Читать книгу Tecumseh - Jim Poling Sr. - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe March sun warmed and loosened winter’s paralysis, stirring new life along every inch of the river’s banks. Fern stems poked their pale heads through awakening soil to feel the sunlight. In the forests, little touched by human activity, the trees stretched and felt their saps beginning to flow. Animal life, from bears to the tiniest insects, emerged and set about the business of a new cycle of life.
Nowhere was the activity more evident than among the dozens of tree-bark dwellings near the riverbank. Shawnee children laughed and chased each other around the wigwams in hide-and-seek games while their parents began the chores of the year’s most important season. The village’s hunter warriors refurbished tools and weapons, and discussed hunting plans; the women threw themselves into the work of village maintenance and prepared to ready gardens for planting. Spring meant new life, new beginnings, new adventures, and new workloads.
For a woman called Methoataaskee, the priority task of the spring of 1768 was to deliver the baby she had carried inside her since the previous summer. She lay in a small bark birthing hut near the family lodge, attended by older women. She was twenty-eight and in her fourth pregnancy. The birth came in the evening, just after they had seen a brilliant meteor brighten the darkening sky. Great joy followed the wracking pain of delivery, but the birth created little fanfare. She swaddled the child, a boy, and later strapped him to a ndiknaagan, the cradle board that would be with her every work day until he could sit on his own. The birthing done, there were the other children to feed, maple sap to render to syrup and sugar, and corn, squash, and beans to plant.
The new son had his own job: feed, grow, and survive the first delicate months of life. When he abandoned the cradle board some months later, his father, Pukeshinwau, organized his naming feast. The boy took his division or tribal affiliation from his father, a Kispoko Shawnee of the panther clan. Mshibzhii is the celestial panther spirit seen crouching or leaping in the starry skies. The naming was decided by an elder from another clan, who offered tobacco and prayers to the spirits. The name chosen was Tecumtha or Tecumseh, meaning “Shooting Star,” and fitting for a life destined to be short, but brilliant.
Tecumseh entered a growing family of some standing. Pukeshinwau, a Kispoko war chief, and Methoataaskee had three sons and a daughter. Cheeseekau had been born seven years earlier, followed by the girl Tecumapease, then Sauawaseekau. The family also included an adopted boy, a white child captured by Pukeshinwau in a raid near Wheeling, West Virginia, a few years earlier. He was born Richard Sparks but the Shawnee renamed him Shawtunte.
The Kispoko village was one of several Shawnee communities along the Scioto River, which started in west-central Ohio, ran 231 miles south through present-day Columbus, and down to Portsmouth, where it joined the mighty Ohio River. The Scioto (sigh-OH-toe), an Indian word indicating the presence of many deer, was part of an ancient trail used by the Indians to link their towns and the hunting grounds to the south, in what later became the State of Kentucky.
The Scioto Valley, sitting below the heavily forested Appalachian Foothills, offered the Shawnee the closest thing to paradise. There were open fertile places to plant food crops and the tobacco used for spiritual, medicinal, and cultural purposes. The forests provided life-giving animals including bears, cougars, deer, elk, wild turkeys, wolves, bobcats, and millions of birds — in particular the passenger pigeon, destined for extinction. The river itself was a transport corridor for their elm-bark canoes.
It was a very different land from what we know two hundred years later. The forests were primeval, the rivers and lakes pure, and the only signs of human occupation were footpaths and small habitation clearings. At the time of Tecumseh’s birth, roughly 95 percent of the Ohio Territory was covered by mature forest, compared with 30 percent today.
One person’s paradise often is another person’s envy. The wildlife, good timber, water, and fertile growing areas caught the covetous eyes of the surging population of the Thirteen British Colonies that were spread along the Atlantic Coast, east of the Appalachians. The French, who had settled Canadian lands north and east of the Great Lakes, also felt they had a stake in the Ohio Country, because of their aggressive explorations and fur trading throughout much of the New World.
The interests of both groups were known and watched nervously by the Shawnee and other Indian nations, who already knew the pain of being pushed from their homelands. The powerful Iroquois, expanding their influence and territory in the mid-1600s Beaver Wars, drove the Shawnee from their Ohio River valleys, dispersing some west, some east over the Alleghenies, and others south to the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and as far as Florida. Pukeshinwau was one of these migrants, and it was in the south that he met and married Methoataaskee.
