Panther in the Sky (73 page)

Being so watched by everyone, he had come to understand that to accept the favors of a woman of one tribe could create envy or contempt among other tribes. Only by taking a Shawnee woman could he avoid those troubles. But if he took a Shawnee woman, he would, by his brother’s code and by the old Shawnee tradition as well, be expected to marry her. Long ago, with She-Is-Favored, he had learned that he could not be such a good chief when he had a wife scattering his thoughts and draining his strength. And then, little by little, he had come to believe what it was convenient to believe and what seemed true to him in his own heart: that he could be a purer, stronger helper of his People if he contained himself and kept himself above desire. It was one of the few beliefs of the French Black Robes that made sense to him. He had looked at the faces of the Black Robes he had seen in his life, and he had seen in their faces a peculiar quality which, it had seemed, must please their God.

And since in his own visions and dreams he had never seen a wife at his side, he suspected that the Great Good Spirit did not mean for him to expend half of his powers upon a wife. Maybe his celibacy did not satisfy the People, but he believed it satisfied his Creator.

Still, he was a strong man nearing his fortieth summer, and his soul and hands and loins had their memories of the pleasures of women, and he would see one now and then whom he desired. But when one turned his head that way, he would remind himself of what had to be done for his People, and he would pass her by, or look away, or remember the misery of that year with She-Is-Favored, and he would not let himself be tempted. He could not control the beauty or appeal of a woman, but he had been learning all his life the many ways of controlling himself. Anger, fear, pain, and lust all could be controlled if a man had learned to rule himself.

But he had not ruled his own head closely enough, and thus he had misled that lonely white girl. She had not even really been one of the women who had turned his head. For years she had been more like a strange little sister. She was an alien. She was rather odd-looking to him, with her light-colored hair, her pale skin that grew red in patches in hot weather or when mosquitoes made her scratch, with her long face and strange, lonely eyes.
Probably she would look quite good to a white youth; her smile was interesting, her large blue eyes were very lively, her voice was rich, and her body was strong and well shaped. But to Tecumseh she looked odd and unhealthy, as most white people did.

She did have a remarkable mind, though, and he did like her very much. He had liked her since he first saw her as a child. He had liked certain white people very much—uncommonly much.

It was a strange thing to him, an unsettling thought, that several of the people he had liked most in his life, those to whom he had been most drawn, and those whose thoughts and words were most intriguing, were white people. He thought of Rebekah and her father, then of Boone, whom he had liked and admired intensely. He thought of Big Fish, who once had been, and now was again, Stephen Ruddell. He remembered, too, how strongly he had been drawn to Copper Hair, Clark’s cousin who had been killed at Piqua. His feeling for those people had not been the same as his love for the people of his family or for Black Fish, his foster father. But what pleasures he had known in his hours with those white people. How they had pulled at his soul! And, in a way, But-lah. Or Kenton, as his real name was. He had not known But-lah in the same way he had known those other white people, but he had admired and feared him for a long time.

And even after all these years he could remember how violently he had hated and loved the white youth who had become Blue Jacket when he was whipping him that day in the gauntlet.

And then suddenly in the eyes of his memory, Tecumseh saw another white person who he knew was more important to him than all the others: the slender young officer whom he had seen at the Fallen Timbers through a spyglass, beside the Long Knife General Wayne.

Harrison.

He remembered how his eye had been drawn to him, how his spirit had whispered to him of that man’s place in his fate, how he had dreamed of that man and the bundle of sticks. And it was all turning out to be so.

And Tecumseh thought: I have cared much for most of the white people I have known, even though they are my enemy. And even the one who is marked as my chiefest enemy, this one for whom I have no love at all, yet I think of him more than I ever thought of anyone I loved.

He was thankful that his warriors, riding so close around him, could not hear his thoughts.

But he knew that the Great Good Spirit could hear them, and
that knowledge troubled him. He wondered if prayers could ever bring him to terms with Weshemoneto after this.

