Part 4
Probably the most remarkable of this long list of adventurers was the Jean Lafitte whom De Aury found in possession of Galveston. A Frenchman by birth and an American by adoption, he and his brother Pierre had, during the early years of the century, established on Barataria Island, near the mouth of the Mississippi, what was virtually a pirate kingdom, where they drove a thriving trade with the planters along the upper river and the merchants of New Orleans in smuggled slaves and merchandise. Although both the State and federal authorities had made repeated attempts to dislodge them, the Lafittes were at the height of their prosperity when the second war with England began. When the British armada destined for the conquest of Louisiana arrived off the Mississippi, late in 1814, an officer was sent to Jean Lafitte offering him fifty thousand dollars and a captain’s commission in the royal navy if he would co-operate with the British in the capture of New Orleans. Though Governor Claiborne, of Louisiana, had set a price on his head, Lafitte, who was, it seemed, a patriot first and a pirate afterward, hastened up the river to New Orleans, warned the governor of the approach of the British fleet, and offered his services and those of his men to Andrew Jackson for the defense of the city. His offer was accepted in the spirit in which it was made, and Lafitte and his red-shirted buccaneers played no small part in winning the famous victory. They were mentioned in despatches by Jackson, thanked for their services by the President and pardoned, and settled down for a time to a lawful and humdrum existence. But for such men a life of ease and safety held no attractions; so, about the time that De Aury’s squadron sailed for Soto la Marina, Lafitte, with half a dozen vessels, dropped casually into the harbor of Galveston and, as the place suited him, coolly took possession.
By the close of 1817 the followers of Lafitte on Galveston Island had increased to upward of a thousand men. They were of all nations and all languages--fugitives from justice and fugitives from oppression. Those of them who had wives brought them to the settlement at Galveston, and those who had no wives brought their mistresses, so that the society of the place, whatever may be said of its morals, began to assume an air of permanency. On the site of the hut occupied by the late governor, De Aury, Lafitte erected a pretentious house and built a fort; other buildings sprang up, among them a “Yankee” boarding-house, and, to complete the establishment, a small arsenal and dockyard were constructed. To lend an air of respectability to his enterprise, Lafitte obtained privateering commissions from several of the revolted colonies of Spain, and for several years his cruisers, first under one flag and then under another, conducted operations in the Gulf which smacked considerably more of piracy than of privateering. In 1819 Lafitte was taken into the service of the Republican party in Mexico, Galveston was officially made a port of entry, and he was appointed governor of the island.
By the terms of the treaty whereby Spain, in 1819, sold Florida to the United States, the latter agreed to accept the Sabine as its western boundary and make no further claims to Texas. Though this treaty aroused the most profound indignation throughout the Southwest, nowhere did it rise so high as in the town of Natchez. From Natchez had gone out each of the expeditions which, since the days of Philip Nolan, had hammered against the Spanish barriers. To it had returned every leader who had escaped death on the battle-field or before a firing-party. In it, as a great river town enjoying a vast trade with the interior, was gathered the most reckless, lawless, enterprising population--flatboatmen, steamboatmen, frontiersmen--to be found in all the Southwest. So, when Doctor James Long, an army surgeon who had served under Jackson at New Orleans, called for recruits to make one more attempt to free Texas, he did not call in vain. Early in June Long set out from Natchez with only seventy-five men, but no sooner had he crossed the Sabine and entered Texas than the survivors of former expeditions hastened to join him, so that when Nacogdoches was reached he had behind him upward of three hundred men: veterans who had seen service under Nolan and Magee, and Kemper, and Gutierrez, and Toledo, and Humbert, and Perry, and Mina, and De Aury. At Nacogdoches Long established a provisional government, a supreme council was elected, and Texas was proclaimed a free and independent republic. Realizing, however, that he could not hope to hold the territory thus easily occupied for any length of time unaided, Long despatched a commission to Galveston to ask the co-operation of Lafitte. Though the pirate chieftain received the commissioners with marked courtesy and entertained them at the “Red House,” as his residence was called, with the lavish hospitality for which he was noted, he told them bluntly that, though Doctor Long had his best wishes for success, the fate of Nolan and Perry and Mina and a host of others ought to convince him how hopeless it was to wage war against Spain with so insignificant a force. Upon receiving this answer, Doctor Long, believing that a personal application to the buccaneer might meet with better success, himself set out for Galveston. As luck would have it, he reached there on the same day that the American war-ship _Enterprise_ dropped anchor in the harbor and its commander, Lieutenant Kearny, informed Lafitte that he had imperative orders from Washington to break up the establishment at Galveston. There was nothing left for Lafitte but to obey, and a few days later the rising tide carried outside Galveston bar the _Pride_ and the other vessels comprising the fleet of the last of the buccaneers, who abandoned the shores of Texas forever.[B]
Doctor Long, thoroughly discouraged, returned to Nacogdoches to find a Spanish army close at hand and his own forces completely demoralized. Surrounded and outnumbered, resistance was useless and he surrendered. Though Spanish dominion in Mexico was now at an end, Doctor Long and a number of his companions were sent to the capital, where for several months he was held a prisoner, the vigorous representations of the American minister finally resulting in his release. The Mexicans had no more intention than the Spaniards, however, of permitting Texas to achieve independence, which, doubtless, accounts for the fact that Doctor Long, who was known as a champion of Texan liberty, was assassinated by a soldier in the streets of the capital a few days after his release from prison. But he and the long line of adventurers who preceded him did not fight and die in vain, for they paved the way for the Austins and Sam Houston, the final liberators of Texas, who, a few years later, crossed the Sabine and completed the work that Nolan, Magee, Kemper, Gutierrez, Toledo, Humbert, Perry, Mina, De Aury, and Long had begun. As for Lafitte, the most picturesque adventurer of them all, he sailed away from Galveston and, following the example of that long line of buccaneers of whom he was the last, spent his latter years in harrying the commerce of the Dons upon the Spanish main. Along the palm-fringed Gulf coast his memory still survives, and at night the superstitious sailors sometimes claim to see the ghostly spars of his rakish craft and to hear, borne by the night breeze, the rumble of his distant cannonading.
