by James Laxer
In June 1813, the Americans suffered one more misfortune in Niagara. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Boerstler, a U.S. force set out to launch a surprise attack on the advance post of Brigadier General Vincent’s troops near Beaver Dams. News of the planned American attack was conveyed to the British in one of the most celebrated incidents of the war. Laura Secord, a Queenston housewife, overheard loose talk among the Americans about the coming assault. At dawn on June 22, she began her journey on foot to alert the British. While the precise route she took and the time of her arrival at Beaver Dams are not established, she did arrive sometime that evening and conveyed her intelligence to Lieutenant James Fitzgibbon, who commanded one company of the 49th Foot.
While Secord’s warning did not provide the Americans’ timetable and detailed plan of attack, it alerted the lieutenant that the enemy was coming. At midday on June 23, an American force set out for Beaver Dams, numbering 575 cavalry and infantry and outfitted with two field guns. The next morning, native scouts sighted the U.S. troops and reported their position to Captain Dominique Ducharme of the province’s Indian Department. About nine o’clock that evening, three hundred Caughnawaga warriors, under Ducharme’s command, assaulted the rear of the U.S. force. One hundred Mohawk warriors under the direction of Captain William Kerr reinforced the attack. During a three-hour fight, the Americans fired uncertainly into the woods, and eventually their morale collapsed. The unnerving sound of war whoops in the woods drove them to the point of surrender. Afraid to give up to the warriors, they finally laid down their arms when Lieutenant Fitzgibbon arrived with fifty men from the 49th Regiment. Fitzgibbon had been alerted by a messenger from Ducharme. “Not a shot was fired on our side by any but the Indians,” Fitzgibbon reported. “They beat the American detachment into a state of terror, and the only share I can claim is taking advantage of a favourable moment to offer them protection from the tomahawk and the scalping knife.” It seems that Ducharme would have called on the Americans to surrender earlier, except for the fact that he did not speak fluent English.37 At Beaver Dams, the Iroquois inflicted a major defeat on the Americans with the help of very few white troops. It was the most significant victory won by the Six Nations during the war.38
With the fighting centred between Burlington and Niagara, the Americans took advantage of the paltry number of British defenders at York to carry out a second assault there. On July 31, 1813, Captain Chauncey’s squadron landed a small force of sailors and soldiers. Virtually unopposed, they destroyed provisions, captured five cannon and eleven boats, and proceeded to burn the British barracks and public warehouses. But they were unable to sustain their position in York and once again abandoned the capital of Upper Canada.
The course of the war on Lake Ontario and along the Niagara Frontier during these months was tit-for-tat, with both the Americans and the British claiming victory in various battles. Within a few months, decisive events farther west would have fateful consequences for Tecumseh and the native confederacy.
hr/> ¶¶ The historian Gilbert Auchinleck, who leaned strongly to the British side in his mid-nineteenth-century history of the war, wrote that “a vast amount of nonsense, relative to this affair, has been penned by American historians who do not seem to reflect that this was an invading force, and that the mine has always been a legitimate mode either of attack or defence.”
Chapter 13
Tecumseh’s Last Days
FOR TECUMSEH AND THE NATIVE confederacy, 1813 was a tragic year. The essential fight took place where it always had, on the edge of the Ohio country, in what for the Americans was the northwest theatre of war. It was on this terrain that the struggle to regain native land from the Americans would ultimately be won or lost. Brock’s death meant that Tecumseh would no longer have a British partner who saw the war the way he did, with native objectives built into the strategy.
Deadly combat in the west began in January 1813, when the opposing armies could move their forces back and forth across the frozen Detroit River. William Henry Harrison, in command of U.S. forces in the Northwest after replacing the disgraced General Hull, prepared to launch an assault to retake both Detroit and Amherstburg, across the river in Upper Canada. He divided his force, sending Brigadier General James Winchester, a veteran of the Maryland Militia during the Revolutionary War, north from the Maumee River, which flows into Lake Erie from the south. Winchester dispatched Colonel William Lewis with a strong contingent to attack Canadian militia and native warriors at Frenchtown (the present-day city of Monroe, Michigan, forty kilometres south of Fort Detroit), on the River Raisin. The first skirmish, known as the First Battle of the River Raisin, took place on January 18. Lewis’s force charged across the frozen river and quickly drove back a combined force of British soldiers and native warriors, clearing Frenchtown of the enemy.
