, and to be starving half to death while waiting to be killed by Long Knives was simply the most dreadful plight he had ever imagined. He was scared and famished and kept dreaming up errands on which he might be sent back to the rear, where there was food and comparative safety. Tecumseh would look at him, raise an eyebrow, and shake his head with a sigh. “No,” he would say, “I need my brother here.” And so Loud Noise was here. But somewhere he had obtained a bit of whiskey, to bolster his courage, and he staggered and stank, and it was doubtful that he would be of much service.

There had never been a chance to surprise and attack Wayne’s army like St. Clair’s, and the confederation of tribes had been on the defensive for a long time. Blue Jacket on this morning had concentrated his thirteen hundred warriors in an enormous tangle of dead trees where a tornado had blown down a grove. This fallen forest made a natural barrier across the valley, from the bluffs down to the river, in the path of the Long Knife army. Here the warriors could hide like poisonous snakes in a brushpile, and if General Wayne meant to move down the valley, he would be bitten terribly in the tangle of the fallen woods.

Two miles downriver from the fallen timber, the new British fort called Fort Miami stood on the river bluff. It had been built by the British to stand in the way of Wayne’s slow march toward Detroit. This fort was full of Redcoat soldiers and surrounded by high palisades and ditches, with its cannons pointing all ways and out on the Maumee-se-pe below. In that valley were hundreds of Indian houses, and orchards, and vast fields of corn and hay, and Alexander McKee’s British trading post. A large island at the foot of the Maumee rapids was growing in tall corn, and on the other bank of the river stood the big town of Chief Pipe, principal chief of all the Delawares. The valley was a rich place, full of food, with the British allies standing ready to feed and aid the warriors, and all of it was protected by this splendid natural obstacle that the Great Good Spirit, through Cyclone Person, had
thrown down in the way of the Long Knives. It was no wonder the American general hesitated so long before this. It was hard to imagine that white soldiers, even three thousand of them, would have enough courage to enter this huge, deadly maze.

Blue Jacket finally decided that the warriors who had fasted so long must eat, or they would have no strength to fight. He was content that Wayne would not attack this morning, if ever. So he arranged for one-third of the warriors to go back toward the British fort, where the agent McKee and the English major Campbell in charge of the fort would distribute food. Some of the warriors did not want to break their fast, famished though they were, because they did not want to face the army’s bayonets with their bellies and bowels full. Others accepted Blue Jacket’s judgment that the army would not move that day, so they left their hiding places in the edge of the blowdown and moved back through the jumble of trunks and dead limbs toward the fort to get rations.

Tecumseh and his warriors lay and knelt behind logs at the top of the bluff. To their right was a band of Ottawas commanded by Turkey Foot, and to their left the ground sloped steeply down to the bottomland meadows a hundred feet lower. Down this slope too and into the bottomland the debris of the tornado was strewn, almost to the river, and everywhere in that great tangle were hidden Shawnees and Wyandots, Delawares and Miamis. Also among the Indians were about seventy of Colonel Baby’s Canadian militiamen from the vicinity of Detroit. Down by the river at McKee’s house, the Indian partisans Girty and Elliott had established a command post.

Suddenly there was a rush of activity in the Long Knives’ camp. Distant bugles blew. Horsemen mounted. Blue-Coat soldiers ran with their guns and lined up.

The warriors still on the line in the timber murmured to each other, checked their weapons, held their medicine bags or
pa-waw-kas
in their hands, and prayed for strength. Tecumseh moved along the line encouraging his warriors to stand firm and be brave. He slipped and squirmed over and under great splintered limbs and roots and through underbrush whose foliage was still beaded with water from the rain. His brothers Stands-Between and Loud Noise trailed after him, and Thick Water was as close as his shadow.

Tecumseh ran hand and foot up a slanting poplar trunk to gain a higher vantage point and watch the army. He saw the blue lines of troops moving on the green meadows below, and some of the
troops were being marched westward up the slope of the bluff, carrying their flags with them, as if they were not going to fight here. He saw also a troop of the horse soldiers from Kain-tuck-ee, riding in that same direction, and much of the remaining army was also lining up as if to march that way.

To Tecumseh now it looked as if they might intend to go around the right flank of the Ottawas, pass through the woods west of the fallen timbers, and perhaps try then to swing northward, either to get behind the warriors or simply to march straight at the British fort. It was a surprising move, one that could endanger Blue Jacket’s well-prepared defense.

On the ground below the tree, someone called Tecumseh’s name. It was a runner from Blue Jacket, saying that the Shawnees should be ready to move to the west with the Ottawas, to help them extend their line in that direction if the Long Knives did try to go around their right flank. The hot, steamy air was tense with expectation and doubt. Tecumseh came down from the tree. He told the runner to go back to Blue Jacket and say that he understood and was ready. Loud Noise stood visibly trembling, his one eye wild with fear. But he was drunk enough not to panic and run away.

As the troops in the distance moved up the slope, they vanished into draws and defilades and could not be seen from where the Shawnees were. The regiments still visible in the meadows below were going slowly in that direction.

Suddenly an excited murmur swept along the Indian lines from the right. The Ottawas were pointing and crouching to move. Tecumseh looked toward the southwest and was astonished to see the mounted Kentuckians coming along the slope, strung out in a skirmish line, rifles, hunting shirts, black hats, straight toward the Ottawas’ position as if they did not even know they were there. Perhaps they did not know. If they did not, it would be a stroke of good fortune.