Billy Wells is that curious frontier creature, a white man who thinks like an Indian-citizen of a shadow world, half civilized, half savage, claimed by two races, not wholly accepted by either. His story is not unusual Captured by the Miami as a child, raised as a young warrior, he grew to manhood as an Indian, took the name of Black Snake, married the sister of the great war chief Little Turtle, became a leader of his adoptive people. As the years drifted by, the memories of his childhood-he is a descendant of a prominent Kentucky family-began to blur. Did he dream them? Was he really white? In the successful attacks on the Maumee against Harmar in 1790 and St. Clair in 1791 he fought with tomahawk and war club by the side of his brother-in-law. In that last battle-the greatest defeat inflicted on any American force by Indians in pre-Custer days-he butchered several white soldiers. But when the grisly work was done, old memories returned, and Billy Wells was haunted by a nagging guilt. Was it possible that he had actually killed some of his own kinsmen? Guilt became obsession. The call of blood defeated the bonds of friendship. Wells could no longer remain an Indian: he must leave his wife, his children, his old crony Little Turtle and return to his own people. There was a legendary leave-taking: “We have long been friends [to Little Turtle]; we are friends yet, until the sun stands so high [pointing to the sky] in the heavens; from that time we are enemies and may kill one another.”
Billy Wells joined General Anthony Wayne, advancing down the Maumee, became chief of Wayne’s scouts, fought on the white side in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The battle over, his wife and family rejoined him. Billy Wells was appointed government agent and interpreter at Fort Wayne; Little Turtle, rendered docile by defeat, continued as his friend and confidant.
Yet no one can be quite sure of Billy Wells, who, like Matthew Elliott, prospers from his government and Indian connections. William Henry Harrison does not trust him, believes him to be secretly conniving with his former people. Tecumseh despises him and Little Turtle as turncoats. Billy Wells is history’s captive, and today he will become history’s victim.
As the heavy stockade gate swings open, he leads a forlorn group down the road that will become Michigan Avenue in the Chicago of the future. He has brought along an escort of thirty Miami warriors to lead to safety the entire population of the fort and the adjacent village of Chicago-some hundred soldiers and civilians. Half of his Miami escort rides beside him. Directly behind is Captain Nathan Heald, commander of the fort (the same man who, the previous spring, intercepted Brock’s couriers to Robert Dickson), with his wife Rebekah, who is Billy Wells’s niece, and his garrison of regular soldiers. A wagon train follows with the women and children of the settlement, the younger children riding in one of the covered carts. The Chicago militia and the remainder of Wells’s Miami bring up the rear.
Why are these people leaving the sturdy protection of an armed stockade and venturing into hostile Indian territory? Simply because General Hull, dismayed by the loss of Michilimackinac, has decided to evacuate the area. He has instructed Heald to destroy all arms and distribute the supplies, provisions, food, and blankets among the neighbouring Indians. The gesture, designed to placate the natives, has the opposite effect, especially as Heald decides to destroy all the garrison’s liquor as well as its arms. Since whiskey and guns are what the Indians desire most, the deliberate destruction of these prizes has put them in an ugly mood. Moreover, one of Tecumseh’s runners has arrived with news of Hull’s crumbling position at Detroit. The momentum of British success and American failure has got their blood up. Just ahead, concealed behind a ridge of sand dunes, lurks a war party of six hundred Potawatomi, the tribe so prominent at the Battle of Tippecanoe.
Billy Wells’s trained eye spots the ambush. He gallops back, to warn Heald, swings his hat in a circle to indicate that the force is surrounded, then leads a bayonet charge up the bank.
It is a tragic error of judgement, bold but foolhardy, for it leaves the wagon train unprotected. Heald’s two junior officers, together with twelve newly recruited militiamen and a handful of regulars, fight furiously with bayonet and musket butt but are quickly subdued by the superior force of Indians. Only one white civilian, John Kinzie, the Chicago trader, survives, spared, perhaps, by the same Indians with whom he is accustomed to do business. At the wagon train, the soldiers’ wives, armed with their husbands’ swords, fight as fiercely as the men. Two are hacked to pieces: a Mrs. Corbin, wife of a private, who has vowed never to be taken prisoner, and Mrs. Heald’s black slave, Cicely, who is cut down with her infant son.
