From the Oxford Research Libraries
Tecumseh, Shawnee Land, Piqua Shawnee
From
the beginning to the end of Tecumseh’s life, he and his people fought
increasing numbers of settlers determined to cross the Ohio River.
Settlers invaded Shawnee lands from the south, steadily expanding their
sovereignty over all but the northwestern corner of Ohio, a region then
known as the Great Black Swamp. For most Native peoples determined to
remain in Ohio, the area of the Maumee and Auglaize region, known as
“the Glaize,” became a site of resistance to American expansion. By 1785
villages led by two Shawnee leaders, Blue Jacket and Buckongehelas
(Captain Johnny), and one Miami chief, Little Turtle, dotted the
landscape. Situated within ten miles of each other for mutual defense,
seven main towns (three Shawnee, two Delaware, one Miami, and a European
trading town) joined forces. In 1790, and again in 1791, these allied
villagers defeated American armies. In the second battle, the 1791
conflict now known as St. Clair’s Defeat, in which Tecumseh did not
participate, the allied Indians inflicted approximately nine hundred
casualties on a force of nearly seventeen hundred soldiers. Amounting to
“possibly the worst defeat in US military history,” these victories
convinced Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and Buckongehelas that together
they could defeat the Americans and preserve their Ohio homeland.
10
These pan-Indian forces tended to fight against irregular militias,
composed of both Kentuckians and Ohioans. For example, Arthur St. Clair,
the commanding general of the army during the 1791 defeat, was the
first governor of the Northwest Territory.
The victories of 1790
and 1791 proved to be short-lived. After these American defeats, the
U.S. government assumed greater control of American expansion, and
assigned to General “Mad” Anthony Wayne the task of breaking the allied
communities at the Glaize. Wayne was an accomplished leader and a
tough-minded disciplinarian who had prepared his troops for battle.
Before the main battle, he had the audacity to build Fort Defiance at
the traders’ town on the Glaize. On August 20, 1794, Tecumseh,
Tenskwatawa, and their brother Sauwauseekau fought Wayne’s army at
Fallen Timbers with not many more than four hundred warriors.
Sauwauseekau fell in battle while fighting alongside his brothers. The
Battle of Fallen Timbers resulted in the devastating Treaty of
Greenville (1795), which laid the groundwork for the United States’
ultimate possession of the Old Northwest.
11
After
Fallen Timbers, President George Washington and his increasingly
confident administration enacted a series of land policies that were
designed to divest Native peoples of their lands. In 1796, Henry Knox,
Washington’s secretary of war, worked with Congress to create a system
of government trading houses. Continued under both the Adams and
Jefferson administrations, and run by the federal government, these
trading houses turned Native peoples into debtors of the United States.
Like Washington before him, President Thomas Jefferson recognized that
when “debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they [Indians]
become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.” William Henry
Harrison, a man widely regarded as “Mr. Jefferson’s hammer,” believed
that one white hunter killed “more game than five of the common
Indians.” Trading houses and increasing numbers of frontiersmen
decimated deer herds, leading to starvation of the Native peoples in
Ohio in the first decade of the 19th century.
12
As
a young adult, Tecumseh lived in villages that had experienced more
than two decades of incessant violence. Settlers who once had to cross
the Appalachian Mountains to reach them now lived in close proximity.
Older chiefs who had struggled against these migrants for decades came
to believe that peace and accommodation, rather than continued
resistance, offered the best hope for survival. For example, in the
aftermath of the Battle of Fallen Timbers, both the Shawnee leader Black
Hoof and Little Turtle became convinced that living with Americans,
behind a constantly advancing frontier, offered the best strategy for
the survival of their people. Approximately eight hundred people lived
at Wapakoneta, Black Hoof’s village on the Auglaize River in
northwestern Ohio. At the same time, not more than forty Shawnees
supported the Shawnee brothers. Their foremost adherents tended to be
younger men. Notable exceptions included Blue Jacket, one of Little
Turtle’s and Black Hoof’s allies from the wars of the 1790s.