Harrison was pleased with this initial success. Even though he feared a British counterattack, he ordered Winchester and Lewis, who had joined the force at Frenchtown, to hold fast to the territory.
Brock’s successor in the southwestern corner of Upper Canada was Major General Henry Procter, a career officer who had served in the British army from the age of eighteen. Contemporaries regarded him as a man of limited ability who tended to play things by the book. Procter had been named governor of Michigan following the triumph of Brock and Tecumseh at Detroit. He kept his headquarters at Fort Malden, however, which was a more defensible position in the event of a new American offensive.
When Procter learned about the British defeat at Frenchtown, he acted swiftly. From the Canadian shore, he led a force of six hundred British regulars and Newfoundland militia, along with eight hundred native warriors from the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Ottawa, Chippewa, Delaware, Miami, Winnebago, Muscogee, Sauk, and Fox tribes, across the frozen Detroit River. Although Tecumseh was in the area and was the pre-eminent leader among the native allies of the British, he was not present for the ensuing battle.
On January 21, Procter’s combined force halted its advance about eight kilometres north of the River Raisin to organize for the coming fight. In the darkness before sunrise, the soldiers and warriors sneaked up to the American camp, which was poorly guarded, and unleashed a devastating attack. General Winchester was quickly captured by warriors and handed over to the British. While the Americans held out in some places for a time, they were eventually defeated and forced to surrender across the battlefield. Dozens of Americans were shot down; warriors tomahawked many of them as they tried to surrender. Others tried to flee in their stocking feet across the snow. Over four hundred U.S. troops died in the fight, and five hundred others were taken prisoner, having been ordered by General Winchester to surrender. The last American holdouts very reluctantly laid down their weapons on condition that their wounded would be protected. Members of the Kentucky Rifle Regiment, who had held out the longest, were in tears, cursing their commander, as the British soldiers collected the arms they had abandoned. The British lost 182 soldiers and 100 warriors in the fight.
Fearing an attack by Harrison’s troops in the south, Procter decided to pull his troops back to Fort Malden, a short trek away across the frozen Detroit River. He marched the able-bodied American prisoners with him. The wounded Americans were housed in wooden buildings, awaiting the arrival of sleds to take them to the British fort. The morning after the battle, a number of native warriors — not those who had fought alongside the British — set the buildings on fire and murdered the wounded U.S. troops as they tried to flee. Some of the Americans who were marched north proved to be too badly wounded to keep up and were left behind to be murdered. Between thirty and one hundred Americans were slaughtered in what became known as the River Raisin Massacre. For miles along the route to the north, the bodies and bones of the dead lay strewn. The heads of a few had been severed and mounted on a picket fence not far from Detroit as a warning to other Americans. So as not to offend their native allies, the British l
eft the heads in place for many days, as the wintry weather froze them in hideous grimaces.
The massacre, mostly of men from Kentucky, provoked fury among Americans, especially in the victims’ home state. Later recruiting efforts among Kentuckians were fuelled by the rallying cry “Remember the Raisin.”***
Following the disaster, Harrison reorganized his army and undertook the construction of Fort Meigs, in northwestern Ohio (present-day Perrysburg) on the Maumee River, near the southwest corner of Lake Erie. Shrewdly, he positioned the fort on a height of land overlooking the rapids. British vessels could make it upriver only to the edge of the rapids. On the other side of the river were the decaying remnants of Fort Miami, a long-abandoned British post near the site of the Battle of Fallen Timbers.
