XII The Story of a Sword
“Show me what kind of country we have to march through,” said the British General to Tecumseh, after Detroit had fallen.
Taking a roll of elm-bark Tecumseh drew his scalping knife and etched upon it the rivers, hills, and woods he knew so well. And the march began,—to be checked at Fort Stephenson by a boy of twenty-one.
It was the dream and hope of the British Fur Companies to extend their territory as far within the American border as possible. The whole War of 1812 was a traders’ war. Commerce, commerce, for which the world is battling still, was the motive power on land and sea.
At the Lakes now, the British fur traders waved their flags again above the ramparts of Detroit. “We must hold this post,—its loss too seriously deranges our plans.”
Smouldering, the old Revolutionary fires had burst anew. Did George III. still hope to conquer America?
“Hull surrendered?” America groaned at the stain, the stigma, the national disgrace! In a day regiments leaped to fill the breach. “Detroit must be re-taken!”
Along the Lakes battle succeeded battle in swift succession.
At Louisville two mothers, Lucy and Fanny, were anxious for their boys. Both George Croghan and John O’Fallon had been with Harrison at Tippecanoe. Both had been promoted. Then came the call for swords.
“Get me a sword in Philadelphia,” wrote O’Fallon to his mother.
“Send me a sword to Cincinnati,” begged Croghan.
Sitting under the trees at Locust Grove the sisters were discussing the fall of Detroit. Fanny had John O’Fallon’s letter announcing the burning of Fort Madison. Lucy was devouring the last impatient scrawl from her fiery, ambitious son, George Croghan, now caged in an obscure fort on Sandusky River near Lake Erie.
“The General little knows me,” wrote Croghan. “To assist his cause, to promote in any way his welfare, I would bravely sacrifice my best and fondest hopes. I am resolved on quitting the army as soon as I am relieved of the command of this post.”
Scarcely had the two mothers finished reading when a shout rang through the streets of Louisville.
“Hurrah for Croghan! Croghan! Croghan!”
“Why, what is the matter?”
Pale with anxiety Lucy ran to the gate. The whole street was filled with people coming that way. In a few hurried words she heard the story from several lips at once.
“Why, you see, Madam, General Harrison was afraid Tecumseh would make a flank attack on Fort Stephenson, in charge of George Croghan, and so ordered him to abandon and burn it. But no,—he sent the General word, ‘We are determined to hold this place, and by heaven we will!’
“That night George hastily cut a ditch and raised a stockade. Then along came Proctor and Tecumseh with a thousand British and Indians, and summoned him to surrender.
“The boy had only one hundred and sixty inexperienced men and a single six-pounder, but he sent back answer: ‘The fort will be defended to the last extremity. No force, however great, can induce us to surrender. We are resolved to hold this post or bury ourselves in its ruins.’”
Tears ran down Lucy’s cheeks as she listened,—she caught at the gate to keep from falling. Before her arose the picture of that son with red hair flying, and fine thin face like a blooded warhorse,—she knew that look.
“Again Proctor sent his flag demanding surrender to avoid a terrible massacre.
“‘When this fort is taken there will be none to massacre,’ answered the boy, ‘for it will not be given up while a man is left to resist!’
“The enemy advanced, and when close at hand, Croghan unmasked his solitary cannon and swept them down. Again Proctor advanced, and again the rifle of every man and the masked cannon met them. Falling back, Proctor and Tecumseh retreated, abandoning a boatload of military stores on the bank.”
“Hurrah for Croghan! Croghan! Croghan!” again rang down the streets of Louisville. The bells rang out a peal as the Stars and Stripes ran up the flag-staff.
“The little game cock, he shall have my sword,” said George Rogers Clark, living again his own great days.
And with that sword there was a story.
When Tippecanoe was won and the world was ringing with “Harrison!” men recalled another hero who “with no provisions, no munitions, no cannon, no shoes, almost without an army,” had held these same redmen at bay.
“And does he yet live?”
“He lives, an exile and a hermit on a Point of Rock on the Indiana shore above the Falls of the Ohio.”
“Has he no recognition?”
Men whispered the story of the sword.
When John Rogers went back from victorious Vincennes with Hamilton a prisoner-of-war, the grateful Virginian Assembly voted George Rogers Clark a sword.
“And you, Captain Rogers, may present it.”
The sword was ready, time passed, difficulties multiplied. Clark presented his bill to the Virginia Legislature. To his amazement and mortification the House of Delegates refused to allow his claim.
Clark went home, sold his bounty lands, and ruined himself to pay for the bread and meat of his army.
And then it was rumoured, “To-day a sword will be presented to George Rogers Clark.”
All the countryside gathered, pioneers and veterans, with the civic and military display of that rude age to see their hero honoured. The commissioner for Virginia appeared, and in formal and complimentary address delivered the sword. The General received it; then drawing the long blade from its scabbard, plunged it into the earth and broke it off at the hilt. Turning to the commissioner, he said, “Captain Rogers, return to your State and tell her for me first to be just before she is generous.”
For years those old veterans had related to their children and grandchildren the story of that tragic day when Clark, the hero, broke the sword Virginia gave him.
But a new time had come and new appreciation. While the smoke of Tippecanoe was rolling away a member of the Virginia Legislature related anew the story of that earlier Vincennes and of the sword that Clark, “with haughty sense of wounded pride and feeling had broken and cast away.” With unanimous voice Virginia voted a new sword and the half-pay of a colonel for the remainder of his life.
The commissioners found the old hero partially paralysed. Lucy had gone to him at the Point of Rock. “Brother, you are failing, you need care, I will look after you,” and tenderly she bore him to her home at Locust Grove, where now, all day long, in his invalid chair, George Rogers Clark studied the long reach of the blue Ohio or followed Napoleon and the boys of 1812.
