Flashman and Madison's War

by Robert Brightwell

  “Five hundred is a good number of warriors,” I reflected thinking back to what the Iroquois had done with just eighty.

  “He is bringing a thousand this time,” crowed the old veteran. “They want revenge against this General Harrison who has been fighting them in America.”

  I left the tavern feeling quite confident that I had done the right thing in coming west. The British had five hundred regular troops and another five hundred militia. With a further thousand Indians, I thought, that should be more than enough to beat whatever force this General Harrison would be able to scratch together.

  After a night at the inn I set off the next morning to General Procter’s headquarters, a large house overlooking the lake. I still had the now faded letter of introduction from the governor general that I had given Brock and I passed this to Procter’s aide while I waited for Procter to see me. In a few moments the general himself emerged from one of the side rooms.

  “Captain Flashman, you are most welcome, sir. I am surprised but delighted that the governor general has sent me such an experienced officer. I need as many such men as I can get.”

  “My compliments to you, sir,” I replied, saluting. “From what I hear in town, General, your command seems very confident of victory in the coming campaign.”

  Instead of sharing the ebullient confidence of his men, Procter seemed to sag a little at what I had intended as a compliment to his leadership. “Not all of my command appreciates the strategic realities, Captain,” he replied wearily. “Now, do you have despatches for me from the governor general?”

  “I regret, sir, that I do not come from the governor; I am here on behalf of John Norton, to tell you that he will not be able to support you as he would have wished. He has been ordered to reinforce the men of General Sheaffe instead.”

  Procter did not hide his disappointment. “Come in, sir, take a seat at the table,” he said gesturing to some furniture at the end of a long room. “I probably should have known better than to expect any reinforcement from the east.” He busied himself pouring us each a glass of madeira before he sat down heavily beside me. “They expect me to perform miracles with a few hundred soldiers and the Indians.”

  “But surely a few Iroquois won’t make that much difference when you have Tecumseh and his thousand warriors?”

  Procter’s initial response was a heavy sigh. “It is not the Iroquois I wanted,” he admitted at last, “but Norton.”

  “I don’t understand, sir,” I replied. “From what I hear Tecumseh commands huge respect from all who have fought with him and he is a skilled war leader. Why would you need Norton as well?”

  “Because Norton is half British, he knows about our ways. See here.” With that he pulled across the map on the table showing Lake Erie and the surrounding territory. “At the moment our ships control the lake, but there,” his finger stabbed down on a small bay on the Pennsylvania shore of the lake, “the Americans are building a new fleet of their own. It will challenge us for supremacy and if they win they can land troops behind us and cut our main lines of supply.”

  “Are we building new ships as well?”

  “Yes, there is one new ship on the blocks here. It is half built and will not be ready until the summer. But it is the skilled sailors I need. What counts as our navy on this lake are known as the Provincial Marine; they can cross the lake but are barely equipped to fight on it. One of the captains I have just stood down was eighty-seven.”

  “So should you not try to destroy their fleet before it can put to sea?”

  “Precisely, now the ice on the lake is clearing we could sail a force there to do just that. But the Americans expect me to do it and I would need every man I can get, including the Indians, to guarantee success.”

  “But Tecumseh does not agree?” I guessed.

  “No, he is determined that we should attack the Americans at Fort Meigs. He wants to destroy it before the Americans can gather there in strength. He does not understand about naval warfare. That is why I wanted Norton to help explain that burning the American fleet should be the first priority.”

  “Is there no way he can be persuaded?”

  “No, his brother is some kind of prophet for his people and Tecumseh has been working towards his vision for a confederacy of Indian nations. Some warriors treat him as an ambassador of their Great Spirit; when he toured south a few years ago a comet was seen in the sky and then last winter there were earthquakes. Many seemed to think that these events were linked to him. He has been influencing tribes as far south as Florida and is only interested in building and defending his Indian territory. Defeating Harrison is part of that dream; keeping naval superiority on Lake Erie isn’t.”

