Tecumseh – Courageous Warrior and Statesman

If you receive our newsletter (and if you don’t, we’d love to send it to you; click here to subscribe), you know that we announced an intermittent series on less prominent Native Americans who are immortalized in the Midwest by places named after them. It seems a long time since I studied Michigan history in the 5th grade, and subsequent U.S. history classes emphasized other things.

Researching these fascinating individuals has provided a better contextual understanding of how the British colonies and the United States expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries, and how the inevitability of that expansion manifested in heroic leadership as Indian leaders sought to protect and maintain their ways.  This time, we hope you’ll be interested in getting to know Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief who is greatly honored for heroism and service.

“Let us form one body, one heart, and defend to the last warrior our country, our homes, our liberty, and the graves of our fathers.” – Tecumseh

In March, 1768, during a period when astronomers an ocean away were observing and assigning numerical relationships to celestial and planetary patterns, an enormous meteor flashed across the night sky over what is now northern Ohio.  The Shawnee people named it “The Panther,” and a minor Shawnee chief, Pucksinwah, took it as a sign that his newborn son was destined for greatness.

Shawnee tradition held that within ten days of a boy’s birth, an event would occur, an unsoma, which would signify what their God, Moneto, wished the child to be called. That such a significant event had occurred exactly at the time of the child’s birth was of highest meaning. Pucksinwah named the infant Tecumseh, (“Shooting Star”, or “The Panther Passing Across” or “Panther Across the Sky.”)

In the same year, the Six (Iroquois) Nations signed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix with the English at a site in what is now upstate New York.  The treaty was an attempt to eliminate frontier violence against European settlers by redistricting boundary lines agreed to five years previously.

The Iroquois hoped the treaty would contain British colonial expansion by ceding claims south of the Ohio River and roughly east of the northern Appalachian range. However, the Shawnee and other clans who were the primary inhabitants of these areas were not represented at the negotiations.

The Fort Stanwix treaty also settled land claims with the Penn family, whose proprietorship would become the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, east of where Tecumseh was born. This treaty, negotiated and refined within the first five years of his life, would set the stage upon which Tecumseh would play the role of warrior, diplomat and statesman.

Ohio was the “center of the world” to the Shawnee people, whose hunters chased after buffalo, elk and deer on southerly forays into what is now Kentucky.  They returned with their captures to feed their people, who lived in semi-nomadic fashion in a loose sect-based consortium of villages ranging throughout the Ohio River valley.  Fairly quickly, the boundaries established in 1768 became more elastic by skirmishes with British colonials and, later, the new Americans. In 1774, Tecumseh’s father was killed in the winning Battle of Point Pleasant in Lord Dunmore’s War, which was fomented by colonial expansion into the Ohio Valley hunting lands from the colony of Virginia.

By the time Tecumseh was 13 years old, half his family had either been killed or moved westward from Ohio.  In 1783, Britain ceded everything south of the Great Lakes, east of the Mississippi River, and north of Florida in the Peace of Paris to the new United States of America.  Small Indian confederations began to refute the annexation, and a struggle that was greater than any individual tribal affiliation was born.

"Mad Anthony" Wayne

The British still held forts in Detroit and Michilimackinac, and in an attempt to strengthen these reduced positions, began to incite Indian resistance.  This culminated in battles in 1792 in Indiana, and the notorious Battle of the Fallen Timbers in northwest Ohio in 1794, where the British slammed the gates of Fort Miami closed in the Indians’ faces, leaving them to be slaughtered by American troops under the command of General “Mad Anthony” Wayne.  This defeat led to the Treaty of Greenville, which gave much of the state of Ohio to the United States.  Wikipedia tells us, “One veteran of Fallen Timbers who did not sign the Greenville treaty was a young Shawnee war leader named Tecumseh, who would renew Indian resistance in the years ahead.”

Image via Wikipedia

As the Eastern tribes were pushed westward by U.S. territorial expansion, the wild game the hunters depended upon receded. Tecumseh himself retreated to Indiana but the systemic land transfers further hemmed his people in.

William Henry Harrison

Fur trading was encouraged via policy and politicians such as Thomas Jefferson and William Henry Harrison (Northwest Territorial Governor), but utilized a factory system designed to instigate indebtedness in the tribes.  This disenfranchisement from the ways of hunting and previous kinship led to hunger, alcoholism, disease, and kept the Indians on a constant war footing, confining them in misery and suffering to a small part of northwest Ohio and northeast Indiana.

Tenskwatawa

These consequences of colonialism, unintended as they may have been, were personified in Tecumseh’s younger brother, Lalawethika. A violent alcoholic, who abused his wives and depended upon his family for support, Lalwethika parlayed a spiritual epiphany out of a near death experience to encompass a crossroads vision for his people.  Taking a new name, Tenskwatawa (“The Open Door”), he foretold of an opportunity for paradise instead of eternal punishment, and advocated tribal revitalization by rejecting European culture.

By 1806, this advocacy had evolved into a political reunification movement.  Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (now being referred to as “The Prophet”) moved their village in open defiance to a new location and renamed it Prophetstown, also known as Tippecanoe. That spring, after a series of accusations involving witchcraft and higher profile confrontations, Harrison sent a letter which challenged Tenskwatawa to perform physical miracles to prove himself and his prophecies.  He might have wished he hadn’t.  In the letter, he writes: “If he (the Prophet) is really a prophet, ask him to cause the Sun to stand still or the Moon to alter its course, the rivers to cease to flow or the dead to rise from their graves.”