W
HEN
T
ECUMSEH RETURNED TO THE HOLY TOWN, HE HAD
no time to retreat into prayer, because the Shaker white men were there and there were many more chiefs of bands from the northwest to be met. And then a half-breed named Anthony Shane rode in with his unwelcome message from the white men’s government. Shane had grown up as a Shawnee in old Chillicothe but now was attached to the Indian agency at Fort Wayne. Shane said:

“I bring to you and your brother a very important message from Captain William Wells, the Indian agent. I am to read it to your men in council.”

Tecumseh’s eyes hardened. “Captain Wells still believes he is very important, if he expects us to call a council to hear his message.” Because of his knowledge of the tribes and his close connection with the vanquished Miami chief Little Turtle, Wild Potato had been appointed Indian agent at the important post of Fort Wayne. Wells had grown rich and was now married to one of Little Turtle’s daughters, and the old chief lived in Wells’s home. Tecumseh knew that Wells was much under Little Turtle’s influence, as well as Harrison’s, and that he had been a big voice in stirring up the white men’s animosity toward the Prophet’s village. Now Tecumseh said to this messenger, “Shane, we will interrupt the good things we are doing, and will call the council as you ask, and hear whether this message from Captain Wells is as important to us as it is to him.”

Soon the huge council house was filled. Shane smoked the pipe, looking around timidly at the huge crowd of warriors and chiefs, many of whom wore garb such as he had never seen before. Then he was invited to stand and speak his message.

It was a demand from Captain Wells that the Prophet and Tecumseh and two of their chiefs come to Fort Wayne, where Wells would read to them a letter from their great father, the president of the United States.

Tecumseh and Open Door looked at each other, eyes flashing. Tecumseh rose to his feet in one swift motion and stood before Shane, his jaw tense.

“Go back to Fort Wayne,” he said, “and tell Captain Wells that Tecumseh has no father who is called ‘president of the United States.’ The sun in the sky is my father, and the moon is my mother, and I know no other. Tell Captain Wells that my
fire burns on this place appointed by Weshemoneto and that he must come here if he wants to tell me something. I think six suns is enough time for you to go back to Fort Wayne and send him here. I shall watch for him to come up the road with his letter from President. Now with a prayer to the Great Spirit, we close this council, which was not as important to us as you thought. You may eat with us and rest before you go back.”

The women gave Shane a dab of pulp in a pan, a gray blob that was hominy cooked with cattail roots. “It is not to insult you,” Tecumseh said. “This is all we have to eat at this time. Game is not so plentiful as it was before your white men came.”

O
PEN
D
OOR’S WORD HAD SPREAD FAR WEST INTO THE
I
LLINOIS
country and up into the lands between the Great Lakes, to the Potawatomis near Lake Mis-e-ken, to the Ojibways and Ottawas from Saginaw Bay to Michilimackinac, to the many Ojibway towns on the dark evergreen shores of Lake Superior. The Ojibways especially, whose villages along the lakes were chaotic with drunkenness and plagued by witches, were seized by the fervor for salvation. One whole village of them, incited by an eloquent disciple, held a ceremony of the Prophet’s rituals, threw all their medicine bags into the lake, then, as the little relics bobbed away on the waves, packed everything and set out down through the Wis-con-sin and Illinois lands, picking up some Menominees on the way, and headed east across the Indiana Territory toward O-hi-o and the Prophet’s village. Their trail led them through Fort Wayne, where their passage in such great numbers added to William Wells’s alarm. These Ojibways would buy no whiskey at Fort Wayne. And more amazing, they would not drink any even when he offered some free to their chiefs, as he did in hopes of getting them to talk about why they were going to Greenville.

