by James Laxer
The natives broke off the engagement and withdrew, carrying their dead and wounded on litters. Tecumseh took the body of Cheeseekau to honour him with a Shawnee burial. Since the death of their father when he was only thirteen, Cheeseekau had nurtured his younger brother and prepared him to become a warrior in the manner of those who had come before him. And now Tecumseh, shaped in large part by Cheeseekau, was ready to step into the void that had been left.
According to Shawnee custom, Tecumseh had to seek revenge for the death of his brother in order to allow his soul to rest. In the months that followed the disaster at Buchanan’s Station, Tecumseh fought a couple of engagements against the Big Knives. In one battle in late November 1792, he led a small Shawnee band within a larger force of warriors to attack about forty American militiamen in central Tennessee. Some of the Americans were killed and most of the others fled. The leader of the American contingent, Captain Samuel Handley, was captured and threatened with death. In the end, his life was spared through the intervention of several warriors on his behalf. There is evidence, although not conclusive, that Tecumseh spoke up for the captive. The captain was later set free.13 This was not the first time that Tecumseh had shown that he found the torture and execution of captives repugnant.
In a second firefight, Tecumseh and a small party, having set up a hunting camp near Big Rock while on their way to the Ohio Territory, were attacked by a much larger force of Americans. With his customary flair, Tecumseh managed to rally his small force, lead a counter-assault against the attackers, and drive them off, killing two of them in the process.14
Tecumseh had grown into a warrior of whom both his late brother and father would have been proud. Bravery and tactical brilliance were essential qualities that fuelled his rise to pre-eminence. His oratorical skills and his gift as a political leader would mark the next stage in his development.
At the end of 1792, unity among the tribes had been reinforced by the military victory on the Wabash, and there was hope among some natives that a robust alliance could be forged with the British. But as was repeatedly the case, political and military struggles between the great powers affected the fortunes of the native peoples in their campaigns to hold on to their land. While the war continued to simmer between the tribes and the United States, the French Revolution, which had erupted three years prior in 1789, had entered its most radical phase. In January 1793, France’s deposed monarch, Louis XVI, went to the guillotine. The revolutionary French Republic transmitted waves of anxiety to monarchical regimes across Europe. The month after the execution of the king, France declared war on Britain. This was the latest chapter in the decades-long conflict for mastery in Europe between Britain and its continental rival, but now it took the entirely new form of an ideological struggle. The British joined the coalition of mostly monarchical European powers against France, which at times included Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, and the Dutch Republic.
The British war against revolutionary France stoked fears that the struggle in Europe could soon spread to North America. Sir Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester, who had been appointed governor of the Canadas, feared that the United States could be drawn into a military alliance with France. To aid in the defence of Canada, the British were suddenly much more interested in regenerating their alliance with the native peoples. One proponent of such an alliance was John Graves Simcoe, the lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada. In a visit to a new British post named Fort Miami, established not far from the southwestern shore of Lake Erie in April 1794, Simcoe informed native warriors of the contents of a speech in which Dorchester had asserted that the British planned to maintain their presence south of the Great Lakes. In his inflammatory address, Dorchester declared, “I shall not be surprised if we are at war with them [the Americans] in the course of the present year; and if so a Line [a new boundary] must be drawn by the Warriors’ Children.”15
While the natives looked to the British for support, the Americans geared up for another military expedition into the Ohio country to reverse the effects of their earlier defeat. Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, who was selected by President George Washington to lead the new force, planned to overwhelm the natives with a larger and better-trained army than the warriors had ever faced. By mid-1794, Wayne’s men had constructed a string of posts that stretched 145 kilometres northwest from Fort Washington (present-day Cincinnati) into the heartland of native power.
In June 1794, an army of twelve hundred warriors under Blue Jacket’s command, Tecumseh and his small band among them, embarked on a mission to cut Wayne’s supply lines. Then they hoped to attack the isolated American forts one at a time. But the plan did not enjoy the support of all the groups of warriors who had been mobilized. This example highlights the recurring problem of native alliances. They were not top-down military organizations that did what they were told. They were coalitions, and those who did not agree with a set of tactics could simply pull out of the coalition. Confederacies waxed and waned as circumstances changed. For native peoples, politics at the village level always remained important, usually paramount. Confederacies that bound different peoples together arose only in response to threats that were perceived as immediate and dire. But these confederacies never amounted to states, federal or otherwise. They did not have an ongoing political structure, source of taxation, or military forces at the level of the confederacy. For common efforts, military forces were mobilized from below. These forces could as easily be removed from the central effort as added to it, so the confederacies were fluid.
The leaders of about half the native forces disagreed with Blue Jacket’s plan and wanted instead to begin with an attack on Fort Recovery, the relatively weak post farthest north. They rejected Blue Jacket’s more strategically daring plan to cut Wayne’s supply lines to the south, which would allow them to deal with the posts one by one.