Tecumseh understood just how vital the bloody combat in this small area had become. The war to re-establish native control of lands would be won or lost here, and that was the war to which Tecumseh was committed. Unless Fort Meigs could be captured by Tecumseh and Procter, Harrison would use it as a base to build his reserves in the coming months and the fort could serve as a springboard for an assault on Upper Canada. Tecumseh pressured General Procter to undertake a joint native–British assault on Fort Meigs.
Twice the natives and the British tried to take the fort, first in April 1813 and again in July. In the first assault, which began with the landing of troops at the mouth of the Maumee River on April 26, the British deployed one thousand troops and Tecumseh mobilized twelve hundred warriors. During the siege, which continued for several weeks, the British fired thousands of rounds of cannonballs at the fort. With their bare hands, the American defenders dug “traverses,” earthen barriers that could shelter them during the shelling. Harrison received reinforcements from Kentucky, who had to fight their way to the gates of the fort. As the siege continued, a large number of warriors drifted away.†††
On May 5, several parties of Americans ventured outside the safety of the fort to assault British artillery batteries. In driving rain, the Kentuckians found themselves in a fight against British soldiers and Tecumseh’s warriors. Believing they had gained the upper hand, they pursued some of the warriors deeper and deeper into the thick woods that surrounded the fort. Tecumseh, a master of this kind of combat, was deliberately pulling his men back to draw the Americans into a trap. When the Kentuckians ventured too far from the safety of their fort and pushed ever closer to the warrior encampment, where more of Tecumseh’s men could join the fight, the warriors suddenly sprang into action against their opponents, terrifying them into headlong flight. While some of the Americans managed to escape, hundreds of them were forced to surrender, desperate to hand themselves over to the British rather than the natives.
Fifty British soldiers sent the captured Americans to the remains of Fort Miami, where they were to be secured temporarily. A large number of warriors, who were in a deadly mood, gathered at the enclosure where the Americans were being held, forcing some of the prisoners to run the gauntlet and flaying them with tomahawks as they passed. Other prisoners were put to death.
The British urgently sent a messenger to find Tecumseh, who was not far from the scene of mayhem. He rushed back to Fort Miami. He arrived to see several warriors shooting prisoners and scalping them. Tecumseh dismounted from his horse and plunged into the milling warriors, loudly ordering the attack on the captives to cease. Although most of the angry natives were not Shawnees and understood but few of his words, they knew who he was. Their anger was quelled and the warriors dispersed.
Later, when the American prisoners were paroled and returned to their homes, they told the story of the native leader who had saved their lives when the British failed to do so. One oft-repeated version of the story, whether true or not, has it that Tecumseh turned on General Procter, condemning him for allowing the killings to take place, and shouting, “Begone! You are unfit to command; go and put on petticoats!”1
While the fighting outside Fort Meigs had been won by Tecumseh’s warriors, overall the British and their native allies were not making much progress against the fort itself. It was well constructed and Harrison’s men had the supplies they needed to hold out. A sufficient number of reinforcements had reached the fort, and the Americans had a greater troop strength than those mounting the siege.
Procter drew the conclusion that the siege was hopeless. On May 7, the two sides arranged for an exchange of prisoners, and two days later, Procter abandoned the fight and withdrew along with Tecumseh’s warriors.
Again, in July, a smaller force of British troops and native warriors returned to assault Fort Meigs. Again the siege failed. Procter decided to lead his force against the less formidable Fort Stephenson, at Lower Sandusky, but his attack failed there as well. The Americans at Fort Stephenson numbered only 160 regulars and were equipped with one artillery piece, which they used to great effect to inflict casualties on a British storming party.‡‡‡
Tecumseh had been all too right about the need for the native confederacy and the British to capture Fort Meigs. It was a strongpoint to which the Americans were sending reinforcements, and soon they would be in a position to take the offensive.
In September 1813, the Americans managed to gain ground in the fight around Lake Erie, first by winning a decisive naval battle on the lake and then by following it up with a land invasion of Upper Canada.
