Tecumseh

Tecumseh (born 1768, southeast of Old Chillicothe [north of modern Xenia, Ohio, U.S.]—died October 5, 1813, near Thames River, Upper Canada [now in Ontario, Canada]) was a Shawnee Indian chief, orator, military leader, and advocate of intertribal Indian alliance who directed Indian resistance to white rule in the Ohio River valley. In the War of 1812 he joined British forces for the capture of Detroit and the invasion of Ohio. A decisive battle against William Henry Harrison’s U.S. troops ended in Tecumseh’s defeat and death.

Early life and training

Tecumseh was born in an Indian village near present-day Xenia, Ohio. His father was killed by whites in 1774. His mother, a Muskogee (Creek Confederacy), left him, when he was seven years old, to accompany part of the tribe to Missouri and then passed into obscurity. Tecumseh was reared by an elder sister, Tecumapease, who trained him in the strict Shawnee code of honesty; an elder brother, Cheeseekau, taught him woodcraft and hunting. He was adopted by the Shawnee chief Blackfish and grew to young manhood with several white foster brothers whom Blackfish had captured.

Murder, massacre, and the invasion of the Shawnee’s lands and the destruction of their crops deepened a hatred of whites that was instilled in Tecumseh by his mother. When he was about 14 years old, during the American Revolution, he accompanied Blackfish in combined British and Indian attacks on Americans. As hostile as he was toward whites, however, Tecumseh rebuked his fellow Shawnees about a year later for the cruelty that they themselves practiced, and it was then that he discovered that words could be as powerful as weapons. He had accompanied one of the predatory Shawnee raids on the flatboats that were bringing encroaching white settlers down the Ohio River; he had seen a white man tied to a stake and burned. Horrified, he had showered his fellow tribesmen with such abuse that they never tortured a prisoner in his presence again.

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After the war Tecumseh was for a number of years a marauder, fighting small actions against the whites in the Old Northwest and assisting the Cherokees in the South. He saw his brother Cheeseekau killed in an unsuccessful raid near Nashville, Tennessee, in September 1792. Although he was the youngest of the Shawnee band, Tecumseh was chosen leader, fought small actions in the South, and made an acquaintance with the Creeks that helped him later to form an alliance with them.

At the call of Bluejacket, the Shawnee chief who was collecting a force to meet a U.S. army under Major General Anthony Wayne, Tecumseh returned to Ohio, where he directed the unsuccessful attack on Fort Recovery in June 1794. On August 20, he led part of Bluejacket’s force when it was decisively defeated by Wayne at Fallen Timbers. There he saw another older brother, Sauwaseekau, killed.

Break with the “peace” chiefs

When the leading chiefs of the Old Northwest gathered at Wayne’s call at Greenville, in Ohio, Tecumseh held aloof; and, when the Treaty of Greenville was negotiated in August 1795, he refused to recognize it and roundly attacked the “peace” chiefs who signed away land that he contended they did not own. Land, he said, was like the air and water, the common possession of all Indians. This doctrine of communal ownership of the land became the cornerstone of his policy.

Partly because of his superb oratory, which the whites compared with that of the young Henry Clay, the rising political leader in Kentucky, Tecumseh became the spokesman for the Indians in great councils in Ohio, at Urbana (1799) and Chillicothe (1804), that undertook to settle grievances. For a time he studied treaties, spoke at councils, and lived peacefully in Ohio and Indiana.

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About 1808 Tecumseh settled in the area of present-day Indiana with his brother Tenskwatawa, called “the Prophet” because he claimed to have had a revelation from the “Master of Life.” There the brothers sought to induce the Indians to discard white customs and goods and to abjure intertribal wars for unity against the white invader. The code of the Prophet had a mysticism that appealed to the Indians, and many became converts.

Organizer of Indian confederation

With inexhaustible energy, Tecumseh began to form an Indian confederation to resist white pressure. He made long journeys in a vast territory, from the Ozarks to New York and from Iowa to Florida, gaining recruits (particularly among the tribes of the Creek Confederacy, to which his mother’s tribe belonged). The tide of settlers had pushed game from the Indians’ hunting grounds, and, as a result, the Indian economy had broken down.

In 1811, while Tecumseh was in the South, William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, marched up the Wabash River and camped near the brothers’ settlement. The Prophet unwisely attacked Harrison’s camp and was so decisively defeated in the ensuing Battle of Tippecanoe that his followers dispersed, and he, having lost his prestige, fled to Canada and ceased to be a factor in Tecumseh’s plans.

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Seeing the approach of war (the War of 1812) between the Americans and British, Tecumseh assembled his followers and joined the British forces at Fort Malden on the Canadian side of the Detroit River. There he brought together perhaps the most formidable force ever commanded by a North American Indian, an accomplishment that was a decisive factor in the capture of Detroit and of 2,500 U.S. soldiers (1812).

Fired with the promise of triumph after the fall of Detroit, Tecumseh departed on another long journey to arouse the tribes, which resulted in the uprising of the Alabama Creeks in response to his oratory, though the Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Cherokees rebuffed him. He returned north and joined the British general Henry A. Procter in his invasion of Ohio. Together they besieged Fort Meigs, held by William Henry Harrison, on the Maumee River above Toledo, where by a stratagem Tecumseh intercepted and destroyed a brigade of Kentuckians under Col. William Dudley that had been coming to Harrison’s relief. He and Procter failed to capture the fort, however, and were put on the defensive by Oliver Hazard Perry’s decisive victory over the British fleet in the Battle of Lake Erie (September 10, 1813). Harrison thereupon invaded Canada. Tecumseh with his Indians reluctantly accompanied the retiring British, whom Harrison pursued to the Thames River, in present-day southern Ontario. There, on October 5, 1813, the British and Indians were routed, and Harrison won control of the Northwest. Tecumseh, directing most of the fighting, was killed. His body was carried from the field and buried secretly in a grave that has never been discovered. Nor has it ever been determined who killed Tecumseh; Kentucky legislator Richard M. Johnson would rise to the vice presidency of the United States (1837–41) largely because of a dubious claim that he had committed the act. Tecumseh’s death marked the end of Indian resistance in the Ohio River valley and in most of the Lower Midwest and South, and soon thereafter the depleted tribes were transported beyond the Mississippi River.