Blue Jacket had little choice but to go along with an initial assault on Fort Recovery. The attack on June 30, in which Tecumseh participated, began well enough, but following a rout of American soldiers outside the fort, the Ojibwas and Ottawas launched their own full-scale attack on the fort itself. This unwise tactic allowed the soldiers inside to take full advantage of their strong defensive position. With no cannon to reduce the stockade, the warriors were caught in long and futile exchanges of fire. The American post held out.16
Even after the arrival of reinforcements, Blue Jacket’s force could not regain the initiative, which left the next move up to Major General Wayne. In August 1794, the natives received news that Wayne’s troops were on their way. As they had in the past, the Shawnees, Tecumseh among them, were forced to abandon their settlements, leaving their crops in the fields, to retreat to new ground down the Maumee River. As they fell back, they passed Fort Miami, where they hoped to obtain British supplies and succour for their women, children, and elderly.
The native allies managed to mobilize about fifteen hundred warriors, including Wyandots, Ottawas, Ojibwas, and Potawatomis, as well as Shawnees, for the coming battle. More surprising was an unofficial British contingent among them, made up of a few French Canadians and fifty-two Canadian volunteers under the leadership of William Caldwell, a Scots-Irish immigrant to Pennsylvania who had fought on the side of the British during the American Revolution and afterward had joined the Loyalist migration to Canada.
Having set up Camp Defiance in abandoned native villages, on August 15 the Americans, numbering thirty-five hundred men, started their march down the Maumee River. The warriors set up a defensive line six and a half kilometres from Fort Miami to await the assault. On the morning of August 20, as few as five hundred warriors were on hand when Wayne’s vastly superior force marched downstream and attacked at Fallen Timbers, a battlefield named for the trees uprooted by a recent tornado.
Although the first volleys from the warriors’ muskets briefly panicked some of the Americans, numbers told. Wayne’s force hit the warriors in a fronta
l assault as well as on their flank. Tecumseh and the Canadian volunteers maintained fierce islands of resistance, but the day was lost.
During their retreat along the Maumee, the defeated warriors reached the gates of Fort Miami. What happened in the following agonizing minutes left a stain on the relationship between the British and the natives for many years to come. The warriors cried out for the gates of the fort to be opened so that they could find safety inside. According to Blue Jacket, Major William Campbell, who was in command of the small British force there, shouted to the painted warriors below, “I cannot let you in! You are painted too much, my children.”17 Although Major Campbell understood the importance of the native alliance, he would not risk war with the United States.
The warriors continued their retreat, but they did not forget the betrayal by the British at Fort Miami.
The following summer, the United States negotiated peace with the native peoples. Among those who signed the Treaty of Greenville on August 3, 1795, was Blue Jacket. The treaty gave the Americans what they had already taken in the much-resented Treaty of Harmar, and more. The natives had ceded about two-thirds of today’s state of Ohio. Although they were to be allowed to continue to hunt in the territories that had once been theirs, the United States claimed ownership. In exchange, the U.S. paid out twenty thousand dollars in goods and in perpetual annuities of one thousand dollars each to the Shawnees, Delawares, Miamis, Wyandots, Ottawas, Potawatomis, and Ojibwas. A few tribes from the Wabash and Illinois Rivers were to receive five hundred dollars a year. The Shawnees were particularly hard hit — they lost much of the land on which their settlements had been located.
Tecumseh had continued to grow in stature, and by 1795 he had attracted enough followers to set up his own village on either Buck Creek or Deer Creek, on land left to the Shawnees in Ohio. His village had a population of about 250, including his younger brother Lalawethika, the future prophet, and several other relatives. Shawnee civil chiefs who headed up village councils in peacetime sometimes inherited their positions and sometimes were selected for the office. War chiefs always achieved their position of leadership through their prowess. As the leader in his village, Tecumseh became both a war chief and a civil chief.18
For nearly three decades, Tecumseh served his apprenticeship. He learned the skills of the warrior, acquired the responsibilities of the chief, and knew the strategic lay of the land for the Shawnee and other native peoples. In the next phase of his life, the mantle of leadership in a great cause was placed on his shoulders. During the years following the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, the tension between the Ohio and Indiana Territory settlers and the forces of native resistance moved inexorably toward a flashpoint. More than any other individual, Tecumseh would lead that resistance, not only in the region of the Great Lakes but also on a continental scale. Inevitably, the resistance movement was deeply influenced by the expansion of the United States, its rapid growth in population, and its transition from a series of states located along the Atlantic coast to a continental power that was pushing into the interior.
As for the Americans, their drive inland not only sharpened the conflict with native peoples, it inflamed tensions with the old imperial power. A new generation of American leaders was convinced that as long as the British remained a power on the continent, the United States could not achieve its territorial ambitions. As a new round of wars roiled Europe, influential Americans toyed with the idea of driving the British out of North America, and particularly the Canadas, whose territory thrust a dagger into the heart of the continent.
