Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (75 page)

The Northwest Frontier

Upon Harrison’s return to the fort, the troops are plunged into a whirlwind of activity. The chief engineer has booked sick, but his replacement, Captain Eleazer D. Wood, throws himself into the task of reinforcing the stockade. Harrison, who seems to be everywhere at once, orders his officers to conduct daily drills of the raw recruits to prepare them for the coming siege. It is not easy. Most of the officers need drilling as badly as their men.

They are much better at felling trees, digging trenches, splitting logs and raising bulwarks—an activity that proceeds under Eleazer Wood’s direction. Work parties haul in fuel for the garrison and timber to fill breeches in the walls. Others dig wells in preparation for a lengthy siege.

Harrison has known since early April that the British, aware of his reduced state, are preparing an attack and expect a swift and easy contest. His old adversary, Tecumseh, has fifteen hundred tribesmen under his command at Fort Amherstburg on the Canadian side of the Detroit River. Fortunately for Harrison, the British commander, Major-General Henry Procter, has moved tardily, allowing the Americans a breathing space. But now the British have landed in full force at the mouth of the Maumee and are moving up the left bank. One of Harrison’s scouting parties discovers them on the twenty-eighth, camped on the site of the old British Fort Miami, and estimates their strength at between fifteen hundred and two thousand. Tecumseh’s Indians have already crossed the river and surrounded the American camp, picking off those soldiers foolhardy enough to leave the stockade for water. Fort Meigs is all but cut off, its garrison outnumbered two to one. Harrison’s only hope lies in the reinforcements from Kentucky, somewhere on the Upper Maumee, nobody yet knows exactly where.

Métoss, head chief of the Sauks, lies belly down in a thicket close by the walls of the fort, waiting for any thirsty American soldier who attempts to steal down to the river. Like his fellow chief, Black Hawk, he has become a bitter enemy of the Americans—and with reason, for they have managed to squeeze fifty million acres of good Mississippi Valley land out of his people. He has come here to fight the Long Knives at the behest of Robert Dickson the fur trader, now an official of the British Indian Department, whom the Sioux call
Mascotopah
, the Red-Haired Man. Each night Métoss crosses the river from his tepee near the British camp to pick off one of the enemy or take a prisoner. The woods are alive with his fellow tribesmen, creeping behind the stumps and logs that litter the clearing around the fort or clambering into the elms to fire down upon the men within the walls.

He is an imposing figure, Métoss—six feet tall, with classic Roman features, his torso, arms, and thighs daubed with war paint, a circlet of feathers ornamenting his head. To the Americans behind the tall pickets, the encroaching Indians are only shadows, featureless and unreal. To the frontiersmen of Ohio and Kentucky they are no better than animals, without human feelings, to be shot on sight, war or no war. No American jury will convict a white man for murdering an Indian any more than it will censure him for slaughtering buffalo.

Métoss’s thirteen-year-old son crouches beside his father, peering into the darkness, playing at being a man. He is his father’s favourite. Métoss can deny him nothing, even this moment of danger. He has urged him not to come; but the boy is here.

They are very close to the fort, their temerity fuelled by the Americans’ inability to locate them in the gloom. Does Métoss catch the glint of a telescope, flickering in the moonlight, behind the palisade? For once the enemy has him spotted. A moment later comes a flash, a coarse roar, and the whistle of grape-shot—scores of heavy balls released from their skin of canvas, whirling in the air, ripping the bark from the trees, shredding the new leaves of spring, tearing into the bowels of the child beside him, who dies, writhing, in his arms.

Revenge!
Back at his tepee, securely pinioned, is Métoss’s captive, a young American soldier taken the night before. Wild with grief, the father picks up the small mangled body, carries it to his canoe, slips across the river. All of his terrible despair is funnelled into an implacable purpose: he will purge his sorrow with a stroke of the tomahawk.

