The Invasion of Canada

by Pierre Berton

  The setbacks continue. Hopkins’s failure has left Harrison’s left flank open to Indian attack. He decides to forestall further Indian raids on Winchester’s line of communications by striking at the Miami villages along the Mississinewa, a tributary of the Wabash in Indiana Territory. On November 25, Lieutenant-Colonel John Campbell and six hundred cavalry and infantry set out to do the job. The result is disastrous.

  American Search and Destroy Missions against the Tribes, Autumn, 1812

  In spite of Campbell’s attempts at secrecy, the Miami are forewarned. They leave their villages, wait until the troops are exhausted, then launch a night attack, destroying a hundred horses, killing eight men, wounding forty-eight. A false report is spread that the dreaded Tecumseh is on the way at the head of a large force. Campbell’s dejected band beats a hasty retreat.

  It is bitterly cold; provisions are almost gone; the wounded are dying from gangrene, the rest suffer from frostbite. A relief party finally brings them into Greenville, where it is found that three hundred men – half of Campbell’s force – are disabled. One mounted regiment is so ravaged it is disbanded. Harrison has lost the core of his cavalry without any corresponding loss among the Indians. The General decides to put a bold front on the episode: he announces that the expedition has been a complete success. He has learned something from the experience of Tippecanoe.

  By December 10, Harrison has managed to get his cannon to Upper Sandusky, but at appalling cost. He has one thousand horses, hauling and pulling; most are so exhausted they must be destroyed, at a cost of half a million dollars. Wagons are often abandoned, their contents lost or destroyed. The teamsters, scraped up from frontier settlements, are utterly irresponsible. “I did not make sufficient allowance for the imbecility and inexperience of public agents and the villainy of the contractors,” Harrison writes ruefully to the acting secretary of war, James Monroe, who has replaced the discredited Dr. Eustis.

  Winchester’s left wing is still pinned down near the junction of the Maumee and the Au Glaize, waiting for supplies. It is impossible to get them through the Black Swamp that lies between the Sandusky and the Maumee. William Atherton, a diminutive twenty-one-year-old soldier in Winchester’s army who is keeping an account of his adventures, writes that he now sees “nothing but hunger and cold and nakedness staring us in the face.” The troops have been out of flour for a fortnight and are existing on bad beef, pork, and hickory nuts. Sickness and death have reduced Winchester’s effective force to eleven hundred. Daily funerals cast a pall over the camps, ravaged by the effects of bad sanitation and drainage (Winchester is forced to move the site five times) and the growing realization that there is no chance of invading Canada this year.

  On Christmas Eve, another soldier, Elias Darnell, confides to his journal that “obstacles had emerged in the path to victory, which must have appeared insurmountable to every person endowed with common sense. The distance to Canada, the unpreparedness of the army, the scarcity of provisions, and the badness of the weather, show that Maiden cannot be taken in the remaining part of our time.… Our sufferings at this place have been greater than if we had been in a severe battle. More than one hundred lives … lost owing to our bad accommodations! The sufferings of about three hundred sick at a time, who are exposed to the cold ground, and deprived of every nourishment, are sufficient proofs of our wretched condition! The camp has become a loathsome place.…”

  On Christmas Day, Winchester receives an order from Harrison. He is to move to the Rapids of the Maumee as soon as he receives two days’ rations. There he will be joined by the right wing of the army. Two days later, a supply of salt, flour, and clothing arrives. Winchester, eager to be off, sets about building sleds, since his boats are useless. On December 29, he is ready. The troops are exuberant – anything to be rid of this pestilential camp! But Darnell realizes what they are facing:

  “We are now about commencing one of the most serious marches ever performed by the Americans. Destitute, in a measure, of clothes, shoes and provisions, the most essential articles necessary for the existence and preservation of the human species in this world and more particularly in this cold climate. Three sleds are prepared for each company, each to be pulled by a packhorse, which has been without food for two weeks except brush, and will not be better fed while in our service.…”