Within the wagons, where the younger children are huddled, there is greater horror. One young Indian slips in and slaughters twelve single-handed, slicing their heads from their bodies in a fury of blood lust.
Billy Wells, a musket ball in his breast, his horse wounded and faltering, hears the clamour at the wagons and attempts to turn back in a last effort to save the women and children. As he does so, the horse stumbles, and he is hurled to the ground, one leg caught under the animal’s body. The Indians are bearing down, and Billy Wells knows that his hour has come. He continues to fire, killing at least one man. As he does so, he calls out to his niece Rebekah, bidding her goodbye. An Indian takes deliberate aim. Billy Wells looks him square in the eye, signals him to shoot.
A short distance away, Heald’s sergeant, Hayes, is engaged in a death struggle with a Potawatomi warrior. Their muskets have been discharged; there is no time to reload. The Indian rushes at Hayes, brandishing his tomahawk. As the blow falls, the sergeant drives his bayonet up to the socket into his enemy’s breast. They die together.
Walter Jordan, one of Wells’s men, has a miraculous escape. One ball takes the feather off his cap, another the epaulette from his shoulder, a third the handle from his sword. He surrenders to the Indians and is recognized by a chief:
“Jordan, I know you. You gave me tobacco at Fort Wayne. We won’t kill you, but come and see what we will do to your captain.” He leads him to where Wells’s body lies, cuts off the head, and places it on a long pole. Another cuts out the heart and divides it among the chiefs, who eat it raw, hoping thereby to absorb some of Wells’s courage.
Heald, wounded in arm and thigh, abandoned by Wells’s escort of Miami, half his force of regulars dead, all his officers casualties, decides to surrender. He approaches the Potawatomi chief, Black Bird, promises a ransom of one hundred dollars for everyone left alive if the Indians will agree not to kill the prisoners. Black Bird accepts; the soldiers lay down their arms and are marched back past the naked and headless bodies of the women and children. Heald, thinking he recognizes the torso of his wife, briefly repents the surrender, then is overjoyed to find that she is alive at the fort, weeping among a group of Indian women, saved apparently by the intervention of a friendly chief, Black Partridge.
Black Bird does not keep his promise. One of the wounded soldiers, Sergeant Thomas Burns of the militia, is killed almost immediately by the squaws. His is a more fortunate fate than that of five of his comrades who are tortured to death that night, their cries breaking the silence over the great lake and sending shivers through the survivors.
More than half the band that left the fort in the morning are dead by the following day. The remainder, twenty-nine soldiers, seven women, and six children, are captives of the Indians, destined to be distributed among the various villages in the area. Thus begins their long travail.
The Healds’ captivity is short-lived. After a few days, with Michigan now in British hands, most of the Indians take off to attack Fort Wayne, and Heald is able to buy his way to St. Joseph’s Island in British territory, where Captain Roberts sends them home under parole. At Detroit, Mrs. Heald’s “inimitable grace and fulness of contour” together with her “magnificence of person and brilliancy of character” make a lasting impression on the fifteen-year-old John Richardson, who, at the end of his life, gives her a certain immortality by making her the heroine of his novel Wau-nan-gee.
Others are less fortunate. That winter o
ne captive freezes to death on the trail; two more, who cannot keep up, are tomahawked; nine exist as slaves for almost a year before they are ransomed through the efforts of the red-headed trader, Robert Dickson.
The family of John Needs, one of Heald’s regular soldiers, manages to survive the massacre only to die in captivity. The Needs’s only child, crying with hunger, so annoys the Indians that they tie it to a tree to perish from starvation. Needs also dies of cold and hunger. His wife expires the following January.
The family of the murdered Sergeant Burns is shattered. One grown son is killed in the fighting; two small children are victims of the wagon massacre. A nine-year-old daughter, though scalped, succeeds in freeing herself. She, her mother, and an infant in arms survive for two years among the Indians before being ransomed by a white trader. For the rest of her life the scalped girl is marked by a small bald spot on the top of her head.
