Prelude to Glory, Vol. 9

by Ron Carter

  He is a fallen prophet! Abandon him! Abandon him!

  Some backed into the forest and disappeared while others held their ground, and the battle raged on. The sun rose in the east, and in the gathering light of a cloudless, calm day, both sides could see the carnage that surrounded them. The American camp was littered with men, white and red, who were dead and dying and crippled, bloody, maimed. Gun smoke hung in the forest and over the battlefield like a pall. Tents were ripped, torn from their pegs. Americans were barefooted, with only their trousers to cover their long underwear. There was little pretense of military formation on either side; rather, it had been a wild, disorganized, disoriented fight for survival, man to man.

  The momentum had shifted. With ammunition gone, the Indians retreated into the forest and within moments had disappeared. Behind them, the Americans reloaded and waited, silent, watching, rifles and muskets at the ready. The firing died, and an awful silence seized the camp. Harrison, sword in hand, picked his way through the bodies to the edge of camp where the Indians had disappeared, then turned and gave orders.

  “You fifty men, take up positions here in a line with your weapons at the ready. The next fifty, start the cookfires for morning mess. Where’s Major Daviess?”

  A barefooted private clad only in his long underwear called back, “Right over here, sir. He’s dead.”

  Harrison flinched, then continued. “The rest of you start looking for the wounded. Do what you can for them. We’ll bury the dead later.”

  By noon they had done what they could for the wounded. After midday mess, they silently set about the mournful business of burying their dead. Eli joined the great body of men assigned to dig the shallow graves. By dusk they had covered the last of the bodies and tallied their losses. Eli was standing near Harrison when his officers made their report.

  “Two hundred casualties, sir. About one hundred Indian casualties.”

  The air went out of Harrison. “Two to one?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Harrison could not raise his eyes for a time. “All right. Get the evening mess finished and get the men to bed. Post double pickets for the night.”

  Eli followed Harrison to his tent and stepped inside. Harrison sat down at his desk and looked up at him defiantly.

  “You wanted something?”

  “What is your plan from here?”

  Harrison’s words came loud, sharp, cutting. “This isn’t the end of it, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m going over to Prophetstown tomorrow and finish it. If that scum thinks he can promise us to counsel just so they can make a sneak attack, he’s badly mistaken. Tomorrow we set this right.”

  “You’ve already lost two hundred men. Are you willing to lose more?”

  Harrison’s eyes were flashing. “If that’s what it takes.”

  Eli heaved a sigh. “As you wish.” He turned and walked from the tent. He took mess with the soldiers who ate without tasting, each lost in his own remembrance of the gun flashes in the dark and the wild melee of men going down, moaning, screaming, dying, in their desperate fight for their lives against Indians who were swinging tomahawks and belt knives.

  He went to his blankets at the edge of camp but was awake and working his way through the forest toward Prophetstown by three o’clock, beneath a myriad of stars and the full moon. He came silently to within eight hundred yards of the village, waiting for a sound or a challenge from an Indian sentry, and there was none. At two hundred yards he saw nothing through the trees. At fifty yards he could distinguish the black shapes of the orderly rows of buildings, but there was no light. The entire village was utterly dark. He waited and watched in the moonlight, and there was no movement. No village dog barked. No sound. Nothing.

  Abandoned! Why? What happened?

  On instinct alone, he stood and walked straight into the Indian village, to the longhouse. The fire that burned constantly in the big fire pit was cold. The great buffalo and bear skins on the floor for ceremonies—gone. All decorations for worship—gone. The longhouse, the center of the Indian religion and government, had been stripped to the walls! Quickly he trotted back out into the village, rifle loose in his right hand, and moved up the street, approaching one doorway after another, to find the dwellings hollow, stripped.

  Why? Why would Tenskwatawa . . .

  It hit him, and he stopped in his tracks, stunned. It wasn’t Tenskwatawa! It was his warriors! His people! He promised them the American musket balls would not hit them, and they trusted him, and a hundred of them died. The Prophet! Fallen! They had lost faith in their fallen prophet! He did not order them to leave. They could no longer trust him, and they left in spite of him, and he had to follow!