When the Ojibways reached the Prophet’s town, they were welcomed very warmly. At once they arranged themselves in a half circle outside the council house, with interpreters, to hear the Prophet, to gaze upon him, and to ask him questions. They looked on in awe as he came out from his lodge carrying what appeared to be a corpse wrapped from end to end in strips of cloth. He carried it as effortlessly as if he were carrying an empty basket; if it was a corpse, then it appeared that their prophet was also a man of uncommon physical strength. He leaned this against a tree beside him, and it stood there stiff and ominous. The visitors looked their famous prophet over long and reverently, remembering that this was the shaman who had once darkened
the sun, but they could not quite ignore the mummy, either. They had many questions to ask, but they felt afraid to ask what it was.

“What,” some wanted to know, “did the Great Good Spirit look like? We have heard you saw him even though he is invisible.”

“On one side his hair is gray,” Open Door replied. “On the other side it is white. For the rest, his face and arms, he is a red man of great age and strength. Words cannot tell it. He is so old that the age itself is beautiful and shiny.” They were convinced; that was how the legends described the deity.

Since his early visions, Open Door had gone back to the other world several times and had received instructions for making the sacred paraphernalia of his office. Now in addition to his medicine fire stick and his strings of sacred beans, he had picture sticks to give to the chiefs of the bands who came to his town. When his followers returned to their homes, they would be able to look at the images carved upon the sticks and remember his recitations. The sticks were uniformly made, of smooth heartwood cedar slabs as long as a man’s forearm, tapering from the width of two fingers at the base to one at the top. The markings carved on the sticks depicted all the things important in life between the family and the house of Heaven: Earth, Water, Lightning, Trees, the Four Winds, Corn, Animals, Plants, Sun, and Sky. “All these,” said the Prophet, “are in me.”

Each of these sticks he presented wrapped in a bundle of smaller, unmarked sticks, like that bundle in Tecumseh’s dream of unity. Thus each bundle was the Prophet, with the unbreakable unification of tribes gathered around him. With such talismans as this, the People could not forget even when they went away.

The most prominent of the Prophet’s totems was the life-size effigy of himself, this large, hollow doll made of hoops and reeds, as lightweight as basketware, concealed from end to end in its wrappings of cloth. Sometimes the Prophet kept this near him while he was preaching. But when he was needed in two villages at once, his disciples could carry to one town this effigy, in which his spiritual power could be transported. Thus many of his converts in distant villages, though they never saw him in the flesh, could attend his presence in the effigy. With this effigy standing nearby, they would draw the strings of beans through their fists, and in doing so they were shaking hands with the Prophet. Open Door had begun training disciples who could carry the word, the
totems, and the rituals to far places and thus reach people who had not yet been able to come to his holy town.

And as the red people kept coming and going, the apprehension of the white settlers grew. They began petitioning Governor Kirker of Ohio to raise the militia.

O
N THE SIXTH DAY AFTER
A
NTHONY
S
HANE HAD BEEN SENT
back to Fort Wayne, lookouts saw a rider in white man’s clothing coming down the road from that direction.

But it was not Captain Wells. It was once again Shane. Tecumseh knew at once in his heart that Wells had been afraid to come. Wells was aware of the executions of the witches, and he was known to be a cautious sort of man.

Shane himself plainly did not relish being put in this spot a second time, and he could see at once that both Tecumseh and Open Door were insulted that Wells had not come. To add to the insult, it happened that the letter was not really from the president of the United States, as Wells had said; it was actually from the secretary of war, Dearborn. However, Shane assured them, it expressed the wishes of the president. The council was convened again to hear this letter.

The message reminded them that the land around Greenville was now American land, part of the state of Ohio and within the boundaries set by the Treaty of Greenville. The message read:

When this was translated, the indignant mutterings that filled the council house made Shane break out in a sweat. And when he turned and saw the fury blazing in Tecumseh’s eyes, he wondered if he would get out alive.

Tecumseh leaped to his feet. He thrust out his arm to still the hubbub of voices, then he filled the room with his own voice.

“Hear my answer to this: Tell Captain Wells, tell President, tell any white man: