Tecumseh

Native American Leader

• Born: March 1, 1768
• Birthplace: Old Piqua, western Ohio
• Died: October 5, 1813
• Place of death: Thames River, southeastern Canada

Native American leader

Leading Indians of the Old Northwest in a united defense against the intrusion of white settlers, Tecumseh contributed significantly to the development of pan-Indianism in American history.

Area of achievement Warfare and conquest

Early Life

Born in a Shawnee village in what is now western Ohio, Tecumseh (teh-KAHM-seh) was the son of a Creek Indian woman. Her Shawnee husband, Puckeshinwa, had met her earlier, while staying with Creek Indians in Alabama. When Tecumseh was still a very young boy, Virginians began pushing into Kentucky onto lands used extensively for hunting by the Shawnee. The Indians resisted, and in 1774, Virginia governor Lord John Dunmore led troops into the area. Puckeshinwa died in one of the subsequent battles, leaving support of his family in the hands of relatives and in those of a war chief named Blackfish from a nearby village.

During the American Revolution, the Shawnee again went to war against whites. In 1779, local Kentuckians wrongly accused several Shawnee, including a popular leader known as Cornstalk, of some recent killings and senselessly killed them. The intense fighting that followed eventually led about a thousand members of the tribe to move for a time to southeastern Missouri. Tecumseh’s mother, Methoataske, was one of the migrants, but Tecumseh and his seven brothers and sisters did not accompany her. Instead, other family members took the children. Tecumseh moved in with his sister Tecumpease and her husband and eventually developed a close relationship with his older sibling.

The muscular young Tecumseh also became popular among his peers, distinguishing himself in games and in shooting skills. At the age of fifteen, Tecumseh experienced his first battle. American pioneers again started flooding onto Shawnee lands near the end of the American Revolution, many of them crossing the Appalachian Mountains and then descending the Ohio River in flatboats. In 1783, the young warrior accompanied his brother Chiksika on a war party in an effort to stop the flatboat traffic.

After winning independence, Americans considered themselves the owners of lands formerly claimed by Great Britain, including the Old Northwest (the area bordered by the Appalachian Mountains on the east, the Mississippi River on the west, the Ohio River on the south, and Canada on the north, comprising the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan). Kentuckians attacked Shawnee villages in 1786 after blaming that group for raids actually launched by the Mingoes and Cherokee in opposition to settlement west of the Appalachians. The Shawnee hit back, with Tecumseh frequently taking part in the fighting. In 1787, he joined a war party led by his brother that went south and helped Cherokee attack settlements in Tennessee and southern Kentucky. Chiksika was killed in the action. The death of his brother greatly intensified Tecumseh’s hatred for the expansionistic whites, and he stayed in the area for the next two years, seeking vengeance.

With Chiksika no longer in a position of leadership, Tecumseh was able to assert himself. Five feet, ten inches tall, with a powerful physical presence and a dynamic speaking ability, he quickly gained a large following, especially among the younger, more antiwhite members of his tribe. By the time the group of Shawnee warriors returned to the Old Northwest in 1790, Tecumseh had emerged as a popular war chief. In addition to his outstanding skills in warfare, however, he also gained a reputation for being kind and good-humored. He frequently demonstrated compassion for those who were weakest or least privileged and an aversion to the torture or murder of prisoners. These qualities made him exceptional at a time when indiscriminate brutality was common on both sides in frontier warfare.

Life’s Work

Upon his return to the Old Northwest, Tecumseh found his antiwhite sentiments increasingly in tune with those of many Indians in the region. Settlers had been pouring into the southeastern Ohio River Valley, and the frontier again erupted into violence. During the early 1790’s, the U.S. government sent armies in on two occasions in attempts to counter Indian resistance, but in both cases, tribes united to hand the whites embarrassing defeats. Together with the prodding of the British to the north in Canada, these victories encouraged tribes to join in a common political front to negotiate a permanent Indian state in the Old Northwest. Differences among the groups, however, prevented success in the effort. The United States then tried a third time for a military solution, sending an army under Major General Anthony Wayne. This time the results were different, with the Americans claiming victory in the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers. The next year, some of the defeated Indians signed the Treaty of Greenville, giving up more than two-thirds of what became Ohio.

Tecumseh fought well in the last two of the three famous battles for control of the Old Northwest and thus added to his growing reputation. He refused to accept the outcome of the Treaty of Greenville, however, and soon was recognized as the dominant leader of those Indians who resolved to put an end to any further white incursions into the region. Over the next decade, Tecumseh and his followers traveled and lived throughout Ohio and Indiana.

In 1805, one of Tecumseh’s brothers, who had failed at nearly everything he had attempted, claimed to have died, to have been taken to the Master of Life, and to have been appointed to lead his people to salvation. He renounced liquor and launched a fundamentalist spiritual movement that encouraged Indians to reject white influence and return to traditional values. He promised believers that the happier times of the past would be restored. He was known as Tenskwatawa, or the Prophet, and after Tecumseh’s conversion to the new faith, the two brothers moved first to Greenville in western Ohio and eventually to Tippecanoe Creek in Indiana. There, in a village that would be named Prophetstown, Indians from throughout the Old Northwest came to live and join the movement, including Wyandot, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Miami, Wea, and Delaware.

