Tecumseh and The Prophet at Tippecanoe (Winter 2021 | Volume: 66, Issue: 1)

Tecumseh and The Prophet at Tippecanoe

AH article image

Authors: Peter Cozzens

Historic Era: Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

Winter 2021 | Volume 66, Issue 1

Editor’s Note: One of the most respected historians of the Civil War and Indian conflicts, Peter Cozzens has written 17 books and is now at work on the third volume of a trilogy about the Indian wars in the American West, the Old Northwest (America’s Heartland), and the Old Southwest (the Deep South). Portions of this essay appear in the second volume, Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation, published last month by Knopf. Mr. Cozzens’ 2016 book, The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars of the American West, won the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History and is the first volume in the trilogy, which will conclude with A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South, projected for publication in 2023.  

tippecanoe
Fought on November 7, 1811, the Battle of Tippecanoe ended Tecumseh's hope for a pan-Indian confederacy. 

Gov. William Henry Harrison of the Indiana Territory was amazed. In a decade on the frontier implementing a fiercely acquisitive government land policy, he had met with scores of Indian chiefs, some defiant, others malleable. Never, however, had he encountered a native leader like the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, the man he considered his principal opponent in the fight for the Northwest, as present-day Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin were then known.

After a contentious council with Tecumseh in July 1811, Harrison penned a remarkable tribute to him, arguably the most effusive praise a government official ever offered an American Indian leader. Tecumseh had parried Harrison’s every verbal thrust, eloquently defending his refusal to relinquish what Harrison considered “one of the fairest portions of the globe, [then] the haunt of a few wretched savages.”

There was nothing remotely wretched about Tecumseh, however. As Harrison told the secretary of war, “The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him is really astonishing, and more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things. If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would, perhaps, be the founder of an empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico or Peru.” 

Tecumseh and his brother’s movement reached across nearly half of the United States, and was the greatest pan-Indian confederation the American Republic would ever confront.

Harrison marveled at the vigor with which the Shawnee chief pursued his dream of an Indian union. “No difficulties deter him. His activity and industry supply the want of letters. For four years he has been in constant motion. You see him today on the Wabash and in a short time you hear of him on the shores of Lake Erie or Michigan, or on the banks of the Mississippi, and wherever he goes he makes an impression favorable to his purposes.”

Harrison’s testimonial encapsulates the talents of this passionate