The Invasion of Canada (8 page)

Tecumseh advances under the curious scrutiny of the dignitaries – a handsome figure, tall for his tribe (at least five foot ten), with an oval rather than an angular face, his complexion light copper, his nose handsome and straight, his mouth “beautifully formed like that of Napoleon.” Everyone who has met him notices his eyes, which are a clear, bright hazel under dark brows, and his teeth, which are white and even. He is naked to the waist, his head shaved save for a scalp lock. He walks with a brisk elastic step in spite of a bent leg fractured and imperfectly set after a youthful fall from a pony. There are some who think him the finest specimen of a man they have ever seen, but no authentic likeness exists on paper or canvas, for Tecumseh refuses to have his portrait painted by a white man.

He halts, looks over the assemblage, sees the soldiers, feigns anger, pretends to suspect treachery. He will not go near the canopy, not because he fears the soldiers but because he wishes to place himself on an equal footing with his adversary. He intends to speak as in a council circle, which puts every man on the same level.

The game continues. Harrison’s interpreter, Barron, explains that it will be a nuisance to rearrange the seats. Tecumseh disagrees; only the whites need seats, the Indians are accustomed to sitting on the ground: “Houses are made for white men to hold councils in. Indians hold theirs in the open air.”

“Your father requests you sit by his side,” says Barron, indicating the Governor.

Tecumseh raises an arm, points to the sky.

“
My
father! The Great Spirit is my father! The earth is my mother – and on her bosom I will recline.” And so sits cross-legged on the ground, surrounded by his warriors.

The problem is that Tecumseh refuses to act like a Harrison Indian. Nor does he act like a white man. He is unique and knows
it. On his endless missions to other tribes, in his dogged attempt to forge an Indian confederacy, it is necessary for him to say only “I am Tecumseh.” That is enough to explain his purpose.

This attitude disconcerts Harrison. In his reports to Washington he tries to shrug off Tecumseh: his speeches here at the great council, he says, are “insolent and his pretensions arrogant.” Yet he is forced to take him seriously. The talks drag on for days; but when the Shawnee war chief speaks, the Governor listens, for this half-naked man in the deerskin leggings is one of the greatest orators of his time.

His reputation has preceded him. He is known as a consummate performer who can rouse his audience to tears, laughter, fury, action. Even those who cannot understand his words are said to be held by the power of his voice. White men who have heard him speak at past councils have struggled to describe his style: in 1806 at a council at Springfield, Ohio, “the effect of his bitter, burning words … was so great on his companions that the whole three hundred warriors could hardly refrain from springing from their seats. Their eyes flashed, and even the most aged, many of whom were smoking, evinced the greatest excitement. The orator appeared in all the power of a fiery and impassioned speaker and actor. Each moment it seemed as though, under the influence of his overpowering eloquence, they would abruptly leave the council and defiantly return to their homes.”

Like his physical presence, Tecumseh’s oratory is, alas, filtered through the memories of eyewitnesses. Even the best interpreters cannot keep up with his flights of imagery, while the worst garble his eloquence. Occasionally, in the printed record – admittedly imperfect – one hears faintly the echoes of that clear, rich voice, calling across the decades:

“It is true I am Shawnee. My forefathers were warriors. Their son is a warrior. From them I take only my existence. From my tribe I take nothing. I am the maker of my own fortune. And oh! that I might make that of my red people, and of my country, as great as the conceptions of my mind, when I think of the Spirit that rules the universe.…

“The way, and the only way, to check and stop this evil, is, for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land; as it was at first; and should be yet; for it never was divided, but belongs to all, for the use of each. That no part has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers who want all and will not do with less.…

“Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the clouds and the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?”

In this three-hour speech at the great council of Vincennes, Tecumseh threatens to kill any chief who sells land to the white man:

“I now wish you to listen to me. If you do not it will appear as if you wished me to kill all the chiefs that sold you the land. I tell you so because I am authorized by all the tribes to do so. I am the head of them all. I am a Warrior and all the Warriors will meet together in two or three moons from this. Then I will call for those chiefs that sold you the land and shall know what to do with them. If you do not restore the land you will have a hand in killing them.”

But from his opening words it is clear that Tecumseh feels that he is not getting through to Harrison:

“Brother, I wish you to listen to me well – I wish to reply to you more explicitly, as I think you do not clearly understand what I before said to you. I will explain again.…”

He is like a patient parent, indulging a small unheeding child. But Harrison will never understand, cannot understand. Land is to him private property, circumscribed by fences and surveyors’ pins, tied down by documents, deeds, titles. He wants to be fair, but he cannot comprehend this Indian. The land has been bought from its rightful owners and paid for. It is purely a business matter.

Now it is the Governor’s turn to speak. He ridicules the idea of a single Indian nation, dismisses the Shawnee claim to ownership of the disputed lands (the Shawnee, he points out, come from farther south), praises the United States above all other nations for a long record of fair dealing.

The Indians listen patiently, waiting for the translations. Not far away on the grass lies the Potawatomi chief Winemac, in fear of his life at Tecumseh’s hands, for he is one of those who has agreed to cede the land. He hides in his buckskins a brace of pistols, a gift from the Governor to guard him from assassination. A sergeant and twelve soldiers, originally detailed to guard the assembly, have moved off a distance to escape the searing sun.

