Once, America’s great Indian nations had a fighting chance.
The Shawnee warrior who stood before the Choctaw and Chickasaw leaders in eastern Mississippi in August 1811 was just under 6 feet tall, broad chested and well-muscled. He was handsome, “one of the finest looking men I ever saw,” according to a white admirer, with a light-skinned oval face and dark eyes under thick brows. Unlike many of his fellow Shawnees, he bore no tattoos, although he often wore a silver ring through his septum. He dressed simply in clean, neatly fringed buckskins with a turban atop thick black hair that fell to his shoulders. He carried himself in a graceful manner that commanded attention.
His very name, Tecumseh, suggested greatness. It evoked the image of a panther leaping across the sky like a shooting star. The meeting with the Choctaws and Chickasaws was one of many he held with tribal leaders during an epic four-year pilgrimage in which he ranged far from his home territory in Ohio throughout both the old Northwest and the Southeast, from well up the Missouri River down to Florida.
The message he delivered was nothing short of revolutionary. Indian peoples—all of them, not just his own and those of his audience— faced a threat unlike any in their long histories. The new white nation to the east, born of its own recent revolution, threatened to overwhelm the tribes that had long ruled lands west of the Appalachians. If they were to preserve their life ways and independence, all must move beyond rigid tribal identities and do what had never been contemplated before—unite. Indians must “form one body, one heart and defend to the last warrior our country, our homes, our liberty and the graves of our fathers.”
Tecumseh’s most famous enemy, the future President William Henry Harrison, that same year called him one of “those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to…overturn the established order of things.” In other circumstances, he added, Tecumseh might have founded an empire rivaling those of the Aztecs and Incas.
On the eve of the War of 1812 Tecumseh represented the last best hope of American Indians to preserve ways of life they had known for centuries as white settlers sought to make their own dreams a reality on the frontier. The fate of hundreds of thousands of Indians of that era and for centuries to come rested on his shoulders as he built the greatest pan-Indian confederation the westward nation would ever confront. Tecumseh was a man of extraordinary foresight, whose vision rivaled that of the founders of the young republic. But his saga would end in tragedy—for him personally and for the Indians as a whole.
Tecumseh’s meteoric rise as a leader occurred during an especially turbulent, violent time. Five years before his birth, as England celebrated the official end of the French and Indian War in 1763, a prominent Ottawa chief named Pontiac led various tribes from the Great Lakes to Kentucky in a new insurrection against the British. The fighting was brutal, but British imperial administrators adopted a much more conciliatory policy toward the Indians to avoid depleting their treasury. Meanwhile, Indians faced a far greater threat: colonial settlers and land speculators. Despite a royal order forbidding moving beyond the Appalachians, families established farmsteads and towns in Tennessee, Kentucky and western Pennsylvania, while moneyed investors eyed millions of acres there. As the colonies edged toward their break with England, tension rose along the colonial frontier.
In October 1774, the growing violence claimed Tecumseh’s father. During the Battle of Point Pleasant, Pukeshinwau fell in a failed effort to resist a thrust by Virginians to secure Kentucky from Ohio Valley tribes who had long considered Kentucky their prime hunting ground. Pukeshinwau’s eldest son Cheeseekau was with him and brought home to the 8-year-old Tecumseh the story of their father’s heroic death and their responsibility to carry on the fight.
Tecumseh passed through his childhood and adolescence during the Revolutionary War. Stories from those years tell of a boy already drawing attention as a natural leader. In his early teens he embarked on his spirit quest through fasting and forest isolation, his face painted black. In various accounts he is said to have discovered that the bison was his guardian, a sign of exceptional strength. The stories’ very embellishments—by one he slew 16 bison with only bow and arrow while perched in a tree—testify to a legend in the making.
Meanwhile the Shawnees and their allies lashed out at Kentucky settlements, and Kentuckians and Pennsylvanians destroyed villages in Ohio, including young Tecumseh’s. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War, Great Britain granted the new republic lands west to the Mississippi and south to Florida, but it was largely a paper fiction. Most of that country was under Indian control, and in the Ohio Valley a collection of tribes—Shawnees, Miamis, Delawares, Mingos, Kickapoos, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Wyandots and others—together represented a considerable military force standing against national expansion.
