The Story of Isaac Brock: Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada/18
It was a picturesque council of white men and Indians that was held at dawn in an open glade of the forest. The fragrant odours of the bush mingled with the pungent smoke of the red willow-bark, puffed from a hundred pipes. Conspicuous at this pow-wow was Tecumseh, who across his close-fitting buckskin hunting jacket, which descended to his knees and was trimmed with split leather fringe, wore a belt of wampum, made of the purple enamel of mussel shells—cut into lengths like sections of a small pipe-stem, perforated and strung on sinew. On his head he wore a toque of eagle plumes.
"My object," said Brock, addressing the Indians, "is to assist you to drive the 'Long-knives' [Americans] from the frontier, and repel invasion of the King's country." Tecumseh, speaking for his tribesmen, remarked, not without sarcasm, that "their great father, King George, having awakened out of a long sleep, they were now ready to shed their last drop of blood in that father's service."
"The pale faces," he continued, after an impressive pause—and the fire of his eloquence and his gestures swayed his hearers like the reeds on the river bank—"the Americans who want to fight the British are our enemies.... They came to us hungry and they cut off the hands of our brothers who gave them corn.... We gave them rivers of fish and they poisoned our foun[Pg 101]tains.... We gave them forest-clad mountains and valleys full of game, and in return what did they give our warriors and our women? Rum and trinkets and—a grave!... The shades of our fathers slaughtered on the banks of the Tippecanoe can find no rest.... Their eyes can see no herds on the hills of light in the hunting grounds of the dead!... Until our enemies are no more we must be as one man, under one chief, whose name is—Death!... I have spoken."
Tecumseh, it should be known, bore a personal grudge against the Americans, especially against the 4th Regiment, then in garrison at Detroit, the "heroes of Tippecanoe." This was a terrible misnomer, for under General Harrison, with 1,000 soldiers, less than a year before, they had taken part in the slaughter of Tecumseh's half-armed band of 600 men and women on the banks of the Tippecanoe River, during that chief's absence with many of his warriors, and had laid waste his village. With a perhaps pardonable spirit of vindictiveness, such as is shared by both redskin and white man, the human-being in him thirsted for revenge.
Brock, perceiving Tecumseh's sagacity and influence over the savages, invited the Shawanese and Wawanosh, Ojebekun and the other sachems, to a private council. Here he unfolded his plans. Before doing this he made it a condition that no barbarities were to be committed. "The scalping-knife," said he, "must be discarded, and forbearance, compassion and clemency shown to the vanquished." He told them he wanted to restrict their military operations to the known rules of war, as far as was possible under the singular conditions in which they[Pg 102] fought, and exacted a promise from the lofty-minded Tecumseh that his warriors "should not taste pernicious liquor until they had humbled the Big-knives." "If this resolution," remarked Brock, "is persevered in, you must surely conquer."
Brock's rapid ascendency over the Indians was astonishing; they already revered him as a common father.
That same afternoon our hero, moving up with his entire command to Sandwich, occupied the mansion of Colonel Baby, the great fur-trader, just evacuated by Hull. In the spacious hall hooks were nailed to the rafters, from which were suspended great steel-yards, by which the beaver packs were weighed. Scattered on the hewn floor in much profusion were soldiers' accoutrements, service and pack-saddles, iron-bound chests mixed up with bear-traps and paddles, rolls of birch-bark, leather hunting shirts, and the greasy blankets of voyageur and redskin. The room on the right became Brock's headquarters, and in this room he penned his first demand upon General Hull.
"My force," so he wrote, "warrants my demanding the immediate surrender of Fort Detroit." Anxious to prevent bloodshed, and knowing Hull's dread of the Indians, he also played upon his fears. "The Indians," he added, "might get beyond my control." This summons was carried by Colonel Macdonell and Major Glegg, under a flag of truce, across the river.
The batteries at Sandwich consisted of one eighteen-pounder, two twelve-pounders, and two 5½-inch howitzers. Back of these artificial breastworks extended both a wilderness and the garden of Canada. Beyond the meadows,[Pg 103] aflame with autumn wild-flowers, beyond the cultivated clearings, rose a forest of walnut, oak, basswood, birch and poplar trees, seared with age, of immense height and girth, festooned with wild honeysuckle and other creepers. In the open were broad orchards bending under their harvest of red and yellow fruit—apples and plums, peaches, nectarines and cherries—and extensive vineyards. Huge sugar maples challenged giant pear trees, whose gnarled trunks had resisted the storms of a century. To the north the floor of the forest was interlaced with trails, which, with the intention of deceiving Hull's spies as to the strength of Brock's forces, had been crossed and recrossed, and countermarched and doubled over, by the soldiers and Tecumseh's half-naked braves.
The air was filled with the fragrance of orchard and forest. Facing our hero, flowed the river, broad, swift and deep; tufted wolf-willow, waving rushes and gray hazel fringing the banks. Across and beyond this almost mile-wide ribbon of water, the imposing walls of Fort Detroit confronted him. Approaching him at a rapid gait he at last espied his two despatch bearers, their scarlet tunics vivid against the green background. They reported that, after waiting upon Hull for two hours without being granted an interview, they were handed the following reply:
"General Hull is prepared to meet any force brought against him, and accept any consequences."
Brock instructed his gunners to acknowledge the receipt of this challenge with the thunder of their batteries, and from then, far into the night, shells and round-shot shrieked their way across the river, the answering missiles from[Pg 104] Hull's seven twenty-four-pounders breaking in a sheet of flame from the very dust created by the British cannon-balls that exploded on the enemy's breastworks. Through the irony of fate, the first shot fired under Brock's personal orders in the cause of Canadian freedom killed a United States officer, an intimate friend of the British artilleryman who had trained the gun. Such are the arguments of war.
The cannonade proving ineffective, as judged by visible results, Brock issued orders to cross the river at dawn, when he would make the attempt to take the fort by storm—and soldier and militiaman bivouacked on their arms.
Camp fires were extinguished, but the tireless fireflies danced in the blackness of the wood. The river gurgled faintly in the wind-stirred reeds. From out the gloom of the thicket came the weird coco-coco of the horned owl. From the starlit sky above fell the shrill cry of the mosquito hawk, "peepeegeeceese, peepeegeeceese!" From an isolated bark tepee came the subdued incantation of the Indian medicine-man, while above the singing of the tree-tops and over all, clear and with clock-like regularity, floated the challenge of the sentry and answering picket:
"Who goes there?"
"A friend."
"All's well."