  The following day, the troops set off for the Maumee rapids. Few armies have presented such a ragtag appearance. In spite of the midwinter weather, scarcely one possesses a greatcoat or cloak. Only a lucky few have any woollen garments. They remain dressed in the clothes they wore when they left Kentucky, their cotton shirts torn, patched, and ragged, hanging to their knees, their trousers also of cotton. Their matted hair falls uncombed over their cheeks. Their slouch hats have long since been worn bare. Those who own blankets wrap them about their bodies as protection from the blizzards, holding them in place by broad belts of leather into which are thrust axes and knives. The officers are scarcely distinguishable from the men. They cany swords or rifles instead of long guns and a dagger – often an expensive one, hand-carved – in place of a knife.

  Now these men must become beasts of burden, for the horses are not fit to pull the weight. Harnessed five to a sleigh, they haul their equipment through snow and water for the next eleven days. The sleighs, it develops, are badly made – too light to carry the loads, not large enough to cross the half-frozen streams. Provisions and men are soon soaked through. But if the days are bad, the nights are a horror. Knee-deep snow must be cleared away before a camp can be made. Fire must be struck from flint on steel. The wet wood, often enough, refuses to burn. So cold that they cannot always prepare a bed for themselves, the Kentuckians topple down on piles of brush before the smoky fires and sleep in their steaming garments.

  Then, on the third day, a message arrives from Harrison: turn back! The General has picked up another rumour that the redoubtable Tecumseh and several hundred Indians are in the area. He advises – does not order – Winchester not to proceed. With the Indians at his rear and no certainty of provisions at the rapids, any further movement toward Canada this winter would be foolhardy.

  But James Winchester is in no mood to retreat. He is a man who has suddenly been released from three months of dreadful frustration – frustration over inactivity and boredom, frustration over insubordination, frustration over sickness and starvation, and, perhaps most significant, frustration over his own changing role as the leader of his men. Now at least he is on the move; it must seem to him some sort of progress; it is action of a sort, and at the end – who knows? More action, perhaps, even glory … vindication. He has no stomach to turn in his tracks and retreat to that “loathsome place,” nor do his men. And so he moves on to tragedy.

  AT FORT AMHERSTBURG, Lieutenant-Colonel Procter has concluded that the Americans have gone into winter quarters. His Indian spies have observed no movement around Winchester’s camp for several weeks, and he is convinced that Harrison has decided to hold off any attempt to recapture Detroit until spring. It is just as well, for he has only a skeleton force of soldiers and a handful of Indians.

  The Indians concern Procter. He cannot control them, cannot depend on them, does not like them. One moment they are hot for battle, the next they have vanished into the forest. Nor can he be sure where their loyalties lie. Matthew Elliott’s eldest son, Alexander, has been killed and scalped by one group of Indians who pretended to be defecting to the British but who were actually acting as scouts for Winchester. Brock called them “a fickle race”; Procter would certainly agree with that. Neither has been able to understand that the Indians’ loyalty is not to the British or to the Americans but to their own kind. They will support the British only as long as they believe it suits their own purpose. But the British, too, can be fickle; no tribesman, be he Potawatomi, Wyandot, Shawnee, or Miami, can ever quite trust the British after the betrayal at Fallen Timbers in 1794.

  Nor do the British trust them – certainly not when it comes t
o observing the so-called rules of warfare, which are, of course, white European rules. Tecumseh is the only chief who can restrain his followers from killing and torturing prisoners and ravaging women and children. Angered by Prevost’s armistice and ailing from a wound received at Brownstown, Tecumseh has headed south to try to draw the Creeks and Choctaws to his confederacy. His brother, the Prophet, has returned to the Wabash.

  Procter needs to keep the Indians active, hence his attempt to capture Fort Wayne with a combined force of natives and regulars. The attempt failed, though it helped to slow Harrison’s advance. Now he is under orders from Prevost to refrain from all such offensive warfare. His only task is defence against the invader.