Tecumseh’s reputation grew ever brighter during these years. He fell during a hunt when he was 20 and shattered his thigh, an injury that would have left most men crippled. But after a few months he willed his way back into an active life, although limping slightly the rest of his days. Earlier that year he took the lead in attacking a flatboat on the Ohio, surpassing seasoned warriors in bravery, according to one who was there. More remarkable was the fight’s aftermath. Five captives were tortured and killed, some burned alive. Despite his youth, the horrified Tecumseh spoke out, condemning the torture as cruel and cowardly.
As the new nation continued to press west, leaders of Ohio River tribes took a remarkable step. They formed a confederacy, pledged to resist further American incursions by force and received encouragement and material support from agents and officers who lingered in British posts throughout the region. There was even talk of forming an independent Indian state, and for a time it seemed a genuine possibility.
In October 1790, an Indian force led by the Miami chief Little Turtle surprised and mauled a command under General Josiah Harmar. The next year General Arthur St. Clair led an even larger force on what was meant to be a campaign of retribution. Instead, on November 4, 1791, confederacy warriors led by Little Turtle and the Shawnee Blue Jacket surrounded and surprised St. Clair’s camp along the Wabash River. Of about 1,400 in the command more than 600 died and another few hundred were severely wounded. It remains the worst military defeat in the nation’s history.
The string of Indian victories snapped in 1794 when a force led by General Anthony Wayne marched methodically through Ohio, building forts along the way and defeating an Indian confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near present-day Toledo. An episode immediately after the battle sharpened the Indians’ loss. When fleeing warriors approached the nearby Fort Miami, its British commander, fearing a crisis with the young republic, ordered the gate closed and barred. The next year, in the Jay Treaty, England finally agreed to abandon all posts on American soil and, in the Treaty of Greenville, Little Turtle and Blue Jacket surrendered most of what is now Ohio.
Tecumseh had been among the first to engage the Americans at Fallen Timbers and among the last to leave the field. In the wake of defeat he was one of many younger men among the Shawnees and other tribes who opposed the Greenville treaty and any accommodation with whites. He was determined to help bring order to that growing resistance movement and defend Indian independence against American expansion.
The strategy Tecumseh developed during the next decade and a half was remarkable for both its audacity and its historical sensitivity. He recognized that one of the main obstacles to native autonomy was deep, ancient animosities dividing tribes. Generations earlier the Iroquois had pushed the Shawnees out of New York and into Ohio. Ohio Valley tribes regularly battled Cherokees to the south, and those same tribes sometimes warred with one another. Now all must transcend those divisions, Tecumseh argued. He called for reviving the earlier confederation and expanding it so that it included all groups west of the Appalachians and stretched from the Great Lakes to Mexico. Failing that, he argued, white leaders would gain more and more land through treaties that played one tribe against others.
Tecumseh also recognized that from the first moments of contact between Indians and white settlers, the two cultures had been shaping each other. Each saw much to gain. From the Indians the English learned methods of clearing and cultivating the land and hunting its game. They reaped enormous profit from pelts of beavers, deer, minks, otters and raccoons trapped and traded by native hunters. In exchange Indians acquired firearms and an array of metal goods—iron pots, hide scrapers, awls, knives and much more—as well as blankets and cloth they much preferred to the animal skins of their ancestors.
For all the Indians gained, however, Tecumseh realized that the cultural swapping left them increasingly vulnerable. They became more reliant on goods that only whites could provide. They were enmeshed in an international market beyond their influence. As the pace of trade quickened, they began overhunting the very creatures they had to have to keep up their side of the exchange. The most vicious consequences were from the illegal trade in alcohol. Addicted Indian men bartered for whiskey rather than needful goods and, once drunk, gave up their pelts for a pittance. Rampant alcoholism gnawed at the tribes’ health, spawned unprecedented violence and shattered bonds of family and community.
The only answer, Tecumseh came to believe, was to disengage from whites and to turn away entirely from their ways. Reject the temptations, he urged the Shawnees and other Indians, whether whiskey or wool blankets or linen shirts. Revive traditional means of living, cultivate the old skills and return to ancient virtues. True independence, he concluded, required an end to all dependencies, down to the myriad details of daily life.