Nothing had touched him like this deed of his nephew,—“Yes, yes, he shall have my sword!”
The next morning after the battle General Harrison wrote to the Secretary of War: “I am sorry I cannot submit to you Major Croghan’s official report. He was to have sent it to me this morning, but I have just heard that he was so much exhausted by thirty-six hours of constant exertion as to be unable to make it. It will not be among the least of General Proctor’s mortifications to find that he has been baffled by a youth who has just passed his twenty-first year. He is, however, a hero worthy of his gallant uncle, General George Rogers Clark.”
The cannon, “Old Betsy,” stands yet in Fort Stephenson at Fremont, Ohio, where every passing year they celebrate the victory of that second day of August, 1813,—the first check to the British advance in the War of 1812.
A few days later, Perry’s victory on Lake Erie opened the road to Canada and Detroit was re-taken.
“Britannia, Columbia, both had set their heels upon Detroit, and young Columbia threw Britannia back across the Lakes,” says the chronicler.
Then followed the battle of the Thames and the death of Tecumseh. A Canadian historian says, “But for Tecumseh, it is probable we should not now have a Canada.”
What if he had won Rebecca? Would Canada now be a peaceful sister of the States?
Tecumseh fought with the fur traders,—their interests were his,—to keep the land a wild, a game preserve for wild beasts and wilder men. Civilisation had no part or place in Tecumseh’s plan.
With the medal of George III. upon his breast, Tecumseh fell, on Canadian soil, battle-axe in hand, hero and patriot of his race, the last of the great Shawnees. Tecumseh’s belt and shot pouch were sent to Jefferson and hung on the walls of Monticello. Tecumseh’s son passed with his people beyond the Mississippi.
From his invalid chair at Locust Grove George Rogers Clark was writing to his brother:
“Your embarkation from St. Louis on your late hazardous expedition [to Prairie du Chien] was a considerable source of anxiety to your friends and relatives. They were pleased to hear of your safe return....
“As to Napoleon... the news of his having abdicated the throne—”
“Napoleon abdicated?” Governor Clark scarce finished the letter. Having crushed him, what armies might not England hurl hitherward! New danger menaced America.
“Napoleon abdicated!” New Orleans wept.
Then followed the word, “England is sailing into the Gulf,—Sir Edward Pakenham, brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington, with a part of Wellington’s victorious army, fifty ships, a thousand guns and twenty thousand men!”
Never had Great Britain lost sight of the Mississippi. This was a part of the fleet that burned Washington and had driven Dolly Madison and the President into ignominious flight.
Terrified, New Orleans, the beautiful Creole maiden, beset in her orange bower, flung out her arms appealing to the West! And that West answered, “Never, while the Mississippi rolls to the Gulf, will we leave you unprotected.” And out of that West came Andrew Jackson and tall Tennesseeans, Kentuckians, Mississippians, in coonskin caps and leathern hunting shirts, to seal for ever our right to Louisiana.
The hottest part of the battle was fought at Chalmette, above the grave of the Fighting Parson. Immortal Eighth of January, 1815! Discontented Creoles of 1806 proved loyal Americans, vindicating their right to honour.
Napoleon laughed when he heard it at Elba,—“I told them I had given England a rival that one day would humble her pride.”
Even the Ursuline nuns greeted their deliverers with joy, and the dim old cloistered halls were thrown open for a hospital.
“I expect at this moment,” said Lord Castlereagh in Europe, “that most of the large seaport towns of America are laid in ashes, that we are in possession of New Orleans, and have command of all the rivers of the Mississippi Valley and the Lakes.”
But he counted without our ships at sea. The War of 1812 was fought upon the ocean, “the golden age of naval fighting.” Bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh, under the “Gridiron Flag,” tars of the American Revolution, sailor boys who under impressment had fought at Trafalgar, led in a splendid spectacular drama, the like of which England or the world had never seen. She had trained up her own child. A thousand sail had Britain—America a dozen sloops and frigates altogether,—but the little tubs had learned from their mother.
“The territory between the Lakes and the Ohio shall be for ever set apart as an Indian territory,” said England at the opening of the peace negotiations. “The United States shall remove her armed vessels from the lakes and give England the right of navigating the Mississippi.”
Clay, Gallatin, Adams packed up their grips preparatory to starting home, when England bethought herself and came to better terms.
The next year America passed a law excluding foreigners from our trade, and the British fur traders reluctantly crossed the border. But they held Oregon by “Joint Occupation.”
“All posts captured by either power shall be restored,” said the treaty. “There shall be joint occupancy of the Oregon Country for ten years.”
“A great mistake! a great mistake!” cried out Thomas Hart Benton, a young lawyer who had settled in St. Louis. “In ten years that little nest egg of ‘Joint Occupation’ will hatch out a lively fighting chicken.”
Benton was a Western man to the core,—he felt a responsibility for all that sunset country. And why should he not? Missouri and Oregon touched borders on the summit of the Rockies. Were they not next-door neighbours, hobnobbing over the fence as it were? Every day at Governor Clark’s at St. Louis, he and Benton discussed that Oregon “Joint Occupancy” clause.
“As if two nations ever peacefully occupied the same territory! I tell you it is a physical impossibility,” exclaimed Benton, jamming down his wine-glass with a crash.
The War of 1812,—how Astor hated it! “But for that war,” he used to say, “I should have been the richest man that ever lived.” As it was, the British fur companies came in and gained a foothold from which they were not ousted until American ox-teams crossed the plains and American frontiersmen took the country. A million a year England trapped from Oregon waters.