  He must tread a line delicately, for the Indians’ loyalty depends on a show of British resolution. As Brock once said, “it is of primary importance that the confidence and goodwill of the Indians should be preserved and that whatsoever can tend to produce a contrary effect should be carefully avoided.” That is the rub. The only way the confidence and goodwill of the Indians can be preserved is to attack the Americans, kill as many as possible, and let the braves have their way with the rest. Procter is not unmindful of how the news of the victory at Queenston has raised native morale – or of how the armistice has lowered it.

  Prevost, as usual, believes that the British have overextended themselves on the Detroit frontier. Only Brock’s sturdy opposition prevented the Governor General from ordering the evacuation of all captured American territory to allow the release of troops to the Niagara frontier. But Brock understood that such a show of weakness would cause the Indians to consider making terms with the enemy.

  Brock’s strategy, which Procter has inherited, has been to let the Americans keep the tribes in a state of ferment. The policy has succeeded. Harrison’s attempt to subdue the Indians on the northwestern frontier has delayed his advance until midwinter and caused widespread indignation among the natives. Some six thousand have been displaced, nineteen villages ravaged, seven hundred lodges burned, thousands of bushels of corn destroyed. Savagery is not the exclusive trait of the red man. The Kentuckians take scalps whenever they can, nor are women and children safe from the army. Governor Meigs had no sooner called out the Ohio militia in the early fall than they launched an unprovoked attack on an Indian village near Mansfield, burning all the houses and shooting several of the inhabitants.

  The worst attacks have been against the villages on the Peoria lakes, destroyed without opposition by a force of rangers and volunteers under Governor Ninian Edwards of Illinois Territory. One specific foray will not soon be forgotten: a mounted party under a captain named Judy came upon an Indian couple on the open prairie. When the man tried to surrender, Judy shot him through the body. Chanting his death song, the Indian killed one of Judy’s men and was in turn riddled with bullets. A little later the same group captured and killed a starving Indian child.

  In their rage and avarice, Edwards’s followers scalp and mutilate the bodies of the fallen and ransack Indian graves for plunder. Small wonder that the Potawatomi chief Black Bird, in a later discussion with Claus, the Canadian Indian superintendent, cries out in fury, “The way they treat our killed and the remains of those that are in their graves to the west make our people mad when they meet the Big Knives. Whenever they get any of our people into their hands they cut them like meat into small pieces.”

  All that fall the Indians continue to concern Procter. They have been devouring his provisions at an alarming rate. The white leadership is shaky. At seventy, Matthew Elliott can scarcely sit a horse, and McKee is worn down by drink. Tecumseh’s restraining hand is absent. Procter has some hope of reorganizing the tribes around Amherstburg into a raiding party under Colonel William Caldwell, a veteran of Butler’s Rangers during the Revolution. Caldwell possesses enormous influence among the Wyandot, whom he has persuaded to adopt the British cause.

  Meanwhile, Procter solves part of his supply problem by dispatching most of the Indians under Elliott to the Rapids of the Maumee, where several hundred acres of corn are waiting to be harvested – the same corn that Harrison has been trying vainly to seize. Elliott may be old and infirm, but he has lost none of his frontier cunning. He has sent Indian spies into Ohio who report that Winchester is again advancing. Elliott dispatches couriers to the villages of the Ottawa and the Potawatomi in Michigan Territory and to the Miami at the ravaged villages of the Mississinewa in Indiana. War parties begin to trickle into Amherstburg; within a month the native force has increased from three hundred to almost eight hundred braves, all stirred to a fever by the depredations of Harrison’s army.

  Winchester’s army, meanwhile, is advancing toward the rapids. He arrives on January 11; Procter learns of this two days later. The British commander moves swiftly, calling out the militia, assembling the Indians. It is his intention to scorch the earth (whatever is not already scorched) along the Detroit frontier to deny the Americans provisions and shelter. The following day he dispatches Major Ebenezer Reynolds of the Essex militia with two flank companies and a band of Potawatomi to the little village of Frenchtown on the River Raisin. Reynolds’s orders are to destroy the village and all its supplies and to remove the French-speaking settlers – forcibly, if necessary – to Canadian soil.

  It is not a pleasant task. Who wants his home destroyed, his property removed, and his cattle driven off and killed by Indians? The settlers have worked hard to improve their farms, which lie on both sides of the narrow, low-banked river. Their town, a simple row of some twenty dwelling houses, squatting on the north bank three miles from the mouth, is not designed as a fort. Its only protection is a fence made of split pickets to secure the yards and gardens. The villagers are in a panic; as Reynolds and his men move in, a delegation slips away, heading for the Rapids of the Maumee to plead with Winchester for help. They carry with them a note for Harrison from Isaac Day, a long-time Detroit citizen, who writes that “five hundred true and brave Americans can secure the District of Erie – A timely approach of our armies will secure us from being forced to prison and the whole place from being burned by savage fury.” Day has scarcely sent off this letter when he is seized and jailed. If Winchester is to act at all to save the settlement, he must act at once.

  RAPIDS OF THE MAUMEE, January 17, 1813. Winchester and his senior officers sit in council. Should they go to the relief of Frenchtown? For almost four days word has been coming back of Indian outrages and British highhandedness. Everything is being removed from the village – cattle, carrioles, sleighs, grain, foodstuffs. Citizens such as Isaac Day, suspected of pro-American feelings, have been bundled off to confinement across the river. Winchester’s information is that the British force is ridiculously small: between forty and fifty militia and perhaps a hundred Indians. It is, however, building rapidly. If the Americans move quickly, Day’s note has told them, they can provision themselves at Frenchtown by securing three thousand barrels of flour and much grain. That possibility must seem as tempting as the succour of the villagers.

  Lieutenant-Colonel John Allen rises – a graceful, commanding presence, perhaps the most popular man in Winchester’s army, certainly the most distinguished, the most eloquent. A handsome Kentuckian, tall, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, close friend and boyhood companion of the lamented Jo Daviess (Tippecanoe’s victim), next to Clay the state’s greatest orator, leading lawyer, state senator, onetime candidate for governor. When he speaks all listen, for Allen commands as much respect as, if not more than, his general.

  He is fed up with inactivity-weary of slow movements that get nowhere, as he complains in one of his letters to his wife, Jane, herself the daughter of a general. He hungers for action; now he sees his chance.

  Winchester’s forces, he points out, have three choices: they can withdraw – an ignominy which, piled upon other American setbacks, is unthinkable. They can wait here at the Maumee rapids for the rest of Harrison’s force, but if they do that they will give the British time to build strength. Or they can go to
the aid of the beleaguered inhabitants of Frenchtown, secure the desperately needed food at the settlement, strike a decisive blow against the British, open the road to Detroit, and – certainly not least – cover themselves with glory.

  The council does not need much convincing, nor does Winchester. Why wait for Harrison, who is sixty-five miles away? A victory over the British – any victory – can make Winchester a national hero. His men, he knows, are as eager to move as he is. The term of the six-month volunteers will end in February; they have refused to re-enlist. All want one brief taste of glory before returning home. They have just received a welcome shipment of woollen underwear, and their morale, reduced by long weeks of inactivity and hunger, has risen again. And there is food at Frenchtown! Winchester, who has already written to General Perkins at Lower Sandusky asking for reinforcements for a proposed advance, now dispatches a second letter to Harrison announcing his intention to send a detachment to relieve Frenchtown and hold it.

  One of Harrison’s many frustrations during this exhausting fall and winter has been a collapse of communications. His letter to Winchester, urging him to abandon his march to the rapids, arrived too late. Winchester’s reply, announcing his intention to move ahead to the rapids, does not reach him until the force is actually at its destination. It is carried by an eighteen-year-old Kentucky volunteer named Leslie Combs, who, with a single guide, crosses one hundred miles of trackless forest through snow so deep that the two men dare not lie down for fear of suffocation and are forced to sleep standing up. Exhausted, ill, and starving, the pair reach Fort McArthur on January 9. Harrison, at Upper Sandusky, gets Winchester’s letter two days later.