This is the memory palace, I'm Nate de Mayo.

Up there on the white horse, how could he not remember?

What with the way that sent and sound and certain movements can suddenly conjure the past

and invite it to ride beside you for a moment?

And so William Henry Harrison, at 68 years old, astried a horse once again,

feeling the saddle beneath him, whether bridal rough and his ungloved hands.

The familiar clop and sway and smell and stride of the animal.

Cold air in his lungs in that late winter morning in 1841.

How could he not think back to a November morning in the frosted pre-dawn, 30 years before?

When he rode another horse, wheeled and reared and charged, and shouted at orders to his men,

a thousand soldiers under his command, under attack in the night by 700 Shawnee warriors,

who sought to surprise them, but Harrison had thought they might and had his men sleeped

dressed for the fight, rifles at the ready and by daybreak, the raiders had retreated,

and Harrison rode through the encampment, counting the dead.

63 men on his side, somewhere near there on the other.

A draw in a way, but by evening he had done what he had come to the typical new to do.

He had burnt the Shawnee city on its banks to the ground.

The warriors had abandoned it to regroup.

In Harrison declared the skirmish a tremendous victory.

One that was hailed in story and song, and made him a celebrity,

an American hero, and got him elected to Congress, and then the Senate,

and the named one of five candidates whom the week party ran for president in 1836.

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