13
However
ardent their desire to return to their traditional beliefs and values,
pan-Indian leaders proposed deep innovations in Indian country. First
among them was the idea that a shared history of oppression at the hands
of colonizers had enabled Native peoples to reimagine themselves as a
race of people, rather than as members of separate tribes. In 1810, when
he was at the height of his power, Tecumseh explained that Indians
“could never be good friends with the United States until [the
Americans] abandoned the idea of acquiring lands by purchase from the
Indians, without the consent of all tribes.” Tecumseh argued that tribal
leaders no longer had the authority to speak, or to sign treaties, with
the United States.
14
American
officials recognized the threat posed by pan-Indian leaders of
revitalization and reform. Historian Sami Lakomäki explains that
revitalization movements are “common among colonized peoples around the
globe.” Anthropologist A. F. C. Wallace defines these worldwide
phenomena as “deliberate, organized, conscious effort(s) by members of a
society to construct a more satisfying culture.” Tecumseh’s idea of a
“more satisfying culture” hinged upon his ability to unite all of the
Native peoples of the eastern half of North America. In his own words,
Tecumseh aspired to “collect the different nations to form one
settlement” in order to “preserve their country from all encroachments.”
15
Federal
officials ignored these demands and continued to sign treaties, largely
in secret, with small numbers of leaders committed to older, tribal
understandings of identity and politics. American officials hoped to
transform tribes into nation-states modeled after the United States.
Jefferson himself consulted with one of Tecumseh’s rivals, Black Beard,
assuring him that “if the United States can be of any service in
bringing you [the Shawnees] all together in one place, we will willingly
assist you.” William Wells, then Indian agent at Fort Wayne, believed
that “each nation should be collected together and some regular sistam [
sic]
of government established among them.” Jefferson, Wells, and Tecumseh’s
arch-rival, the territorial governor of Indiana, William Henry
Harrison, worked assiduously to defeat Tecumseh by consolidating
authority in the hands of tribal leaders sometimes called “government
chiefs” because of their desire to live peacefully, as sovereign
nations, within the United States. Tecumseh recognized the U.S.
strategy, accusing village chiefs of “ruining our Country” by ceding so
much land to the Americans.
16
Americans
ignored the long history of Native reform and revitalization. They
preferred to see revitalization movements as the brainchildren of
competing empires determined to thwart the United States’ continental
aspirations. They could not imagine that Native people themselves could
develop such a sophisticated response to American expansion. For
example, in February 1803, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn believed that
“certain persons among Indian nations . . . were agents from the French
or Spanish government” who were trying to “engage the several tribes”
in a general war against the United States. General James Wilkinson, who
was in 1805 governor of Louisiana Territory, feared a pan-Indian
attack. Ironically, it was Wilkinson himself who dreamed of joining
forces with another empire. In 1805 he was “secretly on the Spanish
government’s payroll” in order to bring new territories into New Spain.
17
Among
Indians of the Great Lakes–Ohio valley region, Tecumseh embodied a
social movement decades in the making. As historian Richard White has
written, Tecumseh was “the culmination of the complicated village and
imperial politics of the middle ground.”
18
Religion was a vital component of the movement. For example, Tecumseh’s
brother inspired the pan-Indian movement that Tecumseh later
championed. For many years, Tecumseh lived in the shadow of this more
famous younger brother, Tenskwatawa, or “the Open Door.” It had not
always been so. Prior to Tenskwatawa’s conversion experience, sometime
between April and November of 1805, this brother, also known as the
“Shawnee Prophet,” had been called Lalawethika, or “the
rattle/loudmouth.” He was blind in one eye from a hunting accident as a
boy. And while he was coming of age, Chiksika had refused to take him
along on his many hunting trips. According to most accounts, he was a
failed hunter and an alcoholic who depended on his older brother to feed
and clothe his wife and children. Lalawethika embodied the worst
effects of colonialism. His circumstances began to improve when he began
listening to “an aging shaman” known as Penagashea, or “Changing
Feathers.”