American officials such as William Henry Harrison, the governor of the Indiana Territory, watched events with apprehension. Harrison was well known for making treaties with individual tribes and winning much land for the government at low prices and through means that were not always ethical. In fact, his practices had deepened the antiwhite attitudes of many younger Indians who resented the loss of homelands and led them to join the Prophet’s movement. Then, in 1809, Harrison gathered chiefs friendly to the government and persuaded them to cede more than three million acres of land in the Treaty of Fort Wayne. This event quickly elevated the status and position of Tecumseh, who had been developing a position that rejected the legitimacy of recent controversial treaties. Land was commonly owned by all tribes, according to the Shawnee war chief, and could not be sold individually.

Tecumseh traveled throughout the Old Northwest and even into the South, trying to win support for a political and military confederacy that would join many tribes under his leadership to stop white expansion. Then, just as Tecumseh was experiencing some success, Governor Harrison took advantage of his absence from Prophetstown and in November of 1811 marched an army to within two miles of the Indian village. Tenskwatawa had been left in charge and decided to take the initiative and attack first. The subsequent Battle of Tippecanoe was not a dramatic Indian defeat, but the defenders withdrew and allowed the whites to destroy Prophetstown.

Eventually, Tecumseh returned home, broke with his brother in anger over the way he had handled the situation, and struggled to put his broken movement back together. The coordinated attack that Tecumseh had hoped would stop the onrush of settlers became a series of random raids across the frontier. Many Americans blamed the British for the violence because they supplied the Indians with arms. This became one of several events that contributed to the outbreak of the War of 1812 against Great Britain. Tecumseh and many of his followers joined the British because the former mother country had tried several times to control American expansion and thus offered Indians the best hope for retaining their homelands. Tecumseh fought in a number of battles and was eventually killed in Canada on October 5, 1813, at the Battle of the Thames.

Significance

In the last half of the eighteenth century, white expansion undermined the livelihood and lifestyle of Indians in the Old Northwest. Settlers destroyed game, treaties (many of them fraudulent or at least questionable) eroded the Indian land base, and alcohol disrupted social arrangements. Tribes grew dependent on European trade goods and eventually were used as pawns in the rivalries between the European superpowers over dominance in North America. The result was an almost constant state of war. This, in turn, elevated the importance of war chiefs among groups such as the Shawnee, who traditionally had separate political leadership for war and for peace.

As a war chief, Tecumseh emerged into a position of leadership in this environment. The movement that he would lead started as a primarily spiritual one under his brother, the Prophet. Tecumseh secularized and politicized the movement as Indians, under intense pressure to give up their lands, were increasingly attracted to his vision for stemming the tide of white advance. He encouraged Native American groups to forget their traditional hostilities toward one another and join in a common military and political effort.

Tecumseh’s position has been called Indian nationalism, or pan-Indianism, and has been one of the most significant developments in the long term of Indian history. Identification on the basis of being Indian with less emphasis on tribal divisions remains a strong force in Native American affairs during the late twentieth century. Other Indian leaders before Tecumseh had attempted intertribal alliances, but on more limited scales and without much success. Even though he was a brilliant strategist, Tecumseh’s movement ultimately failed in its immediate objectives as well. However, he undoubtedly contributed as much toward the evolution of pan-Indianism as any other single historical figure.

Tecumseh has enjoyed more admiration and respect, even among his contemporary foes, than any other Native American leader. As a result, he has attained an unparalleled status in legend and mythology. Evidence of this can be seen not only in the many biographies written about him but also in the many spurious or exaggerated stories about his life that have gained popularity and fooled even some of the best historians who have written about him.

Further Reading

Antal, Sandy. A Wampum Denied: Procter’s War of 1812. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997. Chronicles the battle on the Detroit frontier, led by British commander Henry Procter, during the War of 1812. Details Tecumseh’s role in assisting the British.

Edmunds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Focuses on Tenskwatawa but contains much information on Tecumseh. Demonstrates how the stories of the two famous brothers are intertwined and have to be considered together and also describes the social and political milieu in which their movement thrived.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. One of the best complete biographies of Tecumseh. Scholarly, yet relatively brief and very readable. It is also one of the most balanced accounts, discussing in a concluding chapter many of the myths surrounding the Shawnee leader’s life to which other historians have fallen victim.

Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. “Tecumseh, the Greatest Indian.” In The Patriot Chiefs. New York: Penguin Books, 1961. Reliable and well written, this stands as the best short summary of Tecumseh and his importance in history, although the author presents a slightly more romanticized version of the leader’s life than most of the good later scholarship.

Klinck, Carl F., ed. Tecumseh: Fact and Fiction in Early Records. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961. This useful anthology presents a variety of perspectives on Tecumseh’s significance and on some of the controversies about his life through selections of both primary and secondary resource materials.

Sugden, John. Tecumseh: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Definitive biography of Tecumseh, placing his life within the context of Shawnee and general Native American history. Sugden details Tecumseh’s failed attempts to create a pan-Indian resistance movement.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Tecumseh’s Last Stand. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. A very good treatment of a narrow range of Tecumseh’s life. It begins in the summer of 1813 and discusses in great detail his role in the War of 1812. It also deals with some of the later controversies, such as who actually killed Tecumseh and where he was buried.

Tucker, Glenn. Tecumseh: Vision of Glory. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956. A long and basically reliable biography, but it stands as perhaps the best example of the common tendency to overromanticize Tecumseh and accept too many of the questionable myths that shroud his life.