In June of 1806, The Prophet responded by predicting a “dark sun,” saying, “Fifty days from this day there will be no cloud in the sky. Yet, when the Sun has reached its highest point, at that moment will the Great Spirit take it into her hand and hide it from us. The darkness of night will thereupon cover us and the stars will shine round about us. The birds will roost and the night creatures will awaken and stir.”

Eclipse Chasers tells us, “At around noon on the appointed day, June 16th 1806, a total solar eclipse crossed the region. A long eclipse with a band of totality stretching from near the southern tip of Lake Michigan to just north of Cincinnati it encompassed most of the lands inhabited by Tenskwatawa’s followers. In Greenville, where Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh waited for the event, close to a thousand had gathered to see the Prophet’s sign. The Prophet waved his arms towards the eclipse at the appropriate time, and the people were truly impressed.”

By July 1806, tribes from as far north as the Lake Superior Ojibwe and as far south as the Potowatamis came to join the growing confederation.  Over the next three years, Prophetstown’s population increased and fear proliferated as its inhabitants organize. Tecumseh grew in political stature along with the opposition.

By 1809, Harrison had extended the land grab by accelerating activities in direct opposition to the wishes of President James Madison.  Through the Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809, Harrison promised financial subsidies and ongoing payments to tribes who ceded land around Indiana’s Wabash River.  Over 3,000,000 acres were in play. Harrison finalized the agreements in 1810 with several tribes, some of whom had been loosely allied with Tecumseh’s group before the payments were offered.

It may come as a surprise to many to learn that Tecumseh initiated action with decisive precision toward creating the United Indian States of America, showing exceptional foresight and strategic awareness. Traditional American history texts often gloss over or skip this segment entirely in favor of deeper analysis (and easier research?) favoring the former colonies along the seaboard. Tecumseh’s goal – to preserve his people’s culture by creating a unified resistance operating from a land base bounded by the original parameters set in 1768 – reveals him to be a an inspiring, charismatic and persuasive leader.

Building a coalition among many nations, many of which don’t share a language and are spread apart by thousands of miles, and then mounting a unified political and military resistance with that coalition is a course of action, many contemporary politicians find challenging, if impossible.  Yet Tecumseh, embarking on a series of epic tours on horseback, managed to locate allies and supplies by appealing to the warriors themselves if their chiefs didn’t sign on.

This populist strategy required diplomatic communication and military skills.  Tecumseh was driven by his passionate belief that the land is common property of the entire populace, not just the few. He exclaims to Harrison, who views him as “an uncommon genius,”

“Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?” – Tecumseh

Tecumseh’s wisdom and eloquence is evident as he assails his people’s predicament and the struggle he was born to assess and lead.

“Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mochican, the Pocanet, and other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man … Sleep not longer, O Choctaws and Chickasaws … Will not the bones of our dead be plowed up, and their graves turned into plowed fields?”

As the chief traveled in the summer of 1811 recruiting for the cause, Harrison added troops to his command at Vincennes, Indiana, and then headed north in September toward Prophetstown, where his movements were seen as an act of aggression by Tenskwatawa. By early November, the Battle of Tippecanoe had occurred, ending with the Americans entering Prophetstown and plundering the abandoned village.

Even as Tecumseh rebuilt the alliance in the beginning days of 1812, events escalated toward conflict between the British and the Americans. Still seeking to regain the original Ohio boundaries, Tecumseh traveled toward Detroit and an alliance with the British to defend the Canadian line.  Fighting in consort with the British, Tecumseh and his warriors participated in the siege of Detroit, which fell and then was retaken in a series of bloody actions.

Retreating into Canada, the British and Indian coalition was pursued by Harrison, who delivered the decisive military blow at the Battle of the Thames, where Tecumseh is felled.  Shortly thereafter, his confederacy of Indian tribes surrendered to Harrison at Detroit.  The year was 1813.

Within 25 years, most of the Indians east of the Mississippi had been relocated to lands in Oklahoma against their will as part of President Andrew Jackson’s containment policy.  This “Trail of Tears” was anticipated by the revelations of Tenskwatawa and the foresight demonstrated by Tecumseh as he pursued his mission of unification.

Sir Isaac Brock, the British commander with whom Tecumseh fought in Upper Canada reported of him, “A more gallant and sagacious warrior doesn’t exist.”

The falling star on the day of Tecumseh’s birth did foreshadow greatness, yet perhaps also metaphorically hinted of his demise. The timelessness of his courage and wisdom continues to soar by means of these lyrical words two hundred years later:

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and bow to none. When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and nothing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.”

Places named after Tecumseh can be found in Michigan, Nebraska, Ontario, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. Places associated with this story that are named after General Anthony Wayne are found in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. The cities of Wyandotte, Michigan; Miami, Ohio; Algonquin, Illinois; Ottawa, Ohio; Fort Shawnee, Ohio; all are named for native tribes who participated in the coalition.  General William Tecumseh Sherman was named after Tecumseh, and proved himself to be a mighty warrior in the American Civil War.

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