In the fate of the Lee family are all the ingredients of a nineteenth-century frontier novel All its members except the mother and an infant daughter are killed in the fighting. The two survivors are taken by Black Partridge to his camp. Here the baby falls ill and Black Partridge falls in love-with Mrs. Lee. In order to win her hand he determines to save the infant’s life. He takes her back to Chicago where a newly arrived French trader named Du Pin prescribes for her and cures her. Learning of Black Partridge’s romantic intentions, Du Pin ransoms Mrs. Lee, then marries her himself.
These stories pale before the long odyssey of Mrs. John Simmons, whose husband also perishes during the defence of the wagons. Believing that the Indians delight in tormenting prisoners who show any emotion, this remarkable woman resolves to preserve the life of her six-month-old child by suppressing all outward manifestations of grief, even when she is led past a row of small, mutilated corpses which includes that of her two-year-old boy, David. Faced with this grisly spectacle, she neither blinks an eye nor sheds a tear, nor will she during the long months of her captivity.
Her Indian owners set out for Green Bay on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Mrs. Simmons, carrying her baby, trudges the entire distance, working as a servant in the evenings, gathering wood and building fires. When the village is at last reached, she is insulted, kicked, and abused. The following day she is forced to run the gauntlet between a double line of men and women wielding sticks and clubs. Wrapping the infant in a blanket and shielding it in her arms, she races down the long line, emerging bruised and bleeding but with her child unharmed.
She is given over to an Indian “mother,” who feeds her, bathes her wounds, allows her to rest. She’ needs such sustenance, for a worse ordeal faces her-a long tribal peregrination back around the lake. Somehow Mrs. Simmons, lightly clad, suffering from cold, fatigue, and malnutrition, manages to carry her child for the entire six hundred miles and survive. She has walked with the Indians from Green Bay back to Chicago, then around the entire eastern shore of the lake to Michilimackinac. But a second, even more terrible trek faces her-a three-hundred-mile journey through the snow to Detroit, where the Indians intend to ransom her. Ragged and starving, she exists on roots and acorns found beneath the snows. Her child, now a year old, has grown much heavier. Her own strength is waning. Only the prospect of release sustains her.
Mrs. Simmons’s Trek
Yet even after her successful ransom her ordeal is not over. The route to her home near Piqua, Ohio, is long and hard. By March of 1813 she reaches Fort Meigs on the Maumee. Here she manages to secure passage in a government wagon, part of a supply train that winds its way through swampy roads, depositing her, in mid-April, four miles from her father’s farm.
Mother and child walk the remaining distance to find that the family, which has long since given her up for dead, has taken refuge in a blockhouse against Indian marauders. Here, safe at last, she breaks down and for several months cannot contain her tears. In August, she has further reason to weep. Her sister and brother-in-law. working in a nearby flax field, are surprised by Indians, shot, tomahawked, and scalped in front of their four horrified children. Such, in part, is the legacy of Tippecanoe and all that preceded it.
To these tales of horror and heroism must be added a bizarre coda:
It is October, 1816; the war has been over for two years. Two workmen helping to rebuild Fort Dearborn are travelling by skiff up the north branch of the Illinois, searching out suitable timber, probing deep into the wilderness, far from human habitation. Suddenly they hear the cries of Indian women and, above that gabble, the sound of English words. They spy, half-hidden in the underbrush, an Indian hut and then a white man, standing on the bank, who pleads with them to stop and talk, for he has heard no English for four years. This is the tale he tells:
He is one of Heald’s force of soldiers, badly wounded in the battle with the Potawatomi and saved by an aging Indian woman, to whom he has previously been kind. She prevents her people from scalping him and, with the help of her three daughters, moves him across the river, hides him in the undergrowth, and tends his wounds until he is well enough to be moved.
The four women secure a piece of timber from the ruined fort, tie him to it, and tow the makeshift raft forty miles northward to the shores of a small lake. And here all five live together. He marries his benefactor, Indian fashion. When she dies he takes the two older daughters as his wives. Since that day they have been living here together in the wilderness.
