When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes - Hardcover

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Jay Feldman's writings have appeared in Smithsonian magazine, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, Gourmet, Whole Earth Review, and a wide variety of other national, regional, and local publications. A number of his pieces have been anthologized. He has also written for television, film, and the stage. He lives in Davis, California. For more information, visit www.jfeldman.com.

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Chapter One: A Time of Extraordinaries

Accompanied by an entourage of Shawnee, Kickapoo, and Winnebago warriors, the Shawnee chief strode decisively through the Creek village of Tuckhabatchee. He was a striking figure: five-feet, ten-inches tall, handsome, straight-backed, with a slight limp. As he and his warriors made their way through the village, word spread quickly among the Creeks: Tecumseh has arrived.

The great Shawnee leader was on the last leg of a mission that had taken him three thousand miles in six months. Beginning in the summer of 1811, he traveled south from Indiana to spread his message of intertribal unity. Night after night, the powerful orator stood before the council fires, exhorting the southern nations to bury their various and long-standing grudges and divisions, and prepare for a collective war against the whites to defend what remained of tribal lands, which were being lost to the United States government at an alarming rate as the young republic pushed westward.

Twenty years earlier, a decade and a half after the United States declared its independence from Great Britain, the new nation was already bursting at the seams, and westward expansion had become a deeply embedded tenet of the republic. After the Revolution, the process of acquiring Indian land accelerated as settlers streamed beyond rapidly widening national boundaries. Waves of settlers poured over the Appalachian and Allegheny mountains into Kentucky (then part of Virginia), Tennessee (then part of North Carolina), and the Old Northwest Territory, which included the future states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio.

The migrations inevitably led to confrontations with the indigenous tribes of these regions. Between 1790 and 1795, native resistance escalated on the "frontier" -- a fluid boundary that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries included the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, the future states of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, and the area around the Great Lakes. Much of this territory remained unstable throughout this period, as a result both of Indian conflicts and of great-power rivalries among Spain, Britain, and France, and the upstart United States of America. Beginning with the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, the U.S. government embarked upon an aggressive course of acquiring tribal lands in the Old Northwest, while simultaneously juggling its relationships with the European colonial powers.

In the decade that followed the Treaty of Greenville, the tribes of the Old Northwest Territory ceded a staggering amount of land to the federal government, giving up millions upon millions of acres. The devious methods used to obtain these cessions included bribing tribal leaders and/or plying them with liquor, exploiting tribal poverty with promises of annuities and/or threatening to cut off previously guaranteed annuities, striking deals with individuals who had no authority to represent their tribes, and accepting grants of one tribe's land from individuals of another tribe. By 1805, the entire north bank of the Ohio River had been cleared of Indian title.

Tecumseh saw the handwriting on the wall. Counting on the British to help him resist the U.S. land grab and defend what was left of the natives' ancestral homelands, he had set out to form a military confederation of northern and southern nations. The British, who obtained Canada from France in 1763 as part of the settlement that ended the French and Indian War, had been watching with alarm as the U.S. encroached on the Canadian border. The American government, on the other hand, was apprehensive about both the confederation of Indian tribes and the natives' alliance with the British.

Uniting the tribes against European and Euro-American invaders had been attempted before by leaders like the Ottawa warrior Pontiac, the Mohawk organizer Joseph Brant, and the Creek chief Alexander McGillivray. It was a daunting task, considering the fractured, tense relations among and within some of the nations. Yet by 1811, Tecumseh had met with a considerable degree of success in the north, claiming substantial support among the Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and Winnebago tribes, and a lesser degree among the Shawnees, Miamis, Wyandots, Weas, Piankeshaws, and others. In August 1811 he headed south, traveling with his retinue to the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee nations.

The trip had not started well. The Chickasaws and Choctaws were not responsive to Tecumseh's call for unity against the whites. Frustrated, he and his followers continued on to the Creeks, his mother's people.

Tecumseh's band made their visit to Tuckhabatchee, in what is now Alabama, in late September, timing their appearance to coincide with the annual council of the Creek Confederacy, an amalgamation of about fifteen different Creek groups, at which Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Cherokees were also in attendance. The thousands of people who were gathered in Tuckhabatchee, the largest town of the Upper Creeks, included tribesmen, their families, white traders, and government officials. Arriving a few days after the conference had begun, Tecumseh and his entourage electrified the gathering by making a stunning entrance.

"Tecumseh, at the head of his...party, marched into the square," wrote one early chronicler. "They were entirely naked, except their flaps [breechcloths] and ornaments. Their faces were painted black, and their heads adorned with eagle plumes, while buffalo tails dragged from behind, suspended by bands which went around their waists. Buffalo tails were also attached to their arms, and made to stand out, by means of bands. Their appearance was hideous, and their bearing pompous and ceremonious." After marching around the square several times, they finally approached the assembled chiefs and presented them with tobacco, a common gesture of friendship.

As the council progressed, Tecumseh would come to the meetings in the square each day, but with U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins present, he refused to speak. "The sun has gone too far today," he would say every evening. "I will make my talk tomorrow." Finally, after more than a week, Hawkins concluded his business with the Creeks and left.

That night, before hundreds assembled in the council house, Tecumseh rose to deliver an impassioned recruitment talk, "full of fire and vengeance," urging the southerners to take up the cause of a pan-tribal confederation. No U.S. agents were allowed into the council house, so there is no direct transcription of the speech, but it was a talk Tecumseh had given before and would give again. A reasonable record of a version given a few months later suggests the power of his words on this night.

He stood for several minutes before beginning, surveying the assembled warriors "in a very dignified though respectfully complaisant and sympathizing manner." Then he began, his persuasive, evocative rhetoric punctuated by his manly, athletic gracefulness.

"Brothers -- We all belong to one family; we are all children of the Great Spirit; we walk in the same path; slake our thirst at the same spring; and now affairs of the greatest concern lead us to smoke the pipe around the same council fire!

"Brothers -- We are friends; we must assist each other to bear our burdens. The blood of many of our fathers and brothers has run like water on the ground, to satisfy the avarice of the white men. We, ourselves, are threatened with a great evil; nothing will pacify them but the destruction of all the red men."

Looking around at his audience, Tecumseh no doubt reminded the assembly of his familial connection with Tuckhabatchee -- his mother and father had lived in the village, and he still had relatives there. He continued:

"Brothers -- When the white men first set foot on our grounds, they were hungry;...