Panther in the Sky (92 page)

Firelight gleamed on their sweating muscles; they turned and leaped upon their own shadows. The Creek warriors looking on were wild-eyed now as they watched, and their own limbs twitched, their own hands clutched spasmodically, as their souls moved in battle with the dancers’ souls.
Ai! That is how I would spring upon my enemy! Ai! So strong is my own arm! Ai! Now I stoop to take your scalp, you who were a great warrior but not so great as I!
The dancers now were in a crouch, and their knives flashed this way and that, and finally with an ululating cry of triumph they all leaped far off the ground and landed on the balls of their feet at the last thump of the drum, and stood with weapons in their right hands, their left hands thrust upward, and though their upraised hands were empty, the spectators for a moment saw scalps in them, blood dripping.

Then Tecumseh stood alone in the firelight, his chest heaving from the intense exertions of the dance. All his warriors had filed out from the circle. Of them only Seekabo remained on the council ground. He stood between Tecumseh and the chiefs, to translate. Here he would be at his best, the Muskhogean being his native tongue, the Creeks his own people. Seekabo waited, looking at Tecumseh.

Alone, a black-painted figure on the ceremonial ground of Tuckabatchee in the homeland of his mother, his shadow thrown in all directions by the bonfires around him, Tecumseh waited for his silent immobility to affect the thousands. His heart was fire, honey, and salt because of what he had learned here.

On arriving at Tuckabatchee he had inquired about Turtle Mother.

Ah, they had told him. Your mother has gone. Great in age and wisdom, she should have lain down in peace to sleep with a serene face. But some whites were here, and when they left, many people died of a disease which was like drowning out of water. She like many of the old and weak was among them. Come, we will show you where she is buried.

Now he stood alone in the middle of the council ground just as he had stood at her grave and remembered her face as he had seen it so long ago, beautiful but bitter with hatred for white men, and he remembered the warmth and comfort of her arms. The white men had killed his father, Hard Striker. They had killed his foster father, Black Fish. They had killed his beloved brother Chiksika in Tennessee and his brother Stands-Between at Fallen
Timbers. They had driven his mother out from the Shawnee land into a lonely exile among the Creeks from whom she had grown so different, and at last, thirty years later, they had killed her with a disease instead of a bullet. All this was in Tecumseh’s heart now as he began to speak:

“O Muskogee, my kin! People of my mother’s blood!

“You have seen how the Shawnee strikes his enemy! You have seen his quickness, his strength! My warriors have shown you.

“Thus in the years of my youth I roamed through the south, and struck at white men who were doing wrong things. I made my knife taste their blood because they had taken the Sacred Hunting Grounds.”

He spoke with nearly as much motion as he danced. His arms swept and arced as if with weapons. He coiled tight like a snake and then sprang forward to hurl challenges and taunts from his mouth. He reached for the sky and shook his arms as if creating the thunder in his own voice. The Creek warriors strained forward to watch and listen when he lowered his voice to hisses and whispers; they yipped when he shouted in passion.

“Once our people were many. On all the land from the sunset to the sunrise our campfires shone like stars rained out of the sky.

“Then the whites came. Our fires have dwindled; everywhere our people have passed away, as the snow in the mountains melts in the spring. We no longer rule the forest. Yes, brothers, our campfires are few. Those that still burn we must combine into a great fire!”

It was nearly daybreak when Tecumseh had finished. The Creek warriors were nearly in a frenzy; their hearts were twisted with sorrow and anger for what had been done on the land of the Great Good Spirit by the invaders from the slime of the Eastern Sea. Never had their souls been blown so high and low by words, so thrown about by gestures. The white man Samuel Dale had made himself as inconspicuous as he could, and his own head was spinning with the comprehension of what he had seen happen here. He had remembered everything so that he might report it to Hawkins and show what a danger was being created here, but he wondered if he would get out alive to report it. Such a passion these people were in!