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‡ It is possible that Methoataaskee, their mother, may have joined the expedition. What is known is that she lived a long life and eventually died among the southern Cherokees.
§ New Madrid, it turned out, both figuratively and literally stood on shaky ground, and it failed to become a commercial hub. For Morgan’s dream to come true, duties would have to be charged to commercial travellers in the name of Spain. In 1803, however, when the Jefferson administration purchased the vast Louisiana Territory from France, which had taken over the territory from Spain, New Madrid found itself on American soil. The entire route from settlements on the Ohio to New Orleans was now in the hands of the United States. Then, in December 1811, a colossal earthquake violently shook the region, destroying much of the new settlement and for a time even reversing the flow of the mighty Mississippi. To make matters worse, a technological revolution transformed travel on the Mississippi and its tributaries: the advent of the steamboat.
The first steamboat was actually cruising down the Ohio and into the Mississippi when the earthquake struck. Prior to the steamboat, the vessels that sailed down the Ohio and the Mississippi, some of them en route to New Orleans, were flatboats. They were constructed as cheaply as possible and each of them was destined to have one voyage only. Adding to the cost of the cargo that the flatboats transported to New Orleans was the cost of the disposable vessel itself and the high cost of getting the crew back upriver. The steamboat changed all that. It could sail downriver and then it could steam back up the Mississippi and into the Ohio. This new and revolutionary method of shipping and transportation changed the commerce of the whole region, inextricably tying the Ohio and the Mississippi together.
New Madrid did not factor into the new economy of the Ohio and the Mississippi, but there was no way that Cheeseekau could have known that when he crossed the Mississippi. As it turned out, Morgan returned to the East from New Madrid, giving up on the project he had started. Although there were some tensions between the Shawnees who arrived in the territory and the white settlers, the new settlements founded by the Shawnees had a promising beginning.
Chapter 3
A New Power
THOUGH GEORGE WASHINGTON, the first president of the fledgling United States, famously warned his fellow citizens against “foreign entanglements,” the U.S. was hopelessly entangled with European power struggles. By the dawn of the new century, the French Revolution had been succeeded by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who set himself up as first consul of France following a coup d’état in 1799.
Napoleon’s ascent was based on the success of French armies that swept to victories against neighbouring powers, thus securing dominance for France in Europe. During his rise to the position of French emperor in December 1804, Napoleon consolidated his continental system, in which he and his relatives and military commanders took ruling positions in a host of satellite states. The sole major European power to hold out against domination by the French Empire was Great Britain.
Struggles for power on both sides of the Atlantic swirled around the central conflict between Britain and France. Although a rising power in its own right, the United States was continually buffeted by the effects of the Napoleonic Wars. The new republic was the world’s largest “neutral” trader, and American seaports thrived or withered depending on how their access to the high seas was affected by the combat between Britain and France. Despite the United States’ recurring tendency throughout its history to withdraw from the world, the new country was of and in the world whether its leaders liked it or not.
At home, with its population increasing and its commerce burgeoning, the United States was bursting at the seams on the Atlantic seaboard and in the western interior. Just over five million Americans resided in the nation’s sixteen states (Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee having been added to the original thirteen). About sixty thousand American settlers lived in the country’s frontier territories, the Ohio Territory and the Indiana Territory. In future decades, the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota would be established in this vital region, and the states of Alabama and Mississippi would be created in the territories south of Tennessee.
In the south, Spain exercised erratic control on the Gulf Coast, while to the north, the United States butted against the British North American c
olonies, the largest of which were the great inland colonies of Lower and Upper Canada.
American settlers were on the move westward to acquire land from the native peoples, mainly in the Ohio and Indiana Territories and in the territories south of Tennessee. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the population of the United States rose at a prodigious rate, soaring to over seven million, an addition of two million people that was driven by immigration and natural increase.
Politically, the new country avoided the lapse into one-party rule that so many had predicted for it. In 1801, the peaceful transition from the Federalist administration of John Adams to Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican presidency tested the capacity of the United States to allow rival political parties to function. In 1808, James Madison, a member of Jefferson’s party and a key figure in drafting the U.S. Constitution, won the presidential election and succeeded Jefferson as chief executive. Constitutional government was succeeding, but it was still in its early stages and required prosperity and territorial expansion to sustain it.
In 1803, a one-year period of peace ended in Europe, and Britain and Napoleonic France plunged into war. The European conflict bestowed a glittering opportunity for the United States government to extend its borders. In 1800, Spain transferred the vast Louisiana Territory, comprising all or part of fifteen current U.S. states and covering 2.1 million square kilometres, to France under the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso. Spain had held the territory since 1762. (The actual transfer of authority was not completed until the end of November 1803.) In 1801, Napoleon dispatched a military unit to secure control of New Orleans, a move that shocked Americans and their political leaders. Jefferson’s Federalist opponents accused the president of failing to defend American interests and called for war against France. Jefferson one-upped them not only by threatening war against France but also by touting the possibility of an alliance with Britain.
