Patriotic Fire by Winston Groom Read Free Book Online Page A

apparent to almost everyone that John Armstrong had been a perfectly awful choice for the job.
    By the time the ice thawed in the early spring of 1813, Tecumseh had persuaded British colonel Henry Procter, who had replaced the slain Brock, to attack a newly built American fortification near the western end of Lake Erie, south of Detroit near the Michigan border. Known as Fort Meigs (named after the then Ohio governor with the unusual name of Return J. Meigs), this edifice was defended by only 600 men under the command of General William Henry Harrison of Indiana, who had been fighting Tecumseh and his people for years, and who had recently been appointed to command the Western army after Hull’s debacle at Detroit.
    The British laid siege to Fort Meigs on May 1, but so strongly was it built that little damage was done and even the flaming arrows shot by Indians did not affect it. Four days later a relief force of 1,200 ardent Kentuckians arrived and soon attacked Procter’s army. In their “ardor,” however, the Kentuckians got themselves cut up in a wild melee, and many of those captured were massacred by the Indians, who, not understanding the principles of siege warfare (or, for that matter, the European rules of military conduct), soon afterward disappeared into the forest with their collection of scalps and booty.*  8 Not only that, but to illustrate that militia problems were not confined to the American army, the Canadian militia—comprising nearly half of Procter’s force—declared that it was planting time back home and returned to their farms. Procter then gave up and marched his men back north with some 600 Kentuckians as prisoners, leaving behind another 450 dead and wounded (not counting Indians), including about 100 of his own men.
    Two months later Procter returned with a larger army consisting of 5,000 regulars, Canadian militia, and a large body of Indians, and on August 2 attacked Fort Stephenson, about thirty miles east of Fort Meigs. Here, however, he suffered a shocking reversal of fortune at the hands of the vengeful Kentuckians, who, in addition to blasting them with cannon fire, mowed down the British and Indians with their long rifles “like wheat in a hailstorm.” Complaining that this was “the severest fire I ever saw,” Procter called it quits and once again marched back north. Finally, things seemed to be looking up on the Northwest front.
    A month later, his army now grown to 5,500 men with the arrival of another large contingent of Kentucky volunteers, Harrison determined not only to chase the bothersome Procter out of U.S. territory but, if possible, to destroy him. This he did on October 5, when he finally caught up with the British at Moraviantown, Canada, about five days’ march northeast of Detroit. Procter had formed up his lines between the Thames River and a swamp where he was determined to make a stand, counting on the discipline and massed firepower of his trained regulars and the ferocity of Tecumseh’s Indian tribes.
    This proved to be a mistake, because the Americans mounted a surprise cavalry charge (with militia from Kentucky, made of sterner stuff than other U.S. militia) that broke Procter’s lines in less than five minutes and put the British in a deadly crossfire. Concluding that the battle was lost, those redcoats who could—including Procter*  9 —fled down the road toward Moraviantown. This left Harrison’s army with only Tecumseh’s Indians to subdue, since they did not fight in lines like infantrymen but (more effectively) from behind bushes and shrubs on the edges of the forest. The mounted Kentuckians quickly plunged into these thickets, and fierce hand-to-hand fighting broke out, with Indian tomahawks against Kentucky hatchets.
    During the melee the courageous Tecumseh was shot through the heart and killed, and his body later mutilated by soldiers bent on revenge, so they said, for Indian depredations going back two centuries or more. Accordingly,