Tecumseh’s strategy was bolstered by the mystical visions of his younger brother, Laloeshiga. Unlike Tecumseh, Laloeshiga was unimpressive, even cowardly in battle and in his younger years was considered a blowhard. His nickname, Lalawethika, meant “Noise Maker.” Then, sometime in 1805, sitting in his lodge, he collapsed into a trance so deep he was believed to be dead. After several hours he awoke to say that he had stood at a fork in the road in the spirit world and had been shown the fates awaiting all Indian peoples. The path to the left was for those corrupted by white civilization. It led to three houses where they would suffer fiery punishment for eternity. To the right the path took those faithful to the old ways to a paradise of limitless game, fertile corn fields and lovely, sweet-smelling fields of flowers—and no white people. The Master of Life told Laloeshiga that his mission was to warn all Indians of the choices before them.
Laloeshiga subsequently adopted a new name to express his sacred mission: Tenskwatawa, “the Open Door.” Whites would call him the Prophet. Whites, he said, were of another species created by an evil spirit in the great sea to the east. He compared their voracious presence to a gigantic, hideous crab that moved hungrily west after scrambling onto the continent.
The great crab could be stopped, however. The message from the Master of Life decreed that tribal identities be abandoned: “The Indians were once different people, but now they are one.” They should all follow new rituals passed along through Tenskwatawa. If they did, and if they believed, the Master of Life promised that whites would be banished in a cataclysmic instant and the world restored to its bountiful, pleasured past.
As word of Tenskwatawa’s teachings spread, hundreds of Ottawas, Chippewas, Potawatomis, Wyandots, Delawares and others joined his growing number of Shawnee followers. In keeping with the message of unity, they formed their own town, of all places, at Greenville, site of the treaty that had surrendered much of Ohio. Then, at the invitation of a powerful Potawatomi warrior and holy man, Main Poc, the village was moved farther from white influence, to Indiana where Tippecanoe Creek entered the Wabash River. The settlement took the name Prophetstown.
White authorities were alarmed. Indiana’s territorial governor, William Henry Harrison, tried to call Tenskwatawa’s bluff. If this man is truly a divine messenger, he taunted in the spring of 1806, have him cause the sun to stand still. The governor should have checked his almanac. Apparently the Prophet had, or he had learned from someone that a solar eclipse was to occur in mid-June. He would indeed make the sun do his bidding, he answered. The eclipse came and went, and hundreds more were drawn to Tenskwatawa’s cause.
Tecumseh meanwhile was spreading his own gospel, the call to embrace a common destiny to meet a common threat. The need was increasingly urgent. White authorities, including Harrison, had gained millions more acres through treaties that had played tribes against each other. Tecumseh answered by taking to the road. Between 1807 and 1811, traveling by horse and boat and foot, he wove his way back and forth, visiting and exhorting tribes over an astonishing breadth of Indian country.
He was “in constant motion,” Harrison reported. “You see him today on the Wabash, and in a short time hear of him on the shores of Lake Erie or Michigan or on the banks of the Mississippi.” He was indefatigable. “No difficulties deter him…and wherever he goes he makes an impression favorable to his purposes.” In his own region he visited the Sac and Fox, Winnebagos, Kickapoos, Potawatomis, Senecas and Ottawas. He traveled to Iowa and Missouri to meet with other Shawnees, Osages, Quapaws and Caddos. In the summer of 1811 he turned south into Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and eventually Florida, where he met with Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles. It was during this tour that he learned of disaster back home.
On leaving Prophetstown he had given emphatic orders to avoid all conflict, but when Harrison learned he was gone, he marched on Prophetstown with nearly a thousand troops and volunteers, hoping for a confrontation to destroy Tecumseh’s core of support, “that part of the fabric which he considered complete.” Tecumseh was a steadying influence on his often erratic brother, and now, solely in charge, Tenskwatawa made a calamitous error. After saying he would meet peacefully with Harrison, he ordered an attack before dawn the next day, November 6. He promised that the Master of Life had assured a victory—by some accounts he said they would be invulnerable to bullets—but Harrison’s lines held and at daylight the 700 Indian warriors withdrew to Prophetstown, despairing. The next day Harrison’s men seized and burned the deserted village.