And he knew he would never forget one particular sight: Big Warrior’s own hand clenching his knife handle. Big Warrior himself!

B
UT BY THE TIME OF THE COUNCIL NEXT DAY, SOMETHING
had turned inside Big Warrior. It was as if he thought he had been moved further than he should have been. He knew now that Tecumseh’s night of oratory had made the Creek warriors eager to follow him into a war whose consequences he had not allowed them to think of. Big Warrior himself, who had to think of consequences for his people, had nearly leaped up in accord with the emotions Tecumseh had aroused in every man. But Big Warrior had thought much since then, and he had grown indignant about the influence this visitor had exerted upon his warriors, and he had talked in secret with Dale and with cautious old chiefs. And now Big Warrior faced Tecumseh before the gathering and said:

“You are a bad man. I will not encourage my people to follow you to ruin.”

Tecumseh drew his head back. His lips and eyes narrowed. For a long time he said nothing. Then he pointed his hand at Big Warrior’s mottled face and cried for all the council to hear:

“Your blood is white! Even your skin is growing white, to show it! You have taken my talk, and the sticks, and the wampum, but you do not mean to help the red people! I know why. You do not believe that the Great Good Spirit wants this done. You do not believe that he has sent me on this holy mission!

“You shall know! When I return to the north I will stamp my foot on the ground, and here in Tuckabatchee you will feel the earth shake!”

Now Big Warrior once again felt himself being jarred, almost intimidated, by the boldness of Tecumseh’s words and startled by the fire in Tecumseh’s eyes, which looked as intense as if Weshemoneto’s own eyes were drilling into him with contempt. The council had become a hum of awed voices at those last words.

Tecumseh knew that whether Big Warrior finally condoned or condemned him in the council, many of the Creek warriors had perceived the truth and importance of his plea and were eager to join in resisting the white men. When the earth trembled and the dust rose and the river ran backward, it would shake them loose from all fear and doubt, and they would take up arms against the Americans!

“I
EXPECT NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO COME OF THIS PARLEY,”

General Harrison said to the officers standing around his little field table. “That humbug is only stalling.”

The officers nodded, their elegant bicorn and beaver hats bobbing up and down. They all wore capes and cloaks against the raw, misty cold. Nearby, mauls thudded on tent stakes, soldiers yelled and grumbled, axes thudded, and saws rasped as the army set up officers’ tents and gathered dead wood for bonfires. The aroma of beef boiling in kettles for the evening mess was already spreading in the dank air. There was a rustle of heavy canvas as a team of privates grunted and raised Harrison’s white marquee tent a few yards away. The general went on:

“Here is what I mean to do, gentlemen. We will meet with this Shawnee prophet tomorrow as he has requested. We will restate our demand that he disperse his warriors now and forever. I do not expect him to comply. He will probably plead for more time, more councils.

“But he won’t get them. If he doesn’t yield to our demands tomorrow, we’ll wait till they’ve gone to their huts, then fall upon the town and destroy it. Burn it down, and burn their harvest.”

Colonel Boyd, commander of the regulars, cleared his throat. “Governor, sir, I’ve been thinking we’d do better to strike them now.”

“Aye!”

“Aye! My thinking, too!”

“Now! Yes!”

“Why let them ready themselves, Gov’nor?”

The militia officers were eager. Harrison held up his hand, tilted his head, and lightly shut his eyes and waited for their clamor to stop. A cavalry troop was noisily setting up its camp on either side of the staff officers’ compound. “Gentlemen,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the noise, “no one is more eager than I to break up this nest of banditti. That’s why I brought you here. But the president and the secretary of war both have urged me to do it without force if that’s at all possible. So
we shall try that by talk. If talk doesn’t work, as I expect it won’t, we’ll treat them to buckshot and bayonets. Your boys will have their chance to do what they came here for.”