The displaced Shawnees dreamt of regrouping in a traditional homeland south of Lake Erie. One organized reunification occurred in the 1750s with some tribes drifting back to the Ohio Country. Pukeshinwau and Methoataaskee trekked north about 1759, settling along the Scioto River, likely at or near Chillicothe, about 125 miles north of where the Scioto meets the Ohio.
About the same time, the British colonists’ interest in the Ohio frontier turned to action. In 1748, some Virginians, including George Washington’s half brother Lawrence, formed the Ohio Company, with a plan to get the land west of the Appalachians from King George III of Britain and sell it to settlers for profit. The king granted them two hundred thousand acres of land near what is now the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, even though it wasn’t his to give away. It belonged to the North American Indians. The king expected the Company to distribute the land among one hundred families and to build a fort for the settler’s safety while they broke the wilderness for farms.
The Virginians knew little about the Ohio Country, so they hired surveyor-frontiersman Christopher Gist to explore the country and to help establish trading relationships with the Indians. Gist liked what he found. On February 17, 1751, he wrote in his journal:
… rich fine and Level Land, well Timbered with large Walnut, Ash, Sugar Trees, Cherry Trees etc, it is well watered with a great Number of little Streams or Rivulets, and full of beautiful natural Meadows, covered with wild Rye, Blue Grass and clover, and abounds with Turkeys, Deer, and Elks and most sorts of Game particularly Buffaloes, thirty or forty of which are frequently seen feeding in one meadow: In short nothing but Cultivation to make it a most delightful Country — The Ohio and all the large Branches are said to be full of fine Fish …
This was what the Ohio Company wanted to hear. The land could be sold, settled, and cultivated as rich farms. The Company arranged more surveying and initiated land sales with hopes of becoming rich. The colonists saw this as a necessary and natural progression for their new country. Land sales brought important revenues to build the country and enrich many individuals. Little thought was given to the Indian nations who occupied the land. They were considered a lower form of life, indolent and incapable of making the fullest use of the resources that God had provided them.
The Indian view of life could not have been more opposite to that of the colonists. They had everything they needed, and couldn’t comprehend why the colonists wanted to accumulate more and more goods that could not be carried into the spirit world. They saw white expansion into their land as an extreme danger, for one simple reason: They lived in balance with nature, small numbers of people living off a limited amount of resources; too many people would tilt the balance, deplete the resources, and everyone would be hungry.
The Indian cycle of living was friendly to the environment. In spring, trees were tapped for syrup, men fished the streams, and women planted small garden plots and gathered herbs and plants from the forest. In summer, crops of berries, ginseng, and other roots and tubers were gathered. Fall brought vegetables from the gardens, and more food from the forests, such as mushrooms. Late fall and winter were the meat hunting seasons. This cycle allowed small groups of people to live off the land without extinguishing its resources. The Indians knew that large groups of settlers knocking down forests to create large farms would upset the cycle.
The French in Canada were alarmed when they heard of the Ohio Company’s plans. From their New World along the St. Lawrence, the French had struck out in all directions to explore the wilderness of North America and to establish an ambitious fur trade. They were the first non-Indians into the Ohio Country. The British colonists stayed close to their Atlantic seaboard homes while the French tramped and canoed the West. They believed they had earned the right to the lands below Lake Erie. So they strengthened their claims by dispatching five hundred troops into the region and building forts to enforce their presence.
The French moves sparked the French and Indian War, years of vicious battles between Britain and France for control of North America. It pretty much ended in September 1759, when British general James Wolfe defeated the Marquis de Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham at Quebec City. A year later the British captured Montreal, and in 1763 the two countries signed the Treaty of Paris, giving Britain all of New France, including the Ohio Country, which encompassed the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
The Shawnee supported the French in the war because the French understood the Indians better than most Europeans, and generally treated them as allies, rather than pawns. The Shawnee feared that if the British defeated the French, settlers from the Thirteen Colonies would pour over the Appalachians into the Ohio Country and destroy the Indian way of life. Much to their surprise, King George III had the same fears. In October 1763, Britain passed a Royal Proclamation closing all Indian territories west of the Appalachians to the colonists. It also placed all Indians under the protection of the king.