“The palmetto leaves are whispering, while the gentle trade-winds blow, And the soothing Southern zephyrs are sighing soft and low, As a silvery moonlight glistens, and the droning fireflies glow, Comes a voice from out the cypress, ‘Lights out! Lafitte! Heave ho!’”
WHEN WE SMASHED THE PROPHET’S POWER
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.”
The tone of cynicism, inhumanity, and greed which characterizes that letter makes it sound more like the utterance of a usurious money-lender than an official communication to a Territorial governor from the President of the United States. It is hard to believe that it was penned by the same hand which wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson’s Indian policy was continued by his successor, for in 1809 Governor Harrison, acting under instructions from President Madison, concluded a treaty with the chiefs of the Delaware, Pottawatomie, Miami, Eel River, Wea, and Kickapoo tribes, whereby, in consideration of eight thousand two hundred dollars paid down and annuities amounting to two thousand three hundred and fifty more, he obtained the cession of _three million acres of land_. Think of it, my friends! Perhaps the most fertile land in all the world sold at the rate of _three acres for a cent_! It was like stealing candy from a child. Do you wonder that Tecumseh declared the treaty void, denounced as traitors to their race the chiefs who made it, and asserted that it was not in the power of individual tribes to deed away the common domain? This was the basis of Tecumseh’s scheme for a general federation of all the Indians, which, had it not been smashed in its early stages, would have drenched our frontiers with blood and would have set back the civilization of the West a quarter of a century.
Throughout his campaign of proselytism Tecumseh was ably seconded by one of his triplet brothers, Elkswatana, known among the Indians as “the prophet.” The latter, profiting by the credulity and superstition of the red men, obtained a great reputation as a medicine-man and seer by means of his charms, incantations, and pretended visions of the Great Spirit, thus making himself a most valuable ally of Tecumseh in the great conspiracy which the latter was secretly hatching. Meanwhile the relations between the Americans and their neighbors across the Canadian border had become strained almost to the breaking point, the situation being aggravated by the fact that the British were secretly encouraging Tecumseh in spreading his propaganda of resistance to the United States and were covertly supplying the Indians with arms and ammunition for the purpose. The winter of 1809-10, therefore, was marked by Indian outrages along the whole length of the frontier. And there were other agencies, more remote but none the less effective, at work creating discontent among the Indians. It seems a far cry from the prairies to the Tuileries, from an Indian warrior to a French Emperor, but when Napoleon’s decree of what was virtually a universal blockade imposed terrible hardships on American shipping as well as on the British commerce at which it was aimed, even the savage of the wilderness was affected. It clogged and almost closed the chief markets for his furs, and prices dropped so low that Indian hunters were hardly able to purchase the powder and shot with which to kill their game. At the beginning of 1810, therefore, the Indians were ripe for any enterprise that promised them relief and independence.
In the spring of 1808 Tecumseh, the prophet, and their followers had established themselves on the banks of the Wabash, near the mouth of the Tippecanoe River, about seven miles to the north of the present site of Lafayette, Indiana. Strategically, the situation was admirably chosen, for Vincennes, where Harrison had his headquarters, lay one hundred and fifty miles below and could be reached in four and twenty hours by canoe down the Wabash; Fort Dearborn was a hundred miles to the northwest; Fort Wayne the same distance to the northeast; and, barring a short portage, the Indians could paddle their canoes to Detroit in one direction or to any part of the Ohio or the Mississippi in the other. Thus they were within striking distance of the chief military posts on the frontier and within easy reach of their British friends at Malden. On this spot the Indians, in obedience to a command which the prophet professed to have received in a dream from the Great Spirit, built a sort of model village, where they assiduously tilled the soil and shunned the fire-water of the whites. For a year or more after the establishment of Prophet’s Town, as the place was called, things went quietly enough, but when it became known that Harrison had obtained the cession of the three million acres in the valley of the Wabash already referred to, the smouldering resentment of Tecumseh and his followers was fanned into flame, the Indians refusing to receive the “annuity salt” sent them in accordance with the terms of the treaty and threatened to kill the boatmen who brought it, whom they called “American dogs.”