Panther in the Sky (87 page)

Indians who were Jealous of the Shawnee brothers’ influence brought rumors of all kinds to the governor: that Tecumseh was plotting to murder him; that British agents were at Prophet’s Town, inciting the brothers; that Tecumseh was going to attack Vincennes in force with British help. Though Harrison understood the motives behind such tales, he could not shake from his head the notion that they might have some basis in fact. He began writing long letters with great frequency to the War Department. He requisitioned five hundred new rifles and asked for better swords, saying that the presently available swords might do to split the bare skull of a savage but not the helmeted head of a British dragoon. In his many personal letters to the secretary of war, he began suggesting that he should perhaps be authorized to march a strong force up the Wabash toward Prophet’s Town and at least intimidate the Shawnee leaders. He requested that the federal authorities build a strong new fort close to Prophet’s Town, to guard the way to Vincennes.

In the meantime, he was having Indian troubles right in his own town. The innkeeper Bazadone had killed an unarmed Muskogee, and Harrison, in an effort to soothe Indian resentment, had compensated the Muskogee’s friends with goods and had ordered Bazadone put on trial. Two trigger-happy white ruffians had shot and wounded two Weas without provocation near Vincennes, then had been killed in turn by avenging Potawatomis. The entire population was getting very nervous about any and all Indians. Settlers were leaving. Immigration into the territory, which was needed to bring the population up to the minimum for statehood, was slowing because of the scare.

Harrison began to examine from all angles the idea of marching an army against Prophet’s Town. Of course, as he well knew, he had no legal right to send a force into country still claimed by the Indians. But by broad interpretation of the laws governing territorial defense, he might get away with launching a
retaliatory
campaign—if he could find something in the Shawnee’s doings big enough to retaliate for.

Once he had got the notion of invading, it began to grow. He
wanted the Fort Wayne Treaty lands surveyed and sold and settled as quickly and easily as possible, and the only recourse he could see to clear the way for it was by scattering that nest of red militants and fanatics who dwelt at Prophet’s Town and defied him at every turn.

Then, in the midst of these ponderings and plottings, he would remember that most vivid of all memories: Tecumseh poised to strike. And he would feel the delicious chill of dread. What an enemy that man would be! Sometimes in his reveries of the invasion he would see himself and Tecumseh, in the great, sprawling chaos of battle, seeing each other arid going straight at each other with naked steel. It was a rather frightening image, and he would have an uncanny feeling that that was just how it would happen: that Tecumseh would find him and attack him face to face.

But then Harrison would remember the maxim:

The greater the enemy, the greater the victory!

B
AZADONE WENT TO TRIAL FOR THE MURDER OF THE
drunken Indian. Harrison desperately hoped the Spaniard would be sentenced to severe punishment. He was aware, as Tecumseh had pointed out to him in their private talk, that not once in the years since the occupation of the Northwest had any white man been convicted for killing any Indian, though there had been hundreds of murders. If the Indians could see just one white man punished for such a crime, Harrison knew, one of the worst grievances of the red men would be eased, and incalculable benefit surely would come of it. So he brought the prosecutor to his mansion and talked to him for a long time about the importance of this matter. He said:

“Bazadone is known to be guilty. There is no doubt! You will do the greatest service to this capital and the territory by making the clearest and strongest possible case against the murderer. Do so, sir, I implore you!”

The prosecutor did so.

The jury, made up of white men haunted by the specter of warlike Indians, acquitted the Spaniard without deliberation.

The news traveled swiftly through all Indian towns in the territory.

Once again it had been proven that by the white man’s law, the life of a red man was of no importance at all.

B
Y MIDSUMMER
T
ECUMSEH AND HIS BODYGUARDS AND DANCERS
were ready to go to the south. Their canoes were loaded with
weapons, ceremonial objects, red sticks, and paints. Now Tecumseh went into Open Door’s medicine lodge and sat with him for the most urgent and serious talk he had ever had with him in all the years of their mission. This time he did not sit on the opposite side of the fire-ring but close beside him, and he put his hand on the back of Open Door’s neck, to speak to him as an older to a younger brother, as he had in their childhood.

“My brother,” he said, “I am going to explain some very important things, and I am going to ask for your sacred word of promise. Everything we have done in the past six years, and everything we are about to do to complete our great work, depends upon your attention to what I tell you now. There has never been a time like this, and if you do not give me your word, everything could be undone; as quick as a thunderclap, the fate of our People could be made dark.”

Open Door, his eye glittering with fervent sincerity, said, “Brother, you know you can depend on me. Our mission is my life!”

Tecumseh hoped he could. Lately Open Door had shown some of his old foolish, spiteful traits. He had seemed to grow more distant from Tecumseh, more resentful of his suggestions. It was not hard to understand why, of course. For a while he had been adored and respected as the spiritual father of all the People. But then the realities of the white invasion had required more than mere religious leadership, and Tecumseh had had to assume more and more of the command. It was clear that Open Door felt his own stature shrinking, that he resented being second to his brother as he had always been in childhood. But for these next few critical moons, there must be complete concurrence between them.

Now Tecumseh said:

“As I leave for the south, I am going to stop at Vincennes and try again to soothe Harrison’s fears. He is like a child needing some more attention, but he is like a dangerous child with many knives in his hands. I understand him. He wants to come up here and scatter us because we will not do as he demands. He looks for any excuse to do so. I will try to put him at ease so that he will sit where he is until I come back from the south. When I return from there, the alliance will be complete. It is not quite, yet, and nothing must happen to shake it down until I have put the top on it. Harrison must be given no excuse to march against us. None! Do you in your heart understand how important this is?”

“I understand. How could I not understand?”