  Eli left the ghostly village at a trot. The eastern horizon was deep blue with a sun not yet risen when he encountered the first picket at Harrison’s camp. The two men walked to Harrison’s tent, which showed light from a lantern inside. The picket reluctantly asked permission, and Eli heard Harrison answer, “Enter.”

  Inside, Eli stood before the desk, rifle in hand. Harrison looked up and waited in silence.

  “I just returned from Prophetstown. It’s abandoned.”

  Harrison reared back in his chair. “Abandoned? What do you mean, abandoned?”

  “Not one person. Stripped. Abandoned.”

  “The whole village?”

  “The whole village.”

  Harrison lunged from his chair to pace for a moment. “Well! I guess we did a better job of it than we thought. They attacked us, which puts the blame on them, and we beat them so bad they fled.” His entire countenance had changed. His face was flushed, smiling, jubilant, as he went on. “Abandoned the field yesterday and their whole village overnight. Now, that’s as complete a victory as can be had! I imagine President Madison will find that report encouraging.”

  It flashed in Eli’s mind. Power lust! He’s lost in power lust! He raised a hand and Harrison stopped his pacing, waiting to hear Eli’s reply.

  “You didn’t beat the Shawnee. Tenskwatawa did. I was there yesterday morning before the fight. He told his warriors he had a revelation from the Maker of Life. He told them your American musket balls would not hit them, that they did not need to fear your weapons. They believed him. They walked into your guns, knowing they would be protected. A hundred of them died. The survivors lost faith in their prophet. They could no longer trust him. They revolted and left. Packed everything and left the village behind. He had to go with them or face you alone. The truth is, if Tenskwatawa had not begun to believe he had powers that no man has, and convinced his own people he was right, those Shawnee would not have overrun your camp yesterday. That’s the report that President Madison will hear from me.”

  Harrison sobered and for a time stared at Eli while his mind raced to create a defense. “Make any report you want. I’m going over to Prophetstown this morning and burn it to the ground. My report will state that they attacked us, we drove them back, they abandoned their village, and we burned it. The Shawnee threat is gone. The Wabash Valley is ours. That’s the truth, and the whole of it.”

  “Do you intend reporting that your own staff of officers came very close to a mutiny over your actions? That Major Daviess is dead because of it? That your losses in battle were double that of the Shawnee? Will that be there?”

  “Men die in battle. The point is, we won! We won! We’ve turned the tide!”

  “You better think deeper. Tenskwatawa has fallen from grace. That leaves Tecumseh. When he hears what happened here, what will he do? It’s my guess what happened here will harden him against us. Right now he still might be willing to council with us for a peaceful treaty. When he hears about this, it is more likely he’ll conclude the only way to deal with white men is war. If that happens, there will be no end to the blood.”

  “That’s for him to decide. If there’s nothing else, I have to get this army ready to march to Prophetstown.”

  By ten o’clock Harrison’s men were moving through the aband
oned Indian village with torches in their hands. On his command, they systematically touched fire to every building, then backed away to the perimeter to watch Prophetstown in flames. By noon not one structure remained standing. What had been a proud Indian settlement was reduced to smoking black ashes.

  Harrison gave orders and led his men back to their campground. In the late afternoon he rallied them to deliver his victory speech and commend them for their heroic action in defeating the Shawnee nation. At evening mess the men sat cross-legged with their wooden plates of venison stew, silent, conflicted, divided against themselves at the memory of what they knew they had done, and what Harrison had tried to convince them they had done.

  The following morning Eli watched them strike camp, get their wounded onto everything they could find that had wheels, and fall into a column. At midmorning Harrison gave his orders, and they started their march southward from the junction of the Wabash and Tippecanoe rivers, following the Wabash as it wound through the unparalleled beauty of the wide valley. He moved out ahead of them, covering both sides of the narrow trail, watching for any sign of ambush, and there was none. They arrived in Vincennes, from whence they had started, and on November 18, 1811, Harrison quickly disbanded his army, sent the men home, and set about carefully but quickly drafting his written report to James Madison. His had to be the first to reach the president.