  We talked some more and Procter appeared quite lonely in command. He only had one aide outside and judging from the mood in the town, he had clearly not shared his concerns with his officers. He seemed nervous of Tecumseh and resentful that the Indian’s intransigence was effectively determining British strategy. As I stood to leave Procter ran his eye down my attire. I still had on my deerskin trousers. Most of the garrison seemed to be wearing a varied mixture of garments, but I was wearing my patched army coat to show my rank. “Be careful if you fight among the Indians Flashman, that red coat won’t protect you. The Americans are in a murderous mood after that unfortunate incident at the River Raisin.”

  “Yes, General Sheaffe told me that they would kill any white man found fighting with the Indians.”

  “Hmph,” grunted Procter, before adding, “they would probably hang me as well if they catch us.”

  “Henry,” called a woman’s voice sharply from the other end of the room. “Not in front of Lavinia!” I had assumed that we were alone but when I looked around to the other end of the room, I saw a middle-aged woman glaring sternly around a high-backed chair on one side of the fire and a wide-eyed girl peering around another.

  “Sorry m’dear,” grunted Procter before turning to me. “Perhaps Tecumseh is right. If we drive the Americans from Fort Meigs, they will not have men left to land behind our lines.”

  I left Procter’s presence feeling a lot more sanguine about my prospects. In the east the British were deciding strategy and the Indians were supporting them but in the west the situation was almost reversed. The British did not have the numbers to fight on their own and so they were reliant on their Indian allies, who ultimately were working towards their own goals.

  With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to be dismissive about Tecumseh’s plans for an Indian confederation stretching from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. But back then the idea did not seem so absurd. Just twenty years previously an Indian chief called Little Turtle had annihilated an American force of a thousand men. Now there were a similar number of Indians ready to go to war to achieve it, and if success looked likely, then I did not doubt that thousands more would find the courage to join them.

  I had expected Black Eagle to be supportive of Tecumseh’s plans, but to my surprise he was scornful of the idea. “You will never get that many tribes agreeing for long,” he told me. “Most have been at war with each other for much longer than they have been fighting the whites.”

  “But the Iroquois have formed a long-lasting confederation,” I pointed out. “If the Six Nations can stay together, then why not other tribes?”

  “The Six Nations are not really together, at least not now. Some of us fight for the British but those living in America are keeping out of the war and some would even be willing to fight for the Americans if they were needed.” He grinned and reached across to tug gently on my hair. “But one thing will always bring us together: taking white scalps!”

  Over the next couple of days I saw Procter several times walking about the town, either on his own or with his wife. Apart from the occasional salute from the regular soldiers, he moved almost anonymously around the settlement. Things were rather different for his co-commander. On the third day word spread around the community like wildfire that Tecumseh was coming. His
canoes had crossed the Detroit River and with a bodyguard of eighty warriors he was on his way. Within a very short while every man, woman and child of all races and creeds were gathered in the centre of town and craning their gaze towards its western end. The only person missing was Procter, who stayed aloof in his headquarters. I will admit to being more than a mite curious about this famous chief myself. When his cavalcade went riding past I was among those hanging out of an upstairs window at the inn.

  I saw a portrait of Tecumseh once; in it he was wearing a British army coat, but he wasn’t wearing it that day. Given what I know of him, I doubt he ever wore one as he never saw himself as a British soldier. When I first clapped eyes on him he was wearing deerskin leggings and a printed calico shirt. There was a bandana around his long hair and a small silver ornament was suspended from the skin between his nostrils. I had expected this chief, whom everyone described in almost divine terms, to be severe and forbidding, but instead he was smiling and pointing out people in the crowd. If anything he seemed amused at the scale of his welcome, especially from the white militia. As he dismounted in front of Procter’s headquarters, some of the Indians set up a whooping and started brandishing their tomahawks. The militia nearby started to shrink back, gazing nervously over their shoulders. But Tecumseh just grinned again and shouted something in their language to quieten the warriors down. He certainly exuded a calm confidence and I began to understand why so many would put their faith in him. As he strolled up the steps into Procter’s home, taking the salute of the sentries, he did not look the slightest bit overawed. A man with a white beard greeted the chief on Procter’s porch. This I learned was Elliot from the Indian Agency, who acted as interpreter as Tecumseh spoke little English. Then the pair of them walked calmly inside to finalise the campaign plan with the British general.

