When William Henry Harrison, the governor of the Northwest Territory, the man who had won the battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, against the Indians, and so saved the Northwest to civilization, had later, in 1813, become so hard pressed in his struggle against Tecumseh's forces allied with that Indian's British friends, farther east near Detroit, it was the Kentucky regiment of Johnson's men whose furious valor broke the stout line of British regulars on the Thames River and who kept the Middle West from the clutches of old England. A grateful country afterward made Colonel Johnson Vice-President of the United States. Boys and men cheered the doughty Kentuckians wherever they appeared. Said one of them to Doby: "That Indian chief Tecumseh was a smart man. He had more sense than most white men. He was a king, if ever a man was. When the natives in his absence ceded to the whites so much of the land around Fort Wayne, he was angry. He organized all the Western Indians into a confederacy whose plan was to drive the Americans out of the country. For he understood very soon the thing that it took the other Indians a long time to learn. That was, the English and American way of buying land." "You see, the French, who came here first, met the Indians on terms of friendly equality. The Indians responded to this by offering hospitality. The French accepted it gratefully. The Indians passed the peace pipes and said: 'Our Great Spirit tells us to welcome our pale-face brothers. Our hunting-grounds are his.' And the happy-go-lucky Frenchmen made their best society bows and said, 'After you, kind friends, we will use them.' And they got along together first rate." "Our folks don't want to share and share alike with savages," declared Doby. "We want to buy the land outright." "That's what makes the trouble," answered the old Indian-fighter, "savages do not know what buying land means. They never get our point of view. When we give an Indian 'fire-water' and a disgracefully small piece of money for his land, he thinks it is a present because we thank him for the chance to hunt on that land. He fully expects us to buy it again the next day and the next and the next. He thinks it is still his after all this so-called buying." "He gives us a deed to it," said Doby. "Anybody can understand what a land title is." "An Indian cannot. One day a white man, all smiles, comes to an Indian's land, gives him a tawdry present, juggles a piece of parchment, and shows the Indian how to make his mark among printed words which he cannot read. Next day, the white man, all frowns, says to the Indian, 'What d'you mean, making yourself to hum on my ground? Git out!' and he kicks him off. It makes the Indian mad."