George III and his advisers were not simply being nice to the Indians. The British king wanted to improve the fur trade in North America and he needed the Indians for that. Also, he wanted his colonists, showing signs of rebellion against him, corralled along the Atlantic seaboard where they could be better regulated. The Ohio Company, its deal with King George superseded, was now without lands to sell and was forced out of business. This appeared to be good fortune for the Shawnee and other Indian nations in the Ohio Country. The threat of a white invasion from the east was suspended, and 1768, the year of Tecumseh’s birth, promised a time of calm with hope for a peaceful future.
Without war, Shawnee life was reasonably carefree. The land, as long as it remained relatively unpopulated, provided adequate food and shelter. Life was a constant struggle against nature, but the Indians had centuries of experience and the Shawnee were intelligent and industrious. Women and girls nurtured gardens, collected food, stoked fires, made clothes, and tended to the maintenance of the bark or hide wigwams. Men gambled, smoked, talked, and tended to weapons and tools — and made war. In autumn, families dispersed, travelling to winter hunting grounds where the men sought out the animals needed for food, clothing, tools, and trade.
The child Tecumseh was as free as the animals his elders pursued. His life was outside — running, swimming, learning to build tools and weapons, such as the bow and arrow. He and his pals practised hunting and played war games. Decades later, Tecumseh’s war play was described by Stephen Ruddell, a white youth captured by the Shawnee:
During his boyhood he used to place himself at the head of the youngsters and divide them … he would make them fight sham battles in which he always distinguished himself by his activity, strength, and skill.
Ruddell was another white boy who grew up with the Shawnee after they snatched him during a raid on Ruddell’s Station, a small settlement in Kentucky. He and Tecumseh became blood brothers, sharing war games, and later hunting expeditions and real war.
The war games were important for Shawnee boys because their destiny was not to live in peace. The frontier was always alive with war talk, if only squabbles between tribes or small skirmishes between the Indians and intruders on their territory.
King George’s proclamation protecting the Ohio Country and its Indians did not last long. The year Tecumseh was born, the Iroquois Six Nations Confederacy, which had claimed the Ohio Country since the 1600s, sold part of it to the colonists for ten thousand pounds. Other tribes protested that the land belonged to all Indians and it was not up to the Iroquois alone to sell it. Not long after the sale, the Shawnee watched a new procession of surveyors and settlers from the Thirteen Colonies float down the Ohio River to open new settlements. The colonists, who had started to call themselves Patriots or Americans, ignored the King’s proclamation. This was no big deal for them because they no longer tolerated King George and his laws from abroad. Differences between the new Americans and the British set off the American Revolution, which began as Tecumseh approached the age of reason.
The Revolution impacted all tribes south of Lake Erie, directly and dramatically. The breakaway colonists were expansionists who wanted the Indian lands west of the Appalachians. The British, although they had broken promises before, offered some hope of protection against this expansion if they could put down the American revolt. They needed allies against the upstart Americans, so they gave the Indians guns and supplies, and while reminding them of King George’s promised protection, incited them into raids on American settlements.
In the summer of 1774, Tecumseh’s sixth year, the Shawnee boy’s life and the future of his people was decided. Colonists in Virginia, taking control of the new lands given up by the Iroquois, decided to crush any Indian resistance, which included the Shawnee. The Indians called the Virginians “Long Knives” or “Big Knives,” because of the long swords carried by colonial military officers, and later the name was applied to all Americans. The Long Knives marched on the Ohio Country, determined to destroy the Shawnee villages along the Scioto.
The leaves were changing colour when Pukeshinwau received a messenger delivering a red tomahawk, the call to war chiefs to gather for war. Young Tecumseh, the drums pounding in his ears, watched his father’s warriors strip to breechcloths and prepare their weapons. They painted their faces and shaved their heads to scalp locks. They drank vegetable potions, fasted, and called on the spirits for success in war.
One can imagine the emotions of a six-year-old boy standing with his mother and siblings as the war party prepared to leave. The whoops of warriors and the neighing of excited horses rolling through the autumn air already filled with dust, the smell of horse flesh, tension, and determination. He must have been overcome with envy and pride as his older brother Cheeseekau, just thirteen, took his place in the war party beside his father.
Tecumseh and his family watched the war party disappear in the distance, Methoataaskee with a large belly that told of another child to come in winter. Tecumseh ached for the day that he would join them on the trail to war. He could not know, however, that his own path to war would be part of a desperate struggle to save his people. Neither did he know that he would never see his father again.