  The next morning there was no surprise when it was announced that the army would be embarking to attack Fort Meigs. The fort was some distance up the Maumee River, which flowed into the south-western corner of Lake Erie. The British force embarked on all the available shipping on the 23rd of April as Tecumseh led his Indians around the western end of the lake. If you have not seen it then the term ‘lake’ might be misleading for Lake Erie is little short of an inland sea. In the middle you cannot see any of the surrounding land and it is known for its stormy weather.

  I had no horse and no wish to tramp around the lake with the Indians. So Black Eagle and I got a passage on what was then the fleet’s flagship, the Queen Charlotte. The ship was loaded with men and supplies. Most of the crew were young boys and old men and at least fifty soldiers were detailed to help them. It took for ever to get underway as the soldiers milled around with ropes, unsure what they were doing. Compared to my time sailing with Cochrane in the Mediterranean, the level of incompetence was almost laughable. At one point I heard an exasperated bosun shouting at a line of soldiers to “pull the rope towards the pointed end of the ship,” after they had failed to distinguish between the bow and the stern.

  One person who thoroughly enjoyed the trip was Black Eagle. He had never been on what he called ‘a white man’s big canoe’ before and laughed with delight as the patched sails finally started to pull us through the water. As he saw the men moving about the rigging above his head he wanted to go aloft too. I took him up the shrouds to the maintop, thinking that he would be clutching the mainmast when we got there and nervously peering over the edge – as I had when I first went aloft. Instead the man seemed to have no fear of heights at all. In the end one of the few able seamen on board took him far higher than I wanted to go, virtually to the masthead. He came down gabbling in delight at the experience, lapsing into Iroquoian when he ran out of English superlatives.

  By the time we dropped anchor at the mouth of the River Maumee, Black Eagle was quite the Jack Tar, edging out on the yards and helping to reef in the sails. The Queen Charlotte had too deep a draught to go far up river and so the supplies and guns were winched down onto some of the smaller gunboats and transports to be sailed and kedged upstream. It was tough work, but not nearly as difficult as dragging the heavy guns over the wet muddy tracks. The fort was some twenty miles upriver but eventually we were able to land the guns just before the boats were exposed to bombardment by artillery in the fort. We had two twenty-four-pounder guns taken from Detroit, a mortar, a howitzer and three twelve-pounders; not a huge arsenal, but more than enough to deal with a half-built wooden fort. The first of the Indians started to catch up with us over those final miles as teams of oxen and lines of men struggled to move the guns forward. Then I heard a cry that the fort was in view and Black Eagle and I pushed on to get a first glimpse of Fort Meigs.

  As I scanned it through the telescope my hopes soared. The fort was on a plateau on the south-eastern bank overlooking a bend in the river. A gully protected it on one side and while the river looked wide and shallow – there were several islands mid-stream – it was deep enough to slow any attack. It was a strong position but the escarpment on the opposite bank was taller. Once we had our guns mounted on the heights near the walls we would easily be able to bombard the fort. I had been dreading a long drawn out siege, but I smiled in delight as I watched a swarm of men moving like ants around what seemed quite low walls. It was clear that the fort was not yet finished. Men were dragging barrel loads of soft river mud up the slopes, evidently in a hurry to complete their work before the British and Indian forces started to surround them. I wondered if the stumpy walls were completed all the way around the rows of tents and other buildings I could just make out inside the fort. If not, I thought the siege of Fort Meigs was only likely to last a day or two. Even if the walls were complete, our guns should make short work of them.

