Tecumseh

Tecumseh (c. 1768–1813), Shawnee chief and leader of an Indian confederation.Born when the Shawnee Indians were fighting to defend their Kentucky and Ohio lands, Tecumseh lost his father at the Battle of Point Pleasant (1774), a brother in the American Revolutionary War, and another in the wars that followed. He fought against Josiah Harmar (1790), Arthur St. Clair (1791), and Anthony Wayne (1794). He refused to sign the Treaty of Greenville (1795), which ceded most of Ohio to the United States, and in the next decade emerged as the leading opponent of American expansion.

In 1805, following a vision, Tecumseh's brother, Tenskwatawa, began to preach a return to traditional ways and rejection of white influences. Tecumseh broadened and directed the religious movement into a multitribal confederation opposed to further land cessions. A gifted orator, he carried his message of Indian unity from Canada to Florida.

In 1811, while Tecumseh was spreading his message in the South, William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory, attacked and burned Tenskwatawa's village at Tippecanoe, costing the Indian confederation much unity and momentum.

In the War of 1812, Tecumseh allied with the British and assisted Gen. Isaac Brock in capturing Detroit. After Brock's death, however, the British‐Indian alliance began to falter. Tecumseh despised the caution of the new commander, Col. Henry Proctor, but accompanied the British army on its retreat to Canada after the Americans won control of Lake Erie. He was killed during the Battle of the Thames in October 1813.

Tecumseh was not the first Indian to preach united resistance on the part of the tribes, but he was the most effective, forging a confederation of unprecedented range. Intratribal divisions—as many opposed as supported him among the Shawnees and other Indian nations—undermined his efforts to resist U.S. power. His death killed hopes for a united Indian state and ended major Indian resistance north of the Ohio River.
[See also Native American Wars.]

Bibliography

R. David Edmunds , Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership, 1984.
John Sugden , Tecumseh, A Life, 1998.

Colin G. Calloway