, as far up as Cincinnati. Reports of
these proceedings were confirmed by Michael Brouillette, an Indian
trader, and by Touissant Dubois, a confidential agent of the Governor.
Harrison probably averted an Indian attack, by promptly organizing two
additional companies of militia and throwing them into the vicinity of
Fort Knox, to guard the approaches to the capital by land and water. The
Indians, however, seeing this prompt action, deserted the Prophet and
returned to their homes. The Governor was not fooled a second time. The
Prophet again visited him in the summer of 1809, and made the same old
pretensions of peace. But the Governor forced him to admit that he had
entertained the British the fall before, and that he had been invited,
as he said, to join a league of the Sacs and Foxes against the whites in
the early spring, and he could make no satisfactory explanation as to
why he had not imparted these facts to the government, when he had been
solemnly enjoined so to do. From this time on, the Prophet was regarded
with a just suspicion, and Harrison diligently regarded every movement
of the new faith.

CHAPTER XX

HARRISON'S VIGILANCE

--_His personal courage and activities save the frontier capital._

The spring of 1810 opened with peril to Vincennes. The eternal vigilance
of Harrison alone saved the day. The fall before had witnessed the
making of the Treaty of Fort Wayne and the acquisition of the New
Purchase; this had strengthened the claims of the Prophet and Tecumseh
for a closer union of the tribes, and had given added force to their
argument in favor of a communistic ownership of all the land. What right
had the old village chiefs to dispose of the common domain without the
consent of the warriors who had fought to maintain it? The Great Spirit
gave the soil in common to all the tribes; what single tribe could
alienate any particular portion of it?

Reliable word came to the Governor in April that the Prophet had
assembled one thousand souls at the Prophet's Town, with probably three
hundred fifty or four hundred men among them, consisting principally of
Kickapoos and Winnebagoes, "but with a considerable number of
Potawatomis and Shawnees and a few Chippewas and Ottawas;" that the
French traders along the Wabash had been warned by the Prophet's
followers to separate themselves from the Americans at Vincennes for
trouble was brewing; that the Indians at Tippecanoe had refused to buy
ammunition