  In early December, Harrison’s sensational account reached the desk of President James Madison in Washington, D.C. An elated Madison read it several times, each time finding something new that would aid his upcoming reelection campaign in 1812. Clearly, the “reduction of the Shawnee threat on the northwestern frontier” would be a monumental achievement for his campaign committee to crow about. On December 18, 1811, Madison contacted the most influential newspapers in the United States and issued his official press release.

  The Battle of Tippecanoe had been a monumental, pivotal event in the history of the United States! President Madison had restored peace to the northwestern frontier and opened the great Wabash Valley to the westward expansion of the United States! It was, in his judgment, an unparalleled accomplishment in the history of the fledgling country.

  With his announcement still on the front pages of most newspapers, other reports began to reach Madison’s desk, one from Eli Stroud, others from Harrison’s own officers and soldiers. Madison read them, and it slowly came clear in his mind. They had been there for the battle, and their recitals of it gutted Harrison’s claims. The newspapers discovered the reports and instantly published them, and suddenly what had been a bonanza for President Madison was a matter of hot debate. Was Madison a hero or a liar?

  Senator Thomas Worthington of Ohio described the whole thing as “a melancholy affair” that never should have occurred.

  A shaken Madison called in his secretary of the War Department, William Eustis, a man who went whichever direction the current political winds were blowing, and laid it out before him.

  “What’s to be done?” Madison demanded.

  Eustis replied, “Well, now, Mister President, I really don’t see any gain at all in prolonging public debate over the merits of the contradictory versions circulating in the newspapers. I suggest you ignore it and move on.”

  Shaken, Madison turned to a new tactic to blunt the cutting edge of the rising controversy. Arm and equip companies of volunteer militia to serve as frontier rangers, then appoint three commissioners to meet with the Indians, investigate their claims against the Americans, and settle the whole matter without bloodshed.

  Slowly the furor faded as new and dramatic events surfaced between the United States and England.

  As for William Henry Harrison? In January 1812, Mr. Harrison’s request for a commission in the regular army reached President Madison’s desk. Included in his documentation was his claim that “no officer in the army can maneuver a battalion with more exactness than myself.”

  President Madison took up his quill, and in his neat, cursive handwriting, carefully wrote across the face of the document, “Request denied.”

  Then he moved on to other, more pressing matters on his agenda.

  Notes

  The events described herein are accurate. In the summer of 1811, the Shawnee Indian leader Tecumseh left his home ground in Indiana Territory to go south in an effort to rally support for his stand against further white encroachment on Indian lands. He left his brother, Tenskwatawa, also known as The Prophet, in charge of their village, Prophetstown, near the junction of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers in what is now northwestern Indiana. William Henry Harrison was the territorial governor at the time, and he was ambitious to rid his territory of the Shawnee threat. Learning that Tecumseh had left Tenskwatawa to preside over Prophetstown, he decided to amass a fighting force and require the Shawnee to vacate Indiana. He sought help from Ohio governor Charles Scott, who sent him one hundred riflemen. As late as September 25, 1811, Tenskwatawa sent messages to Harrison stating his desire to counsel in peace. Harrison ignored his pleas, and with his combined force of about 1,200 soldiers, marched north from Vincennes, Indiana, up the Wabash and established his camp two miles from Prophetstown.

  Not knowing the terrain or the strength of the Indian forces, he hesitated in attacking, choosing rather to visit them at their village and demand that they leave. On November 6, 1811, he made the visit with no result. Harrison failed to post proper pickets and in general was not efficient in handling his command. Harrison’s own officers came close to mutiny when they understood what Harrison had in mind.

  Tenskwatawa, fearing Harrison’s intentions, organized his fighting force that night, promised them American musket balls could not touch them, and led them into an attack before dawn on November 7, as described herein. The battle was strongly in favor of the Shawnee until they realized the American musket balls, followed by buckshot, were in fact killing the warriors. Their faith in Tenskwatawa shattered and their ammunition low, the Indians retreated back to Prophetstown. The battle concluded with about two hundred American and one hundred Indian casualties. Major General Joseph Hamilton Daviess, one of Harrison’s chief critics, was killed in the fight.

