Chapter 2: When We Smashed the Prophet’s Power

IT is a curious and interesting fact that, just as in the year 1754 a collision between French and English scouting parties on the banks of the Youghiogheny River, deep in the American wilderness, began a war that changed the map of Europe, so in 1811 a battle on the banks of the Wabash between Americans and Indians started an avalanche which ended by crushing Napoleon.

The nineteenth century was still in its swaddling-clothes at the time this story opens; the war of the Revolution had been over barely a quarter of a century, and a second war with England was shortly to begin. Though the borders of the United States nominally extended to the Rockies, the banks of the Mississippi really marked the outermost picket-line of civilization. Beyond that lay a vast and virgin wilderness, inconceivably rich in minerals, game, and timber, but still in the power of more or less hostile tribes of Indians. Up to 1800 the whole of that region lying beyond the Ohio, including the present States of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Missouri, was officially designated as the Northwest Territory, but in that year the northern half of this region was organized as the Indian Territory, or, as it came to be known in time, the Territory of Indiana.

The governor of this great province was a young man named William Henry Harrison. This youth—he was only twenty-seven at the time of his appointment—was invested with one of the most extraordinary commissions ever issued by our government. In addition to being the governor of a Territory whose area was greater than that of the German Empire, he was commander-in-chief of the Territorial militia, Indian agent, land commissioner, and sole lawgiver. He had the power to adopt from the statutes upon the books of any of the States any and every law which he deemed applicable to the needs of the Territory. He appointed all the judges and other civil officials and all military officers below the rank of general. He possessed and exercised the authority to divide the Territory into counties and townships. He held the prerogative of pardon. His decision as to the validity of existing land grants, many of which were technically worthless, was final, and his signature upon a title was a remedy for all defects. As the representative of the United States in its relations with the Indians, he held the power to negotiate treaties and to make treaty payments.

Governor Harrison was admittedly the highest authority on the northwestern Indians. He kept his fingers constantly on the pulse of Indian sentiment and opinion and often said that he could forecast by the conduct of his Indians, as a mariner forecasts the weather by the aid of a barometer, the chances of war and peace for the United States so far as they were controlled by the cabinet in London. The remark, though curious, was not surprising. Uneasiness would naturally be greatest in regions where the greatest irritation existed and which were under the least control. Such a danger spot was the Territory of Indiana. It occupied a remote and perilous position, for northward and westward the Indian country stretched to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, unbroken save by the military posts at Fort Wayne and Fort Dearborn (now Chicago) and a considerable settlement of whites in the vicinity of Detroit. Some five thousand Indian warriors held this vast region and were abundantly able to expel every white man from Indiana if their organization had been as strong as their numbers. And the whites were no less eager to expel the Indians.

No acid ever ate more resistlessly into a vegetable substance than the white man acted on the Indian. As the line of American settlements approached the nearest Indian tribes shrunk and withered away. The most serious of the evils which attended the contact of the two hostile races was the introduction by the whites of whiskey among the Indians. “I can tell at once,” wrote Harrison about this time, “upon looking at an Indian whom I may chance to meet, whether he belongs to a neighboring or a more distant tribe. The latter is generally well-clothed, healthy, and vigorous; the former half-naked, filthy, and enfeebled by intoxication.” Another cause of Indian resentment was that the white man, though not permitted to settle beyond the Indian border, could not be prevented from trespassing far and wide on Indian territory in quest of game. This practice of hunting on Indian lands in direct violation of law and of existing treaties had, indeed, grown into a monstrous abuse and did more than anything else, perhaps, to fan the flame of Indian hostility toward the whites. Every autumn great numbers of Kentucky settlers used to cross the Ohio River into the Indian country to hunt deer, bear, and buffalo for their skins, which they had no more right to take than they had to cross the Alleghanies and shoot the cows and sheep belonging to the Pennsylvania farmers. As a result of this systematic slaughter of the game, many parts of the Northwest Territory became worthless to the Indians as hunting-grounds, and the tribes that owned them were forced either to sell them to the government for supplies or for an annuity or to remove elsewhere. The Indians had still another cause for complaint. According to the terms of the treaties, if an Indian killed a white man the tribe was bound to surrender the murderer for trial in an American court; while, if a white man killed an Indian, the murderer was also to be tried by a white jury. The Indians surrendered their murderers, and the white juries at Vincennes unhesitatingly hung them; but, though Harrison reported innumerable cases of wanton and atrocious murders of Indians by white men, no white man was ever convicted by a territorial jury for these crimes. So far as the white man was concerned, it was a case of “Heads I win, tails you lose.” The opinion that prevailed along the frontier was expressed in the frequent assertion that “the only good Indian is a dead one,” and in the face of such public opinion there was no chance of the Indian getting a square deal.

As a result of these outrages and injustices, the thoughts of the Indians turned longingly toward the days when this region was held by France. Had Napoleon carried out his Louisiana scheme of 1802, there is no possible doubt that he would have received the active support of every Indian tribe from the Gulf to the Great Lakes; his orders would have been obeyed from Tallahassee to Detroit. When affairs in Europe compelled him to abandon his contemplated American campaign, the Indians turned to the British for sympathy and assistance—and the British were only too glad to extend them a friendly hand. From Maiden, opposite Detroit, the British traders loaded the American Indians with gifts and weapons; the governor-general of Canada intrigued with the more powerful chieftains and assured himself of their support in the war which was approaching; British emissaries circulated among the tribes, and by specious arguments inflamed their hostility toward Americans. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, had our people and our government treated the Indians with the most elementary justice and honesty, they would have had their support in the War of 1812, the whole course of that disastrous war would probably have been changed, and the Canadian boundary would, in all likelihood, have been pushed far to the northward. By their persistent ill treatment of the Indians the Americans received what they had every reason to expect and what they fully deserved.

During the first decade of the nineteenth century there was really no perfect peace with any of the Indian tribes west of the Ohio, and Harrison’s abilities as a soldier and a diplomatist were taxed to the utmost to prevent the skirmish-line, as the chain of settlements and trading-posts which marked our westernmost frontier might well be called, from being turned into a battle-ground. Harrison’s most formidable opponent in his task of civilizing the West was the Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh, perhaps the most remarkable of American Indians. Though not a chieftain by birth, Tecumseh had risen by the strength of his personality and his powers as an orator to a position of altogether extraordinary influence and power among his people. So great was his reputation for bravery in battle and wisdom in council that by 1809 he had attained the unique distinction of being, to all intents and purposes, the political leader of all the Indians between the Ohio and the Mississippi.

With the vision of a prophet, Tecumseh saw that if this immense territory was once opened to settlement by whites the game upon which the Indians had to depend for sustenance must soon be exterminated and that in a few years his people would have to move to strange and distant hunting-grounds. Taking this as his text, he preached a gospel of armed resistance to the white man’s encroachments at every tribal council-fire from the land of the Chippewas to the country of the Creeks. And he had good reasons for his warnings, for the Indians were being stripped of their lands in shameless fashion. In fact, the Indian agents were deliberately ordered to tempt the tribal chiefs into debt in order to oblige them to sell the tribal lands, which did not belong to them, but to their tribes. The callousness of the government’s Indian policy was frankly expressed by President Jefferson in a letter to Harrison in 1803:

“To promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to spare and we want for necessaries which we have to spare and they want we shall push our trading houses and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them in debt; because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.”