Tecumseh

Tecumseh was a Shawnee leader who, in the first years of the nineteenth century, tried to unite the Native nations of the Great Lakes, the Ohio valley and the South into a single confederacy to stop the advance of American settlement. With his brother Tenskwatawa, known as the Prophet, he built a movement around the principle that Native land belonged to all the tribes in common and could not be sold by any one of them. Allied with Britain in the War of 1812, he helped capture Detroit, and he was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. He is honoured in both the United States and Canada as one of the most remarkable Native leaders of his age.

Tecumseh was born around 1768, though dates between 1764 and 1771 have been suggested, in the Ohio country, probably near the Shawnee town of Chillicothe on the Scioto River. He belonged to the Kispoko division of the Shawnee. His father, Puckeshinwau, was a war chief, and his mother, Methoataske, may have had Creek ancestry. His name is often translated as shooting star.

His whole life was shaped by war over land. When he was about six, his father was killed at the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774, fought against Virginian militia during Lord Dunmore's War. During the American Revolution the Shawnee mostly sided with the British, and American militia repeatedly burned their towns; part of the nation, including his mother, migrated west beyond the Mississippi. Tecumseh was raised by an older sister and trained as a warrior by his elder brother Cheeseekau. In the late 1780s and early 1790s he fought alongside Cheeseekau, including with the Chickamauga Cherokee in Tennessee, where Cheeseekau was killed in 1792.

After the Revolution, the new United States claimed the lands north of the Ohio River by right of conquest over Britain, though the Native nations living there had never been defeated or consulted. A confederacy of Shawnee, Miami, Delaware and other peoples resisted. In 1791 it destroyed an American army under Arthur St Clair, the worst defeat the United States Army ever suffered against Native forces, and Tecumseh served as a scout in that campaign. In 1794 the army sent by George Washington under Anthony Wayne defeated the confederacy at Fallen Timbers, where Tecumseh led a small party. The British, who had encouraged the confederacy, shut the gates of their nearby fort to the retreating warriors. In the Treaty of Greenville of 1795, the tribes gave up most of present-day Ohio. Tecumseh refused to sign.

Over the next decade he led a small band in Ohio and Indiana and gained a reputation as a speaker and as a warrior who would not torture prisoners. The pressure on Native land kept rising: under Thomas Jefferson, American agents bought tens of millions of acres through treaties with individual chiefs, often in debt to traders, while game grew scarce and alcohol and disease weakened communities.

In 1805 Tecumseh's younger brother Lalawethika, until then a man of little standing, had a series of visions and took the name Tenskwatawa, the Open Door. He preached that Native peoples must reject alcohol, American goods and customs and the influence of the whites, whom the Master of Life had not created, and return to a purified way of life; then they would be restored. The message spread rapidly, and thousands came to hear him. In 1808 the brothers founded a new town, Prophetstown, near the meeting of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers in Indiana.

Tecumseh turned this religious revival into a political and military movement. He argued that the land was the common property of all Native peoples, so that no chief or single nation had the right to sell any part of it, and that only unity across tribal lines could stop American expansion. Many older village chiefs, whose authority the movement challenged, opposed him; much of his support came from younger warriors. The turning point came in 1809, when William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, signed the Treaty of Fort Wayne with Delaware, Potawatomi and Miami leaders, buying about three million acres. At tense meetings with Harrison at Vincennes in 1810 and 1811, Tecumseh demanded that the treaty be cancelled and warned that the confederacy would resist any settlement on the land.

In 1811 he travelled south to the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and others, urging them to join. Most southern leaders refused, but his visit inspired a faction of young Creeks, later called the Red Sticks, whose rising became the Creek War of 1813 and 1814. The great comet of 1811 and the New Madrid earthquakes that winter were widely taken as signs supporting his cause. While he was away, Harrison marched on Prophetstown. On 7 November 1811 Tenskwatawa's followers attacked the American camp at Tippecanoe; after a hard fight the warriors withdrew and the Americans burned the town. The Prophet's prestige was badly damaged, but Tecumseh rebuilt the movement.

When war broke out between the United States and Britain in June 1812, Tecumseh joined the British in Canada, seeing in the alliance the last chance to secure a Native homeland. In August his warriors cut the supply lines of the American general William Hull, who had invaded Upper Canada, and helped force his retreat. The British commander Isaac Brock and Tecumseh, who admired each other, then advanced on Detroit, and on 16 August 1812 Hull surrendered the town and his army without a fight, partly from fear of the Native force. Encouraged, many more warriors joined the alliance, and the Potawatomi took Fort Dearborn, on the site of present-day Chicago.

In 1813 Tecumseh and the British general Henry Procter besieged Fort Meigs in Ohio. After a successful attack on an American relief column, some warriors began killing prisoners; Tecumseh is credited by several witnesses with stopping the killing and rebuking Procter for allowing it. The second siege failed. In September the American naval victory on Lake Erie cut British supply lines, and Procter decided to abandon the Detroit frontier. Tecumseh bitterly opposed the retreat. On 5 October 1813, near Moraviantown on the Thames River in present-day Ontario, Harrison's army attacked. The British line broke almost at once, while Tecumseh and his warriors fought on until he was killed. American soldiers mutilated a body they believed to be his, and his burial place has never been found. The Kentucky colonel Richard Mentor Johnson later built a political career, including the vice-presidency, on the claim that he had killed Tecumseh, but this was never established.

With Tecumseh's death the confederacy collapsed. At the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 Britain dropped the idea of a Native buffer state, and the nations of the Old Northwest were later forced to cede their remaining lands and move west. Harrison rode his reputation as the victor of Tippecanoe and the Thames to the presidency in 1840.

Even his enemies praised his courage, eloquence and restraint towards prisoners after his death, partly because a noble foe flattered their own victory. Many speeches attributed to him were recorded by others or invented later, and his life has attracted much legend, so historians treat the sources with care. In Canada he is remembered as a defender of Upper Canada in 1812, and in the United States towns and people, including the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, were named after him. For Native peoples he remains a symbol of resistance and of the idea that their nations could stand together. Recent historians have also given more credit to Tenskwatawa, arguing that the religious movement came first and that the brothers' partnership, rather than Tecumseh alone, created the confederacy.