After the defeat at Tippecanoe Creek, Tecumseh shifted his strategy. The United States was facing its own crisis of independence, a gathering confrontation with England, and when the War of 1812 began the following June, Tecumseh committed his followers to the British. He did so reluctantly. Ending reliance on all whites was, after all, a central goal. But the English once again raised the possibility of a separate native state if the region’s Indians supported them. And for a while the grand dream seemed still possible. Following his botched invasion of Upper Canada (the country around the Great Lakes and upper St. Lawrence River), American General William Hull surrendered Fort Detroit without a fight in August 1812. The British victor, Maj. Gen. Isaac Brock, was savvy, brave and aggressive like Tecumseh, and the two formed a quick friendship. After Brock was killed in battle two months later, however, his replacement, Colonel Henry Procter, tentative and aloof, earned Tecumseh’s disdain.
The British command—and with it the great native dream—soon unraveled. After Tecumseh led two failed efforts to retake his home country of Ohio, American Captain Oliver Hazard Perry defeated a British squadron in the Battle of Lake Erie. With the British and their Indian allies virtually defenseless, Tecumseh’s old nemesis, William Henry Harrison, quickly invaded Canada and pressed toward Procter. When Procter announced he was withdrawing east, Tecumseh, recalling Fort Miami’s barred gates after the defeat at Fallen Timbers, boiled over. You are like a fat animal that struts with its tail high in easy times, he told Procter, but at the first whiff of real danger flees with its tail between its legs.
Nonetheless, Tecumseh committed to protecting the English withdrawal, and it was then, as Harrison pursued them along the Thames River, that he made his final stand in a battle that proved to be a turning point in the War of 1812. On the clear morning of October 5, 1813, near the village of Moraviantown, British riflemen formed two lines across a road to await the American advance. Tecumseh and his warriors took positions in some dense swampy thickets to the British right. Tecumseh, dressed in traditional deerskin and wearing an ostrich plume in his turban, walked among the soldiers and warriors, pressing hands and buoying spirits with a confident smile and phrases in Shawnee.
When the Americans opened with a mounted attack the British riflemen quickly buckled and ran. The horsemen regrouped, turned toward the thickets, and attacked in two columns. In the bitter firefight that followed, the badly outnumbered Indians at first held their own. Then an American spotted Tecumseh in the brush, leveled his pistol and fired a shot to his left breast that killed him almost instantly. As word of Tecumseh’s death spread, the demoralized Indians fled through the surrounding woods.
The shot through Tecumseh’s heart marked the culmination of one great struggle for independence and the end of another. At the conclusion of the Revolutionary War in 1783, the United States won a formal recognition of sovereignty, but the nation’s independence was not fully secured until the War of 1812 played out and Britain withdrew from the United States once and for all. The Battle of the Thames closed out the fight for control of the old Northwest frontier. At the same time, it marked the demise of Tecumseh’s vision of a powerful pan-Indian confederacy and cleared the way for an unstoppable onslaught of white settlers and the permanent removal of Indians from their native lands.
Many of the men involved in crushing the Indian war of independence emerged later as national political leaders. The Kentuckian who reputedly killed Tecumseh, Richard M. Johnson, was elected vice president under Martin Van Buren. He campaigned on the doggerel: “Rumpsey dumpsey, rumpsey dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumsey.”
Johnson’s commander, William Henry Harrison, would be elected president after Van Buren, largely because of his victory on Tippecanoe Creek. The president before Van Buren, Andrew Jackson, first rose to national attention in March 1814 with his devastating defeat of Tecumseh’s Creek allies in Alabama at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.
In the decades ahead, even as dispossession continued, Tecumseh took on a fabled reputation as a noble native foe. A mountain, towns in five states and eventually a submarine were named for him. The irony sometimes was especially acute. General William T. Sherman oversaw the defeat of far western Indians and the final suffocation of native independence after the Civil War. His middle name was Tecumseh.
Elliott West teaches history at the University of Arkansas. His most recent book is The Last Indian War.
Originally published in the December 2012 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