After Penagashea died in 1804, Lalawethika fell into a
trance so deep that his relatives believed he was dead. Miraculously, he
awoke with a vision of reform that featured some of the components of
sin and salvation common during the Second Great Awakening in places
such as Cane Ridge, Kentucky. Tenskwatawa described an Indian hell in
which alcoholics were forced to swallow molten lead for all time. But he
also preached that polygamy, hide hunting, and relying on personal
medicine bundles were sins. Both the five Shawnee divisions and
individual Shawnees possessed medicine bundles that conferred special
powers on those who took care of them. In asking his supporters to
destroy them, Tenskwatawa asked his followers to abandon their
individual power and follow him. For many, this had to have been a
terrible choice, because it meant forsaking sacred powers conferred on
them during their vision quests. Shawnees regarded their bundles as
living beings, other-than-human persons, tasked with protecting the
individual and advancing his interests. In abandoning them, Tenskwatawa
hoped to lead them into a new way of life. He also demanded that Indian
women married to non-Indian husbands must leave them and return to
agricultural pursuits. In contrast, Indian men had to abandon
domesticated animals, from chickens to cattle, and return to hunting for
meat rather than trading. Those who ignored his demands, and continued
to believe in their bundles, were often accused of directing the power
contained within them against their followers. Witchcraft allegations
led to the deaths of Shawnees, Wyandots, and Delawares in both Ohio and
Missouri. Those who were killed tended to be tribal leaders, Christian
converts, and men deeply invested in trading with the Americans. Such
advocates of living in a plural world, behind the frontier, were an
affront to Tenskwatawa and the reforms he promoted.
19
In
1805 the Shawnee brothers established a new town at Greenville, Ohio,
where they intended to consolidate all of the Shawnees and their
neighbors in a single, revitalized community. It was a place freighted
with meaning. They built their town near the site of the infamous Treaty
of Greenville, where Native peoples resigned themselves to American
power in the wake of the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Establishing a
pan-Indian community there symbolized Native people’s desire to rise,
phoenix-like, from the ashes of that defeat. But for American officials,
Tecumseh offered a more philanthropic rationale. He explained: “The
Shawnese have heretofore been scattered about in parties, which we have
found has been attended with bad consequences. We are now going to
collect them all together to one town that the chief may keep them in
good order and prevent drunkenness from coming among them, and try to
raise corn and stock to live upon.”
20
Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa attempted to build their coalition at
Greenville for the next three years. However, living in such close
proximity to their Native opponents, as well as traders and government
agents allied with them, was not a winning strategy. In the spring of
1808 they moved farther west, on the Tippecanoe River, a tributary of
the Wabash River, which granted them easier access to western tribes
that were more sympathetic to their cause. By May 1810, Harrison wrote,
“The Prophets force at present consists in part of his own Tribe, which
has always been attached to him; nearly all the Kickapoos, a number of
winebagoes, some Hurons from Detrot who have lately joined him, a number
of Potawatomis, 20 or 30 Muskoes or Creeks and some stragglers from the
Ottawas. Chippways and other tribes in all perhaps from 6 to 800.”
21
In
a speech to Harrison in August 1808, Tenskwatawa proclaimed that his
supporters “were once different people, they are now but one.” Such
rhetoric belied the fact that most of these supporters came from lands
to the north and west of the middle Ohio valley. Tribes such as the
Kickapoos, Potawatomis, Ojibwes, and Ho-Chunks were central to the
revitalization movement. In contrast, tribes in the vicinity of
Greenville (1805–1808) and Prophetstown (1808–1811) opposed the reforms.
As
their revitalization movement gained momentum, Governor Harrison fueled
Tecumseh’s and Tenskwatawa’s popularity by confronting Native peoples
between 1803 and 1809 with the most aggressive series of treaties they
had ever encountered. His treaty making culminated with the Treaty of
Fort Wayne, which ceded more than three million acres of land along the
southern Indiana-Illinois border and east-central Indiana.