  Chapter 10

  The history books will tell you that the battle for Fort Meigs was won by the American General Harrison. There are seven hundred men from Kentucky who would probably question if it was won at all, but for my money the battle was won by the engineer that Harrison left in charge of the fort while he went recruiting for a new army. His name, I later discovered, was Eleazer Wood and like most engineers he was a cunning bastard. I realised this the next day when I stood on the escarpment across the river and immediately opposite the fort. Now I could see that the walls were completed all the way around the stronghold and that they were not as short as I had first thought. Wood had guessed that we would place our batteries near where I was standing and had built a long embankment of mud just in front of the walls to protect the fortification. It was a bit like a stone glacis, built in front of stone forts to deflect cannon balls. If the mud had been dry and brittle it would have been an insignificant obstacle, but the mud was wet, indeed it was raining as I stood there that morning. The bank would be impossible to destroy with gunfire. At least we could fire over the walls into the fort, I thought. There was a tall row of tents near the wall and probably many more beyond that.

  Over the next few days the British dug out gun batteries, most on the escarpment where I had stood, but also one on the southern bank. Some twelve hundred Indians had arrived now and they roamed around the fort to ensure that no one got in or out. The Americans had a number of guns of their own and did their best to disrupt our preparations, but on the 1st of May we opened the bombardment.

  By the end of that day all we had achieved was to make the bank in front of the fort resemble a giant steamed pudding, with dozens of cannon balls stuck like currants in the mud. To make matters worse as our cannon opened fire the Americans pulled what we had thought was the canvas of tents away to reveal huge embankments within the fort that further protected those inside. Just before sunset Tecumseh and Procter stood on the embankment surveying the complete lack of progress made. To add insult to injury, as the light began to fail several Americans could be seen scampering along the bank and digging out the British cannon balls, presumably to fire back to us the next day.

  Procter gazed disconsolately at the scene but Tecumseh was shouting and raging at Elliot, his i
nterpreter. I drifted over to eavesdrop on the conversation. The Indian seemed to be complaining that the Americans were fighting like groundhogs, burrowing in the mud instead of fighting in the open like men.

  “I have invited them to surrender,” Procter was telling the tall chief beside him. “I have even warned that I cannot guarantee their safety as prisoners if the fort is stormed by your warriors, but they have refused to consider our demand.” Tecumseh growled something in his language and while Procter looked up expectantly, Elliot just shrugged, tactfully deciding that translation would not be helpful. Procter pressed on. “Our gunners will get better and tomorrow we will have a furnace heating shot. They probably have around a thousand men in there and they did not have time to stock up on supplies. We will starve them out if we have to.”

  The next few days were a miserable existence – cold and wet with soldiers, militia and Indians spending most of their time languishing in rudimentary shelters. The furnace took forever to heat round shot to a glowing red and invariably this just proved a very labour-intensive method of drying out a small patch of mud on one of the embankments. We out-numbered the defenders by two to one, but that was not a lot of use when they would not come out and we appeared unable to get inside their defences. Hopes of a quick victory were well and truly dashed and everyone seemed resigned to a long drawn out stalemate. Then on the sixth day everything changed.

  It started like any other; I awoke in the British camp on the northern shore as the sun crept over the horizon. I was cold, my clothes were damp and my limbs stiff as I crawled out of my shelter and staggered to my feet. My hovel was at the edge of the British encampment where it joined a swathe of shelters built by the Indians. Until the previous night I had shared my bijou residence with Black Eagle, but the day before Morag had arrived, having travelled overland with many of the women who followed their men on the warpath. I buckled on my sword, tucked the tomahawk into my belt and grabbed my musket and ammunition pouch. Finally I picked up the round river stone wrapped in a patch of leather from under the collection of chopped branches and foliage that made up the roof I slept under. Then I ambled over to a much sturdier shelter that Morag had thrown up on her first day in the camp. A big moccasin-covered foot protruded from the entrance.