Tecumseh

Tecumseh (1768?–1813), Shawnee Indian chief, who established a confederacy of tribes, and was led into a war (1811) with the U.S. when the government refused to recognize his principle that all Indian lands were a common possession that could not be ceded by or purchased from individual tribes. During his absence, Tensk‐watawa (1768?–1834?), the “ Shawnee Proph‐et,” who is considered to have been Tecumseh's twin brother, was maneuvered by W.H. Harrison into the disastrous battle of Tippecanoe⧫ (1811), and the war came to an end. During the War of 1812, Tecumseh was made a brigadier general by the British, and was killed in battle. In 1836 Dr. William Emmons published “a national drama” called Tecumseh, a subject he had previously employed in his epic The Fredoniad; or Independence Preserved (4 vols., 1827), a poetic history of the War of 1812. The Indian chief also figures in James Strange French's Elkswatawa; or, The Prophet of the West (1836), Edward S. Ellis's The Forest Spy (1861), and other melodramatic novels, as well as being the subject of a romantic biography (1841) by Benjamin Drake.