The workmen return to Chicago to report their strange discovery. Next day, the army surgeon accompanies them upriver with a boatload of presents for the quartet, only to discover that the women are on the point of spiriting their joint husband away, deeper into the wild. He, for his part, has made no objection; indeed, he has decided to take their younger sister as his third common-law wife.
The doctor examines his wounds. They have healed; but one leg is shorter than the other, and one arm is useless. Does he wish to return to his own kind? The old soldier shakes his head: not as long as his harem will live with him and care for him, he says. He is already preparing to move further from civilization, further into the unpopulated forest. Perhaps he will visit the fort some day, he remarks, but only if the soldiers solemnly promise not to make fun of his little teen-aged bride.
But he does not come. No white man ever sees or hears of him again. He and his little family melt away into the recesses of the coniferous jungle that clothes the territory. No pen records his odyssey; no stone marks his grave; nor can anyone recall his name. Like so many others he is the faceless victim of a war not of his making; and, again like so many others, he has managed to come to terms with his fate and in that process to survive and even prosper in his fashion, a creature of the wild, at once its prisoner and its conqueror, master and servant of all he surveys, monarch of an empty empire.
6
QUEENSTON HEIGHTS
The End of Isaac Brock
No tongue shall blazon forth their fame-
The cheers that stir that sacred hill
Are but the promptings of the will
That conquered then, that conquers still
And generations shall thrill
At Brock’s remembered name.
–Anon.
LEWISTON, NEW YORK, August 15, 1812; with the United States Army of the Centre.
Major John Lovett, who is more poet than soldier, leaps out of his quarters to the roar of musket fire on the heights above the Niagara River, flings himself onto his horse, and dashes off. The cries of his commanding officer, Major-General Stephen Van Rensselaer, echo behind him: Come back! Come back! But Lovett gallops on. Later, the General will tell him that he fully expected he was about to run away, never to be seen again; but this is mere badinage, for the two are old friends. Lovett serves the American commander officially as military aide and secretary; he is also confidant, political ally, and something of a court jester-an antidote against the loneliness and burden of command. To Lovett, soldiering is a new experience, war is something of a lark, the sound of musketry exciting.
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As the Major gallops for the cliffs, he realizes that two other riders are close behind him. Both are high-ranking officers. Lieutenant-Colonel Solomon Van Rensselaer is the General’s aide-de-camp, kinsman, and friend. Brigadier-General William Wadsworth of the Upper New York State militia has been in charge of recruiting for the coming thrust against Queenston-a difficult and thankless task, given the mood of the region.
As they run their horses up the broken rock of the precipice (the worst terrain Lovett has ever known), the musket fire increases. They burst out of a copse into open land; a soldier runs up crying, “General, do ride into that hollow, for the balls fly dreadfully here!” but they gallop in, seeking to discover the cause of the gunfire. One of the guards posted on the cliff starts to explain just as a ball fans his face. He leaps behind a great oak, pulling his arms close in to his body to make himself invisible, and then, seeing the ludicrousness of his position, grins ruefully, causing Lovett to burst out laughing. General Wadsworth maintains a straight face and is careful to present his breast to the enemy at all times, for he does not intend, he says, “that a Wadsworth should be shot through the back.” A few minutes later the skirmish ends inconclusively. It has been caused, significantly, by the attempts of two Americans to desert to the Canadian side of the Niagara River by boat.
That evening, Lovett takes pains to write his friend and confidant, John Alexander of Albany, a breathless account of the incident “principally for the purpose of enabling you to meet the lye should any fool or scoundrel manufacture one, out of what little did actually take place.” He does not want it “conjured up as to another Sackett’s Harbor Battle.” Lies there have been and rumours aplenty, including one monstrous falsehood, heard during the army’s march north through Utica, that the American post at Sackets Harbor had been attacked and blockaded by the British-a piece of fiction that caused the General to abandon his route to the Niagara River and march to the relief of the town, only to find that nothing untoward had taken place.
The American Invasion of Canada Page 21