The red-headed Dickson, who seems to know everything that transpires in his camp, is there ahead of him.
Do not do this thing
, says Dickson.
Do not destroy this man. Surrender him instead to me—otherwise your father, the King, will look on you with sorrow
.

No other white man and few other native chiefs have Dickson’s power over the western tribes. He is the master of the fur country, the protector of his people, their unquestioned champion, spokesman, general. To save them from starvation he has been prepared to beggar himself, and he has never betrayed their trust. Métoss cannot refuse him.

The chief tears off his headdress, struggles with his emotions, goes at last to his tepee. There he pulls a knife from his belt, severs his captive’s thongs, takes him by the hand, leads him to Dickson, speaks in a mournful voice:

“You tell me that my Great Father wishes it—take him!”

Then, no longer able to control his emotions, he weeps like a baby.

The boy is buried next day with full military honours. The body is laid out first in Métoss’s tent, a small rifle beside it with a quantity of ammunition and provisions for the journey that must follow. A dozen warriors painted black perform a solemn ritual dance. Suddenly, the chief rushes into the midst of the group, frantic with sorrow, his grief violent, ungovernable. They lead him, at last, from the body of his son, and the funeral procession moves off toward the newly dug grave on the river bank under the command of Lieutenant Richard Bullock of the 41st.

The red-coated firing party discharges the customary three rounds. The black-painted warriors follow with volley after volley. And still Métoss cannot control his grief. In the months that follow
he becomes attached to Bullock, the officer who headed the firing party, makes him a chief of the Sauks, asks him to exchange names, treats him as a blood relative as if to replace his missing son. But he cannot staunch his tears, and it is the better part of a year before anybody sees him smile.

FORT MEIGS, OHIO, APRIL 28, 1813

Rain drenches the besieged American camp. The flash of lightning competes with the blaze of cannon; the crack of thunder with the roar of musketry. Indian warwhoops add to the cacophony.

Into this hellish night—into the mud, into the unseen tangle of stumps and broken logs, into hidden thickets and lurking shadows—goes a young captain, William Oliver, protected briefly by an escort of dragoons and by the thickness of the night itself. He carries a two-sentence message from Harrison to Brigadier-General Green Clay, in command of the Kentucky reinforcements somewhere on the upper reaches of the Maumee:

Dear Sir: I send Mr. Oliver to you, to give you an account of what is passing here. You may rely implicitly on him.

The note reveals nothing, for Oliver’s chances of getting through are minimal. The real message will be oral. Harrison can only wait and hope while he strengthens his defences. Meanwhile, to raise morale, he composes one of those eloquent general orders for which he is famous:

Can the citizens of a free country who have taken arms to defend its rights, think of submitting to an army composed of mercenary soldiers, reluctant Canadians goaded to the field by the bayonet, and of wretched, naked savages? Can the breast of an American soldier, when he casts his eye on the opposite shore, the scene of his country’s triumphs over the same foe, be influenced by any other feelings than the hope of glory? Is not this army composed
of the same materials with that which fought and conquered under the immortal Wayne? Yes, fellow soldiers, your General sees your countenances beam with the same fire which he witnessed on that glorious occasion; and although it would be the height of presumption to compare himself with that hero, he boasts of being that hero’s pupil. To your posts, then, fellow citizens, and remember that the eyes of your country are upon you.

Harrison’s order contains all the proper ingredients. It reinforces the American attitude that this war is a fight for freedom, that the British regulars are really mercenaries without a cause, that the Canadians are enslaved and must be goaded to fight. It conjures up the savagery of a so-called civilized nation that fights its colonial wars with unrestrained natives. Finally, it recalls past glories; directly across from Fort Meigs is the site of the Battle of Fallen Timbers, where General “Mad Anthony” Wayne humbled the combined Indian armies.

