elt of wampum, made of
the purple enamel of mussel shells--cut into lengths like sections of a
small pipe-stem, perforated and strung on sinew. On his head he wore a
toque of eagle plumes.

"My object," said Brock, addressing the Indians, "is to assist you to
drive the 'Long-knives' [Americans] from the frontier, and repel
invasion of the King's country." Tecumseh, speaking for his tribesmen,
remarked, not without sarcasm, that "their great father, King George,
having awakened out of a long sleep, they were now ready to shed their
last drop of blood in that father's service."

"The pale faces," he continued, after an impressive pause--and the fire
of his eloquence and his gestures swayed his hearers like the reeds on
the river bank--"the Americans who want to fight the British are our
enemies.... They came to us hungry and they cut off the hands of our
brothers who gave them corn.... We gave them rivers of fish and they
poisoned our fountains.... We gave them forest-clad mountains and
valleys full of game, and in return what did they give our warriors and
our women? Rum and trinkets and--a grave!... The shades of our fathers
slaughtered on the banks of the Tippecanoe can find no rest.... Their
eyes can see no herds on the hills of light in the hunting grounds of
the dead!... Until our enemies are no more we must be as one man, under
one chief, whose name is--Death!... I have spoken."

Tecumseh, it should be known, bore a personal grudge against the
Americans, especially against the 4th Regiment, then in garrison at
Detroit, the "heroes of Tippecanoe." This was a terrible misnomer, for
under General Harrison, with 1,000 soldiers, less than a year before,
they had taken part in the slaughter of Tecumseh's half-armed band of
600 men and women on the banks of the Tippecanoe River, during that
chief's absence with many of his warriors, and had laid waste his
village. With a perhaps pardonable spirit of vindictiveness, such as is
shared by both redskin and white man, the human-being in him thirsted
for revenge.

Brock, perceiving Tecumseh's sagacity and influence over the savages,
invited the Shawanese and Wawanosh, Ojebekun and the other sachems, to a
private council. Here he unfolded his plans. Before doing this he made
it a condition that no barbarities were to be committed. "The
scalping-knife," said he, "must be discarded, and forbearance,
compassion and clemency shown to the vanquished." He told them he wanted
to r