Actually, Harrison well knew in his own mind, the president probably would have apoplexy if he knew the army was here. Harrison had been authorized to march his army only to the edge of the treaty lands as a show of force. By coming into the heart of the Indian lands like this, he was committing just such an act of aggression as the old Greenville Treaty forbade. But the president was too far removed from the Prophet’s establishment to understand what a Damocles’ sword it was over Vincennes, what an obstacle it was to settlement and statehood, what a vipers’ pit of British intrigue it had become. Harrison figured that he knew the situation and its remedy better, and that the national administration would, after he had solved the problem quickly and neatly, admit that the end had justified his means.

D
USK SETTLED EARLY OVER THE
W
ABASH VALLEY, UNDER
the gloom of low, drizzling clouds. Charcoal Burner’s scouts watched Harrison build his camp on the narrow, wooded plateau a mile west of Prophet’s Town, and they noted every detail. The plateau was covered with an open oak forest, among whose trees the army had set up a defensive perimeter in somewhat the shape of a footprint. The long east side of the elevation looked over a marshy, grassy bottomland that stretched along the Wabash toward Prophet’s Town, and along this side, for a distance of three hundred paces, were posted a large part of the Blue-Coat regulars, interspersed with units of the Indiana Hunting-Shirts. At the south end, or heel, of the encampment, the Yellow Jacket militia could be clearly seen setting up their tight salient, their horses tethered inside. In the woods at the wider north end of the camp were the Beaver-Hats, also with their horses tethered inside. The west side of the plateau dropped off abruptly twenty feet into a willow-thicketed ravine through which gurgled a fast, rocky-bottomed creek on its way to the Wabash-se-pe. This long side of the camp was guarded by a small body of Blue-Coats and a long line of Indiana Hunting-Shirts. In the heart of the camp stood the officers’ white tents, protected by horse soldiers. Supply wagons were also inside the perimeter, the beef cattle were grazing in the lowland beyond the camp of the Yellow Jackets, and there were sentries stationed everywhere outside the lines. Charcoal Burner noticed that although the soldiers were cutting a
great amount of wood, they were not building breastworks with it but only making big stacks of firewood.

Charcoal Burner stayed near the army’s camp until nightfall, moving from one sheltered place to another, observing everything, hearing the snatches of voices, singing, and laughter in the hush of the wind, sending his scouts all around the camp or back to Prophet’s Town to report on the army’s doings. Finally he himself went back to hear what the chief warriors would be saying in their council about this army whose bonfires glowed within sight of the holy town.

He found them in the council lodge, in a semicircle in front of Open Door, urging him to do something to protect the women and children. They were making all kinds of suggestions. Some were in favor of moving the whole population away up the Tippecanoe under cover of darkness; others recommended that Harrison be seized and stabbed during the parley the next day.

Open Door sat with his cloak drawn over his shoulders, his face set hard and stern to conceal the doubts and fears that billowed inside him. As if to forestall a need to decide, he asked Charcoal Burner to tell everything he had seen of the American camp.

It was apparent that the Long Knife general was very alert, Charcoal Burner told them, and he described the thoroughness with which the defense had been put up even though tomorrow was to be a peace parley day. White Loon, a Wea warrior chief, seized on that and expressed his fear that the white men had built no barricades because they had come here to attack in the night, not to defend themselves. “They will come out of their camp in the night and fall upon our town!” he cried. “Why else would they not build barricades when they are so close to us? Would white men dare to sleep without a fence around them? No! They mean to come and kill us in our sleep!”

“We must strike them in the night, or they will strike us,” insisted the Kaskaskia war chief, Stone Eater. The Winnebagoes in one excited voice agreed. They were infuriated by the threat these Americans were posing to their families, who had traveled so far to be safe in this holy town under Weshemoneto’s cloak. “Though the Great Good Spirit has let the Long Knives come this far, he will not let them destroy us,” said Wood, another war chief. “Father, you said we will always be safe here, that no one can hurt the town. You told us that anyone who tries to hurt your people will die or go crazy.”