Harrison’s order is also a statement of America’s military philosophy. It reminds the young recruits from Ohio and Kentucky that they are citizens first and soldiers second (a truth with which the regulars would wryly agree) and that their commander is a citizen, too, and an equal. This approach, which springs out of the Revolution, is at odds with that of the British, who believe in disciplined professional soldiers following orders without question within the perimeters of a rigid caste system. No British general would ever refer to his men as “fellow citizens”—nor would a Canadian, for that matter.

But Harrison must inspire his artillery with more than words. The British are building gun emplacements on a ridge directly across from the fort, on the north side of the Maumee, concealing their own gunners in a hollow at the rear. A second battery has been moved across the river and is about to bear down on his position. The General sees at once that his own entrenchments will be ineffective against these massed cannon. He must drastically alter his own defensive plan. With Eleazer Wood’s engineering help he will criss-cross the camp with a series of traverses—great embankments
of earth, buttressed against cannon fire, with caves scooped out at the base in which the half-buried troops can eat and sleep.

The largest of these embankments is planned to run the entire length of the fort. Because it must be constructed in secrecy, Harrison has his second line of tents taken down to leave an open avenue but keeps the first line standing to mask the work of construction. Now the entire camp is employed throwing up this vast wall of earth, three hundred yards long, fifteen feet high, twenty feet thick at the base. The troops work in three-hour shifts, urged on by Wood who is heartened and astonished by their energy and courage.

This is work the raw recruits understand, for they have toiled with pick and shovel on frontier farms for most of their lives. Driven to almost superhuman exertions by the British activity across the river and by the musket balls of the Indians raining down into the camp, they are remarkably cheerful, singing as they work:

Freemen, no longer bear such slaughter
,
Avenge your country’s cruel woe!
Arouse, and save your wives and daughters
,
Arouse, and expel the faithless foe
.

The heavy rains turn the camp into a swamp, filling the trenches with water and slowing the work, which must be finished before the British get their cannon into position. But the British, too, are hampered by weather. Their gun emplacements are completed on April 29. Now they must secretly move up their two big twenty-four-pounders. At nine that evening, under cover of darkness, two hundred men straining on drag ropes with several teams of oxen start to haul the heavy ordnance along the river road through mud that reaches to the wagons’ axles. It takes six hours to move the guns one mile; the first streaks of dawn are lighting the sky before they are finally in place.

All this ponderous preparation weighs on Tecumseh. It is Harrison he wants—Harrison, the former governor of Indiana who has stolen the Indians’ land; Harrison, whose troops have wantonly burned the villages of the Miami, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, and Ottawa;
Harrison, who has sworn to destroy the Indian confederacy, which the Shawnee war chief and his mystic brother, the Prophet, forged on the banks of the Tippecanoe.

Now Harrison is hiding from him, his men burrowing into the earth like frightened animals. Why cannot the so-called victor of Tippecanoe come out into the open and fight like a man? Tecumseh dispatches a blunt challenge to his old enemy:

“I have with me 800 braves. You have an equal number in your hiding place. Come out with them and give me battle. You talked like a brave man when we met at Vincennes and I respected you, but now you hide behind logs and earth like a ground hog. Give me your answer.”

There is no reply. The former governor must see once again in the mirror of his memory that swarthy, hazel-eyed figure in unadorned deerskin who upset so many of his plans, frustrated his attempts to buy native territory for a pittance, dared to face him down on his own estate at Vincennes; who has through the magic of his personality, the eloquence of his oratory, and the quickness of his intelligence managed to rally the tribes of the American northwest and bring them over to the British side. It is Tecumseh who is at the root of America’s disgrace; his presence at Detroit tipped the scales to give the British a bloodless victory and control of most of Michigan Territory. His example has brought others swarming to the British cause—Sioux, Sauk, Chippewa, and Menominee from the far reaches of the Upper Mississippi; Mohawk from the Grand Valley of Upper Canada; Caughnawaga from the St. Lawrence; and a horde of American Indians from the Old Northwest.