“I have told you that this will be the year of the sign. It will be the year when the nation of red men is complete. The long star is in the sky, going toward the south. The squirrels listened to the Master of Life and fled toward the south. Everything on the earth is getting ready. All creatures except the white men know that this year the red men are to be as one, and that the president of the Seventeen Fires will then have to be honorable with us, and stop what he is doing. This is the most important thing that ever shall have happened among the red men. Not Cornstalk, not Chief Brant, not Pontiac, not Little Turtle in their old greatness ever did a thing that was this important to the red people. You, my brother, have become the greatest of all the leaders. As such, you will have to show more patience and wisdom than any red man ever has, and you probably will be tested very hard by Harrison while I am gone. Listen:

“It will surely take me six or seven moons to do what I have to do in the south. In all that time, everything we have here will rest in your hands. I feel that Harrison will seek an excuse to destroy it while I am gone, and if I did not have to go to the south now, as the signs direct me, I would not leave this place. When I go to see him, I will try to put him at ease. But if in my absence he demands anything, you might have to give it. If he gives you an insult, you might have to eat it. And listen, now: If he does come up the Wabash-se-pe with his army, you must not fight him, but take the people up the Tippecanoe and hide them until it is safe. Remember, my beloved brother: If he burned this town, we could build another. But never again could a confederation like this be rebuilt. Do I have your sacred promise? Will you live up to my trust, knowing that the fate of all the red people depends upon doing so?”

“My brother, you have my sacred word.”

“Neweh-canateh-pah Weshemoneto,
the Great Good Spirit favors our People.”

“Weshecat-welo k’weshe-laweh-pah,
let us be strong by doing right.”

T
HEN
T
ECUMSEH WENT TO SEE
S
TAR
W
ATCHER AND
C
AT
Pouncing. He told his son, “While I am away, I want you to go and seek your Spirit Helper. It is a hard and frightening thing to do, but your life will be blessed when you have done it. Promise me that you will try to do that, and I will be happy as I travel.”

Looking frightened, the boy replied, “I promise, Father, I shall try.”

Then Tecumseh said to Star Watcher, “Good sister, great love I have for you. I will be away from here for as much as half a year, and this is a terrible time to be gone because of the Long Knife Harrison. He wants any excuse to blow us away like leaves.” She nodded her graying head, then looked straight into his eyes, her face resolute. He told her of the promise he had extracted from Open Door, then said, “Our brother has become a great man, and we know he has done much good for the People. But he is like a stone house built in a marsh, so great a weight upon a character of muck. I wish my trust could rest with him as easy as it does with you. How I wish his heart could be as strong and true as yours!

“Our brother listens to your wisdom as to no one else’s. Help him stand by his promise to me. If Harrison provokes him and he swells up, remind him of what I said to do. Use your voice in the women’s council to hold this town safe.

“Now here is something I have done. I asked Charcoal Burner to stay here and be a second chief in my absence. I beseeched him to use all the same cautions, and to be a steadying hand. Charcoal Burner wanted to go to the south with me but said he will stay here and do this. He gave me his pledge that he too will always counsel Open Door to restraint. With you and Charcoal Burner on either side of our brother, I have less fear of leaving. Now, listen:

“I am going to stop at Vincennes on my way down the Wabash-se-pe, and will try to put Harrison to sleep. I will tell him the truth of my going, so that he will know I am not here planning war. I will ask him again not to let white people move into the treaty land until I have talked to the president of the Seventeen Fires, and I hope he will grant me that promise.”

“Are you going to talk to the president, then?”

“When the five southern nations have joined us, I think, it will be a good time to go and talk to him. Then we will be so strong that he must listen to us. We shall see. The tomorrows are in the management of the Great Good Spirit, who will tell me what to do. This is the year of the great sign. We must all do the best that is in us, and thus we can turn the fortunes of our race.”

She gripped his hands in both of hers. Her hands were work-hardened and as strong as a man’s. Then she spoke of something he had known she would say. “When you are among the Muskogee, you will see if our mother is well?”

“I will find her.”

“Do you think she would want to come back and live her last years among us?”

“I will ask her that. She was bitter when I saw her last. And what made her bitter has grown much worse since she left us. But with the years she may be serene in her heart and say yes.”

Star Watcher drew his hands toward her and put her cheek against them and was silent for a while, and they could feel goodness and strength flowing between them. “I wish,” she said, “you could take your son with you, so that she might see him.”

“I will try to bring her back here to see him, and to see your own children. Going there will be too dangerous a trip to take a boy. We will pass through many whites, and then among many red peoples who have been our enemies. I hope to make them our friends.”

“Then,” she said, “until you have won them, may the Great Good Spirit shield you with his hand.”

G
OVERNOR
H
ARRISON WATCHED WITH SATISFACTION, EVEN
with delight, Tecumseh’s departure down the Wabash with the twenty-four elegant warriors of his bodyguard, their canoes filled with weapons and ceremonial objects.

And the populace of Vincennes then watched with great relief as the rest of the Indians, in canoes, on horseback, and afoot, struck their camp north of the town and started back up the Wabash toward their own village on the Tippecanoe, their dust and their voices lingering in the hot summer air after them.

The governor’s second council with Tecumseh had been mere formality. Neither had said anything new, and neither had conceded anything. Harrison had not let himself be disarmed by Tecumseh’s personality this time, but neither had there been any anger shown on either side. Each had been merely playing for time.

Harrison was delighted not only because the Indians were gone and the townspeople could breathe easy, but because he knew the most formidable opponent of his plans would be far out of the way in the south for a long time, which would make everything so much easier. He could not have asked Tecumseh to do anything so convenient. And now Harrison penned another letter to Secretary of War Eustis, reporting on the council and stating his own intentions: