Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (31 page)

There are other tales: Tecumseh is speaking to his followers at the River Raisin when he feels a tug at his jacket, looks down, sees a
small white girl. When he continues to speak, she tugs again: “Come to our house, there are bad Indians there.”

He stops at once, follows her, seizes his tomahawk, drops the leader with one blow and, as the others move to attack, shouts out: “Dogs! I am Tecumseh!” The Indians retreat. Tecumseh, entering the house, finds British officers present. “You are worse than dogs to break faith with your prisoners!” he cries, and the British apologize for not having restrained the Indians. They offer to place a guard on the house, but that is not necessary, the child’s mother tells them. So long as Tecumseh is near she feels safe.

Another incident occurs about the same time. Tecumseh’s followers are ravenous. The game has fled; the settlers are short of supplies. Near the River Raisin, Tecumseh approaches a boy working with two oxen.

“My friend,” says Tecumseh, “I must have these oxen. My young men are very hungry. They have nothing to eat.”

The youth remonstrates. His father is ill. The oxen are their only farm animals. Without them they will die.

“We are the conquerors,” Tecumseh says, “and everything we want is ours. I
must
have the oxen, but I will not be so mean as to rob you of them. I will pay you one hundred dollars for them, and that is more than they are worth.”

He has his interpreter write out an order on Matthew Elliott for that sum, then takes the beasts, which his men roast and eat. But Elliott will not pay: Hull, after all, has stolen quantities of Canadian cattle, not to mention a herd of fine Merino sheep. When Tecumseh hears this he drops everything, takes the boy to Elliott, insists on payment. The Shawnee’s anger rises when Elliott remains stubborn:

“You can do what you please, but before Tecumseh and his warriors came to fight the battles of the great King they had enough to eat, for which they only had to thank the Master of Life and their good rifles. Their hunting grounds supply them with enough food, and to them they can return.”

“Well,” Elliott responds, “if I
must
pay, I will.”

“Give me hard money,” says Tecumseh, “not rag money.”

Elliott counts out one hundred dollars in coin. Tecumseh gives it to the boy, then turns to Elliott.

“Give me one dollar more,” he says.

Elliott grudgingly hands him an extra coin.

“Here,” says Tecumseh to the boy, “take that. It will pay you for the time you have lost getting your money.”

There are many such tales growing out of the victory at Detroit. The Americans believe Tecumseh to be a brigadier-general in the British Army. He is not, but he dines with the officers at the victory dinner in Amherstburg, ignoring the wine in which the toasts are drunk yet displaying excellent table manners while his less temperate followers whoop it up in the streets of Detroit.

When news of Prevost’s armistice reaches him, he is enraged. The action confirms his suspicions that the British are not interested in prosecuting the war to its fullest. If they will not fight, then the Indians will. Already the tribes are investing the American wilderness blockhouses—Fort Harrison, Fort Wayne, Fort Madison. Tecumseh leaves them to it and heads south on a new journey, attempting once again to rally new tribes to his banner.

For the British, if not for the Indians, the results of Detroit’s surrender are staggering. Upper Canada, badly supplied and even worse armed, now has an additional cache of 2,500 captured muskets, thirty-nine pieces of heavy ordnance, forty barrels of gunpowder, a sixteen-gun brig,
Adams
(immediately renamed
Detroit)
, a great many smaller craft, and Henry Brush’s baggage train of one hundred pack animals and three hundred cattle, provisions and stores. The prize money to be distributed among the troops is reckoned at $200,000, an enormous sum considering that a private’s net pay amounts to about four shillings, or one dollar, a week.

As a result of the victory at Detroit, every private soldier receives prize money of more than four pounds—at least twenty weeks’ net pay. The amount increases according to rank and unit. Sergeants of the 41st Foot receive about eight pounds, captains, such as Adam Muir, forty pounds. General Brock is due two hundred and sixteen pounds. One luckless private bearing the Biblical name of Shadrach
Byfield is left off the list by mistake and does not receive his share until May of 1843.

More significant is the fact that Brock has rolled back the American frontier to the Ohio River, the line that the Indians themselves hold to be the border between white territories and their own lands. Most of Michigan Territory is, for practical purposes, in British hands. A council of tribal leaders called by the U.S. government at Piqua, Ohio, for the express purpose of maintaining native neutrality collapses with the news of Hull’s surrender. Many Indians, such as the Mohawk of the Grand Valley, who have been reluctant to fight on either side, are now firmly and enthusiastically committed to the British. The same can be said for all the population of Upper Canada, once so lukewarm and defeatist, now fired to enthusiasm by Brock’s stunning victory. In Montreal and Quebec, the spectacle of Hull’s tattered and ravaged followers provokes a wave of patriotic ardour.

The General, who has to this point treated the militia with great delicacy, reveals an iron fist. Now he has the power and the prestige to enforce the oath of allegiance among the citizen soldiers and to prosecute anybody, militiaman or civilian, for sedition, treason, or desertion.

In Canada Brock is the man of the hour, but in America the very word “Hull” is used as a derogatory epithet. In their shame and despair, Americans of all political stripes—civilians, soldiers, politicians—lash out blindly at the General, who is almost universally considered to be a traitor and a coward. On his drooping shoulders will be laid all the guilt for his country’s singular lack of foresight and for its military naïveté. Forgotten now are Hull’s own words of advice about the need for controlling the Lakes before attempting to invade Canada. Ignored is Major-General Dearborn’s dereliction in refusing to supply Hull with the reinforcements for which he pleaded or launching the diversionary attacks at Niagara and Kingston, which were key elements in American strategy.

Hull is to be made the scapegoat for Dearborn’s paralysis and Washington’s bumbling. When he is at last exchanged (and Prevost
is anxious to release him because he believes Hull’s return will cause dissension in America), he faces a court martial that is a travesty of a trial. Here he comes up against his old adversaries, McArthur, Cass, Findlay, Miller. But his lawyer is not permitted to cross-examine these officers or to examine other witnesses; the old general, unschooled in law, must perform that task himself.

Though his papers were burned on their way from Detroit to Buffalo after the surrender, he is not allowed to examine copies at Washington. The court is packed against him: Henry Dearborn is the presiding judge. He is unlikely to be sympathetic, for if the court acquits Hull of the twin charges of cowardice and treason, Dearborn himself and his superiors in Washington must be held culpable for the scandal at Detroit.

The charge of treason is withdrawn on the grounds that it is beyond the court’s jurisdiction. Three months later, when the weary process is at last completed and Hull is found guilty of cowardice, the court adds a rider saying that it does not believe him to be guilty of treason. There is more to this than simple justice, for the charge is based entirely on the loss of the
Cuyahoga
and all Hull’s baggage before he knew war was declared. That misfortune cannot be laid at the ill-starred general’s door but at that of Dr. Eustis, the Secretary of War, who was scandalously remiss in informing his outposts of the outbreak of hostilities.

Hull, officially branded as a coward, is sentenced to be shot. The President, taking into account the General’s Revolutionary gallantry and perhaps also pricked by a guilty conscience, pardons him. Hull spends the rest of his life attempting to vindicate his actions. It is an irony of war that had he refused to surrender, had he gone down to defeat, his fort and town shattered by cannon fire, his friends and neighbours ravaged by the misfortunes of battle, his soldiers dead to the last man, the civilians burned out, bombed out, and inevitably scalped, the tired old general would have swept into the history books as a gallant martyr, his name enshrined on bridges, schools, main streets, and public buildings. (There is also the possibility that he might have beaten Brock, though somehow one doubts it.) But for the rest of their lives the very soldiers who, because of him, can go back whole to the comfort of their homesteads, and the civilians who are now able to pick up the strings of their existence, only briefly tangled, will loathe and curse the name of William Hull who, on his deathbed at the age of seventy-two, will continue to insist that he took the only proper, decent, and courageous course on that bright August Sunday in 1812.

FIVE
Chicago

Horror on Lake Michigan

The wretchedness of that night who can tell! the despondency that filled the hearts of all, not so much in regard to the present as from apprehension for the future, who … can comprehend?… Alas, where were their comrades—friends, nay, brothers of yesterday? Where was the brave, the noble-hearted Wells … the manly Sergeant Nixon … the faithful Corporal Green—and nearly two-thirds of the privates of the detachment?

—From
Wau-nan-gee
, by John Richardson.

FORT DEARBORN, ILLINOIS TERRITORY
, August 15, 1812. Billy Wells has blackened his face in the fashion of a Miami warrior. It is a sign that he expects to be killed before sundown.

He has come to escort the garrison and the people of Chicago from the protection of the fort to the dubious security of Fort Wayne on the Maumee. It is not his doing; the move has been explicitly ordered by General Hull, who is himself only a day away from defeat and disgrace. Billy Wells has greater reason than Hull for pessimism; his blackened face betrays it.

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.