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.
LIEUTENANT WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON 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.”
THE 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 th
e 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.
They came on, riding at a quick walk, straight toward the ambush. The warriors, naked and painted and greased for battle, crouched and slithered in the shade, moving to the best vantage points in the edge of the woods for good shooting. The horses were so close now that even in the rain-soft ground their hoofbeats could be heard, and the rattling of guns and gear.
Then a loud cry spun out on the air, and one gunshot, then a hundred, and the quavering war cry from hundreds of throats. Soldiers fell from their saddles. Horses fell or reared. The remaining horsemen stopped in disarray, raised their rifles, and returned a ragged volley into the woods, and some of them were already riding away in disorderly retreat.
It was too much of a temptation for the Ottawas and Wyandots and many of the Shawnees along this front. With a howl they burst from the woods in pursuit of the fleeing Kentuckians. Thick Water was among those rash ones.
Tecumseh sprang up in alarm. He shouted, “No! Pe-eh-wah, come back!” It had looked too much like a decoy trick, those troops riding up so close while the main army was maneuvering around on the slope. But not many warriors heard his warning cry over the noise, only those nearby. Some who heard his voice stopped and came back, but not many. Warriors from up and down the line were darting out from their hiding places and running out to get the scalps of the fallen horsemen, ready to rush on to another great victory. Was not this just the way St. Clair’s militia had turned and run? Was not this just the way the defeat of St. Clair had begun?
Tecumseh watched, still shouting, as the hundreds of warriors rushed screaming across the open slope in pursuit of the horsemen. And then what he had feared began to happen.
Army drums, faint and dull sounding because of the damp air, thudded in the distance, down toward the river, and two cannon shots reverberated in the valley. Shouts relayed along the slope.
And then the whole Blue-Coat army, on that signal, suddenly was coming into view, moving not to the west, but straight toward the timbers. A double line of them three-quarters of a mile long had flanked right and was coming on at a very fast step. Some of them were hidden by the gunsmoke of the skirmish, but it was plain that the whole line of Blue-Coats was in a full charge now, that it would simply overrun the warriors who had rushed out into the open and would be here in the edge of the timbers within minutes. Never had Tecumseh imagined that so many hundreds of men could move in such unison. They came swiftly, the weeds and tall grasses soaking their legs, their long guns and bayonets held on a slant. This was an attacking army, coming on hard, not an army moving away in confusion.
Now these oncoming lines let the retreating horsemen pass back through to safety and closed again, still coming. The warriors who had run after the horse soldiers were now hesitating, right in the path of these hundreds and hundreds of Blue-Coats. Many of the warriors turned and raced back toward the timber; others stood bravely shooting at the ranks. Tecumseh saw Thick Water load, fire, then turn back toward the timbers.
Tecumseh clenched his jaw in dismay and in frustration, because now his warriors in the woods could not shoot at the Blue-Coats without hitting their own people, those who had been rash enough to be decoyed out. The warriors had been deceived by one of their own kinds of ruses, because they had not expected one of these marching generals to use a decoy trick.
The lines of Blue-Coats began a deep, droning cry, a monotonous bellow of fury from a thousand throats, as they clashed with the warriors in the field. Some of the warriors shot or hacked at soldiers before they themselves were speared by the bayonets or trampled by the oncoming lines. The flurry of fighting out there hardly slowed the so
ldiers. Down by the river the mounted dragoons were charging forward in front of the walking soldiers, who now were charging as if with lances instead of guns, and they were almost at the edge of the woods now. The warriors floundering back into the covert were in the way of those who tried to shoot at the soldiers. Tecumseh’s heart was torn with chagrin. The chance to mow down the soldiers with arrows and bullets from this covert was lost. So swiftly the advantage had been swept away! The only hope now was that the mass of fallen trees would slow the tide of Blue-Coats enough that clubs and knives and hatchets would suffice to stop them. Tecumseh could see the soldiers’ faces now, the young, pink ones, the craggy, leathery ones, the blue-eyed ones, their faces pouring sweat, their mouths open with their hard yelling and hard breathing, could see the teeth in their mouths, could see the sheen of daylight on the sweaty planes of their faces, and he screamed in desperation to his warriors, “Be strong! Kill them now! Brothers, be strong!” He discharged his rifle into the face of a gaunt soldier who had reached the woods. Then in his haste to reload, he tamped a ball down the muzzle without a charge of powder, thus rendering the gun useless. With a curse for white men’s iron inventions, he cast it down and drew his war club from his belt with his right hand and his knife with his left. “Pe-eh-wah!” he cried, and sprang forward. His great voice rallied some of the warriors, and they screamed their battle cries and flung themselves at the countless soldiers who came crashing and bellowing into the deadwood. Tecumseh flailed at black hats and ferocious faces, and he parried away thrusts of the long bayonets. He was desperate; his blood was full of fire. He could not bear the thought that a white army might once again win a battle in his land.
Panther in the Sky Page 40