After the U.S. strategists decided in the winter of 1813 to focus on winning naval control of Lakes Ontario and Erie, and the British reached the same conclusion about the importance of the lakes, both sides began a feverish shipbuilding race. On Lake Ontario, the Americans and British constructed ships at Sackets Harbor and Kingston respectively, with neither side gaining a decisive advantage. At Presque Isle, Pennsylvania, master shipwright Noah Brown headed up the U.S. effort to outfit its naval force on Lake Erie.
In September 1813, Commodore Oliver Perry, the twenty-seven-year-old officer who had been transferred from Rhode Island to take command of the U.S. naval fleet on Lake Erie, sailed forth from Presque Isle in command of two new twenty-gun brigs, seven schooners, and other smaller vessels, to meet the British squadron. At daylight on September 10, Perry’s squadron closed with the British ships. A deadly exchange of carronade fire erupted. In the early going, the British had the advantage. At one point, Perry’s flagship, the Lawrence, was being pounded on both sides, and in the bloody wardroom below the deck a young surgeon tended to the wounded, amputating dangling limbs and staunching the bleeding.
Perry left the ship and rowed under fire to the undamaged Niagara. There, he continued the fight for an additional forty-five minutes, until the British commodore struck his colours and surrendered.2 In the absence of British vessels, with their ships free to sail the lake uncontested, the Americans could threaten British forts at will. Perry’s victory had dire consequences for the British and grave implications for Tecumseh’s confederacy.
Procter was panicked by the American control of the lake. In the aftermath of Perry’s victory, he prepared to abandon Fort Malden, while Harrison readied his troops for yet another invasion of Upper Canada.
Encamped with his warriors on Grosse Ile, in the Detroit River, Tecumseh did not hear directly from Procter about the British defeat on Lake Erie, but he soon saw indications that the British were planning to give up Fort Malden.3 Procter, who was obviously intent on falling back up the Thames River, had not consulted the Shawnee chief about his decision to retreat. The British commander imposed martial law over the western portion of Upper Canada so that he could husband the meagre supply of provisions still left to him.
When it became clear to him what Procter was up to, Tecumseh tried to stiffen his ally’s spine. Assembling his warriors at Amherstburg, Tecumseh met with Procter and his officers in a large council room. Speaking in Shawnee, he summoned wit, ridicule, and his rhetorical powers to pour scorn on the British commander’s decision to withdraw. He
wore a fitted leather suit, and in his hair was a plume of white ostrich feathers. He held a wampum belt of many colours that had been arranged to set out the story of his people.
Tecumseh reminded Procter that two summers earlier, “When I came forward with my red brethren, and was ready to take up the hatchet in favour of our British father, we were told not to be in a hurry — that he had not yet determined to fight the Americans.
“When war was declared, our father stood up and gave us the tomahawk, and told us that he was now ready to strike the Americans; that he wanted our assistance; and that he would certainly get us our lands back, which the Americans had taken from us.”
“Listen!” the Shawnee chief lectured the British general. “You told us that time, to bring forward our families to this place; and we did so, and you promised to take care of them, and that they should want for nothing, while the men would go and fight the enemy.”
Then he turned to ridicule. “You always told us, that you would never draw your foot off British ground; but now, father, we see you are drawing back . . . We must compare our father’s conduct to a fat animal, that carries its tail upon its back, but when affrighted, it drops between its legs, and runs off.” When the interpreter rendered these words into English, the British officers laughed.
Tecumseh concluded by telling Procter that if the British intended to retreat they should leave their weapons and ammunition for the native warriors to use. “Our lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit — we are determined to defend our lands, and if it is his will, we wish to leave our bones upon them.”4
Following his peroration, the natives on hand rose to their feet, shouted, and shook their tomahawks. Procter took in the message. Fearful that the British alliance with the natives was about to come apart, he requested another council in two days, at which time he would respond to the case made by Tecumseh. This was far from forthright. It was Procter’s resolve to retreat, but so far he had been unwilling to share his plans, not only with his native allies but also with subordinate British officers. During the next two days, Tecumseh’s warriors watched the British transport weapons, ammunition, and supplies from Fort Malden en route to the Thames.
