Pierre Berton's War of 1812 by Pierre Berton Page B

the signal.” The Indians are more than ready. Patience is not among their virtues; how does one keep them keyed up to fight, yet hold them back from action for months, perhaps years? For Elliott, it is an impossible task.
    He is an old man, into his seventies, trying to act like a young man. This year he has taken his first legal wife, an Irish girl, Sarah Donovan, half a century his junior. No doubt she sees him as a father, for she married him shortly after the death of her own father, a schoolmaster. But it is no token relationship; she will bear him two sons.
    He is wealthy enough to retire, has been for a generation. He is by far the richest farmer in the area, though farmer is scarcely the word for Elliott, who runs three thousand acres as a plantation with a staff of overseers, clerks, and several score slaves, both Indian and Negro. Some of the latter go back thirty years to his raids in Kentucky with Alexander McKee and the Girty brothers. The Indians have made Elliott a fortune. Some of the land on which his handsome home rests was bought directly from the Wyandot and Ottawa tribes in contravention of British government policy (but winked at by his superiors, who have so often winked at his activities).
    His mansion, with its neat lawn, ornamented by tree clumps running down to the river, is furnished as few homes are. He has enough flatware and plate to serve one hundred people. His wife has at least fifty dresses and thirteen pairs of kid gloves. He himself owns eleven hats. There are no banks in the Canadas; one’s wealth is stored in the attic. In one trunk, Elliott keeps nine hundred pounds’ worth of silver plate.
    It does not occur to the old man that he can retire. This is his life; he knows no other. He is close to exhaustion, but the job must be done. He dictates a note to his superior, Superintendent WilliamClaus. Restraint is necessary, of course, he agrees, but—a little wistfully—would it not be proper to keep up “the present spirit of resistance”? Claus sends the note to Gore at York, who passes it on to the ailing governor general, Sir James Craig, at Quebec, who chews over it for months.
    Craig is faced with the same dilemma; his own policy has brought about this problem. A distressing possibility confronts him: what if the Indians should attack prematurely and the British be blamed? His conscience tweaks him, and on November 25 he writes to the British chargé d’affaires in Washington asking him to warn the American secretary of state that he suspects the Indians are planning to attack the American frontier. That surreptitious message forms one of the strands in the skein of events that will lead to a bloody denouement the following year at Prophet’s Town on the Tippecanoe.
    As the Governor General attempts to conciliate the Americans at the possible expense of the Indians, his underlings at Amherstburg have been attempting to conciliate the Indians at the possible expense of the Americans. For the traditional dispensation of presents includes a generous supply of hatchets, guns, and ammunition, ostensibly for hunting game but equally serviceable in the kind of frontier skirmish that is already arousing Yankee dander. Within a year the discovery of some of these weapons will fuel the growing American demand for war.
    The ceremony follows a time-honoured ritual. Each chief hands Matthew Elliott a small bundle of cedar sticks to the number of his tribe, cut in three lengths to represent men, women, and children. With these, Elliott’s clerks determine how the gifts are to be dispersed. Now the presents are brought from the storehouse and heaped around a series of stakes, each of which bears the name of a tribe. Elliott makes a brief speech, calls the chiefs forward, points to the mounds of gifts—bales of blankets and calico cloth, great rolls of tobacco, stacks of combs, scissors, mirrors, needles, copper pots, iron kettles—and weapons. On a signal the young men dart forward, carry