Tecumseh and Brock (6 page)

The natives' triumph generated political shockwaves and inspired hope in the Ohio country that they might actually reverse the onslaught of settlement and take back some of the land they had lost. Impressed by the scale of the victory, the British briefly considered the idea of establishing a native buffer state between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, a project that would come back to life almost two decades later, at the height of Tecumseh's career.

Defeat in the American Revolutionary War had not marked the end of British interest and ambition in the region that Americans called the Northwest Territory. For one thing, when the Treaty of Paris concluded the war in 1783, the British military still clung to many posts on the U.S. side of the new border. For another, the British retained a lively interest in the fur trade south of the Great Lakes. As far as the British were concerned, the Americans had not achieved unchallengeable control of this vital region. The British could recall a long series of changes in territorial arrangements in North America over the course of the eighteenth century. They had no reason to believe that the current boundaries were set in stone.

But the Americans did not see things that way. The administration of George Washington had no intention of accepting the stunning defeat on the Wabash as final. While the government was prepared to negotiate a temporary peace settlement with the native peoples in the region, its intention was to buy time until it could send a more effective military force into the territory to reassert U.S. control.
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In this urgent new conflict with the Americans, Tecumseh and his small band of followers skirmished with the enemy, sometimes on the attack and sometimes bearing the brunt of ambushes. Tecumseh learned how to give no ground when he found himself in a fight. He assessed a battleground with cool intelligence, discovered the enemy's weak point, and struck it with such force that he filled his adversaries with terror. It was over the course of these battles in which Tecumseh acted as a leader on his own that he developed a reputation as a formidable warrior.

Cheeseekau, still a more important leader than his younger brother, was also drawn into this new round of warfare farther south. Often his missions were launched against American settlements on the Cumberland River in Tennessee. Hit-and-run warfare against the settlers was a gruesome business. For a leader such as Cheeseekau, survival hung in the balance during each raid.

Tecumseh soon returned to Tennessee to fight at his brother's side. In late September 1792, Cheeseekau and his followers prepared to hit John Buchanan's Station, located six and a half kilometres south of Nashville. Stephen Ruddell records that before the attack commenced, Cheeseekau predicted that he would be killed. “Saying that his father had fell [
sic
] gloriously in battle,” Ruddell wrote, “he considered it an honour to die in battle and that it was what he wished and did not wish to be buried at home like an old squaw to which he preferred that the fowls of the air should pick his bones.”
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As in other episodes in this gruelling guerilla warfare, Cheeseekau and his allies positioned themselves around the station at midnight. They left their horses about a kilometre and a half away and stealthily approached the target on foot, under a clear full moon. They were only a few yards away from the gate when their footsteps spooked some cattle into flight. Alerted by the sound of the cattle and then by the approach of the warriors, an American soldier who was inside the blockhouse at the gate shoved his weapon through a porthole, fired, and shot Cheeseekau dead. For about an hour the assault against the station continued, but the Americans held a strong defensive position — they managed to kill and wound several warriors and escaped with no casualties.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 frontal 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.”
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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.
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