The Shawnee translation of Harrison’s remarks ends. The Potawatomi translation begins. Suddenly Tecumseh rises and, with violent gestures, starts to shout. Harrison notes, with concern, that Winemac is priming his pistols. John Gibson, the Indiana secretary, who understands
the Shawnee tongue, whispers to Lieutenant Jesse Jennings of the 7th Infantry to bring up the guard quickly: “Those fellows mean mischief.” Tecumseh’s followers leap to their feet, brandishing tomahawks and war clubs. Harrison draws his sword. A Methodist minister runs to the house, seizes a rifle, and prepares to protect the Governor’s family. Up runs the twelve-man guard, muskets ready. Harrison motions them to hold their fire, demands to know what Tecumseh is saying. The answer is blunt: the Governor is a liar; everything he has said is false; the United States has cheated the Indians. The angry Harrison banishes Tecumseh and his followers from Grouseland. They leave in a fury, but the following day, his anger spent, Tecumseh apologizes.

What is the meaning of this singular incident? Had Tecumseh planned a massacre, as some believe, only to be faced down by Harrison and his troops? That is unlikely. It is more probable that, hearing the translation of Harrison’s words, he briefly lost his remarkable self-possession. It is also possible that it was a carefully staged part of a plan to convince Harrison of Tecumseh’s strength and leadership.

Harrison, mollified by the apology, visits Tecumseh at his camp on the outskirts of Vincennes and finds the Shawnee in a totally different mood. The menacing savage has been transformed into a skittish adversary. The two sit together on a bench, Tecumseh talking all the while and edging closer to the governor, who is forced to move over. Tecumseh continues to talk, continues to crowd Harrison, who presently finds himself on the very end of the bench. Harrison at length protests. The Shawnee laughs: how would he like to be pushed right off, as the Indians have been pushed off their lands by white encroachment?

But beneath this burlesque Harrison recognizes a firmness of purpose that makes him apprehensive. As the council proceeds Tecumseh makes it clear that he intends to prevent, by force if necessary, the lands ceded at Fort Wayne from falling into the hands of the whites. His final words are unequivocal:

“I want the present boundary line to continue. Should you cross it I assure you it will be productive of bad consequences.”

Harrison has no choice but to halt the surveys of the disputed territory. He will not get his two dollars an acre until the power of the Shawnee brothers is broken forever.

WHO ARE THESE SHAWNEE BROTHERS? Harrison may well ask himself. Where have they sprung from? What was it that produced from one Indian tribe and from the same parents the two most compelling native leaders of their time? What has made them rise above their own fellows, their own kin, so that their names are familiar to all the tribes from Michilimackinac to the borders of Florida?

The two do not even look like brothers. If Tecumseh is grudgingly admired, the Prophet is universally despised. To the white romantics one is a “good” Indian, the other “bad” – the noble savage and the rogue native, neat stereotypes in the bosom of a single family. Part of the contrast is physical. Tecumseh is almost too handsome to be true; his younger brother is ugly, awkward, and one-eyed, a handkerchief masking the empty socket, mutilated in childhood by a split arrow. One is a mystic, mercurial and unpredictable, the other a clear-eyed military genius. Yet the two are indivisible, their personalities and philosophies interlocking like pieces of an ivory puzzle.

In looking forward to a new future for the tribes, the brothers are gazing back upon an idyllic past when the vast hunting-grounds were open to all. The idea of land held in common springs directly from the Shawnee experience and must have been held by others before them. Always partially nomadic, the Shawnee were deprived of any share of the profits from lands sold to white men in Kentucky. The sedentary Iroquois pocketed the cash while the advancing pressure of settlement forced the Shawnee northward and westward always onto lands occupied by other tribes. For years now they have been hunting over the disputed territory east of the Wabash, but in Harrison’s conventional view they do not “own” it because the Miami were there first. Tecumseh’s own wanderings underline the Shawnee dilemma. He has no fixed home but has moved northward from settlement to settlement, from Kentucky to Indiana to Ohio to Prophet’s Town on the Tippecanoe. Men with such a history must feel the land belongs to all.

Unlike the Prophet, Tecumseh is a warrior. The major influence in his life was his older brother, Cheeseekau, fourteen years his senior and clearly a replacement for his father, who died when Tecumseh was an infant. Cheeseekau taught him to hunt with bow and arrow (nurturing in him a contempt for firearms, which frighten away deer), to fight with a tomahawk, and to develop his scorn and hatred of the white man, especially white Americans. From the age of fifteen, when he survived his first skirmish at his brother’s side against the Kentucky volunteers, he has done battle with American frontiersmen and American soldiers. He has fought in every major engagement, rising to band leader after Cheeseekau’s death in the Cherokee war in 1792 and emerging unscathed two years later at the disastrous Battle of Fallen Timbers, when another brother fell to an American musket ball.

Tecumseh’s Frontier

Yet his closest companion for fifteen years was a white youth, Stephen Ruddell, who has become a Methodist missionary to the Shawnee. Captured by the tribe during the Revolution and adopted into a Shawnee family, young Ruddell was present on the famous occasion when, at sixteen, Tecumseh impassively watching a white prisoner being consumed by the slow fire of the stake, rose up and in a speech that foreshadowed later eloquence swore he would never again allow such horror in his presence.