1768-1813
Shawnee war chief and pan-tribal political leader
Born at Old Piqua, a Shawnee village on the Mad River in Ohio, Tecumseh (Panther Springing across the Sky) was the fifth of nine children born to Puckeshinewa, a Shawnee warrior, and Methoataske, a Creek woman. Puckeshinewa was killed in 1774 at the Battle of Point Pleasant, and in 1779 Methoataske emigrated to Spanish Louisiana. Tecumseh remained in Ohio, living with Tecumapease, an older, married sister, but was influenced by Chiksika, an older brother who opposed white settlement of the Ohio Valley. Chiksika and Tecumseh fought against the Americans in 1782 and 1783, and raided settlements south of the Ohio in the postrevolutionary period. In 1788, after Chiksika was killed in Tennessee, Tecumseh remained in the South and did not oppose Josiah Harmar's campaign into Ohio and Indiana (1790). In 1791 he led a party of Shawnee scouts who monitored Arthur St. Clair's march up the Miami River, but he did not participate in the attack upon St. Clair's encampment. On June 30, 1794, he joined in the attack upon Fort Recovery, and two months later he led a party of Shawnee warriors at Fallen Timbers, but he refused to participate in the Treaty of Greenville (1795).
Following the signing of the treaty, Tecumseh and a small band of Shawnees withdrew. They first settled on Deer Creek, a tributary of the Mad River, and then in 1796 moved to the Great Miami River in western Ohio. In 1797 they moved to the Whitewater River in eastern Indiana, and one year later they settled on the White River, near modern Anderson. Tecumseh remained in this village for seven years, until in 1805 he moved to a new village, near Greenville, Ohio. During this period Tecumseh was married twice. His first marriage ended in a formal separation. His second marriage, to a woman older than he named Mamate, produced one son, Pachetha. Mamate died soon after Pachetha's birth, and the boy was raised by Tecumapease, Tecumseh's sister.
In April 1805, Lalawethika (the Noisemaker), a younger brother of Tecumseh, sustained a religious experience in which he claimed to have died and been given a doctrine of revitalization. Changing his name to Tenskwatawa (the Open Door), he argued that the Americans were the children of the Great Serpent, the Shawnee epitome of evil, and he advised the Shawnees and neighboring tribes to relinquish all contact with them. After this "prophet" successfully predicted an eclipse of the sun, his influence expanded, and during that summer he and Tecumseh established a new village, near modern Greenville, Ohio.
Tecumseh played almost no role in the rapidly spreading religious revitalization, but he did provide political leadership to the large number of Indians who flocked to the village at Greenville. By 1808, however, he began to transform the religious movement into a political alliance, urging Indians to accept a common ownership of their remaining land base and to sell no more land to the Americans. He also championed a unified political structure that would prohibit village chiefs from negotiating independently with state or federal officials. Meanwhile, local settlers had become alarmed by the large influx of Indians at Greenville, and Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa moved their village to a new site, Prophetstown, at the mouth of the Tippecanoe River, near modern Lafayette, Indiana.
Tecumseh spent the next three years promoting his political confederacy. Traveling across Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, he urged younger warriors to abandon village chiefs friendly to the United States and join in his alliance. He also visited British officials in Canada, seeking political and logistical support. Angered by the Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809), in August 1810 Tecumseh met with William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana Territory, and proclaimed that he was "the acknowledged head of all the Indians." He also warned the Americans against occupying the territory ceded in the Fort Wayne Treaty. He then visited the British in Canada, and in July 1811 he passed through Vincennes, meeting with Harrison while en route to recruit warriors from the Five Southern Tribes—the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. He met with the Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks, but only the Creeks received him favorably.
In November 1811, while Tecumseh was in the South, Harrison marched on Prophetstown, defeated the Prophet at the Battle of the Tippecanoe, and subsequently burned the Indian village. Tecumseh returned to the Wabash in January 1812, where he assured American officials of his friendship but secretly rebuilt his alliance. In July 1812, when war was declared between Britain and the United States, Tecumseh was in Canada. There he helped the British repulse an American invasion, led a mixed force of British and Indians who ambushed an American relief force at Brownstown, and was wounded in the subsequent Battle of Monguagon. In early August he assisted the British in their capture of Detroit, then participated in Major Adam Muir's unsuccessful campaign in the Maumee Valley.
Tecumseh spent the winter of 1812-13 in northwestern Indiana, but in late April 1813 he led the Indians who accompanied Colonel Henry Procter's ill-fated siege of Fort Meigs, near modern Toledo. On May 5, 1813, he intervened to stop the killing of American prisoners after the Indians captured a party of Kentucky militia, but he was disappointed when the British eventually abandoned the siege and withdrew to Canada. During the following summer he assisted the British in their unsuccessful attempts to capture Fort Meigs and Fort Stephenson.
In September 1813, after the American naval victory on Lake Erie, Tecumseh opposed British preparations to abandon Amherstburg and withdraw to Niagara. Embittered, Tecumseh denounced Procter as a coward and demanded that the British either stand and fight or surrender their guns and ammunition to the Indians. Procter reluctantly agreed to make a stand on the Thames River, near modern Moraviantown, Ontario, but on October 5, 1813, when the American forces advanced, the British army fired only three volleys and then fled. Tecumseh and his warriors fought on, but in the subsequent battle Tecumseh was shot and killed, probably by Colonel Richard M. Johnson. After the battle Kentucky militiamen skinned and mutilated Tecumseh's body. He was buried in a mass grave near the battlefield.
Tecumseh advocated Pan-Indian political unity, but during his lifetime many of his political concepts seemed alien to other Indians, most of whom still viewed their world from a tribal perspective and were wary of his attempts to centralize political leadership. Since his death Tecumseh has been portrayed by both historians and the general public as an idealized "noble savage." Enshrouded in myth (e.g., that his mother was a white captive, that he predicted the great earthquake of 1811, that he was in love with a white woman, that he was a member of the Masons), Tecumseh has emerged as an American folk hero. Unquestionably Tecumseh was one of the most gifted and admirable of all Native American political and military leaders, but his career stands on its own merits. His biography should not be embellished with the romanticism of non-Indian historians.
See also
Shawnee;
Shawnee Prophet (Tenskwatawa).
Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indians' Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Benjamin Drake, Life of Tecumseh and His Brother the Prophet (1841; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint Company, 1969); R. David Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984).
R. David Edmunds
Cherokee
Indiana University
