"I HAVE fallen in love with American names," declared the Pennsylvania poet Stephen Benet, and he continued evocatively with the famous lines:
You may bury my body in Sus-
sex grass
You may bury my tongue at
Champmedy.
I shall not be there, I shall rise, and pass:
Bury my heart at Wounded
Knee
Benet's reference was to the notorious massacre of 153 Sioux Indians, many of them women and children, by the US Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in December 1890. Eighty years previously, however, a similar event took place whose memory hash proved less durable: the "hero" of the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811 was General William Henry Harrison, and his ruthless defeat of Chief Tecumseh marked the beginning of the end for the proud Algonquin Indians.
Harrison himself went on to become the ninth President of the United States. Nowadays a new president is inaugurated on January 20th following the elections, but at that time the appointed day was March 4th this later date having been chosen by the drafters of the American Constitution to allow a decent interval of time to elapse between the autumn elections and the assumption of power by the successful candidate. The new president, after all, had to make arrangements for leaving home to travel to the capital using the rather primitive means of transportation available at the time, and to assemble his White House staff. The journey from some of the more extreme localities of the young nation might take up to three weeks of overland travel.
Harrison's Inauguration Day, on this date 155 years ago, was cold, blustery and miserable. Ignoring the biting wind, however, the old soldier disdained a carriage, and insisted instead on undertaking the two hour procession from the White House to the Capitol on horseback. His inaugural address took another one hour and 40 minutes, and by the end of the day, not too surprisingly, the president had caught a chill.
The chill worsened in the weeks that followed. Moreover, the weather continued raw and bitter for the remainder of the month, and the president persisted in ignoring it, wearing neither hat nor coat at his engagements out of doors and experiencing, as a consequence, a number of severe wettings. By early April, Harrison's cold had deepened to pneumonia, and he died, president for a mere month, on April 4th, 1841. The weather, it could be said, had finally avenged the cruel slaughter of Tecumseh and his Algonquin braves at Tippecanoe some 30 years before.