22
These treaties galvanized his opponents, and Tenskwatawa became more
and more bellicose. Harrison sent spies such as Michel Brouilett and
John Tanner in an attempt to gauge the prospects of war. The Prophet
discovered them and responded by telling Harrison “that his people
should not come any nearer to him, that they should not settle on the
Vermillion River—he smelt them too strong already.” Prophetstown became a
prominent resting place for Potawatomis, Kickapoos, Sauks, Meskwakis,
and Ho-Chunks on their way to consult and trade with the British at
Amherstburg. To accommodate the traffic, village dwellers built a large
dwelling they dubbed “The House of the Stranger.”
23
Like
most Americans, Harrison believed that the British were ultimately
responsible for all anti-American actions on the frontier. He could not
imagine that Native peoples acted on their own. In his opinion, they
were little more than British pawns. And so, in an 1810 letter to
Secretary of War William Eustis, he wrote, “I have as little doubt that
the scheme originated with the British and that the Prophet is inspired
by the superintendent of Indian affairs for Upper Canada, rather than
the Great Spirit, from whom he pretends to derive his authority.”
24
Between
1808 and 1811, Tecumseh traveled far and wide in search of people
willing to join the revitalization movement. He visited the Sauks and
Meskwakis in Illinois and Iowa, and his own kinsmen at Cape Girardeau,
Missouri. But his central aim remained the unification of southern and
northern tribes into a grand confederacy. Like so many Shawnee leaders
before him, including Peter Chartier in the 1740s and, more recently,
Black Beard in the first decades of the 19th century, Tecumseh had a
deep connection with the large confederacies of the Southeast, and the
Creeks and Cherokees in particular. His awareness of southeastern
protocols, combined with his mother’s Creek lineage, gained Tecumseh
favor among the Creeks. He arrived at Tukabatchee in mid-September, just
in time for the meeting of the Creek national council. And it was here
that Tecumseh competed for the Creeks’ attention with Benjamin Hawkins,
the southern superintendent of Indian affairs. Hawkins advocated a
“civilization plan” that included slave ownership, stock raising, and
the privatization of land. In public speeches, Tecumseh asked his allies
to “unite in peace and friendship among themselves and cultivate the
same with their white neighbors.” But in Hawkins’s recollection of
Tecumseh’s visit, he demanded that the Creeks “kill the old Chiefs,
friends to peace; kill the cattle, the hogs, the fowls; do not work,
destroy the wheels and looms, throw away your ploughs, and everything
used by the Americans.”
25
Small numbers of Creeks did travel with Tecumseh and fight with him
during the War of 1812. But more importantly, Tecumseh helped to ignite
the Redstick War of 1813–1814, a Creek civil war over Hawkins’s
civilization plan that Tecumseh’s Creek supporters ultimately lost.
During
Tecumseh’s travels, Tenskwatawa became the leader at Prophetstown.
Aware of Tecumseh’s absence, Harrison seized the opportunity and marched
north from Vincennes, along the Wabash River, to Prophetstown. Warriors
tracked his army’s progress and, on November 6, sent a delegation in an
attempt to forestall combat. But inside Prophetstown, the diverse
inhabitants of the village called for war. Tenskwatawa headed their
demands, and chose to initiate conflict with Harrison’s army in the
predawn hours of November 7, 1811. The Battle of Tippecanoe lasted
approximately two and a half hours. After their initial surprise,
Harrison’s men rallied, and Tenskwatawa’s men retreated from the
battlefield. When the dust settled, approximately 35 warriors had been
killed. In contrast, 62 Americans had been killed and another 126
wounded.
26
When Tecumseh learned of the battle, he threatened to kill Tenskwatawa.
Indeed, their movement never again obtained the same level of support.
Harrison’s men’s burned food stores and made it difficult for
Prophetstown to rise to power once more. However, by disbursing
Tecumseh’s and Tenskwatawa’s followers, Harrison vastly expanded the
field of combat between settlers and Native peoples. The revitalization
movement fragmented, but it did not fall apart.
Piqua Shawnee
www.piquashawnee.com