  Incensed at the pre-dawn attack, Harrison marched his army to Prophetstown the following morning to find it abandoned. The Shawnee had lost faith in their leader, The Prophet, because his promise regarding the American musket balls had proven fraudulent. Unable to trust their leader, the Indians had abandoned their village.

  Harrison declared total victory and marched his army back to Vincennes where he disbanded his soldiers on November 18, 1881. Then he wrote a glowing report to President James Madison in which his role was much exaggerated. Madison, facing re-election in 1812, used the report to enhance his own standing with the voters in his press release of December 18, 1811, declaring the battle to be a great American victory, obviously to his credit since it had happened during his presidency.

  Shortly thereafter, other reports from participants in the battle, including some of the officers, strongly contradicted Harrison’s account. The newspapers pounced. Politicians were divided and had a field day with the conflicted affair. Ohio senator Thomas Worthington declared the Tippecanoe fight to be “a melancholy affair.” Madison was deeply concerned. He conferred with his weak War Department secretary, William Eustis, who advised him to ignore it. Madison shifted his emphasis to a peaceful resolution, and the matter slowly faded from public memory, and Madison moved on.

  In January 1812, Harrison requested a commission as a regular officer in the Continental Army, claiming, among other things, that he could maneuver a battalion of men better than any other man in the army. Madison and members of his administration rejected the application.

  See Stagg, Mister Madison’s War, pp. 184–93; Wills, James Madison, p. 91; Hickey, The War of 1812, pp. 25, 294; Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812, pp. 158, 206–228; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 16; Barbuto, Niagara, 1814, pp. 4, 5, 339. The Indiana territorial bank account was down to three dollars
, Stagg, Mister Madison’s War, p. 183. For the count of the Indians at Prophetstown, in excess of two thousand, see Stagg, Mister Madison’s War, p. 182.

  For a map of Indiana showing the location of the places described herein, see National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Fifty States, p. 151.

  For a description of the longhouse and the general appearance of the Indian villages of the times and of the rites and ceremonies conducted therein, see Graymont, The Iroquois; Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution; Hale, The Iroquois Book of Rites; Morgan, League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois; all pages and all illustrations in these references.

  The reader is advised that there are many, many other persons involved in the politics and conduct of this event and many other minor occurrences that occurred in conjunction with it; however, they are far too numerous to be set out in detail. For that reason, only the core characters and events are included herein.

  The “Tippecanoe Affair” is included in this book in such detail because it later became one of the two most prominent causes of the War of 1812.

  Eli Stroud is a fictional character.

  Washington, D.C.

  June 1, 1812

  CHAPTER X

  * * *

  It was uncertain whether the high ceiling and the massive oak desk with the great, overstuffed chair behind and the four large matching chairs in front made the man seem small, or whether the smallness of the man made the room seem large. It was only known that when President James Madison, diminutive at scarcely over five feet and one hundred pounds, slender, delicate, heart-shaped face, blue eyes, soft voice, sat behind the desk in his private study in the Executive Mansion, he somehow seemed dwarfed, misplaced, overpowered. The illusion soon faded when one engaged him in discussion on any topic the visitor might choose. Then his visitor discovered him to be a giant among men. The range and depth and the orderliness of his mind and his logic startled men who perceived themselves as being among the wise and learned of the world, and left them less sure of themselves, struggling to match the loftiness of his intellect. His strength lay in his rare ability to reduce the chaotic mess of world affairs to a simple, logical, organized, understandable whole, and lay a plan filled with hope. It was also his weakness. The chaotic, messy world did not function on principles of logic, simplicity, rightness, and organization. It functioned as it had from the dawn of time—a chaotic, messy stew of sinners and saints, heroes and villains, and the unpredictable whims of the human race. The world respected no human plan. Rather, it ran over men’s plans in its relentless march into the future, and the saints and sinners of the next generation were left to struggle and win and lose.